Promises You Can't Keep


A few assurances to Weiss later, and Adam found himself walking beside the source of all his hatred. Jacques' steps were light, the man barely caring around what Adam was certain was his palpable aura of fury, no matter how trained he kept his expression. The fairgrounds tapered away to Beacon's empty pavilions and classical buildings, and crowds tapered to a scant few walking the opposite way towards the Festival. Multiple times, in the increasingly oppressive silence, Adam found his hand twitching, seeking to rest on Wilt. He didn't trust himself enough to allow it.

"I'm afraid I don't know you well enough to enjoy long walks with you," Adam drawled, tired of Jacques' attempts to ratchet up the tension. "So speak: what has you so interested in me now?"

Jacques snorted and folded his arms behind his back. "The only interest I have in you is ensuring you faunus don't bring harm to my daughters."

Adam rolled his eyes. "Save your racist creed for someone who cares, Schnee."

Yet to his surprise, Jacques smiled. Smiled without mirth, yes, but still unexpected. "I thought you cared quite a lot about my words, considering how you've built your entire life around them."

He glared at Jacques. Already, he didn't like where this conversation was going. "Get on with it."

"When Winter came back to her home years ago, rambling on about the Altebrucke Collapse, I had a feeling it was one of you who filled her mind with such foolishness about it being some grave travesty on my part. Imagine my surprise when I looked into the supposed mastermind and found a Vizesteiger that used to be employed by me. Almond, was it?" They'd stopped by then, turned to face one another. Both their gazes were filled with nothing but ice.

"But the title was de jure at most. The de facto leader was a miner by the name Adam Minier Senior. And so his son stands before me, the little bastard that's been attacking my company, killing my family and now with a penchant, it seems, for ripping away my daughters," Jacques hissed.

Adam didn't know when he'd grabbed onto Wilt, but it was far too late to pull his hand away now. "From what I've seen, you've done your fair share of the last."

Jacques sneered. "I would advise you keep silent on what you know little of, boy."

"And I advise you to remember who you're standing in front of, Schnee," Adam spat back and took a step forward. Their auras both flared to life at once, the space between them suddenly charged with a frantic energy and arctic wind alike. The two glared at each other for a moment longer. Then, Jacques stepped back and adjusted his tie. For all his pomp and attitude, the CEO's hand was shaking.

Adam couldn't help but notice they were alone, now. Through some dark miracle, the few souls he'd seen passing by were long gone, with no other around. His instinct roared at him, and his hand twitched on Wilt's handle. Adam forced it still.

"You were bold to come here alone," Adam said.

Jacques paused, and the tremble in his hand stopped as he folded them behind his back once more. Adam deciphered the meaning of something so small: he'd misjudged his surroundings. Typical. He must've had guards hiding in the buildings and in the shadows, thinking it would make him safe.

" 'Bold' implies I have anything to be afraid of. I'll cut to the chase: I know who you are, Taurus. My question is if my daughter knows."

Adam scoffed. "Which one?"

Jacques rolled his eyes. "Don't play the fool: the one that matters."

Of all the people Adam ever thought he would feel offended for that day, Winter was nowhere on his list. Whether it was from the boy within he thought long dead or simply his growing conscience, he found himself scowling enough to bare his teeth. "You really are disgusting," he hissed.

He waved it off, unfazed. "Pragmatic, I prefer. If Winter is going to choose to listen to the ramblings of a radical faunus and abandon her family, why should I give chase? She chose her allies, and now I want to know if Weiss has chosen hers."

"Then get out of my sight: she knows nothing of my past," Adam lied with neither hesitation nor remorse.

"I'm afraid it's not that easy. If you really think I would let my daughter fraternize with her family's foe, then you're an even bigger fool than I thought. I brought you here for two reasons: the first was to ensure my daughter was not a traitor, and the second was to inform you that I am kind enough to give you two days until I ensure you will never be near her again, and if Ozpin refuses to act, then your face will be plastered on every Scroll on Remnant."

He gripped Wilt tighter, eyes flaring crimson: after all the work he had done, after choosing to remain here, it was going to be Jacques Schnee who ruined it all, and he couldn't do a damned thing about it?

"And do not take my mercy as anything but the benevolence it is: I don't know, nor do I care, why you are here or why Ozpin allowed you here, but I do know that Weiss is still alive in 'your' team. A head start is payment enough, even though rightful justice will find you soon enough." He smiled, false and taunting.

Adam could feel his control crack and splinter, a twig young enough to bend yet old enough to snap with enough force. "Like you know anything about 'justice'! The only justice there would be is you were ripped to shreds and buried like my father!" He shouted, and in a flash, Wilt was out and at his side, slicing a line in the road.

Jacques stumbled back, and Adam could see glints of light around him: the early sun reflecting off of Schnee guard armor and the red glints of laser sights in windows. Jacques had played his hand, and yet in the back of Adam's mind, he still knew that wouldn't be enough. No. It'd be fuel. Every shot would be more fuel used to light the fire that would extinguish Jacques' life in an instant.

"You... you can't hurt me, Adam," Jacques tried to convince himself as he pointed to Adam, but he couldn't hide how quickly he was breathing. "You're not afraid of imprisonment or death: I can see that in your eyes. It's your precious team you care about, isn't it? And you know exactly what would happen if you laid a finger on me! What they would say!"

"That might be true," Adam conceded. Slowly, he raised Wilt to point to him. "But that means your daughter is your only lifeline. Remember that, Schnee, because the moment she finally recognizes what a wretched beast you are, there won't be a reason on this earth to keep you alive. So please, give me that reason."

Though every muscle in his body fought him along the way, Adam forced himself to sheathe his blade. "Consider your offer accepted. Since you have a tendency to go back on them, just remember that I may not consider the opinion of my peers worth more than your pathetic life if I see you again." He forced a mocking smile. "Have a good day, Schnee."

He didn't give Jacques time to speak before he twisted on his heel and strode away. He kept his chest out and head high, the same as he would in the White Fang to hide his thoughts, now just a mask to hide the inferno burning within him. Adam was sure, as he walked back to their dorm, that people were addressing him, but he couldn't hear them. The world was just one loud blur until the dorm's door shut.

No one was there. Good. Calmly, he forced his aura to recede. Calmly, he walked over to his desk. And as the reality of the situation came rushing back, he roared and pulled his fist back.


Another punching bag, its leather gnarled and blackened, crashed to the ground. Another seventy lien she was about to be out of, on top of what she used to rent out the training room. Yang, however, just stared at it with neither thought nor emotion. There was far more to think about. As she dragged it away and prepared to find another, however, those thoughts were dashed when the door was flung open.

The door slamming shut behind Adam was the only sound in the room as he strode through it. Every step was measured, almost robotic in nature, yet no amount of control could hide the waves of hatred in his crimson eyes. Technically, they were Semblance training: Yang to concentrate her anger down into a single burst of endurance and strength alike, Adam to let his energy loose for longer than a climactic strike. In reality, each day they had trained was more an excuse to have fun, whether or not it produced results. The few that weren't were excuses to blow off steam.

But the memories of that were far away, now. Adam passed Yang without a word and tossed a gym bag onto a bench. As he rifled through it, Yang clenched her fists. The sheer nerve to act as though nothing had happened. To pretend, all this time, like he didn't know who her mother was. To lie right to her face, even when she let herself be vulnerable. The fire within her began to build again.

There was a reason to the silence: only uncertainty and anger laid beyond it. It was the door that had just as much a chance of leading to understanding as a harsh and fiery end to their friendship. Even the team as a whole. Try as Adam might, he couldn't bring himself to risk it. Try as Yang might, she couldn't bring herself to rip the door open herself. But she could bring herself to walk towards him. The fire within blinded her with its smoke, and no matter how much she knew the real reason why only silence reigned in that training room, it didn't stop her from remembering every single time Adam could have told her when he was the only one who knew how important it was.

Adam stopped, knowing Yang was approaching, but he made no move to stop her. Yang only sped up, storming ahead without thought. It was without thought when that fire struck its peak. Without thought when she twisted her hips and brought her first back, barely feeling the flames surrounding it.

The screech of metal against metal was lost completely in the crash and cacophony of flame and force. A short-lived wave of flame faded from a shining white to a twisting orange, the wall ahead held up only from a flickering field of cyan, hard light that gave out and shattered like glass. The scent of Dust-borne O2 mingled with ash and gunpowder. Yang's fist stayed raised, pushed over his shoulder by Wilt's now-smoking blade.

The lights had faded and the ringing in their ears had ended, yet the two stood, frozen in that moment. Adam had turned only enough to be able to glance back at Yang, yet Yang's expression was masked by her hair, her gaze turned to the ground. Both knew what had happened. Both knew they could mention it. But both also knew to do so would be to address the Grimm in the room and to open the withered, cracking door they both wished would stay closed. One second ticked by. Then two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Adam turned to Yang, an eyebrow raised. "Showing off your progress, I see."

Yang looked up with a cheeky grin. She winked. "I might."

He ignored her eyes still being red as rubies. She ignored how fake he sounded. Together, they began walling off that door, uncaring for how long it could last.


A clap of thunder and burst of blinding light, and Neptune Vasilias was sent crashing through the wall of a dilapidated building. As Yang shook her smoking fist out, the buzzer rang.

"And an absolutely brutal takedown from Yang Xiao-Long!" Port's voice boomed throughout the stands of Amity Coliseum.

"Unfortunately for Sun Wukong and Neptune Vasilias of Haven, Yang came into this fight most certainly ready for anything they had to throw at her and, far worse for them, came in angry," Oobleck added on, speaking twice as much yet managing to take up only the same time Port had.

"And boy, do those numbers prove their case..."

Yang had barely lost a third of her aura, and what wasn't used to empower even a simple jab to dangerous levels of strength was instead used to just walk through anything Neptune tried. She'd split from Weiss almost immediately, leaving her to fend off Sun and keep him from helping her partner. Sun, however, was persistent, and keeping him from Neptune was just about all Weiss could do, the two skirmishing time and time again at the edges of desert-turned-urban ruins.

"Had your fun yet, Yang?" Weiss called over her shoulder, creating a network of gravity glyphs all around the monkey faunus, each one calculated to be just enough to throw him off balance no matter where he turned. A last shove of force from one and... Sun latched onto another one of her glyphs with his tail, and hung upside-down from it. Sun grinned and waved to her, though he shuddered as the Yang approached with all the dread and weight of a thunderstorm.

"You could take him," Yang grumbled back as she stepped in beside her. Her eyes hadn't faded from their sharp, dangerous red since the match had begun.

Sun squinted. "I'm pretty sure we met before. You know, with the giant—" A wave of Dust-spawned fireballs and shotgun slugs shut him up before he could elaborate.

A hard nudge to his side took Adam's attention away from the fight and from Yang. He shot a glare over at the perpetrator: Velvet. She only smiled, winked and pointed to his other side. Ruby was glaring up at him with worried eyes and a pout trying to capture even a fraction of Yang's furious storm, yet managing only a thin wisp.

"I've been trying to get your attention since Neptune was still conscious!" Ruby exclaimed in a hushed voice.

He still found it too hard to be annoyed near Ruby for long. Adam sighed, resigning himself to how soft he'd become. "What's the problem?"

Ruby leaned over and jabbed his arm hard. Well, hard for Ruby. He felt nothing more than a shift of his sleeve: his aura was up. Adam sat up straight, and all at once he noticed the sharp pain in his hand from gripping Wilt, the headache from the constant din he was focusing through to hear Weiss and Yang through, and even the very two he was focusing on became one with the uproarious noise. He grimaced as the last of his aura returned to him.

"Uh-huh, yeah! You're so tensed up you've had your aura on since the fight started, Weiss is super distant and Yang's... extra Yang-y." Ruby clutched her cloak tighter to herself, voice growing louder despite her attempts to stay calm. "Like a whole week ago everything was going better than ever and now it feels almost worse than before and nobody's telling me anything like Jaune or Weiss or even Uncle Qrow and—"

Adam gently put a hand on Ruby's shoulder, cutting off her rambling. This was very quickly turning into a conversation not exactly fit for cheering crowds. He nodded to once of the exits, then rose. With Ruby silently following behind, he glanced back towards the arena.

On first glance, it might have looked like Sun was holding his own against Yang and Weiss, spins of his crimson staff abruptly turning to a storm of buckshot bursts at all angles from the pair of shotgun-nunchucks—Huntsmen always amazed him with their bizarre weapon choices—it broke into. To a more trained eye, however, it was clear that Sun was on the defensive, looking for openings but not throwing himself out there. A holding pattern.

Good. It meant they had time.


No one came to Amity Coliseum to not watch the tournament. It was one of the few times the grand walkways surrounding the central stadium were empty and, if anything, it granted the surroundings a surreal emptiness that only the recognition of scale could provide. It by no means sounded empty, however: Adam could still feel the bass of the music pulsing through his chest, and aura could fortunately dull the roar of the crowd, but that didn't stop it from being ever-present.

He and Ruby stayed quiet as they walked through the gate and leaned against the wall beside it. Then they stayed quiet for a little longer. Then Adam started getting annoyed.

He sighed. "I would've thought you would have an entire list of things you wanted to say by now."

Ruby crossed her arms, already starting to pout again. "Yeah, I do! I just... there's so much stuff that..." She groaned and let her head bump against the wall. "I'm worried! This doesn't even seem like stuff being a super great leader could help, either, so here I am stuck just watching everything fall apart and I don't even know what's causing all of it!" She slowly slid down the cold metal until she was sitting down, legs sprawled out. "And sure, I just said I probably couldn't help, but that doesn't make me feel any better as a leader. Can you just tell me what's going on?"

She looked up to him, but Adam didn't meet her gaze, instead staring out into the cloudy skies. It'd be best not to worry her, Adam thought. Dragging her deeper into the mess that was his past and into the disaster that was Raven was folly, at best. More importantly, if Ruby felt like this now, he doubted the knowledge that Jacques schemed to break up her team altogether would help her at all.

So, he waved it off. "It's complicated: something that deals with us alone."

He glanced over, expecting protest or resignation, yet found Ruby looking disappointed.

"Are you really not going to tell me anything?" she asked, shoulders slumped. "It might've taken some pushing—okay, maybe a lot of pushing—but I actually liked how you didn't treat me like I'm some kid."

Adam's instinct was to roll his eyes, but it was his mind that let him see the wall he was building between them, brick by brick. He could excuse the wall forming between him and Weiss: it was one Jacques and no doubt Winter were trying to build as swiftly as possible. The one between him and Yang was one they both built.

Yet here he was, about to not just shove Ruby away, but shove her into a position where she would have few, if any peers to turn to. Adam fought a grimace: try as he might to avoid the thought, he knew that was exactly what he had done to Blake. Pretending as though those around you would be better off not knowing the full truth, yet they find out anyway and it somehow grows worse without your control. Familiar. Not for the first time since he'd come here, he'd wished he had thought of this even two years ago.

Adam let himself slide down the wall until he was sitting beside Ruby.

He decided it also helped that he really needed someone to mention this crap to.

"Jacques not only has managed to figure out just who I am, but intends to, in all his spite and pettiness, reveal it to the world at large. Combine that with Ironwood being not just head of security but more than willing to use extrajudicial means to eliminate me, and it's impossible for Ozpin to provide any truly worthwhile protection. When pulled between doing the right thing and letting one man perish, I know what anyone in power would do. Not even race could change that." He scowled. His headache was starting to come back.

"I obviously will not allow myself to be captured: even if whatever Cinder has planned is not enough to cause widespread panic, I can escape to the Ildaite Ward. Jacques is a fool, short-sighted on anything not involving the transfer of lien: I doubt he thinks I would remain in Vale at all, let alone as a free man. Once I do, do you truly think he would keep Weiss here? Of course not! And so in one fell swoop, that bastard just throws it all away! Even though his grip is ephemeral, he tightens it all the same to make the fleeting moments of control he still has over Weiss and even over myself as horrid as possible. What I wouldn't give..." He seethed in place, every detonation of Dust and crack of gunfire amplified and reverberated throughout the coliseum only feeding his hatred.

In the quiet that followed, he forced himself to calm down. After all, the murderer of his father splitting his team apart and likely siccing Atlas itself on him personally was only part of the problem. When he looked to Ruby for her reaction, he was surprised to find her glaring at the ground as though it'd be able to change any of this, lips drawn to a fine line and hands tightly gripping her skirt.

"... How can people be so evil?" Ruby muttered under her breath.

Adam snorted. He knew that feeling well.

Ruby jumped to her feet, fists curled at her sides. "I mean it! Mercury or Weiss' da—Jacques shouldn't even exist: monsters are what the Grimm are supposed to be, not us!" She rubbed her face as if trying to banish the mere thought of them, starting to pace. "I don't get it: why? Why even do that? And you know what the worst part is?"

Realizing early on that this must've been brimming under the surface for a while now, Adam only motioned for her to continue, even if he knew the answer.

"No one does anything about it! All the heroes in the stories are off fighting dragons or Goliaths or whatever, and even the worst evil kings are after something, but these people are the worst! They're the monsters, but there's no Huntsmen around for that kind of—" She turned to face him again and, shocked, her words were caught in her throat. When faced with exactly what she was talking about, it was easy to see just how dark the path her thoughts were on had gotten.

Part of him was pleased that she finally struck this realization. Another spouted constant warnings—the same he was used to hearing with every step Ruby took towards reality. They loudest, however, was the one trying to suffocate them both, done with the game of worrying about every word.

Behind them, the buzzer rang. They didn't need the announcement to know who won.

"... I don't care what kind of monsters try to pull us all apart: it'll take more than that to keep Team RWAY down!" Ruby proclaimed, leaving no room for Adam or even fate itself to question it. "And if that jerk Jacques gets you thrown out, then... t-then I'll just have to go to Ildaite with you!" she declared.

Stunned, it took a moment for Adam to gather his thoughts. That was no small claim for her. "Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves: I doubt joining a 'terrorist' would do well for your chances of being a Huntress."

Ruby crossed her arms. "Well, if there are more monsters than Grimm, maybe I'll just need to be more than a Huntress."

Adam sighed, but he couldn't fight off a smile: of course she would think that. "I suppose I'd be a hypocrite if I saw issue with that, wouldn't I?"

He doubted that she would change her mind upon hearing the full scale of their opponents, but it wouldn't be fair to let her run in without knowing. He stood, knowing he should explain Raven, but contemplating whether or not to tell her about the supposed monster behind the Grimm. His Scroll buzzing cut that short. A Scroll he kept solely for dealings with the White Fang.

He snapped it out, cursed under his breath, and shoved it back into his pocket.

"Give Weiss and Yang my regards: I need to go." Adam was already starting to walk away when Ruby rushed over to his side.

"Wait, what's going on?"

He didn't slow down. "The White Fang are mobilizing. Ilia and I need to investigate."

Ruby kept pace. "I'll come with you."

"I'll tell you exactly why when I return, but Yang needs her leader—and her sister—more than ever, and while Weiss doesn't know the story, I'm sure she'll start putting two and two together soon enough."

She didn't even give it a moment's thought before nodding again, determined. "You better come back safe."

He smirked. "Of course I will. I can't keep a fellow comrade-in-arms waiting."

As she rushed off in the other direction, Adam paused to watch her leave. Then, his expression cold, he ran off for the shuttles.

Mountain Glenn. Ildaite. Every district in Vale and every camp outside of it. Each and every cell was mobilizing: a move that would be obvious to a novice with a radio, let alone police or government trained to watch them. It was reckless, but it also showed intent.

No matter the answer he found, Adam was certain of one thing: Cinder's plan was approaching its endgame, and they would have to respond in kind.