Chapter 8: Remember When This Story Was Just Random Crack? Me Neither

"Misery is an essential component to stability."

— 17 —

"Oh," Blake said as she closed the door behind her, her cat ears flattening against her head. "I thought Weiss would be here."

Shamrock twisted their organic looking weapon, Saint-Gede, from its halberd form back into a nifty sword. It had been the weapon Cemetaire had helped them build, naming it after the god-saint Papa Gede, the trickster lord of the dead whose soul created Dust. It sounded a lot like Jetty; that somehow made it feel more personal to them, their name when they were a female. His holiday, Fèt Gede, always had a special importance to them. It's why the outfit that Shamrock wore resembled Papa Gede's iconic wardrobe.

"She's still in the hospital for observation," Shamrock said with a shrug.

"The hospital!" Blake looked aghast. "Oh God, I didn't realize I hurt her that badly."

Shamrock brushed their hair with the hand, the same place as Blake usually wore her hair bow. "I see the ears this time around."

Blake swallowed, looking back towards the door she was pressed against. "I… wanted to talk to her. As myself, I guess. With no bows or anything to hide behind. I'm feeling more and more stupid about that every minute."

Sheathing their weapon, Shamrock sat down on their bed and spread their hands. "It's not really stupid. Honestly, I knew you'd come back here. Figured it was easier than going after you, just letting you come to me."

Blake's ears perked up. Shamrock thought it was somewhat weird. "You wanted to talk to me?" she asked.

"Did you know actual cat ears don't do that?"

"I'm sorry?" Blake asked, shaking her head in confusion.

Shamrock made a gesture. "Your ears are moving with your emotions, right? The cat ears."

Self-consciously, Blake put her hands over her ears. "Where's this coming from?"

"I've been faunus here and there. I kind of like going with a bird motif when I can. Feathers helped me hide cards, you know?" They shook their head. "It always seems to me like the way the animal parts function is entirely dependent on the individual. An actual cat's ears don't shift around with their emotions quite like that. It's like you're running dog software."

Blake's expression soured considerably. She pressed her back against the door, if somehow looked poised to jump. "What the hell are you on about?"

Shamrock felt their Semblance. Their body shifting with it, cells and chromosomes and even bone structures adjusting with a tactile sensation. Once out in Catchfire, they had met a mute girl with an ability like their own. Her Semblance had been to change, illusion, misdirection. But it was like shattering glass; it was all so much hocus pocus. None of it was real. When Shamrock changed, it was permanent as far as anything was concerned. New organs appeared as needed, old ones shrank and morphed. The actual mechanics were somewhat beyond their understanding. But then again, no one truly understood how a Semblance worked.

The best theory they had ever heard had amusingly come from communists. The infra-materialist branch of scientific communism, whose influence you could still feel out in its birthplace of Catchfire, among the dissatisfied socialist labor unions and people who never read any of the theory but just had a gut feeling that things were wrong. La Semblance de l'État. According to their card playing friend, Indigo Jack, a Semblance was just a state of mind. Something inside you has to break so badly that it offers you a solution from the core of your soul itself. Indistinguishable, as far as Shamrock was concerned, from the dark magics of the old gods, save for a Semblance adhering to specific hard-coded rules. Several branches of communism stated that a collective society with sufficient revolutionary fervor could manifest a Semblance and Aura all its own. That was the core of infra-materialism.

In theory, that meant a socialist society could grow better and more apples by virtue of believing hard enough in itself and being particularly traumatized. Classes here at Beacon didn't really have any better answers to exactly why a Huntsman had their powers. All of the books in the library glossed over getting the abilities, and focused more on understanding and utilizing what you had. Shamrock had just come to understand that no one really knew, and it was just up to your own personal pet theory.

Whatever the case, after a brief shifting of her new organs and body, Shamrock blinked her cat eyes at Blake. Her red-furred ears twitched.

"See, if I get angry or embarrassed right now," Jetty Shamrock said, "they don't move." She tried making various expressions, running the gamut, displaying how her ears didn't really react.

Instead of this somehow being a way to relate to Blake, the girl just looked incredibly distressed by the sight. Her eyes were wide, her ears standing at attention. The left one made an uncertain motion. Slowly, her face morphed into an aggressive grimace.

"Don't do that," she said in a low voice like she was trying to threaten Shamrock. "You're really freaking me out. I just came here to try to find Weiss, not to get mocked. What's next? Are you going to tell me about your favorite rap musician? Is your favorite single of this year Fuzzy Skinhead? Is that where this is going?"

"No, of course not!"

Blake didn't let up. If anything, she was getting angrier. "Just because I'm a faunus doesn't mean I'm some Valean stereotype. I don't even listen to that kind of stuff. So, there!"

Shamrock sighed, letting herself fall onto her back. His body shifted. Male, protective. More emotionally dense. Weaker pain tolerance as with all men.

He let out a breath. "No, no, I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to be offensive. I guess I was trying to blend in with you if that makes any sense. After I took Weiss to the hospital, we had a chat. Decided that she wanted to talk to you, and ask me to go find you. Kind of made me realize you and I never really talked either. And I don't really talk with anybody in the team. I suppose I kind of wanted my moment in the limelight too."

Blake took a couple of hesitant steps forwards, before abruptly shifting course and sitting down on her own bed. "Oh."

There was a long pause. It was like nobody could figure out how to move this conversation forward. And the lack of progress only made it harder to start, like a dying lawn mower.

"We talk during lunch and stuff, right?" Blake asked.

"Superficially. I'm usually just kind of there, y'know? Pretty much all I'm good for. Been sitting here and waiting for you for hours, bored out of my mind, just me and my thoughts and my Semblance."

"Yeah…"

He let out another sigh. "No, no, don't even try. You wanted to talk to Weiss and I'm just an annoying speed bump." Shamrock sat up suddenly, hands in his lap. The top of his suit was folded neatly by the pillow of the bed. "Back when we first met, Jaune used to call me Shadow Person. I had been under the impression he was just an asshole who refused to learn my name due to some joke of his. I called him out on it a couple times. He replied by ignoring me, and forcing me to help him lie to some girl in the student center in order to steal something from the lost and found. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if he had a point. Still an asshole, I mean. But it was like he took one look at me, and instantly saw right through me. Knew the only thing I was good for was fading into the background and just existing, like a shadow."

Shamrock spread his hands. "You see what happens to me when you leave me alone too long to think? I start getting self aware. I hate that. Let me go back to just straight up existing and taking up as little space as possible."

"Why are you a Huntsman?" Blake asked suddenly, and it was enough that Shamrock flinched.

"What?"

Blake made an uncomfortable noise in her throat. Giving a sort of go on gesture with one hand, she said, "You're a Huntsman, sometimes a Huntress. If you wanted to fade into the background, why are you here? We're people who are going to change the world. Help to save it. Make it a better place. I don't know. Just so long as we don't screw it up like everyone else before us has."

"Do you really believe that?"

She nodded. "Sometimes I have to. Sometimes I tell myself that I'm just lying. That I'm only here for me. Trying to escape who I was and reinvent myself. But even if I'm lying, I feel like I have to believe it. If not for myself, then for the people around me. I'm doing it for them."

"Jaune?"

"Tch!" Blake said through her teeth, waving Shamrock off. "What does everything have to go back to him? This is between me and you."

"Good point. Let's not dwell on that suspiciously blond tumor growing on all of our brains."

"I know, right?" Her smile was small, but genuine. It lasted for all of a moment. "But you haven't really answered my question. If you just want to fade into the background, why are you here?"

"You're asking as if I had a choice."

"Are you one of those people who likes leaving things in the hands of fate? The gods?"

Shamrock threw his head back and laughed. "Oh hell no. When you leave it in their hands, then you're just gambling. And the dice of the gods are cruel and loaded."

Blake put her hands in her lap, looking up and to the side. Lost in her own little world of thought. "So why are you here?"

Running his fingers over his shield, Shamrock said, "I like to think I didn't have a choice. I mean, sure, I could do like all the old fairy tales say and do whatever I wanted. I can be anybody, quite literally. I left home because they wanted me to be something in particular. I didn't have a say in it. All I had was this Semblance. But that's kind of the problem. It's like being given a hammer, and suddenly everything before you is a nail. People idealize Huntsmen, but it's a gilded cage. You have these abilities and you can't just not use them, you know?" He spread his hands. "It's like this little voice inside of you, this compulsion, this urge, someone else in your head. You can't just not use your Aura. Even people who don't like their Semblance keep putting themselves into situations where they have to use it, at least in part. So here I am, a runaway kid here in Vale, and the only real option I have is to come here. I apply, go through the interviews, and get in. Because what else am I supposed to do with my life? People want to be us, but once you bell the cat, what now? No offense."

"Some taken," Blake said, with a twitch of the ears.

"But, yeah. I talked to Weiss and that seemed to help her get through her problems. It seems like you and your partner are always talking and you seem to be doing pretty good. But for me, just talking about stuff somehow feels fake. Like I should be doing things. And just sitting in the background and waiting otherwise. Like I'm just some stupid shadow and not really a member of the team. Am I even making sense, or am I just kind of like some desperate loser? I feel like I'm coming across as some desperate loser who's just a speed bump in your way. In everyone's way no matter where I go. It's just, I've committed this time around, and I can't just run and fit in somewhere else."

Blake didn't seem to have an immediate response to that. She played with her fingers, making this vaguely pained expression. "So you ran away too?"

Shamrock nodded. "There's not much hope for a lot of people in Vacuo. I—" And suddenly he was laughing. "Is it wrong that I find this stupid? Just, talking about it. It feels like I'm trying to force myself to open up, but I really don't… I don't know, I don't want to. It's as if something is telling me that if I just tell someone what's wrong, that's it. Somehow things will work out. As if these aren't deep-seated issues that there's really no point in working through. This is what happens when you give me too much time to think. That's why I'm usually off playing cards with my friends like Yang or Jack. I don't have to pretend like the other person is a therapist or whatever. Just some asshole I'm trying to earn a couple lennies from."

Blake took a deep breath. "I understand."

"How so?"

She made an inarticulate series of motions, as if trying to say something, but failing. Finally she just shrugged. "Talking and thinking, it's like half of what I do nowadays. Trying to relate to people. Mostly my partner. After I punched Weiss, well."

"Why did you even do that?"

She smiled, but it was all teeth. "Because I watched my partner punch somebody in the face and that somehow turned them into best friends. I don't really know. Sometimes I don't feel like I'm myself anymore. I wonder if I've ever really been myself. If Blake is a girl who ever really existed, or if I'm just the sum of what I see. There's just people I see doing things I can't do, and I guess I kind of respect them, and I think if I just do that same thing, I'll be able to solve my problems the same way they are. Whether their name is Dad, Adam, or Jaune."

Shamrock folded his arms, giving Blake a significant look. "You respect Jaune? Like a brother, a role model, what?"

Blake looked out towards the window, at the snow falling down. "I don't know. I feel like if I decided, I would change my mind the very next minute. I kind of feel safer just not knowing. Just letting things be as they are. Did you know I actually asked him for advice with Weiss? He was just this drunken asshole I hated, that I kept hoping and wishing would just die, and now he's someone I ask for advice. I keep thinking, what do I have to do to do that? To be the kind of person someone else looks at and goes I want her help and input to solve my problems. But when I try to be someone like him, I just punch Weiss in the face and send her to the hospital. And now I've got you feeling some kind of way. All because I'm trying to be someone I'm not, because I don't really know who I am. Just some girl trying to go through life and figure it all out."

"I don't know who I am either."

"You're my teammate," she said with a hopeful smile.

"That's a role, a hat I wear." He held up his hat for demonstration. "J. Shamrock. The partner to Weiss, the teammate of Blake, a member of BASS. Those are roles I play, not who I am. All I'm good for, it feels, is just reading off whatever script I've decided I need at the moment. As if my entire world is just a stage, and I'm the world's shittiest actor. Sometimes actress."

Blake stood up slowly. She took a couple of ponderous steps towards Shamrock, her face hesitant. Until she steeled herself and crossed the gap and sat down beside him. They were uncomfortably close, and both of them felt it. Blake looked away suddenly, as if she were doubting the entire reason she were doing this, whatever it was. Shamrock couldn't look back either.

With a slight cough, Blake stood back up, rubbing her hands together. "Okay. Uh. Yeah."

Shamrock snorted. "Was that another tactic you've seen someone do and work?"

She nodded. "I'm sorry, that was weird. I thought it wouldn't be weird but it was and now—agh!"

Neither said anything to each other for a moment.

"Sometimes," Blake said with the slowness of someone trying to walk across eggshells, "I feel like there's nothing I can do. But sometimes things are just stupid and broken and that's just the way it is. Maybe it's not something we can fix. Just something we have to live with and work past. I don't think I'll ever live down the things I've done, the people I've hurt, the mistakes I've made. But I think that just doing better here at Beacon, it's like a second chance. Redemption."

"Suck it up, buttercup?" Shamrock suggested with a wry smile.

"I don't think I'm good with words like this. I'm not good at comforting people or offering solutions. Sometimes I don't even know what I am good for. I kind of feel like people just tolerate me whenever I screw up. But tolerance is painful."

"But you're a faunus," Shamrock said, pointing at her ears. "I thought tolerance was the thing you wanted most."

Blake made a so-so gesture. "It's just a buzzword leftists in Vale like to use. Or the 'compassionate conservatives' in power. 'Look at how diverse we are. Look how much we tolerate these people.' But it's an ugly word. An ugly idea. You only tolerate something you don't want but have to put up with for one reason or other. I tolerate bad grammar in books I like because I'm invested in the plot and characters, but if I could, I'd get rid of it in a heartbeat. It's like that."

Shamrock hugged himself. He kept thinking of his mother, putting up with him just because she saw him as a meal ticket. He had powers and abilities that could elevate her status, but it wasn't like she actually wanted him. Her flaky, androgynous kid who just happened to be related by blood and for whom she was obligated to care.

"So where does that leave us?" Shamrock asked.

"I don't know. Do you?"

Shamrock shook his head. "No."

Blake gave the smallest of smiles. "And maybe that's all we'll ever have. Neither of us knows who we really are. I want to find myself, and you keep making new yous, is that right?"

"Yeah."

She held her hand out to him. "So maybe that just leaves us as Blake and Shamrock, two teammates with no idea what they're doing, going their own way, but all in this stupid thing together."

Reluctantly, Shamrock took her hand, and let her haul him to his feet. "And what happens when I'm no longer Shamrock one day? It wasn't always my name, and it could change again."

Blake gave him the biggest, biggest, yet most sincere smile Shamrock had ever seen. "Then, maybe one day, I'll get my dream of a new teammate." She winked. "I'd love to get to know them!"

Shamrock laughed. "That's so cheesy!"

Blake huffed, hands-on hips. "I'm trying here, give me a break."

"No. Never. I'm always going to be there to call people out on their shit." He reached up, and after some hesitation, gave Blake a little playful punch on the shoulder. She didn't seem to mind. And that somehow took a weight off his heart.

"Then whoever you are, whenever I screw up, you tell me. You never let me off the hook when I'm in the wrong. And whenever you're trying to figure out who the new you is that day, I'll be there to tell you I have no idea, and I'll do it with a smile. Sound like a deal, Shamrock?"

"This is going to be the worst trade deal in maybe ever."

"And maybe is a baby who always says yes," Blake said with a wink.

"Oh, sure. Just say that and it'll all be fine," Shamrock said with a mocking smile. "Ça ira."

Blake folded her arms self-consciously. "Yeah. Copacetic. All that kind of friendly, inspirational nonsense."

"Is that really how you want to play this off?" He gave her a dubious expression.

"I can't help it, it's catchy and I can't get it out of my head!" She made a face that was almost a pout, oddly childish. The expression of a girl half her age.

Shamrock covered his face with his hands and laughed, and she broke. Blake laughed too. And suddenly they were laughing together for the first time since he met her.

— 18 —

Weiss doom-scrolled social media. That was the right word for it that the kids used, wasn't it? Just endlessly wasting your time going through post after post. It wasn't like she had anything else to do, sitting atop the veranda one level below the hospital roof. The only higher place to go was the ship pad on the roof itself, where Bullhead VTOLs would take teams who had been desperately injured out in the field straight to intensive care. That didn't fit her at all. Sure, she was still technically under observation for the next hour or so, but Croaker had given her enough leave to become the only person outside on the veranda, under a sun shade umbrella that no one needed save for how it kept away the snow. Wrapped in her warmest clothing, she just put her thumb on her scroll and flicked down pages upon pages for content to keep herself entertained. There was surprisingly good Wi-Fi up here.

The cold never bothered her in any case. It was more comfortable sitting up here in this chair than laying in bed all day long just bored out of my mind. At least up here, she could be bored out of her mind with a lovely view of the school and the city beyond. From the skyscrapers of the commercial heart of the city to the endless plumes of smoke from the industrial borough, this was her new home, this was Vale, la Ville Lumière. Idly, she watched the aerostatics, the hovering airships that polluted the skyline like the endless commas of a run-on sentence. Some carried advertisements for products or services she had no interest in. With a seventeen-million Lien grand prize and countless other prizes, there's a new winner everyday for the lottery—but you have to play to win! That kind of thing.

Other airships appeared to be the luxury flying homes of the well-to-do in some kind of imitation of Atlas. Still others, she suspected, had a military purpose. Unlike the clear separation of service branches back home, Vale only had two branches: the Royal Navy and the Royal Army, who both steadfastly clung to a royal namesake that hadn't been true in nearly a century due to some embarrassingly antiquated sense of pride. They had been led by a king the last time they were truly relevant to the world, after all.

And so she continued scrolling.

Sometimes girls be like ()() and sometimes you lay down and it's () . . . () 's just how it be

She examined the post for a moment, before hitting the like button. After all of her time just laying down in the hospital bed, that was a particularly relatable feeling of discomfort. And if you found something relatable on social media, it was part of the social contract that you had to leave a like, much like a good ruler was obligated to take care of his people. That was part of some theory by the philosopher Therrier or something. Those who didn't maintain the social contract were doomed to revolution, like the old kings of Mantle.

Social media had been something new to Weiss. She hadn't exactly been allowed to use these kinds of websites back in Atlas. It wasn't proper. And in any case, a Schnee had better things to do than waste her time looking for relatable posts just to pass the hours. It was unproductivity of the worst sort. But it wasn't as if she had many options right now. Besides, in between finding posts that she could vaguely relate to, she just kept finding things that annoyed her, and the constant low burn of heated irritation kept her warm and toasty under her coat.

It was honestly a pretty pathetic excuse for a living. She had absolutely no idea how so-called influencers made one out of this. Weiss supposed it was just symptomatic of the parasitism of the modern economy, a phenomenon primarily observed among the well-to-do of Vale. She could definitely see why this kind of thing was frowned upon in Atlas, which, in an ironic twist of fate, meant that wasting her time like this was another act of subtle rebellion.

Look at me, Father. I added a like to a post I could relate to!

"Weiss?"

She gasped in surprise, nearly fumbling the scroll out of her hands. When she looked up, she saw Blake standing by the door to the veranda. It took her a moment to realize what was wrong with this picture. Blake's ears were exposed. Not the human ears, but the cat ones on the top of her head, the ones Weiss had revealed when she had accidentally pulled off Blake's bow.

The two girls just stared at each other. Without realizing what she was doing, Weiss realized she was fingering at her face, at the recently stitched cut on her eyebrow. With any luck, the delicate stitchwork wouldn't result in a noticeable scar. Even if it had taken longer to get, it was preferable to staples and a guaranteed scar.

"You're a faunus," Weiss said, the words tumbling out of her mouth.

And behind her back, Blake sucked on her lips and nodded. "Yeah. This is, this is me. Hi. I'm Blake Belladonna. I have four ears and I punched you in the face."

Weiss sat her scroll face down on the table she was sitting at. Her mouth felt dry. It wasn't as bad as it was when she was first trying to play cards or attempting to force down sushi. No, this was a different feeling, part of the same family tree, but distinct.

The silence hung in the air like an airship that had just run out of fuel, coasting on inertia before its inevitable collapse into the ground.

Part of her wanted to lay into Blake. To rake her over the Dust and demand to know why she did what she did. It was what a Schnee would do. But was it what Weiss would do? She didn't know, and that was the worst part.

They both tried speaking at the same time. Only to realize they were speaking over each other, and awkwardly stop again.

Weiss held up her hand. "You punched me, and I'm pretty mad about that still," she said evenly. "But I also said some pretty choice words back then. I think you were trying to help me and—"

"I'm sorry!" Blake said quickly, taking a couple of steps towards her. Her ears pressed flat against her hair. It was both weird and vaguely endearing, like a kicked puppy, which was all the more bizarre considering those were definitely cat ears. "I didn't mean to hurt you. I mean, I did, I punched you on purpose, but that's not what I meant."

"I didn't know punching someone in the face could carry more than one message."

Blake did it again, taking a couple of steps forward, her feet crunching in the snow. "I was thinking too much," she said quickly, like she had to get all her thoughts out at once before she forgot them. "Like I could maybe knock some sense into you, but then you got hurt and it was the worst thing possible, and I'm so sorry, Weiss. I really mean that. And I really want to make it up to you. That's why I'm here, like this, no bow, no lies, just me—I wanted to talk without any of that pretense, you know?"

Weiss looked down into her lap. "I wanted to talk too."

Blake grimaced. "About?"

Rubbing her old scar, Weiss breathed. Her breath misted in the cold air. And oddly, she found a smile poking at the corner of her lip. The Schnees avoided much of the more vulgar Atlesian slang derived from the old backcountry tongues of Solitas like Mansk or Boarisch; it was impossible not to learn something here and there. Mist was a word of some minor vulgarity, the equivalent to rubbish or crap. Like Kipt, a word Blake was apparently fond of, it was something you could use derogatively towards Mistral.

"What's so funny?" Blake asked, nervously tugging at her collar.

"You're too far away for me to punch you back," Weiss said wryly.

"Do you want to?" Blake said, almost like she was offering it.

Weiss laughed, shaking her head. "What's the point of punching someone who wants to be hit?"

"I think it's part of a kink somewhere?" She pitched her voice to make it a question.

"Do you think I look like a kind of girl who knows anything about kinks and sexual deviancy?"

Blake took a couple more hesitant steps forward, before she was able to sit down beside Weiss. She kept her fists balled in her lap. "I don't know what you know. It feels like I don't know you at all in some ways. Hell, I don't know anybody on this team. I was just talking to Shamrock, and I realized I didn't know anything about them. I barely know anything about you except what drives me up the wall. Sometimes I'm not even sure I recognize the girl in the mirror."

"Is that with or without the bow?"

Blake swallowed. "Without. Definitely without. I've worn that damn thing for nearly a year at this point. I almost feel naked without it. Like people are going to see it, and they're going to point and laugh and make fun of me, and it'll just be like what happened to Velvet."

"Who?"

"The girl with the rabbit ears on team CFVY. You can't tell me you haven't seen her get bullied or teased or sexually harassed about them, right? That thing just kind of happens to a faunus, especially us girls."

Weiss' eyes fluttered and surprised. Yes, she did know Velvet Scarlatina. Not personally, but through proxy. Coco and Team CFVY were living legends in their own right. The best teams in each academy for that year were minor celebrities and, to someone like Weiss who paid attention to that sort of thing, people worth knowing.

"I kind of used to think one day I'd be her friend," Weiss admitted. "At least indirectly."

That got a strange look from Blake. "What?"

Weiss held up her hands. "Look, it's really dumb. Her team is well known. When I first got here, well…" She played with her ponytail, feeling like people were staring at her, people beside Blake. "When I first got here, I was hoping to team up with Pyrrha Nikos. You know her, right?"

Blake nodded.

"I used to think I'd team up with her as my partner, and I'd be the natural leader of our team. I get the best, most powerful, most ambitious people altogether, and I'd be in charge. And then I'd make friends with the best team from the last year, getting advice and personal tips from Coco Adel like her pupil or something. I don't know. It makes me feel like a little girl when I say it out loud." She cracked a sideways smile. "Can you imagine how I felt when I found out Coco was interested in our team, but she had made friends with Jaune of all people? I lost a chance to get my ideal teammates, I wasn't even made the leader somehow despite my obvious credentials, and the girl I thought would show me the ropes is instead giving advice and tattoo suggestions to him."

She shook her head. "There's not a single thing I dreamed of or planned that came to fruition. The center could not hold, and things fell apart. And now I'm just sitting on a veranda, mildly high off hypergammon to help treat a mild concussion, and praying to a God I don't believe in that I don't get another scar on my face."

Blake winced. "I'm sorry about that."

"You already said that."

"And I'm still sorry. What, am I not allowed to repeat myself when I mean it?"

Weiss took a breath. "My Father used to tell me that you only said things once if you meant them. If you had to repeat yourself, that meant they weren't listening, and that was your fault. You only really had one chance to get your message across."

"Did I get mine across?"

With a sad smile, Weiss said, "No. You basically just started rambling without any real coherent message for why you punched me."

"I thought it was the best way to make friends."

Weiss blinked. "Run that by me one more time."

"No." But she was giving a knowing kind of look, throwing Weiss' words back at her.

It was enough to make Weiss chuckle.

"I guess I thought you were acting kind of like a brat," Blake said, nervously playing with her fingers. It was like she couldn't quite sit still. "Maybe I could knock some sense into you, and then we would argue, and then we would figure things out. But I guess none of my plans worked out either. That's one thing we have in common."

Weiss sighed, looking out across the city. "Yeah. Just two girls with moonshards in their eyes, and nothing but failure to show for it."

"Do you want to start over?" Blake suggested. "I mean, from the very beginning. Or at least, from right after we had sushi together. I feel like we were almost bonding there as a team. Then it was a couple of quiet weeks until I punched you. Still sorry for that, by the way."

With a dismissive wave of her hand, Weiss said, "We all do things we can't take back. That's part of growing up, I think. We have these dreams and hopes, and getting them crushed is what separates girls from women, boys from men, and whatever child Shamrock is from adult Shamrock. I don't want to pretend like you never punched me or that I said things to you. I'm pretty sure saying things to you was partially why you wanted to punch me."

Blake looked away. "You have a pretty nasty track record of demeaning faunus."

For a moment, Weiss bristled. "It's not them, not you. My family is important to me. There's a saying back in Atlas, blood makes noise. We've been victimized by the White Fang. Murderers trying to shield themselves behind the rhetoric of liberation and freedom. I lost an uncle to them. And I've known plenty of peers who've been hurt worse."

"And that excuses you calling them all animals?"

"It's not—it's not what I—" She compressed a sigh in the back of her throat. "It's complicated. I don't have anything against you personally. But you have to see things from my point of view here. I'm a human and proud of it, proud of everything my family has built, even if I am ashamed of what my father has done with it."

"You mean labor practices that any sane country would outlaw?" Blake asked pointedly, her eyes halfway towards a glare.

"That stopped when I was a little girl," Weiss protested. She made another noise in her throat. "My father was wrong to do it. Most of the corporations in Atlas were wrong. I'm not going to defend evil. One day, when my father is dead, and I'm in charge of the Schnee Dust Company, I'll have mountains of work ahead of me to make things right. That's my responsibility with what I was born into. But you can't pay evil unto evil and call it justice. How many songs talk proudly about killing people like me? How many of your people hear about members of my family suffering, and laugh and smile? Have you ever heard Ça Ira? When they sing in Valais 'les aristocrates à la lanterne', about sending people like me to hang from lamp posts just because of how I was born? Or the more modern album Straight Outta Catchfire and its pretty rapey undertones?"

Blake shook her head, one of her cat ears sticking up. "I'm not familiar with old revolutionary songs. And that album isn't the kind of music I listen to, though I guess knowing about it is kind of inevitable. It is pretty popular, but it's still not my thing."

"Good. It shouldn't be anyone's. It's nothing but swearing, objectifying women, and faunus being proud of being violent degenerates."

"It's the language of a people with their backs against the wall," Blake said. "People who are angry and feel like they have nothing to lose. Whether in a dead end job in Vale or the grueling factories of Atlas. Can you blame them for expressing themselves?"

"I can when they celebrate hurting me." Weiss hugged herself and shivered. "When I was a little girl, the leader of the local White Fang slaughtered an entire factory's worth of people. Attacked the seat of government. Oceans of blood. The single greatest terrorist attack in the history of the country. And I was there, at all the funerals, standing beside my father, listening to endless eulogies and watching broken families and grieving widows. I locked myself in my room for days just to cry. It was one of the worst days of my life, not because I was hurt myself, but because I had seen people hurt and couldn't do anything about it. And then pop culture seemed to celebrate this mindless atrocity, and I couldn't help but hate them for it. Why shouldn't I be angry when they're celebrating innocent lives being hurt? They can't help who they were born as, and I can't help who I was born as. The world isn't a fair place like that. We've all got to do the best with what we're given in life."

Blake didn't say anything for a long time. She kept looking like she wanted to, but couldn't bring herself to do it.

Finally, she said, "You can't blame everyone for the actions of a few."

"Says the girl who called all Mistrali Kipts. You really can't see the irony?"

Blake grit her teeth. "They hate my people in Mistral."

"And your people hate my family, my entire blood, across the whole world. You really can't see it?"

"I'm sorry," Blake said in a quiet voice.

Weiss swallowed, unable to look Blake in the eyes. "I—yeah." She paused uncomfortably. "The world is a messed up place. I came to Beacon because I wanted to try to fix it. My father is going to live to an old age. I couldn't do anything for my family, and so I left to try to help in piecemeal ways. To try to show the world that a Schnee wasn't just some monster. We used to stand for something. We used to be something noble. Something people could respect and aspire to be."

"But that's not what you are these days."

Weiss looked down into her lap. "No. And… I guess for what it's worth, Blake, I'm sorry. If you're faunus, that means my family has probably hurt you too, hasn't it?"

"You said it yourself. There's bad things we've done that we can't undo. Things we just had to learn from so we can move on and become better people in the future."

Weiss laughed. It wasn't a humorous sound. "That wasn't exactly what I said, but I think I like the way you phrase it better. I don't think I'll ever really be able to understand your point of view or perspective. But I also don't think you'll ever really be able to understand mine. We come from different worlds. Money, privilege, responsibility—what do we really have in common?"

"We're both on a team and we both want to try to make up the world a better place for our people. We're both just a couple of girls in a fucked-up situation."

Weiss tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ears. "You're not wrong, I suppose. Did you always used to swear this much?"

Blake looked away sheepishly. "I've been getting worse. Every now and again I find myself unironically saying ain't, too."

She made fists out of the hand she had been resting on her lap. Both of her cat ears were standing erect. "But that's all beside the point. The point I want to make is, I want to get to know you. Maybe I can't forgive you, and maybe you can't forgive me, but that doesn't mean we still can't get to know each other. Understand where the other person is coming from. Acknowledge that we've both screwed up as people, that we're both screwed up as people, and still try to work through things."

"You start?" Weiss suggested, with a humorous little half smile.

Blake spoke quickly. "My dad used to be the leader of White Fang, back before they were violent the way they are today. I used to look up to him. Just like I used to look up to other leaders of the White Fang." She was breathing heavily now, and swallowed. "The reason I want to stop them so badly is because I used to be a member of the White Fang until I realized how horrible we were. So I betrayed them and I left and I went here to try to fix my mistakes and undo the damage."

Weiss blinked. She couldn't help but stare at Blake, slowly inching her head away. Her gut reaction was a sudden flare of white hot hatred. She wanted to reach out and strike Blake. Wanted to call her out. For God's sake, the girl was a terrorist! How the hell did she make it into Beacon? How the hell did she make it onto this team? And despite all of that, despite all of the hatred and anger and the inexplicable sense of betrayal she felt—why couldn't Weiss find it in herself to express that?

Her eyes looked over Blake, drinking her in slowly. Trying to find something to latch onto for that sudden bit of rage. But as she stared at the girl, the way she seemed to suddenly become so small, shrinking in on herself, Weiss couldn't help but feel almost a sense of pity.

Except, no, that was the wrong word. Pity meant she looked down on Blake. But she couldn't look down on the regret behind her amber eyes. How she shivered in the cold. How, until just a few words ago, Blake had just been another normal girl to her, if a girl who seemed to get a little too easily offended. But that all made sense now.

And as she kept staring at Blake, she found that icy hatred melting away. Evaporating into vapors that left Weiss feeling oddly empty and tired. She couldn't find the effort to be angry right now. Her scar itched, but she couldn't do anything about it.

"I… Okay, wow. Things are slowly, um, I guess they're clicking into place." It felt so weak and pathetic to say. So anticlimactic. Without any of the drama and excitement that she would have expected from this kind of revelation

Blake braced herself, as if expecting to be punched. "So. There! That's my dark, horrible secret. You're one of the only two people who know that. Well, maybe three. Headmaster Ozpin knows."

"…and the other person you told was Jaune, right?"

Blake shook her head. "No, no—he figured that out on his own somehow."

"He does seem to know a lot more than he lets on sometimes, doesn't he?" Weiss said slowly, thoughtfully. Some half formed thought was bubbling up in her hindbrain, something ominous and suspicious about that new information in a way she couldn't articulate even to herself, but it got shunted to the background when Blake spoke up again. She supposed it didn't matter. Not when she had more pressing things to worry about right now.

"I thought he'd hate me for it. Instead he just, I don't know, just accepted it. I'm trying to be better than who I was. Because I was a monster in my own way. I used to think that those who did nothing in the face of evil were themselves evil, but now I don't think it's that simple. I still believe it in a way, but it's more complicated. I just want to do the right thing."

Cat ears flush against her head, she sat up straighter, trying to control her breathing. "So, yeah. That's my dark and horrible secret past. What about you?"

"Me?"

"Yeah, you. I showed you mine, so you show me yours. I'm pretty sure that's how friendships begin, right? Mutual cringe-worthy embarrassment and regret."

"All of the best ones, obviously."

"Yeah, obviously." She paused. "So…?"

Weiss thought for a very long moment. The ensuing silence felt pregnant, and that thought gave her an idea. Cringing in on herself, she said, "I grew up not knowing a lot of really simple things. Did you know if you're really stressed and aren't eating right, you can actually miss your period? I didn't."

Blake squinted in disbelief. "What are you—huh?"

Shifting uncomfortably in her chair, Weiss continued. "So one day, I just missed it. I was in a bad headspace, and I wasn't eating right. My father had punished me because I had been sneaking into the kitchen at night for snacks, and he had said I'd been getting a little fat. So when I missed it, I panicked, almost as badly as I panicked when I first had one and had to get one of the maids to explain to me that this was a natural thing girls did. I kept trying to figure out why, crying to myself in my room in terror. I thought if I told someone, I would be in trouble. Because the only reason someone would miss a period is because they were pregnant, right?"

Blake didn't reply. She looked oddly tense.

"So, all I could think about was the only thing I have been doing differently lately was how I had pet this really cute dog, and for just a split second, I thought I had somehow gotten pregnant with a dog—that was just the quality of my sex education, you know? I mean, I pretty quickly realized that was impossible, but that was where my mind went for just a second. This horrified, disgusted second where there is nothing but a panicked inability to breathe and tears. I would be disowned as some kind of whore after I gave birth to puppies."

Blake looked horrified. "I'm really confused right now."

Weiss faked a smile. It was the best expression she could come up with. Equal parts self-defense and self-deferential. "You grew up with some pretty bad role models that led you down a dark path. I had some pretty bad role models that rendered me pretty much incapable of being a functioning adult. I still don't even know how to use a vacuum or cook or do anything that a normal person should. Plus I still have to try to figure all this out so I can undo the damage my father did. Make things right for the people we've hurt, and all that I've been complicit in just due the circumstances of my birth. So that's my awful backstory."

Shaking her head, Blake just made this confused noise. "Girl, what the fuck?"

"I'm a pretty poor excuse for a human being just trying her best and failing my way forwards. Meanwhile, when you pretend to be a human, everyone's fooled. I wish I could do that."

Blake laughed a little harder. "I think that was the most disgusting thing I've heard in a very long time, and I talk to Jaune almost every day."

Weiss laughed back. "So. Yeah. This is you, the former terrorist trying to save the world. And this is me, a complete screw up just trying to save her family. I think that's some common ground to start out with."

"I think I can handle that. Dog babies." She whistled, shaking her head. "That's a new one, but I think it's about as good as anywhere to start. I've made do with worse people on this very team once already. You and me, this ain't nothing, girl. Beginner level shit."

"Are we doing this?" Weiss asked. The question came out more nervously than she had intended. She kept playing with her hair and couldn't stop. "Are we actually becoming friends in the worst way possible?"

Blake gave her a side-long expression. "I don't know. But if you say we are, I won't correct you."

"Good. I don't handle being corrected very well."

Both girls laughed together, getting along for the first time ever since they met.

Weiss hoped it wouldn't be the last time. First with Shamrock, and then with Blake. She actually thought she could get used to this. Not so much laughing as much as just having a friend. A novel experience she didn't realize how much she had been craving until it happened.

It made her feel like everything was going to be alright for the first time in her life.