Chapter 27: Fessing up.

In a twist of fate as ironic as it is tragic, those most hungry for truth are often ill-equipped to deal with it.

If ever a fancy strikes you to share some information intended only for a few select pairs of eyes and ears, look no further than the nearest rooftop. Even in Vale, a city whose population density exceeded its next competitor by a wide margin, most commotion was nonetheless happening on the street level, and despite the exceptionally pleasant weather, it still took more than that for your average passersby to lift their eyes off the street and into the sky, or, more specifically, the roofs of the surrounding buildings… if only because anything worth looking at had a vanishingly low probability of taking place up there. Shooting up the fire ladder in the nearest shady-looking alleyway, Darius and Blake once again found themselves overseeing the city… or at the very least its next-to-nonexistent skyline. Once again, Darius was reminded that this was, indeed, not Atlas. However comparatively short his squatting in the city's bowels may have been, the first proper look he got at the metropole once he was out was something that stuck with him to this day. This didn't even compare… maybe with the exception of the sunny weather.

I never realized how much I missed sunlight until I spent half a year without it.

Indeed. You then spent half a decade near the polar circle. Funny how life works.

True. Maybe I should go sunbathe one of these days. Really soak it in.

What you should do is focus and get talking. It's improper to make a lady wait.

That was true as well. Having already singled out a spot not completely covered in filth, Blake had her eyes set firmly on Darius and nothing else, not even bothering to hide her eagerness. Pulling himself together in one long breath, Darius sat down cross-legged, and slightly bowed his head:

"Please, ask away."

"I feel like we should probably get the obvious out of the way," Blake pondered. "How did you survive? I remember the news saying your body wasn't found, but..."

"...But what are the odds of an eleven year old boy surviving both the White Fang's butchers and the subsequent fire?" Darius smirked bitterly. "As a point of fact, the answer may surprise you. Well… I suppose I should begin by stating the obvious fact that our family wasn't exactly strapped for cash, not to think I'm boasting or anything. This afforded us a certain degree of freedom in what we could consider spending it on. In particular, my father spared no expense nor effort towards my development, mental and physical alike. As a matter of fact, at the time of the raid, I was at the stage of my training where I was working towards unlocking my aura."

Seeing understanding light up in Blake's eyes, he continued with a short nod:

"So when the assailants came and my initial panic subsided somewhat, I attempted to fight," a grim half-smile etched its way across his face. "Futilely, of course. I was overpowered by the first enemy I encountered… though in my defence I believe this may have been their leader who was looking for me specifically. It went about how you'd expect."

He paused for a second.

"Having made quick work of me, he left the spreading fire to make certain I wasn't leaving the house. Luckily, at the one moment that mattered most, my aura finally activated, and rendered a fatal wound a… well, a merely excruciatingly painful one. Left a very nasty reminder on my side, too - I was basically bisected. It did safeguard me against the flames, though, so once my bum got sufficiently roasted, I was able to make it out of the debris virtually unharmed… physically, at least."

"The man that… tried to kill you," Blake quietly spoke. "Did you remember what he looked like?"

"I'm afraid not," Darius shook his head. "His face eludes me. Could've been the smoke, could be my child's psyche repressing it to this day. I do remember that he sounded distinctly male, though. I also remember his hair. Red... burning as brightly as the fire that surrounded me."

Enraptured by the brief flash of his past, Darius was too distracted to notice Blake freeze up like a salt pillar, shivering as terror gripped her heart for a split second.

Darius sighed:

"Oh well. Returning to subject matter of my survival, things only got more complicated as I finally got out. Even with my newly awakened aura, my wound was still dangerous, and to my addled mind, every passersby looked like a rabid Faunus just waiting to tear into my throat. On pure instinct, I took to the shadows, running headfirst into the nearest dark alleyway. Then… I ran. No sense of direction, hardly even registering that I was, in fact, running. I just ran until the smell of blood and smoke in my nose was suddenly replaced by the rancid stench of poverty. In my mad dash, I managed to descend all the way from the upper city and into the gutter," he pondered. "Have you ever been in Atlesian slums, Blake?"

"Never even been to Atlas, Darius."

"Wouldn't recommend," he quietly chuckled. "It's like any other slum, only there's no natural light because of constantly ongoing construction, and in my particular case, I also managed to get myself evicted just in time for the winter cold to begin proper. No snow, either. Just the cold."

Fishing out a small canteen from his cape, Darius chugged some water to refresh his rapidly drying throat.

"For several days I just wandered the slums, completely lost… in every sense of the word, really. Even our police avoid those parts. I subsisted mostly - only, really - on the energy of my still active aura as it slowly healed my wound and nourished me, seeing as I couldn't really turn it off at will. Consequently, it took a bit of time for reality to start setting in, when my aura ran out and the hunger pangs began. It..."

Interrupting his next sentence at its very start, a coughing fit suddenly overtook Darius as his next breath scraped against his throat, once again as barren as a desert. Blinking a couple times in confusion, he once again extracted his canteen and gave it a perplexed, suspicion-filled look, before emptying it. Swallowing down the last bit of water, he took a second to further consider his verbiage, then proceeded.

"It was at that point that it finally dawned on me that the events that transpired weren't just some bizarrely vivid, extended kind of nightmare that I was going to wake up from any moment now. I… pretty much broke down on the spot."

He clenched his teeth, forcefully dispelling a flood of age-old memories come back to haunt him for the mere audacity of bringing them up again. Albeit successful, this nonetheless left his thoughts a thick, amorphous putty damn near impossible to pull together and his throat, again, treacherously sore. Darius was beginning to think he'd just have to deal with this fact of life. It irritated him.

"At this point, the question that ought to be on your mind should boil down to this: how's a whelp who never wanted for anything in his life supposed to survive in Atlas' bowels without so much as even a full set of clothes on his back?" a rhetorical question was posited. Now pushing through the baffling disobedience of his vocal cords, Darius' voice grew a very distinct, dry sharpness, while the numb anger at the regrettable state of his inner equilibrium echoed in a subtle yet unmistakable rumbling deep in his chest. "And the answer is I wasn't. By all conceivable rights, I was supposed to die there, likely from the septic shock of my sure to become infected wound before hunger got to me."

A passing glance at Blake somewhat cooled the Silva's tempers, as it was beyond apparent that the sight of him unraveling in such unsightly manner was… perturbing to her, to say the least. Interrupting himself once again, Darius took a moment to regain his bearings for good, mercilessly ripping his thoughts out of the murky state they were in and restructuring them into a form he could work with. Blinking away the fleeting daze that typically followed such process, he looked again at the Faunus. For some reason, she appeared only more unnerved.

"Apologies," he sighed. "As I was saying, my outlook was pretty grim. Luckily, or perhaps through some divine intervention, I was granted a savior in the shape of, ironically, a Faunus. One of the tiger variety, going by the name of Dusk. Not only did he take me in, dress my wound and share his food with me, he also didn't run away or try to kill me after learning exactly whose life he just saved," he smirked briefly. "You could stand to take a note out of his book."

"You still remember that?!" Caught off-guard by such sudden change of both tone and topic, Blake couldn't even conceal her confusion properly as she just stared blankly at Darius, much less muster a witty retort. "I thought I already apologized for that!"

"You didn't," he chuckled. "Primarily because I didn't ask then, and won't ask now. I just felt that the mood needed changing."

"Some comedic timing you have," Blake grumbled. "So what? You just slummed it up with Dusk?"

"Essentially, yes," Darius nodded. "Initially I wanted to get out as soon as possible, of course… but evidence persuaded me to, begrudgingly, accept that there was no way back. Particularly convincing was the piece of correspondence where we learned that after a whopping week of investigation, I was declared dead to the fire."

He scowled. "Somehow nobody, not even the official investigation, dared to entertain the thought that maybe there'd at least be some kind of charred remains if that were the case. In addition, there could be no ignoring the feeding frenzy as the whole gaggle of jackals mistakenly called the Atlesian corporate elite began picking apart the pieces of my father's enterprise with the kind of voracity I, to this point, have never seen equaled. For being a barely fifteen year old street urchin, Dusk was surprisingly well aware of how things went in life, and I was no idiot, either. So, putting both our heads together, it didn't take me long to realize that coming back was just begging for a terrible accident to happen to me, lest I had the chance to even try to dispute the barbarism unfolding. Not to mention that staying dead dramatically reduced the number of people out to kill me just 'cause'."

He clenched his fists.

"So, I kicked back - metaphorically, of course - and watched helplessly as everyone, even those my father used to call friends - the Schnees notwithstanding - picked clean the lion's corpse within as little as a couple of months," Darius sighed, his voice growing sorrowful. "I would later come to learn, however, that my anger against the Schnees, at the very least, was… misguided. For all his spinelessness, Jacques alone had the dignity to do what Julius would have wanted, allowing the council to nationalize every Silva asset that he'd acquired. He still made a tidy profit off of it… but that's to be expected of a corporate crook. Credit to him, I suppose."

I wonder if Weiss knows about that tidbit.

I wonder if I should tell her.

"I, in the meanwhile, had to see to the… increasingly urgent matter of my survival. Thankfully, it wasn't too hard to convince Dusk that having me tag along would be beneficial to the both of us. Though a Faunus he may have been, he always was… rather fragile. I, on the other hand, was more than equipped to do some heavy lifting, now that my aura has replenished," he mused some more on the subject. "And so it went. Dusk would show me the lay of the land, mentor me in the ways of the street rat, show me a couple of tucked away spots where one could, on a very good day, catch a couple minutes of sunlight, and generally make sure we wouldn't keel over and freeze to death, get in the kind of trouble I couldn't get us out of, or puke our guts out from the food I found. My part in this arrangement should be pretty obvious by now."

"Sounds like you two had a pretty good thing going."

"It's a matter of perspective, really," Darius shrugged. "If you consider a loaf of untainted bread a lucky haul, then yeah, we did. I think it bears noting that a malnourished, emotionally scarred eleven year old with a fledgling aura does not a good fighter make. It's not like I could just swagger in a building and tell the local bums to get lost on pain of assbeating. Head on, I could take one man at best, two if I got the drop on the other… which is how I had to go about most of these encounters," he pressed his lips together as the more unglamorous parts of his winter vacation came into light. "That's how I took my first life. And the many that followed. In the six months that I spent in the Atlas' gutter, I killed a good two dozen people and then some, most of them over disputes of who would get to sleep in a warm boiler room and who would be spending the night outside, in the cold. Overall, I'd say the goodness of the thing we had going was… debatable at best."

"That's… that's awful," Blake whispered, her hand covering her mouth.

"It is," he nodded.

They sat in silence for a moment. After letting about a minute pass, Blake quietly inquired:

"Are you… alright?"

"I've had more than enough time since to agonize over those things, if that's what you're asking," he shook his head. "I seek no justification for what I did, and I'd rather you didn't, either. This is what people do when they end up in straits as dire as mine were. We both know what it's like to fear for one's life. Let us hope one day no man on Remnant will."

"That's a very tall order, Darius."

"Most good things are."

They left it at that.

"So..." after a brief silence, Blake spoke up again. "Six months. Something change after that?"

"Indeed," Darius sighed. "Quite radically, at that. Something that was bound to happen eventually, happened. I stole from the wrong people, and I left witnesses while at it. To spare you the minutiae, let's just say I stole some bread - good bread, too - from a gang boss with a reputation to uphold. Also I took his eye. In retrospect, the latter probably played a bigger role."

"Alright. Why, though?"

"The bread? Or the eye?" Darius laughed. It came out much more bitter than he intended. "I stole the bread because at that point I've been eating things the local dogs left alone for the better part of a month and would kill for food I didn't have to force down my throat. As for the eye..." he shook his head. "Honestly, the answer stays the same. Make no mistake, Blake, my mental condition did not improve at all during my therapeutic stay in that sunless shithole. I, uh… never quite got over the jarring transition from sleeping on clean sheets to having to wallow in filthy, often bloodsoaked rags, and so on and so on. Even before my final mistake, I was already getting reckless… if not outright rabid."

He paused for a moment.

"So of course he and his posse eventually ran us down. He pushed the tough-guy-speech, then told Dusk to just… look the other way. Honestly..." He couldn't help but let out a quiet, strangely malicious-sounding chuckle. "Had he not done this, and had Dusk not accepted, we may never have met."

"Pardon me?" Blake raised her eyebrow. Something in her eyes told Darius that she already knew what she was about to hear.

"I… I hold no grudge against Dusk," he said quietly, his gaze stumped. "As mentioned, this is what people do when their life is on the line, and honestly, the stakes in that Light-forsaken place could not have been any lower to justify any amount of self-sacrifice… but I'm afraid that was not my outlook back then, in the heat of the moment. I was already barely holding onto reality… but seeing the only person not immediately hostile to me just turn away finished the job. I got angry. Beyond furious, even. Actually frothing at the mouth. I lunged right at the idiots that gangbanger sent at me to 'teach me a lesson'..." a thin flicker of black mist permeated into reality from the great beyond, coiling around his wrist. "...And as my Semblance manifested, I butchered seven people before I could so much as blink."

After a short silence, Blake tentatively spoke up:

"Did Dusk?.."

"He wasn't harmed, thankfully," the Silva shook his head. "But he did bail on me the second I tried to talk to him once I snapped out of it. Can't really blame him: I looked about the same as after one of our field trips. So, having been left alone, I… kinda just plopped down on my ass and sat there, in the blood and gore. I'm not sure how long, time… basically lost its meaning, as did most other things."

At long last past this most unpleasant chapter of his life, a faint smile appeared on his face.

"I know for certain, though, that at some point I was discovered by one Lin Greystone… and that's an entirely different story. One that I'll have to take a pretty major detour for for everything to make sense. Tell me, Blake, what do you know about the Church of Light?"

Thrown entirely off-kilter by this question seemingly out of nowhere, it took Blake a solid half a minute to regain her composure and to even begin considering his inquiry:

"That's some detour alright," she mused, throwing Darius a long, piercing look in a futile attempt to extract some answer directly from the depths of his cranium. "Though I suspect the correct answer is 'less than you'."

"Very astute," he enthusiastically nodded, before instantaneously switching gears to a much more somber demeanor and lowering his tone. "And very few people are aware that such difference exists. I'd like to make something clear, Blake: what you're about to hear is not common knowledge. Realistically, I shouldn't even be telling you this."

After yet another excruciatingly long and suspicious look, Blake pondered:

"I'm growing somewhat suspicious of where this is going."

"There is a reason I don't talk much about myself. Point is: no soul on Remnant should hear what I tell you from you: not Ruby, Weiss, nor Yang, no one on the teaching staff, no one at all. Do we have an understanding?"

Darius was certain the little 'from you' bit wouldn't go unnoticed. He was equally certain Blake would derive the correct meaning from it. And he had absolutely no doubts about what would happen next.

After a brief consideration, Blake nodded and said:

"We do."

"Then it's time for a history lesson," Darius clasped his hands together. "I know you love those."

"Got me all figured out, haven't you," the Faunus snickered.

"I do my best. As you likely know, the Church has acted as the primary protector of mankind against the Grimm scourge up until after the Great War, where, having been bled just as dry as the rest of the world, it simply lacked the raw numbers to continue that function. That, combined with weaponry having made leaps previously thought impossible through incorporation of Dust, thanks primarily to none other than my very late predecessor, has prompted the powers that have been to… strongly reconsider the approach to that pressing issue, resulting in foundation of the very establishments we're now part of, as well as all the supplementary infrastructure like the combat schools and somesuch. Now, Blake..." narrowing his eyes, Darius began inching closer to the topic, starting with a leading question. "Jog my memory, exactly how did the Church manage to practically monopolize that niche? After all, Dust has been with us for almost as long as history remembers it."

"Well, when you put it like this..." as the bow on her head twitched ever so slightly, Darius could easily visualize gears swiftly turning in Blake's head as tracks were switched and noggins were jogged. "...Then I'd have to say that it came down to the fact that while we did use Dust in its most basic forms for a very long time, training a soldier who could use it to full effect was still prohibitively difficult, mostly boiling down to years and years of grueling drilling or extraordinary circumstances that would cause their aura to awaken. The Church, meanwhile, has found a reliable way to unlock one's aura, allowing them to mass-recruit people and adequately train them. I mean, they had a standing army's worth of soldiers spread across all four continents within as little as three centuries from their foundation. Really, what's not to like?"

"Indeed," he nodded. "But have you ever wondered what that method is? It's clearly different than awakening it the 'natural' way. Nor do our contemporary methods produce anything even close to the… uniformity that the priests of the Light demonstrate. In fact, their powers differ so dramatically from conventional Semblances that they don't even benefit from Dust."

His answer was silence. With an apologetic half-smile, he shook his head a little:

"If you thought I was going to tell you the details here, then I'm afraid I've misled you. That is not my secret to keep or give away," in expectation of a justified swear word or twenty flying his way, he threw his hand up, buying himself another precious second. "I can, however, tell you that the method the Church uses traces back millenia, originating long before there was even any notion of the four Kingdoms… long before mankind ever discovered Dust."

Seeing as no interruption came, Darius interpreted the silence as a sign to continue.

"'When man first walked the earth; when shamans banged their tambourines and danced their dances around campfires and when people still prayed to gods, some men already saw the first Grimm baring their teeth; the first sign of the storm that would consume us if not broken. First, they begged their gods for help, but no god came. Next, they turned to the soil they trampled, the water with which they washed away their refuse and the fire that they have tamed. Reluctantly, they helped, but they, too, failed to stop the scourge, for it is the nature of Grimm to destroy that which stems from man. In their desperation, they pleaded with the very stars that shone brightly through the night sky, and to the sun that upended the encroaching dark… and the Light answered its children'," in an even tone, Darius recited, quoting directly from the source material. "Really, one of the first scriptures tells it all plain and clear; one must only listen. In a time most pressing, when it seemed that humanity's existence would come to a very untimely end, some of us have managed, in the one moment where it mattered most, to tap directly into the one thing that discerns us from animals - the divine spark universal to us all, human or Faunus. What the scripture fails to mention, however..." smoke spilled forth from his outstretched palm, briefly solidifying all around his hand as a protective greave of purest black, before disappearing just as quickly. "...Is that the Light wasn't the only thing that answered."

"...I really don't like where this is going."

His left eyebrow slowly sliding up his forehead, Darius asked:

"Sounds to me like you're seeing something that I'm not. What's not to like?"

"Well..." Blake scratched her head. "Thing is, while I don't feel like you're bullshitting me, for multiple reasons, I can't help but feel like you're about to start telling me of this age-long feud the Church and whoever the others are have been having, and honestly this just feels like..."

"I'm gonna have to stop you right here," chuckling heartily, Darius raised a hand, breaking up Blake's tirade mid-sentence. "You're already wrong. While my Order's history and that of what would become the Church are intensely intertwined, we have never been enemies. How could we? We're all kin; children of Creation, fighting for the exact same goal, using the means the Makers saw fit to grant us."

"I… have several questions."

"I am at your service."

"The Order?"

"Order of the Servants of Dark, shortened to whatever you like… mostly the Order, though," reaching into his cape, Darius extracted the clasp with the engraving of his Order's holy symbol-that of a caped woman cradling a star in her arms. Channeling the tiniest fraction of his aura into the metal, he handed it over to Blake as his energy surged through the metal, giving the etching that much more detail. "Doesn't really roll off the tongue, but since we, unlike our brothers, never had to worry about going public, nobody could be bothered changing the nomenclature. And preempting your next question - yes, I am part of said Order, in case there was any doubt on that matter. The man I mentioned earlier - Lin - was a high-ranking member of its Atlesian wing who happened to discover me while going about his business… whatever it might have been in that blasted place. After restoring me to a more or less adequate state, he inducted me into the Order, then mentored me for the seven years I've served with them. Most of the things I know and can do I learned with them."

Taking a second to properly inspect the clasp, Blake then handed it back, her eyes somewhat narrowed.

"That… does answer a lot of things. Though there's still one thing I'm not quite getting. So you keep saying that this Order of yours and the Church have been pals for the longest time… yet any time I hear anything even related to their writings, the centerpiece theme is always the eternal conflict of the Light and the Dark. It's so even in the scripture you just told me. They've spent centuries practically antagonizing people like you, making them scapegoats! Exactly how does this jive with what you're saying?"

"I expected something of the sort," Darius bowed his head. "I can answer that. I know you don't care much for most things clerical, so I'll just say that as a member of the Church climbs up the ranks, they are eventually inducted into the more… fitting, and actually correct, ideology of creation. It is at that point that they are also introduced to us. And while it is true that the two, being polar opposites, often come into conflict, it is merely an expression of the duality of the whole. Much like we can only see the stars in the dark of night, and much like our crops would dry and burn had our planet seen only the brightness of our sun, our very universe is a product of their union, and suffers when they come into conflict. I mean, even the Grimm are black and white!"

As the two shared a moment of laughter of this surprisingly not too far-fetched analogy, Darius grew somewhat more somber.

"Now as to why the Church, on the surface level, deals only with the truncated version of this all… is a slightly more complicated matter… though at the same time it's fairly simple. It goes back a long time, or, to be more precise, to about the point of the Church's foundation. Put simply, at some point the number of people with awakened auras and bizarrely uniform powers became too big to stay unnoticed, and while it was easy for the likes of us to remain under the radar, it was simply not an option for our less shady brothers. It was thus decided to kill multiple birds with one stone: by institutionalizing and writing up a coherent agenda, our brothers could spread their influence faster and bring in many more recruits, thus making our cause that much easier. As to why said agenda took the form it did…" stumbling for a second in indecision, he chose the easiest approach to the issue. "Honestly, it's just easier. I can pontificate here for as long as I like, but to a farmhand whom the lord makes plow his field instead of his own every month and to a soldier making his coin by killing or dying, selling the idea of a metaphysical conflict is just that much easier than, at a surface level, a very vague idea of a metaphysical symbiosis and the unity of the two extremes. It already takes several weeks of thorough indoctrination just to prepare a recruit for their initiation, and back in the olden days, time spent bringing in and training up new recruits meant time not spent actually defending people from the Grimm. Steps are being undertaken towards changing up the general attitude now that the population is that much more educated on average, but that too takes time. Does that answer your question?"

"I suppose, yeah," shrugging in uncertainty, Blake nodded, admitting his points. "It's not pretty, but I guess it makes sense. So what is it that the Order actually does?"

"While our brothers looked out for the common folk, we dealt in reality and, in particular, with those who thought they were above the lowly plebs and beyond such benign things as morals," his response was laconic, yet succinct. "I'd say our performance was, for the most part, adequate."

"And you're in Vale because?.."

"It was decided I would be useful here. I've shown myself to be more than capable of handling a Hunter's training regimen, which is an opportunity we couldn't really neglect, on every conceivable level."

"I sense conspiracy. I assume Ozpin knows?"

"Of course he does," Darius shrugged. "Matter of fact, he's the one who pitched me that investigation I spoke of."

"I was wondering when you'd mention that," Blake perked up. "You'd best deliver."

"I would never deign to disappoint you," he chuckled, springing up on his feet and checking the time on his scroll. Conveniently, it was about time he got jogging if he wanted to scope out the best ambush spot. "At about half past midnight, wharf seven of the Vale harbor will be raided by the White Fang. Their target is a very sizeable shipment of Dust coming straight from Atlas. The plan is to get the drop on them, pump them for whatever intel they might have, then have the cops fetch them. Sound interesting enough to you?"

"Is there a point asking you how you know all this?" following suit, Blake too stood up, taking a moment to stretch and limber up.

"Absolutely none."

"Then why are we still standing here?"