Chapter Eleven: The Burden of History

Silent and hanging on by a thread, the guard shadowed Adam up the rest of the mountain path. They both squeezed through the gap, which required removing their packs and pushing them along in front with their feet while they shuffled through sideways. It took several minutes to make it all the way through. In the middle, where the light of either side couldn't reach, Adam had to activate his meager aura just so the red glow would stave off a claustrophobia- and memory-induced panic attack.

He came out of the other side soaked in a cold sweat and shaking, but he picked up his bag and stepped out of the way before Besh could notice. He needn't have worried, though; the guard had other priorities. He emerged and immediately began looking around, a strange focus in his eyes as he stopped not far from the gap's exit.

"We're safe here, right?"

Surprised at the break in the silence, Adam raised an eyebrow. "More than we were. Why?"

Instead of answering, Besh let his bag fall back to the ground. He began to search the rock face around the gap, nudging some of the loose stones with his foot.

Setting down his own duffel, Adam watched him with a frown. "What are you doing?"

"Apparently, the only thing I can."

This was clearly going to take a while. Too tired to ask any further questions, Adam slid down the nearest tree until he was sitting and let out a quiet groan. For a minute, he simply sat there.

When that minute was up, he forced himself out of the fugue that had been threatening to drag him into sleep and pulled out his first-aid kit. Not as large as the one Autumn had carried, it would barely have enough gauze and dressing to clean and re-dress the old wounds on his leg and address the new wounds the creep had given him. He hadn't packed it expecting to be wounded this heavily. He hadn't expected to be wounded on this trip at all.

While Besh kept looking through the rocks, Adam gingerly removed his vest, hoodie, and button-up. The clothes stuck to his skin, and some of the wounds' scabbing came off with them. Fresh blood welled up. He blotted it away, then pulled the cap from the saline with his teeth. He bit down hard on that cap as he poured the solution over the open wounds, then set the bottle aside and switched to the antiseptic wipes to deal with what remained on the edges. With the wounds as clean as they would get, he set to dressing and wrapping them. It was tricky one-handed, especially since shifting his arms and shoulders that much to reach across to the opposite side just made things worse.

After several failed attempts, he resisted the urge to just be done with it. Petty frustrations aside, he needed to stop the bleeding. Maybe if he used the tree for leverage…

"Do you want help?"

Adam cut his gaze over to Besh, who had paused his hunt for some particular kind of rock. "What?"

"With the bandages. It looked like you were having trouble."

It had been rather obvious, hadn't it? He nodded and shifted away from the tree so that Besh could kneel behind him. He talked Besh through treating the first laceration, and from there, Besh was able to work without guidance. All the while, Adam suppressed shivers from the cold.

As Adam has anticipated, it was Besh who broke the silence. Like him, Besh had an ulterior motive. "You didn't even try to stop her."

Adam closed his eyes. "It was her choice. She could have lived if she wanted."

Besh dabbed one of the cuts harder than necessary and Adam winced. "She wasn't thinking straight. We're not thinking straight. Her sister was killed trying to save her, she felt like she destroyed the company her family owned for generations, and one of the people traveling with her was probably going to kill her once he thought he could make it to Vale alone."

Though Adam stiffened, Besh trailed off.

Right as he began to relax again, though, Besh spoke up. "I should've been strong enough to protect them. That was my job. My only job. I'm never going to be able to get them out of my head, and I'll probably think about this nightmare of a trip for the rest of my life, but I know they deserved better than to die the way they did when you were supposed to be on our side."

He scoffed at the mere idea of him being on their side. "They were Dust heiresses. They deserved nothing."

"They at least deserved to be given a chance! All you did was argue and belittle them, and then when you had to make a choice to put their lives over—over whatever it is you believe in, you just let them die."

Adam jerked away from Besh and spun on his knees to face him. Even though Besh was kneeling on slightly elevated ground, they were at eye level. The guard's eyes were brimming with fresh tears, but Adam didn't care. "I would watch them die a thousand times," he snarled. "It's your pathetic view that humans like them deserve a chance when they have had decades to learn better that keeps us under their heels."

Besh's eyes widened a fraction and he tipped back, expression tightening even as his tears spilled over. "And you?" he bit out.

Adam narrowed his eyes. "What about me?"

"I don't know everything you did, but there's a reason you didn't try to lead us to a White Fang camp, isn't there?" His voice grew stronger with each word. "A reason you looked so confused when Miss Annea called you a member, right?"

"Stop," Adam growled, but Besh talked over him.

"It's because you're not one anymore, isn't it? Because all of that makes the rumors feel true. That there is no White Fang anymore, and that it's gone because you destroyed it."

Though he knew silence was as damning as an empty denial, Adam couldn't find anything to say.

"And you're the one who led the attack on Beacon, right? The reason why the CCT stopped working. The reason why villages like Vernell can't call for help anymore. Right?"

He could do nothing but take it.

Besh's voice finally began to crack. "I just saved your life, but how many innocent people have died because of you?"

And Adam couldn't hold his gaze any longer. He weathered the shame, trying to cling to his anger at the Dust heiresses for...for what, exactly? Existing? Oh, he had any number of reasons to hate the Mariners. Autumn herself had admitted wrongdoing with their Dust mines. But she had also expressed concern about that and horror at the treatment of Tiem. She had given him the benefit of the doubt at the very start of this disaster despite having no reason to do so.

He couldn't even fault Annea for her actions if he bothered to think of why she had acted the way she had. She had been terrified of him at the start, her outbursts a result of that fear. Nearly every interaction with him had been her fighting through that fear to try to understand him.

So when he'd killed her sister, he had shattered all of that himself. She'd expected him to kill her too, and every hour of every day after Autumn's death had been spent waiting for him to finish her off.

She was a good person, Besh had said about Autumn, and Adam had brushed him off without a second thought. He had no metric for judging what a good human was; he had only ever thought of them as innocent or guilty, and as his own recruitment efforts had stated, there were no innocent humans. Autumn Mariner was not innocent. She was part of a company and culture known for exploiting faunus. But she was neither blind to it nor uncaring. Annea, though ignorant, was not willfully so. She hadn't denied the truth of the MDC's operations once she heard it, and she had, in her own way, tried to find peace with him.

And both of their efforts to treat him with some modicum of dignity had been met with callous disregard in return.

In saving his life, Besh had returned a favor that Adam had completely failed to perform despite twice having the chance to do so.

How hollow his grandstanding was. How empty his convictions. All those weeks spent in reflection, and none of it had mattered the moment he was back in the world.

Besh was still waiting for an answer. Adam dragged his gaze up. "I don't know." He forced himself to take a deep breath and give the response Besh actually wanted. "I should have done more than watched. They deserved better."

He couldn't bring himself to apologize. It wouldn't be honest; Annea Mariner had wanted to die, and Autumn—well, he would take his doubts over his own actions to the grave. They wouldn't help anyone, least of all Besh.

His words, though, were enough. Besh's shoulders dropped under the weight of an exhaustion that wasn't physical. After a beat, he gestured to the med kit. "You're still bleeding."

He was. Once more, he sat in front of Besh. The new silence lasted half as long as its predecessor.

"I'll tell you now, if you want."

Though Besh's comment meant nothing at first, it didn't take long for Adam to connect the dots. "Go ahead."

"You've already figured it out, but," he paused his treatment, drew in a deep breath, and then spoke the truth all at once, "I'm a faunus. A fox faunus, like my mother was."

Although it was gratifying to be proven right, one aspect of Besh's admission stuck out. He had no fox ears, and typically for fox faunus, there was only one other major expression of that heritage. "You have no tail." And his uniform was not fitted in a way that could hide something like that.

Besh didn't continue his explanation until he had finished wrapping Adam's arm and moved to the next cut on his shoulder. "I used to."

Three short words, but there was a wealth of pain behind them. Adam kept his gaze fixed on the grass in front of him. He suspected that Besh was only being so forthright because they weren't speaking eye-to-eye. "What happened?"

"About ten years ago, the White Fang was changing from just activism. People were nervous. People in Atlas were nervous." He swallowed. "I found out later that someone was killing big names in the Dust industry. They wanted ways to protect themselves. They invested in new technology, in the huntsman academy, in security. No one invested more than the Dust company leaders, and none of the leaders invested more than Theodore Mariner." He hesitated. "I need to clean this one again."

Adam gritted his teeth against the sting of more saline washing over the cuts on his left side. Working quickly, Besh wiped away the excess and pressed a gauze pad over the largest intersection of the myriad lacerations.

"Ten years ago," he said quietly, "my mother died. We were homeless in Mantle. It was Winter. I was desperate for any way to get warm, so I snuck myself onto a ship heading to Atlas. I thought it would be a safe place; everyone talked like it was supposed to be so much better than Mantle. He found me while I was wandering around half-frozen. I guess, to him, it was the perfect coincidence." His voice turned bitter. "Robots could be hacked. Security guards could be paid off. But a faunus kid with no trait and nowhere to go would have no choice but to be loyal."

Though he didn't say it outright, his implication was clear: Theodore Mariner had sanctioned Besh's mutilation. Cutting away faunus traits wasn't unheard of—there were surgeries for some of the less exotic manifestations of their heritage, whether or not Adam agreed with their existence and the ideology behind them—but to do it to a child, to force it on one, was entirely different.

There had always been rumors of Atlesians trying things like that, of SDC experiments, but Adam had been leery of stories like those. They never had evidence attached to them, and he had been well aware that letting potential propaganda or false intelligence inflame his troops without him there to control that information would make them reckless. He had treated the rumors as possibilities, but they had never been—nor been able to be—priorities.

And now he had living proof wrapping gauze around his shoulder.

"He made me train for almost a year before he introduced me to his daughters," added Besh.

Having been the recipient of training at a young age, training that had often been brutal but at least voluntary, Adam could only imagine how hellish those months had been for a faunus boy who had had the only thing tying him to his family and heritage taken from him.

"He made me swear to never reveal I was actually a faunus. And he made it clear that getting too close to his daughters—that he'd kill me for it."

And suddenly, Besh's reserved behavior made sense. It wasn't sourced from professionalism. It was sourced from fear.

Finished with the wounds Adam hadn't been able to treat on his own, Besh tossed the thin roll of gauze back into the kit and stood. Adam tracked him as he returned to the rocks. "And you've been working for him ever since."

"What else could I do?" Going to one knee, Besh tugged on a semi-flat stone until it tumbled away from the rest.

Adam pulled his duffel closer and rummaged through it until he found the one remaining shirt that wasn't either bloodstained or torn. As he pulled that on, careful of his dressings, he noticed that his banner wasn't faring much better than his clothes. The black and red fabric that he had spent hours painstakingly customizing with the waterfall breaking up into petals had been riddled with holes, scorch marks, grime, and debris. After a brief moment of hesitation, he pulled it free of his belt, folded it, and tucked it away in his duffel. Once they were in Vale, he would take some time to repair it and the rest of his clothes.

While he put on his jacket and vest again, he thought over Besh's story. To the Mariner head, Besh had been a perfect anonymous bodyguard for his daughters. A bodyguard that, to any snotty Atlesian, would appear as human as the rest of them.

The logic, while deranged, was there: though a faunus forced into servitude would be more susceptible to White Fang messaging, if that faunus was kept isolated from the White Fang and other faunus in general, he would never know about them. And with what marked him as faunus surgically removed, he would feel that much more cut off from anyone who might have been able to help. That would all foster a sense of dependence the Mariners never could have achieved with a human in Atlas.

But secrets like that were hard to keep, and thinking about it, Adam began to see how it was likely that Autumn had found out. That conversation she'd had with him by the river, the strange focus she had put on Adam's scar and the potential power in that wound…At the time, he had believed it was caused by her determination to save her company, but maybe, maybe, it had been about more than that. Maybe she had been wondering if Besh could've had a way out of his enslavement all along.

And with that perspective, her strange behavior towards him, so different than that of her sister, began to make sense. Even on a more surface level, the medical knowledge she had used for Trace's benefit could have been gained as she hunted for a way to help Besh. A procedure like his could easily have all kinds of unintended side effects needing treatment over the course of years.

Quiet, contemplative, Adam watched Besh arrange the two semi-flat stones he'd found. But he couldn't hold his questions back forever. "Why not try to contact the White Fang?" Back then, it had still been a prominent force, even in Atlas. "Even if he tried to keep them from you, you must've heard about them."

"I couldn't. I wanted to." His lips thinned. "Most nights I prayed that faunus in masks would break through the windows and take me away. But the Mariners kept a close eye on me. Anything out of line I did…they made sure I didn't do it twice. When I got older, I stopped caring about getting away. I just wanted to see it all burned down, but he kept me on a tight leash. There wasn't anything I could do, not without help, and I never had help. Not in that house."

"Autumn wasn't your ally?"

"How did you—I guess it doesn't matter." Besh shook his head. "She tried, but she was as stuck as I was. She knew that if she got caught, I would take all the blame." His expression twisted. "So after the border closed, she came up with a plan to get all of us out of his reach when he couldn't follow."

"She was smuggling you to Vale."

He nodded. "It was a chance to save me and the MDC. She practically begged him until he agreed and didn't tell me until after it was decided. She was going to cut me loose right after we arrived and make up some story for Miss Annea."

Adam zipped his duffel closed and stood, casting a brief, wary eye up towards the nevermores that had never stopped tracking them. They were relatively small, and for now, leaving them alone. He approached Besh and stopped next to him, but he got the sense that the former guard wasn't done.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to be feeling," he admitted, shoulders falling and voice breaking as he stared at the makeshift gravestones like they held the answer. "I hated him. Hate him. But Miss Annea never knew about any of that, and Miss Autumn was trying to help."

It was rare for the source of anyone's pain to remain fixed. Far more often, it bled through the edges and stained anything close to it. One mining camp, one city, one Kingdom, an entire race—it just kept seeping. Until that source was faced, it would never stop. Mariner to Mariner and then beyond, it would just keep going.

This…this kid on his left had been through hell, and Adam had nothing for him. He was the disgraced former leader and destroyer of the White Fang. If anything, he'd actually contributed to Besh's pain by mocking him and the heiresses and then letting the two of them die in front of him.

But, part of him protested, how could he have known?

It was a convenient excuse to stave off the guilt, but it was also a pathetic one. In retrospect, this entire journey, from the ship crashing to this mountain pass, was a far more drawn-out instance of those two children getting cornered by Grimm in the gulley outside Argus. Back then, he'd had someone else at his side to push him into action, to force him to confront his own prejudices, to hold up a mirror to that source and expose the old wound for what it was.

Here, there had been no mirror. He had let himself be blind to his own ignorance, and Besh had paid the price. Closing his eyes, he let the shame roll through. He deserved it.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Besh let out a broken chuckle. "Yeah, me too."

Adam glanced at him, then at the gravestones. "I…misread you. Your heiresses, too. I," he paused, not wanting to say the words but knowing they were necessary. "Believing all of you human, I did intend to kill you when we reached Vale's outskirts."

Besh had known it was coming, but Adam couldn't get a read on him; his face was carved from stone. Adam kept going. "It was just another reason to let the heiresses die. When this began, I didn't, I still don't, believe it could ever be worth it to put my life on the line for a human's, but I at least thought I could evaluate a situation objectively. I was wrong."

On the right-hand stone, Besh had crudely chipped the rock with the hilt of his knife in the rough shape of Autumn's name. The left one had an even rougher carving of Annea's name. "What's done is done, but I'll apologize for what I failed to see and for failing to act. You deserved better."

Besh worked his jaw. "Just because I'm a faunus?"

That was the root of Adam's sympathy, he wouldn't deny it, but their connections went deeper than that basic level. "Not entirely."

Blinking and wiping away the last of his tears, Besh squared his shoulders. His voice still shook, but he was leagues more stable than he had been. "Mister Taurus, if it wasn't for me, and it wasn't for Miss Autumn and Miss Annea, then why were you on that ship?"

One truth deserved another. And if he and Besh were to understand each other, then he would need to dispel all of the rumors and legends Besh must have heard in Atlas.

He reached for his blindfold.

Fun fact: this is the chapter that has seen the most revision out of any of my stories to date (discounting whole rewrites). I think this is version 5.

Anyway, better planning probably could've had this story ending on a day less unceremonious than a Wednesday.