The Rose Has Thorns II
Why did he join the White Fang?
Adam supposed it was only a matter of time before someone asked him. No, before Ruby asked him: he knew that even in her best moods, Weiss would never purposefully bring up memories of the past and Yang was not one to pry into truly deep matters. He looked off at the darkness beyond their building and let out a deep sigh. It was the only sound between the two for some time. The city still rumbled from the movements of the unseen Grimm, and Adam mentally held onto that consistency for all it was worth to keep his thoughts straight.
"It's a complicated matter." In truth, Adam thought that Ruby had already come to believe he wasn't going to answer her at all. Considering just how fast Ruby was uncomfortably close to him with a wide, expectant grin, he supposed he was wrong. Adam calmly pushed Ruby to a respectable distance with his sheath, and returned his gaze to the darkness beyond.
"At first, I believed the White Fang to be the last organization I would join. Of course, back then, I was young and foolish: a child of a faunus miner in Atlas—Mantle, at the time—who thought that given time, we could befriend the humans, and right the 'wrongs' of our attacks on them in the Faunus Rights Revolution. All we had to do was keep working and keep quiet." He dragged the tip of Wilt's sheath across the edge of the rooftop.
"Altebrucke," Adam growled. "That was the mine my father and I worked in."
Ruby furrowed her brow and bit her lip. "How long ago was this?" She looked like she wanted to take it back already.
"Ten years ago. I was eleven, at the time."
He glanced behind him. Ruby looked sick.
"Oh, don't worry, Atlas changed their laws. Why, I think the 'official' age to work in the mines is fourteen, now," Adam 'reassured' her with a mirthless smile.
Her expression didn't change.
"My mother taught me to keep my head down in public. My father taught me to keep my head high in private. We lived. We worked. We scrounged and saved just like every other faunus down there, thinking our futile savings would one day magically break us free of that wretched place." He raised his sheathed blade. "And then..." He struck one of the bricks to the abyss below.
"There was an explosion. Two hundred faunus and fifty humans were trapped, along with their illustrious guest: the young heiress herself, Winter Schnee, who had demanded to see the operation she would one day own. In the chaos, blame was thrown everywhere. Surely, it was the faunus: saboteurs and terrorists among them. Surely, it was the humans, whose lack of regulation brought them to this disaster. Even the Schnee girl was left to carry the weight of her family: some were certain that they'd just marked us all off to die." Adam snarled. "The latter were closer to the truth than they knew."
"The Schnee Dust..." Ruby grimaced. Using the last name of her best friend in relation to what sounded like such an evil company didn't sound right to Ruby at all. "The SDC didn't try to help you?"
Adam let out a bark of a laugh and twisted on his heel to face her. "If you believe the public version, they did, but I'm getting ahead of myself. My father was the one who brought the two sides together and had them work to find a solution in harmony. Two months would pass before we were able to create a means to escape." Adam more forcefully shoved another brick from its perch. The sound of it crashing to the ground was lost in yet another rumble from the city's core.
"A second explosion ripped apart that plan, along with many lives. Including my father. Chaos and panic spread quickly. In my ignorance, I had come to believe that one of those humans was my friend, and in my pursuit to follow my father's ideals, I protected her and all others that I could until, to our surprise, the Schnees came to rescue us only a week later."
Ruby assumed the worst. "They'd only come because their heiress was there, right?"
His laughter was much more cruel, now. "In a sense. Imagine our surprise when we were brought up and found news crews, cameras, even shareholders of the SDC all crowding around. We'd become minor celebrities in our time down there. Jacques Schnee spent the next month thanking the faunus for helping save his daughter and praising the ingenuity of the miners for almost getting out on their own. The momentum of such a PR coup made it all too easy to pass new regulations, all with even the upper class cheering every step of the way." Though the events he spoke of were positive—wonderful, even—Adam had begun to pace along the rooftop, words harsh and growing louder, eyes burning bright-red.
Abruptly, as if remembering she were even there at all, he spun around to face Ruby. She flinched.
"Why did I join the White Fang?" His hair had begun to glow as he stalked closer. "I joined the White Fang because after two years of thinking we were a step closer to unity, I found out that bastard Jacques had planned Altebrucke's destruction from the beginning! The explosion that trapped us, the second that crushed my father and our hope of escaping, that Schnee being trapped down there with us, all of it was that rat just getting rights groups off of his back without upsetting shareholders! Worse yet? The human 'friend' I'd made in that mine was a part of it."
Ruby was left with widened eyes and covering her mouth in shock. "Weiss' dad would do that? He'd nearly kill his own daughter? Winter didn't know?" She couldn't even fathom anyone being that evil. Not Weiss' father. Not anyone. No one could be that... despicable.
He was quiet for a few moments, light fading and breath coming heavy as he forced his growing anger under control until, just like he used his semblance, he forced all of his bitter hate into two words: "She knew."
Silence fell over the two for a time, after that. Finally, Ruby pushed down her fears. "So... you joined to get revenge on Weiss' family?"
"No." Adam sighed. "Not at first. I'd woken up to what the world truly was like for faunus. I'd woken up to the truth: unity was all but impossible, so long as people like Jacques existed... but just because I saw the darkness surrounding the faunus did not mean I wanted to give up. Instead, knowing that humanity would not share their light, I would just have to provide the light and hope for faunus myself. I refuse, and still do, to leave them wallowing in the shadows."
Ruby's lips twitched up into a tiny smile. "Sounds a bit familiar..."
Adam snorted, though he'd gained a soft smile of his own. "You could say that."
Another rumble rattled the city, and this time, it was close enough to shake the building they stood on.
"That's getting awfully close..." Ruby mumbled as she peered through her scope for any sign of what was moving around, out there. "You don't think that's White Fang, do you?" Try as she might, however, all she could see past a hundred yards was the black curtain of Mountain Glenn's supernatural night.
"I doubt it, but after seeing that mutant Grimm, I can't say for sure." He nodded for Ruby to follow, then leaped from the building to the road below. They needed to be sure it wasn't coming for them.
Their trek towards the source of the shaking was mostly in silence. Ruby had first thought that Adam's tale would've satiated her curiosity, yet as they crept around rusted cars and over mounds of rubble, it kept crawling back more and more. It wasn't very long before she realized why: what she really wanted to know wasn't just why Adam joined the White Fang. What she wanted to know was—
"What happened?" she suddenly spoke up as they used an old truck as a perch to peer deeper into the frozen traffic on the main street.
Adam threw a questioning glance over his shoulder, but didn't say anything.
"Well, I mean, you said you wanted to bring light, right? So, if you joined to be good, what happened that made you... um..." Ruby trailed off. It wasn't as if he wasn't evil before he showed up at Beacon, but it still felt a little mean to say it right to his face. Her stomach fell when Adam just turned back to search for the source of the rumbling.
" 'If you gaze for too long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.' " Adam recited into the black. "And my mentor showed me just how deep the abyss really was. Maybe it was the night she revealed that to me that I lost myself. Maybe it came later. When I began attacking the Schnees directly, or perhaps when I first donned the mask. Whatever it was, it made it all too easy to focus on exterminating the dark rather than lighting the way."
He could only offer a shrug at his own non-answer. "I suppose I'm still searching for that answer, myself. It'll make it easier to resist the temptation, once I find it. Whether that's for me... or for any of us."
"Pssh, that'll be easy, anyway!" Ruby declared and hopped over beside Adam. Seeing his confused expression at her suddenly lighter mood, she nudged his side and explained: "Our friends would never let us dragged to the 'dark side' or whatever!"
Adam cocked an eyebrow. "I did have friends at the time, Ruby, and that didn't change much."
"Yeah, but did you listen to them?"
Adam opened his mouth to protest, but instead found himself only snorting and glancing aside.
"Exactly! I bet you were just too busy trying to do everything by yourself, just like you did before we made you listen to us. It's pretty easy to slip when you're only listening to yourself. Trust me, I should know! My dad, my uncle, my sister, my teachers... my Signal friends... and I'm pretty sure Zwei told me to not take on too much at once. They said one person can't go and change the world alone."
"And do you listen to them?"
"Nope!" Ruby chirped, completely oblivious to the hypocrisy of it.
"Good," Adam said, "because that's one of the most foolish things I've ever heard. The history of the world is full of those who dared to challenge society and succeeded: Ghira Belladonna, Sienna Khan, the Last King of Vale, the list goes on! Remnant changes only when someone forces it to."
Ruby threw her hands up, finally feeling justified. "Exactly! That's what I tell them—wait, no! I'm trying to get you to listen to us more!"
"In fact, if you listened to my mentor," Adam continued on as if he hadn't heard that, "even the Grimm themselves aren't exempt from this rule. Everything comes down to individual might."
And just like that, Adam had the young reaper's absolute and total attention, silver eyes gleaming with curiosity. "Your mentor thinks that there's something in control of the Grimm? Like some kind of... Ultra Alpha?"
Adam shook his head. "More than that. My mentor grew evasive when I questioned her more, but she told me that with enough power, Grimm become more than just intelligent. They have goals. Strategy."
"Woah... How big does a Grimm need to get be that smart?"
The intersection ahead of them exploded, the shockwave large enough to force both of them off of the truck and into the mass of cars. Ruby carefully peeked over one of them to see the road lit by a bright, orange glow: old cars with their Dust engines were ablaze, their unstable fuel sometimes still going off in sharp cracks and bursts of light. But that was not what got her attention.
What got Ruby's attention was the pillar of a Grimm leg that fire surrounded. Surrounded by a black miasma and coated with countless bony plates almost as big as the vehicles it stomped on, an elephant Grimm as tall as the buildings around it slowly dragged itself across the street, leaving craters and shattered vehicles in its wake. It shook its head slowly, and its ears bulldozed through the faces of the towers around it with no resistance at all. The groaning of both its strain and that of the world around it was loud enough to hurt.
"Roughly that large!" Adam called to her over the din.
"What is that?!" Ruby shouted as she scrambled back atop the truck to get a better look at it. Not that it mattered much, really, considering how even that high she was eye-level with its knee.
The beast came to a halt and, seemingly hearing them, slowly turned its head towards the two. Red, glowing eyes each as large as she was stared down upon Ruby. Suddenly, the main street was completely silent other than the crackling of flames and nervous, giddy giggles from Ruby herself. She didn't know if she was shaking from fear or excitement.
"A Goliath. One of the most powerful Grimm, if not the most powerful 'species'," Adam explained. His words that fell on deaf ears.
"Imagine how many points that's worth! Come on, come on, we can totally take it!" Her finger was already inching towards the trigger when Adam bolted onto the truck and yanked Crescent Rose's barrel down. Ruby looked downright crushed, her silver eyes unusually bright as she tried her best puppy eyes on him. Behind them, the Goliath made no moves, regarding them with a strikingly human curiosity.
"Even if we won, we would certainly be gravely wounded at best." He forced the scythe blade down into the truck. "Or dead. Most likely the latter." Unable to resist that blasted gaze of hers for too much longer, Adam instead risked a glance back towards the Grimm. The Goliath, by now, had already lost interest. It looked around as if deciding just which direction it wanted to go.
Disappointed, Ruby watched the grand beast linger in the intersection. "It's... ignoring us? It did see us, right? How can a Grimm just walk away? I thought they hated humanity? Wouldn't it sense our aura?" She sent off a barrage of increasingly quick questions. "Do Goliaths—"
"Goliaths have no interest in the individual," Adam interjected. With great reluctance, he let go of Crescent Rose. "Some Grimm have certain 'tastes': Death Stalkers are drawn most to those who fear death, King Taijitu to paranoia, Nevermores to loss. The Goliath, on the other hand? Goliaths seek out one thing and one thing only: catastrophe. They, most of all, wait for hundreds of years, knowing that killing one person will only bring more. They don't seek out the destruction of Remnant because it is a source of food or primal attraction to negativity: it is a guided, coordinated attempt to extinguish civilization." The short-lived stillness collapsed as, with slow, deliberate movement, it stomped onward. Cars burst and cracked like eggs beneath its feet.
Adam let out a faint sigh of relief, keeping his eye on the beast. "But think about it, Ruby: if the Grimm have existed alongside faunus and man since their birth, society building to the point where 'catastrophe' could even be possible on a grand scale would have taken centuries."
He turned to Ruby. "Yet Goliaths have been depicted since the beginning of history."
She furrowed her brow in thought. "Like they were already waiting for us to build up? And your teacher thought they were already being led by the Ultra Alpha?"
The corner of Adam's lips twitched up: she was certainly already fond of that 'Ultra Alpha' term of hers. "More than just an Alpha, Ruby. She thought they were created and led by a Queen. It was a slip of the tongue, and one she never repeated, but... if that's true, is there really any greater proof that one individual can change the world? One single 'person' who leads the enemy of Remnant itself!"
"Or more importantly," Ruby added on with a wild grin, "whoever gets to take her down!"
Adam let out an amused grunt and tousled Ruby's hair, ignoring her protest. "Don't get any ideas yet, freshman."
"You're in the same class as us!" she huffed.
"Am I really?"
"... Wait, are you—"
"I'm saying you have a long way to go if you can't even take on a Goliath."
Behind them, the beast had finally begun to tread onward and out of view. Loud pops and roars of exploding cars followed its wake, as did clouds of dust and rubble knocked free from the buildings surrounding it. They could already feel the street rumbling from a second Goliath not too far from where the first had come.
"It doesn't look like they'll be coming this way," Adam said and turned away. "We should return to our camp before we get too distracted. Besides, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before your sister and my partner decide to come scouring the ruins for us when they realize we're both gone." He didn't realize that his words were yet again falling on deaf ears.
Ruby's attention was drawn back to the path of destruction the Goliaths were leading. She remembered the huge tracks near where she and Oobleck had talked. There was just one set, back then. As the flames finally petered out enough for the Goliath's dark cloud to swallow up the light, Ruby realized that if Goliaths came through the streets often, there shouldn't be so many cars that could explode left behind. In fact, there was no way that the city could be standing if the Goliaths were here all the time from how much rumbling and shaking their walking alone caused, and if that was the case...
"Those Grimm must've shown up here recently," she thought out loud. When she didn't hear any response, she turned around to find Adam staring off in the other direction, frozen in place. Ruby couldn't tell what he was thinking, but as Adam's grip tightened on his weapon enough to tremble, she could guess he'd realized the same thing.
"If the Goliaths are here, and they can sense a catastrophe about to happen..." She trailed off, but they both knew what it meant: whatever Cinder and the White Fang were planning, it was gargantuan in scale. Large and clear enough for even the Grimm to take notice.
"I don't understand," Adam hissed under his breath. "This was my organization. I built it from the ground up: every cell, every branch, every operation in this country at some point passed by my eyes, but we had nothing even close to planned that could potentially bring a disaster of that scale. The White Fang is strong, but to do something of this caliber while their leader 'mysteriously vanished' or died? It's impossible."
"They have Cinder's help, don't they?"
"Cinder's help? No, it's the opposite: whatever Cinder is planning, she is getting our"—Adam flinched—"the White Fang's help to accomplish it. There's no true alliance here. She's using them for her own schemes."
"All the more reason to stop her, then!" Ruby declared and hopped over beside him. "She used Blake to try and hold you down, right? Who knows what she has over them to make them listen to her. There's no way your old group would want to do something this terrible: I-I mean, even faunus would get caught up in it, right?"
He remained silent, but his grip softened, slowly but surely. A look over his shoulder confirmed what he was already sure he would find: Ruby staring up at him with the most optimistic, innocent eyes, as if what she'd seen already was nothing at all. Yet, Adam could see a certain dullness that betrayed their supposed mirth. He wondered if that was the world's fault or his own. No matter what the answer was, Adam decided he wouldn't see them dull any further: he wouldn't fail a second innocent fighter who just wanted to do what was right.
So he smiled. "You're right, Ruby." He lied. "We don't know just how deep Cinder has dug her claws into the White Fang." And he ignored the fact that the monster he helped create had been hoping and praying for an attack like this to disgrace a Kingdom for some time. "There might still be time to stop them from doing something they'd regret."
Even if he knew that for someone like Ruby, thinking they were monsters would make the inevitable deaths easier. After all, he was the same as her, a long time ago.
Ruby furrowed her brow and, for a brief moment, Adam thought he had been found out.
"Are... you alright?"
Adam's face fell slack and he turned to face her. "Excuse me?"
Ruby shuffled in place. She suddenly found the rusting surface of the truck so much more interesting than the world around them. "I-I mean, with having to go against not just a few White Fang grunts but their entire base, and that's probably way more important than just watching over some Dust robberies, so you'll have to fight your old friends and I... I, um..." She searched for words as she rambled on, clearly having not exactly planned this far ahead. "You said you built the whole branch, right? Will you be okay with... you know..."
It took a moment for Adam to truly realize that, out of all people, Ruby was worried about him. He let out a short, disbelieving laugh and shook his head. As Ruby only grew more worried, Adam smiled and let his gaze drop to his weapon. A shift of his thumb and a soft click revealed the crimson blade within, where the Mistrali language rose from the base. Chuugi. Loyalty. Language that would soon be coated in his own former comrades' blood.
It wasn't as if he hadn't killed his own, before: he'd slain some at the docks, and he was no stranger to executing some of the lesser officers he had found so willfully working with Torchwick as the 'Ace of Spades'. That didn't make breaking into their base—their home—and likely needing to massacre them in order to prevent some grand catastrophe feel any better.
He sheathed Wilt and looked up at Ruby, smile cold and empty. "It'll be one of the hardest things I've ever had to do in my life, but I think I'll be fine."
How loyal he was to the people he'd raised and had been raised by...
" 'Do what you have to do', right?" Ruby's words carried a hint of hollowness to them and, for a brief moment, a frown crossed Adam's face.
Refusing to show any more weakness, Adam smirked and twirled his sheathed weapon in his hand. "It isn't me that you should be worried about. Now, let's get moving." He dropped down onto another car and began to hop his way across them. By only the second, however, Adam noticed he wasn't being followed, and turned to find Ruby staring off into the darkness after him, just standing at the edge of the truck. She kept readjusting her hold on Crescent Rose, eyes downcast and mind elsewhere.
"Does it get easier?" Adam knew not if Ruby was asking him or herself: her voice was soft enough for his improved hearing to barely catch it. Still...
"In your case, I hope it never does."
And yet, Ruby did not move.
"I-I think..." She took a deep breath, then smiled brightly, back to her old self. "I think I might stay here for a little bit. You know, clear my head, blow off some steam."
Adam nodded and turned to leave. "You aren't planning on attacking one of those Goliaths, are you?" he teased.
Ruby jolted in place. "Pssh, what?" She nervously giggled and turned away. "Nooo..."
"Ruby..."
"Alright, alright, I won't attack the Grimm!" Ruby pouted. "Spoilsport..." The only response she got was a chuckle as Adam walked off into the shadows.
"Explain."
He had only made it a few steps inside the building—not even the floor they were on—when he saw Yang waiting for him. And now he was here, held against a wall with Yang gripping his coat and both their eyes a blazing red only matched by the flames growing around her hair and the glow emanating from himself. Adam expected Weiss and Yang to have noticed that he and Ruby were gone after only a short time, and he expected them to be angry, as well. But he did not expect their fury to be this intense.
"You are very lucky you did not attempt to take me by surprise with this little stunt," Adam growled.
"I said explain," Yang repeated through gritted teeth. "You don't have Weiss to save you, this time."
"There's nothing to explain. Now, let go of me, because whatever this is about, I doubt it'll be worth what will happen if you don't," Adam warned and made no attempt to hide how he aimed Wilt's hilt directly at her stomach, nor how his finger slipped around the trigger. Friend or not, he refused to be disrespected so flagrantly.
" 'Whatever this is about'?" Though there was only disbelief on her face, her blazing hair growing brighter spoke to her true feelings. "We already told you! This is about you killing someone else in front of my sister! It's about her clearly being just a little bit screwed up because of that and instead of coming to us as a team or even to her damn sister she's going to you for help! So, I'm gonna ask you one more time: what did you say to her? What did you do?!" Yang roared, and her demand echoed off the walls back at them both. Quietly, she added, "Why did you hurt her in the first place?"
Time passed in silence. Though Yang's flames did not fade, she made no attempt to stop him, and though Adam's glow remained, he made no attempt to force Yang away.
"I'm trying to help her." Adam willed his anger down until only Yang's fire lit the room. "I'm the only one who can."
Yang's eyes widened and she gritted her teeth as if Adam had struck her. "Why you?"
"Because," he started with a calmness that threatened to strangle Yang's flames from its frigidity alone, "this is a situation only I can understand, and though it is the last thing I ever wanted to say to her..."
His plan for Tacet was going so well.
Adam counted the seconds going by as he walked away from the assassin, savoring each one. Tacet's life was over now, and that wretched assassin knew it: whether he chose to return to Almond to inevitably be sent against him again, or tried to attack and would be struck down, he would not live to see the next year, let alone the next month. Horrid as it may be, that knowledge left his steps light and airy even though the battle had tired him. All he had to do was wait, and he would be rid of him and still be able to avoid murdering in cold blood. Why, his semblance would even make it clean.
When Tacet roared in anguish, Adam's smile grew. When the world went silent, that smile became a wild, savage grin. It took all of his effort not to laugh at how easily Tacet was throwing his life away. With sick glee rapidly overwhelmed by the concentrated wrath of his Semblance, Adam grabbed Wilt's hilt and began to turn. Then, he smelled roses, and time came screeching to a halt. As Adam saw the blood-red rose petals flickering by him, what barely scratched two seconds felt like ten. As he heard the beginnings of a rattling gasp and knew that the field of silence had collapsed, ten seconds became twenty.
And as Tacet Avalanche fully came into his field of view with Crescent Rose cleaving halfway through his torso, his weakened, black aura trying and failing to resist the deadly, bright-red glow surrounding Ruby's weapon, twenty seconds became an eternity.
Adam did the only thing he could: he activated his Semblance, and he finished what she had started.
Tacet's fallen halves faded into wilting rose petals before they'd even struck the ground, whirling away in a silent storm of death befitting the assassin. Behind the cloud of petals, Ruby stood horrified, frozen with her eyes locked onto Adam's. Blood, hot and bright splashed across her, so vibrant against both her pale skin and the metal of her scythe before it, too, peeled away into petals and vanished away.
It was as if Tacet never existed.
"I am the only one who can tell her that she did what she had to do."
