Before anything else, I own nothing but the original characters, and content therein related to them. RWBY is owned by RT, and any mentioned creator's work belongs to them, and them alone. Rest in peace Monty, your vision lives on in us all.

CHAPTER 9

In the morning, Pale went around Kuo Kuana's hospitals looking for an old friend. His position as Sheriff gave him some leeway in finding her, and thankfully he didn't have to go to more than two emergency rooms. He knocked on the doorframe of the room, and Trifa's attention instantly shot up to him from the window she was looking out of. "Morning." Pale said as he came in.

"Sheriff…" Trifa said as Pale sat down in the bedside chair.

"Please, I'm off duty, and handing in my badge once we're done saving Haven." He said.

"Pale… What are you doing here?" Trifa asked after correcting herself.

"I came to chat." Pale said, resting his elbows on his knees. Trifa snorted.

"You came to chat with me? That's hilarious… What is it you want?" Trifa asked.

Pale sighed. "The militia and the civil guard are going to Mistral in two weeks, and I was coming here to offer you a pardon… In exchange for your service with the militia." He said.

"Done." Trifa said shortly. Pale eyed her curiously. "Oh don't pretend you didn't know my answer to that. I want to see Adam Tarus dead just as much as you do, and if you can pull this off, the world won't need the White Fang anymore… I get it, you hate us, and I know why. Bombing civilians and murdering kids is bad, believe me I hate that I even have to acknowledge that the White Fang does that, but if Ghira's plan works out, the faunus go from terrorists to saviors overnight." Trifa said.

Pale shrugged. "Just didn't think you'd be so ok with me being the one that asked."

Trifa smirked. "You haven't changed a bit, Steely Eyes." Trifa said, using her old pet name for Pale. He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one heard that.

"That ship has long since sailed." Pale said. Trifa's smirk just widened.

"Aw come on Pale, you can't tell me we didn't have fun when we were kids." Trifa said. Pale rolled his eyes.

"Trif, I was 12, you were 15. We didn't know half of what I do now." Pale said, holding the edge of his eyes with his thumb and index finger.

"You were eager to learn." Trifa said playfully.

"Until my old man found out about us." Pale said, rubbing his face in embarrassment. Trifa snickered. "He whooped my ass so hard, I couldn't sit for two hours." Pale said, before chuckling himself.

"And after that you still snuck out to see me." Trifa said with a smile.

"Yeah well… I was younger and dumber." Pale said with a sigh.

"You started seeing me less after that though…" Trifa said. There was a second of silence between them. "What happened to that you, Pale? The human kid who wasn't afraid of The Argiope's "freak of nature daughter?" Who saw everyone for who they were and not what they were?" Trifa asked. "What happened to the boy I fell in love with? Who fell in love with me?"

Pale sighed. "He grew up… Started to see that who people were was usually just what they were masked behind lies… He lost his leg fighting those people…" Pale said. Trifa sighed.

"Look, I'm sorry I joined the White Fang… I was 18, and nobody in Sakkura wanted to work with me because of my hands… But I didn't stop loving you… You were the exception to humanity's cruelty." Trifa said.

Pale shook his head. "Well I'm sorry too… I thought you left the village, and me. That might not have hurt as much as losing my sister and my dad, but it stung all right… I don't love you anymore Trif, and it ain't because of your hands, or even because you're a faunus. Those hands are a part of a beautiful woman, and at that a faunus who had her head half screwed on right to know when shit was wrong… I stopped loving you because you disappeared, like the rest of Sakkura did…" Pale said, before he stood up. "But at the very least…" Pale extended a hand to her. "We can still be friends." Trifa smirked as she grabbed his forearm, and he grabbed hers.

"With benefits, possibly branching into lovers, then romantic partners?" Trifa asked quickly.

"Don't push it, Trif." Pale said with an eye roll.

Later that day, Pale sat down with Ghira to go over a simplified training program to teach as many people as possible to shoot as soon as possible, while Blake was out with Sun tracking down that Captain in the port. Most of the armament Menagerie had were pre-Great War single shot rifles sold to them by Vacuo and Vale after the war. This simplified loading and shooting drills, but also meant the army would be screwed if they ran into automatic fire. Pale kicked back a sip of whisky, and set his glass on the table of the tea room. He still couldn't get it out of his head. In less than 2 weeks he'd be setting sail to Anima, and marching on Haven with an army of faunus to kill Adam Tarus. Ghira seemed to notice how troubled Pale seemed. "What's wrong?" The larger man asked.

Pale sighed. "4 weeks. I've got no doubt we'll win, but in 4 weeks I'm going to finish what I should have at Beacon." Pale said, running a hand over his holstered revolver. Pale looked at Ghira. "You know about what he's done right… Not just at Beacon, but in Anima?" Pale asked.

It was Ghira's turn to sigh. "I only know what kind of person he is… And what he's done to my daughter."

Pale nodded. "Stabbing her, yeah… Bit of a dick move."

"I wasn't referring to what he did to her at Beacon." Ghira said, catching Pale's attention. "How much do you know about Blake and Adam's relationship?" Ghira asked the sniper.

What did Pale know? They dated, they were intimate, they went out and did terrorism together, until it got to be too much for Blake. "Can't say a whole lot." Pale shrugged.

"Blake was 12 when she ran off to join Ilia and him in Anima, they first started dating when she was 14… And when he was 21." Pale, took a second sip of whisky, knowing if that was the opener there was going to be a lot to process. "Had Kali and I known what would happen to our daughter, we would have never let her meet him… She'd send us letters sometimes, write to us about how things were going, about how they were freeing faunus laborers in mines in Anima… Then the letters got worse… She told us they started having fights, that they came to blows, and…" Ghira took a second to breath, trying not to get angry at the thought. "We found out through Ilia that on a number of occasions he'd forced himself on Blake…" Pale took a third sip of whisky before simply downing the rest of the glass. "We didn't want to believe it. Her letters never made any mention of it, and she always wrote about how she felt guilty about starting the fights… Kali and I assumed the worst. That Blake was being manipulated, that she'd given up trying to resist him, that she was scared to leave him… And we were right… Adam Taurus is a merciless, self centered bastard that gets his kicks asserting dominance over people weaker than him… And Kali and I… We couldn't do anything to stop him from taking our little girl from us. And I doubt even I'd be able to do anything about it now… But you..." Ghira poked Pale in the chest. "You can do something about it…"

Pale looked at Ghira dangerously. "Chief, I can't take orders I don't have. What are you asking me to do?"

Ghira drew a breath. "I'm asking you to kill the piece of shit that stole my daughter."

Author's note.

"Ara ara." 15 year old Trifa probably. Yeah, pre burning of Sakkura, Pale was engaged in a relationship with a faunus, again trying to show that racism is a learned behavior, one that Pale seems to quickly be growing out of as cognitive dissonance plays in his favor. He keeps getting jobs and favors to do from faunus, and it's easier to just do the job, than it is to resist.

On Adam. RT has yet to expressly state, show or tell that Adam and Blake had a sexual relationship, and what their cannon ages would be at the time... So I had to do it myself. Blake said in V1 that the white fang changed leadership 5 years prior, roughly the time she would have met Adam, as Sienna got into power. (Even if the comics fuck up their ages through a failure to stick to their own material.) What this means is that Blake was literally 12 when she met and ran off with Adam, purely because she was intoxicated by him. Adam being the generally creepy, controlling piece of shit that he is, more than likely in cannon raped Blake. (Be it just statutorily at the minimum even if she wanted to have sex, or in the case of my version, violently because that's who Adam is.) I'm letting you know that in this story Adam Taurus is a child rapist. And rape is a special kind of evil that a bunch of other bad guys in this series would not even stoop to, Roman especially made a threat way back in V2 that if his goons did anything to Ruby, he would point them out to Clayton and Siniy, unlike what may or may not have happened in the Manga version of that interrogation.

Granted my version of Roman is slightly more cowardly, but he's intelligent enough to be scared of the giant pissed off animal guys, and if that's what it takes to have him condemn and stop a rape, so be it.

But I digress. I'm not going to just have Adam randomly go from mentor, to posible boyfriend, to obsessives abusive ex without there being at the very least hints and trails to the later from the very beginning, (Blake ripped out notebook pages with him drawn in them as far back as the WHITE TRAILER) and this is where the culmination of all Adam's sins come to a converging point. He's not just trying to establish a faunus dominant society because of his spite, or because of his hatred, or even because he's justified in fighting against a much worse version of humanity. He's doing it because deep down, Adam is a sick twisted individual that rapes kids, murders people he doesn't agree with, and is trying to put himself at the top of the food chain.