Two Minutes Silence

by catsvrsdogscatswin

When Yang falls, its quiet. Calm. She did what she had to do. When Ruby and Blake fall, it's a jolt, a cold shock of horror that they didn't quite make it. When Weiss falls, it's almost with relief. Living or dead, she'll see them again. When Jaune falls, he thinks of his team, of one more letter knocked off of Team JNPR. When they wake up, they're at Beacon. Fix-it fic after V8.

5. Haunted House

Crimsonit is a play on Reddit, given as that's already color-related and in-RWBY objects are supposed to be analogs. On Blake and Adam's relationship, while I do wholeheartedly agree the show could have done a hell of a lot better than paring down his post-V3 characterization to "BLARGH BLAKE'S ANGRY EX!", it is a decided fact that one doesn't just…accidentally trip headfirst into manipulating someone's emotions for your own benefit. That takes practice, planning, and intent, and in his V6 short it's clear that Adam's very comfortable and very experienced in manipulating Blake's emotions and headspace by the time she even starts to question his violent tendencies. Ergo its not a stretch to think that he was something of a bad person even before All That went down.

---

Door locked and the curtains tightly closed to prevent any intrusions, the dry-erase marker squeaked rapidly over the board Ruby and her team had set up in their dorm room, leaning against Blake's bed with everyone else was sitting in a line on Weiss's bed opposite, as Ruby sketched out the outline of her master plan.

"Okay, here's what we're dealing with." she said, stepping aside to reveal her scrawl as she capped the red marker. "First off!"

She stabbed the tip onto the words Operation Pick the Pocket.

"I checked out a book on how to prevent thievery techniques from the library, which we can kinda reverse-engineer, and Yang downloaded some articles on how-to-pickpocket on her Scroll." Ruby shifted trajectory to point the marker at her partner. "Weiss can use her Earth Dust to make some little round tokens that fit in our pockets, which should be about the same shape and size as the thingy Lionheart's got, and we can practice stealing them out of each other's pockets for the rest of the semester."

Several stick figures diagrammed this, including cheerful-looking Weiss with several round tokens in her uplifted twiggy hand.

"Any questions?"

"It would also be a matter of weight, but we can't control that without knowing what the original object is." Blake said with a sigh, sinking her chin onto one hand. "No questions here."

"Shouldn't be too weird for me to have these articles on my phone, since I can always say I was trying it out for a laugh." Yang said. "No questions here, either."

"Given your prior experience, you'll probably be the best out of all of us," Weiss said, looking towards Blake. "But even if we pass it off as a joke, you should probably be careful not to get caught stealing things out of our pockets. The repercussions of that could get…ugly."

"I'll make sure not to do anything around Cardin and his lot." Blake mumbled, her ears flattening back slightly in dislike.

"Right!" Ruby bounced in place and then jabbed her marker at the next order of business. "Second thing, we've got to get allies!"

She rapidly uncapped the marker and drew a line under Reverse Corruption and Operation Save Green From Mean.

"Neo knows too much for us to leave her alone, so unless we want to try and kill her, we need to try and make her at least neutral." Ruby continued with a frown. "So we either need to make her listen to us at the docks, or we'll have to give up on that and figure out how to get her before she gets us. Following that, and way more important-"

She drew several urgent circles around Operation Save Green From Mean.

"-we need to get Emerald out of there, too."

"That'll be a lot harder." Yang said, folding her arms across (or rather, underneath) her chest with a long sigh. "Neo might want to kill us, yeah, but at least we can argue with her and offer proof and stuff. She knows how badly working for Salem can go. She can be reasoned with…ish."

"Does anyone really remember how Emerald acted at Beacon?" Blake asked, pinching the base of her nose and rubbing gently. "Because all I'm getting is her hanging around with Mercury and Cinder a lot."

"She was friendly, but I don't doubt that was almost completely a façade." Weiss said with a huff, folding her arms a bit more sharply than Yang. "Still, do you remember how she was at Haven?"

"She stopped me from fighting Cinder." Ruby said.

"And she flipped when she realized that Cinder was dead, or at least not coming back." Yang said, rubbing the elbow of her recovered arm. "You remember that? She started crying before blasting us all with that hallucination of Salem, and her teammates had to drag her limp body out of there with them. So there's some strong feeling there, at least."

"She came over to our side because she was scared of Salem." Ruby mused, rubbing her chin. "Do you think she was that scared of Salem back then, too? The illusion was honestly a lot freakier than the real thing."

"It makes sense." Blake said. "Emerald was Cinder's underling. In turn, Cinder was Salem's underling. Even in a ranking of three, that puts Emerald at the bottom, and Salem had other direct subordinates who were clearly more important than Emerald, like Tyrian and Watts. Emerald and Mercury only actually did things when they were following Cinder's orders, like at the Vytal Festival. Everything else –when Ruby first fought her, the Breach, stealing the Maiden power– that was all Cinder."

"So Emerald is low on the totem pole." Ruby said, scribbling out a sad-looking stick figure of Emerald with Cinder and Salem's faces hovering above it with cartoonishly ominous glares. "She's above Torchwick and Neo, because she obviously knew about Salem due to working so closely with Cinder, but she wasn't above them by much. She defected because she was scared. Do you think she was reluctant to be a bad guy in the first place?"

"Reluctant or not, she still was pretty much instrumental in causing the Fall of Beacon." Yang pointed out, her voice sharpening just a little. "She could've found a way to jump ship if she was as scared as all that."

Ruby pouted, obviously unhappy at the suggestion that Emerald wasn't the best that she could be under the circumstances, but, well, there it was. Yang wasn't wrong.

"Perhaps we're looking at this from the wrong angle." Weiss said, interrupting the argument on the inherent amount of good/bad in people before it could truly begin. She looked meditatively at the board, and Ruby's scribbles of Emerald and her two masters beneath the underlined and double-circled words Operation Save Green From Mean. "It was obvious from Haven that Emerald is terrified of Salem, and we can assume that that fear was laid upon an earlier foundation, perhaps as early as before she came to Beacon. Quite frankly, no one in their right mind would work for Salem, so something prevented Emerald from fleeing early on."

"Ruby, Yang, you said that she obviously felt something strong over Cinder." Blake suggested, and Ruby gasped, straightening up.

"Ah! I remember now!" she said, an epiphany flashing over her silver eyes. "At Haven, Emerald said that she 'owes Cinder everything,' and she said later that Cinder wouldn't let them down! Its Cinder!"

"So she feels a strong connection with Cinder." Weiss said, and sighed, looking at the board with resignation. "Well, that doesn't exactly make our job easier. If Emerald felt a strong enough bond with Cinder to avoid running from Salem, it must have taken a lot of time and a lot of soul-searching before that bond eroded enough for her to want to escape…something which we can hardly mimic. We don't have the time and quite frankly, we don't have the ability to persuade her."

"And this is towards the beginning –when Emerald was still completely loyal to Cinder." Blake added, sounding just as resigned. "We can tell her about the Fall of Beacon until we're blue in the face –even if she doesn't just ignore us, she'll still put all her faith in Cinder to keep her safe and see it through. And like Yang said, Neo might hate us, but at least we can convince her and have evidence that she'll understand. What do we have to reason with Emerald? She doesn't know us."

"But we're still getting her out of there." Ruby said, tapping the marker harshly against the board, her voice and posture brooking no arguments. "M-maybe we can wait until after she's been arrested or something, or we can try to get Neo to drag her with when we go to ask Jinn some questions, but we're not leaving her behind. We're not."

"Chill out, sis, nobody said we'd throw her to the Beowolves." Yang said, raising her hands in a gesture of surrender. "On the dragging her with to Haven, though –bad idea. On the off chance we actually manage to convince Neo to switch sides, we might not trust her, but at least she won't be actively working to sabotage us on the way to Haven. Emerald would."

"Assuming we do manage to convince Neo to be neutral or allied with us, we can take her suggestions." Blake said, looking like she'd just bitten into a lemon at the idea. "Not that I'd believe a word Neo says normally, but…she would have had more contact with Emerald, so maybe she would know how to convince her to switch sides. She'd know more than us, at least."

"This is hinging too much on converting Neopolitan." Weiss said, her voice sharpening a little. "We cannot rely on one plan, or the conversion of one criminal. Emerald, for all her deeds, at least recognized what she did was wrong and felt guilty. Neo obviously doesn't, if her actions in the Central Location were any judge. Aside from seeing her rapscallion of a boss alive, what has changed between now and then that might convince her to change sides?"

"Weiss has a point, Ruby." Yang said, looking sympathetic –but not apologetic. "I know you want to save everybody you can, sis, but some people just won't cooperate with that."

"I know that." Ruby said, and there was a hardness in her silver eyes that her fifteen-year-old self had never possessed as she crossed her arms tightly over her chest. "I know that if, if we do commit to our plan to do things at the docks and Neo doesn't listen to us, we'll have to kill her. I know that. But there's no harm in trying."

"Not if it makes you tunnel-vision on one aspect of the plan." Blake said. "We can do this with or without Neo, but we need to focus on our goal. We need to make contact with Jinn and figure out what happened to us, because there's too much we don't know about our current situation. We can't make concrete plans for the future without knowing our context in the present."

Ruby sighed, slumping a little, and turned to squeak-squeak-squeak out a new section of the board.

"Operation Spring Vacation." she finally announced, stepping aside and tapping the new heading with the marker. "Pyrrha's hometown is in Argus, and Jaune used to visit Shion –it's this camping village in Anima. Team JNPR can fake a trip to Mistral pretty easily, and if we've managed to boost our friend stats with them enough, we'll be able to come with. We can spin it as a fun road trip between sister teams."

"Dad'll buy that one pretty easy, once we show off how much stronger we've gotten." Yang said with a lazy smile, flexing her bicep. "Hardest part will be convincing him that he can't come with."

"My father might have a few things to say about that…if he were made aware of our plans before we left." Weiss said, her voice prim but her face conspiratorial.

"I don't think I'll let my parents know that we're going, either, since the White Fang has a pretty hefty presence in Mistral." Blake said, rubbing the back of her neck guiltily. "A-actually…I should probably contact my parents soon. They haven't heard from me since I left with Adam."

"What the actual fuck, Blake?" Yang asked, her eyes going round. "Wait, when did you first check in with them, like, originally?"

Blake sank down a little bit, her ears drooping.

"Um…"

"You…didn't seriously contact them for the first time when Beacon fell and you ran back to Menagerie, did you?" Weiss asked, incredulous.

Blake slumping further as her face flushed was answer enough.

"Blake, what the actual Grimm-loving fuck." Yang repeated, raising her hands a little before letting them fall limply to her sides. "Like, I get you not checking in with them while you were with that piece of shit Adam, but we were at Beacon for almost a whole year and you didn't even give them a Scroll call?!"

"I wasn't in a good headspace." Blake mumbled. "I thought-"

"It was a risk you couldn't afford, right?" Weiss asked, turning to look at her with a slightly raised eyebrow. Blake blinked at her, and Weiss smiled in bitter understanding. "I'm somewhat used to…complicated feelings, regarding one's family."

Blake huffed in acknowledgement, before her gaze fell to her lap and she rubbed one arm self-consciously.

"I…I didn't know if they would accept me back." she admitted. "I said some terrible things before Adam and I…before I left with him, and even though I knew they'd find out that I was at Beacon –it's not like I was trying to hide the fact I was attending here– I just…I couldn't face going back to them, letting them see me again, without some sort of accomplishment. I wanted to prove to them, that I hadn't just made terrible mistakes. I wanted to show them that I had found another path, a path they would be proud of, and I was sticking to it."

"Weeeell…" Yang slid her arm around Blake's shoulders in ultra-slow-motion and then abruptly yanked the startled Faunus to her side, holding up her Scroll like she was about to take a selfie, or the extended screen was some sort of trophy. "Since you don't think like that anymore, you can call your parents tomorrow and tell them you're not dead in a ditch somewhere!"

"Yang-!"

"Call your parents and let them know you're not dead in a ditch somewhere." Yang's voice and expression flattened.

"Ugh." Blake snatched the Scroll from her partner, shrinking it again with a flick of her wrist. "I will. Just…not tonight. We are planning for the future right now."

"Speaking of which!" Ruby hastily double-circled the large caption that read Shut Out the Shutterbug. "Electronics! They are bad and the work of the devil, and we shall never use them ever!"

"Ruby, it'll be more obvious that we know something's wrong if we just completely stop using our Scrolls and suchlike." Weiss groaned, rubbing her temples with the fingers of both hands. "We need them for class, after all. What I think you're trying to get at is the fact that we cannot commit any of our long-term…extra-dimensional, shall we call them, plans to an electronic device of any sort."

"Yup!" Ruby chimed, capping her marker with a pop. "Until we know the ins and outs of hacking, we won't know what is and isn't safe to use, and that Watts guy is supposed to be some kind of hacker supergenius, right? He'll be able to outsmart us, no problem, so it's best to just avoid electronic stuff entirely."

"I can hack some systems, at a pinch." Blake said, tangling her fingers through the end of her much-longer hair, absentmindedly winding a lone curl around and around her index. "I've done it on missions –deactivating Atlas security and so on. But Ruby's right, I wouldn't be much of a match for someone who made their living on information technology, much less a savant in that field."

"Our Scrolls and stuff should be safe enough for now, since there was that attack on the CCT during the dance that probably gave Watts his in for the Beacon systems and stuff." Yang said, tugging her Scroll back from Blake and flipping it open. She glanced down at her pictures, paging through them. "Problem is, can he retroactively look through things? Because if he can tap his little dance on the keys and look through everything we've written down on our Scrolls, we'd be fucked. Blake, you got any ideas on that?"

"Not my area." Blake replied, her ears drooping a little. "Like I said, my hacking expertise is almost entirely limited to deactivating or altering security systems, not long-term data systems like the Scroll networks. For all I know, you can code a virus to search for specific terms and images and infect the whole CCT with it. Watts was able to hack Penny, whose mechanisms were intricate enough to impress the Spirit of Creation himself, so I don't think we should take any chances."

"That's a fairly unanimous vote, then." Weiss sighed, tossing her ponytail a little. "However safe it might be now to commit our plans to Scroll or show our future-based actions to cameras, we don't dare risk it. Security cameras, certainly, can be reviewed well after an event, and while we won't give Salem's people anything to be suspicious of if we do our jobs correctly, it's still not worth leaving evidence for them to find if they go looking."

"Do you think that means we'll have to leave our Scrolls behind when we go to Mistral?" Ruby asked, brushing her fingers nervously over her belt.

"I don't think so." Blake said. "We'd be expected to be going there, after all, since we'd have given the excuse of being on vacation. Maybe it would be better for Yang and whatever backup she has not to take them to the Branwen camp, or for us to take them when we break into the Vault, but other than that, it shouldn't be a problem. I think Scroll tracking can only be done real-time, too, so if we don't give them anything to be suspicious of beforehand, it wouldn't matter."

"We're still not taking them into risky zones." Yang said, and Blake shook her head quickly.

"Of course not." she agreed. "As far as we're concerned, anything digital is compromised until proven safe."

"Okay, so here's what we got." Ruby said as she brought the rest of the team back to the present, her marker squeaking rapidly as she dashed it across the board, then stepped back.

Operation Pick the Pocket

Use tokens to practice
Blake be careful around racists!
Practice every single day, review team scores every evening

Reverse Corruption

She's a doer that needs to be dealt with ASAP

Talk at docks
Talk fail –execution
Talk succeed –tagalong to Mistral

Offer safehouse/panic room for both of them in case of emergency
Use lamp's answer as evidence for sticking on our side being better
Blackmail re: Jaune's plan if necessary?

Arguments:
Your boss wants to blow up the world, which you exist on
We'd have no reason to kill your partner if he's on our side
We also want to violently murder the woman who left you to die. Team effort!

Operation Save Green From Mean

She's a follower that can wait for a while :(

Lack of evidence to convince her to switch sides!?
Offer plea bargain if captured
TELL OZPIN SHE'S NICE
Kidnap (in a friendly way) and try to convince
Befriend at Beacon!
Ask mole to help out with this?

Operation Spring Vacation

Go to Mistral with JNPR for semester break
Yang visits mom
Visit Haven for keepsake purposes!
Team JNPR serve as backup for mom mission and acquiring the souvenir?

Shut Out the Shutterbug

ELECTRONIC EYES WATCH ALWAYS
Scrolls & cameras safe for now
However, guilty until proven innocent
Do not commit plans to digital, ever
Its not paranoia if they are out to get you :)

"Its…thorough." Blake said after a moment.

"I like the conspiracy smiley-face, especially." Yang deadpanned.

"Hey, I know it better than anyone else." Ruby said, and then pinched the edges of her eyes and stretched them wide in demonstration. "They are out to get me."

"And your silver eyes, too." Weiss grumbled, rolling her own, though not without fondness.

"Eh, yeah, it's not like the rest of us are really on Salem's hit list yet." Yang said with a sheepish chuckle, rubbing the back of her neck. "Just some random first years, after all."

"What we really need to focus on right now, is not losing the edge we had in Atlas." Ruby said, folding her arms importantly. "We were Huntress level, and we can't let lack of practice and faking being first-years drag us down over the course of the semester, because we're going to be fighting Neo and maybe even Raven, who's a Maiden, at the end of it. Maybe we'll even have to fight them on our own. Jaune's obviously good with his team, but there's a chance he might not be able to drag them along."

"It would be interesting to try and explain to them why we're breaking into Haven and what we're doing with the magic lamp if they don't trust us unconditionally." Yang sighed.

"I also don't like…forcing ourselves upon them as friends." Weiss said, a faint frown on her face. "We were naturally friends with Team JNPR before, but now we're…we're not the same people that were friends with them. We're older than them, we're more experienced than them, and more importantly, we know them more deeply than they will ever know us. It feels…manipulative, to extend our hands and smile and fake that we're just like them."

"Well, it's not like we can do anything else." Blake said, curling up to tuck her chin against her knees, but she was frowning too. "They were –are– our friends, and whatever this is, whenever or wherever we are, that's not going to change. We owe it to them to stay friends, even if things aren't…if we're not quite the same people."

"I-it doesn't matter!" Ruby said, stubbornly dragging them back on task. "We need to keep our skills sharp and our friends close, which means training together as hard as we can to enable both of those things. We need to make sure that they're as close to the people we know as possible when we go to Mistal, because we- we need that backup. We need Team JNPR with us, not Team JNR, and definitely not just plain Team RWBY! We need everyone!"

She smacked her fist into one hand.

"Whatever else we're thinking about, whatever else we have to deal with, it doesn't matter. We don't have any of the answers as to why we're here or what's going on, so until we stand in front of Jinn and she explains all this, everything else is just pointless speculation. It doesn't matter if, if we've somehow gone back in time or if we've been sucked into an alternate dimension, or if this is all some freaky dream and we're all dead! It doesn't matter, because we have no way to deal with it and we need to keep moving forward until we can. Okay?"

"Right. We've got to stay focused, or our energies will disperse and our plans will be useless." Weiss said with a long, drawn-out sigh. "Our most immediate problem is finding a training room or area that does not have any cameras. We should set a time for this goal to be accomplished by, perhaps the end of the week. We also need to acquire the material and tools to upgrade our weapons back to their prior standards, since we don't technically need a workshop bench for that."

"Ruby and me are the only ones who need to upgrade." Yang said, looking thoughtfully at where Ember Celica sat on her shelf. "Blake only fixed her blade, and you didn't do anything with Myrtenaster."

"One can't improve upon perfection." Weiss said smugly.

"Or boring-ass simplicity."

"Perfection."

"Ahem." Blake pointedly coughed into her fist from where she sat between the bickering duo. Weiss and Yang both subsided, leaning back into the prior positions and looking sheepish.

"We also need to focus on forming points of contact with Team JNPR." Ruby said, twisting the cap on the marker back and forth. "We could have a game tournament, maybe, on Friday? To celebrate our first week at Beacon? We could talk to Jaune then, too, and update him on whatever new stuff we've figured out."

"Actually, it might be good to make that a weekly event." Weiss said, perking up. "It would form a point of contact, as you said, and facilitate friendly relations between our two teams."

"Can you even play video games?" Blake asked, raising an eyebrow, and Weiss flushed.

"W-well, it might be nice to learn." she coughed. "However obnoxiously loud the rest of you get at playing kung-fu-action-whatever."

"Kung Fu Ninja Ultimate Slayer Death Battle 2, you absolute heathen." Ruby said with an offended sniff. "Don't listen to her, Blake, she's trying to besmirch the glory of one of the best Scroll games ever created."

"Opinions on that vary." Yang stage-whispered behind her hand, and Ruby squawked in outrage.

"Slander! Slander, I tell you! The second Kung Fu Ninja Ultimate Slayer Death Battle is just as good as the first, if not better! I don't care what those stupid Crimsonit blogs say about the graphics and Flying Ninja's finishing moves, it's the best!"

Yang made a loud iffy noise and wiggled her hand, making the others laugh.

---

It should not be this hard to find a place for a video call, Blake thought morosely, the morning after her team's impromptu planning session, as she trawled through the halls of Beacon.

It was early, early enough that the sun had barely risen and the few students awake were mostly third and fourth years returning from missions, and almost no one except her was wandering the halls to begin with. And that was fine, that was good, even. Even though over a day had passed since she was last in Atlas, Blake's nerves were still very close to hair-trigger, and she did not feel comfortable wandering about without backup, so it was good that no one was around to see her jumpiness.

The bad news was that her caution, sharpened by almost a full 48 hours of a constant barrage of disasters, did not serve her well when she was looking for a "safe" place to patch a call through to Menagerie. She rejected the courtyard as too open, her skin tightening as she looked up at the sky and wondered when the next titanic Grimm would come crashing down, or which decorative shrubbery would be hiding an eavesdropper. It wasn't even fear of a real enemy, just a reflexive twitch away from the unmitigated nuisance that bullies like Cardin or his team would be.

She rejected the library, her normal go-to place for just about anything, due to the fact that Kali would probably have a lot of things to say at very high volume to her, and Blake was a nice person who didn't interrupt study time or the hallowed quiet of the library for any reason whatsoever. Also, Weiss had already claimed that spot for her call to her family, and those were two conversations that Blake did not want to mix under any circumstances.

The hallways were too exposed, too, opening up the risk of people listening around corners and other unseen dangers. It would've been nice for the rest of her team to be with her to stand guard, but Ruby and Yang had refused to wake up this early for any reason other than a catastrophe.

Blake could understand that, and after a few deep breaths to remind herself that things here were fine, finally climbed up into one of the trees in the courtyard and, settling herself into the crook of several thick branches, propped her back against the trunk. She flicked open her Scroll: this was one of the instances that they could trust and use their technology, because what was unnatural or suspicious about Blake calling home? No one on Salem's side except Neopolitan knew of the future, and Neopolitan had no idea if Blake had made a similar such call in the original…world? Timeline?

Whichever.

This was perfectly safe, so long as she didn't do anything overtly futuristic.

It was still odd, to be able to effortlessly patch a call through to the other side of the world. Blake had lived and strategized in a world where the CCT was down for so long, it was almost shocking to remember how easy it was to pass information across the globe when it was still up. Here she was, perched in a tree in Beacon, in Vale, and with a flick of her thumb, she was contacting her mother's Scroll in Menagerie. Blake knew that she would answer: even though Blake had disposed of her personal Scroll after cutting ties with the White Fang, this was a Beacon-issued number, with all the gravitas that a Hunter Academy demanded. Kali would answer even if she didn't know who it was. A call from a potential Hunter was not something to be taken lightly, be they student, teacher, or licensed adult.

"Hello?" her mother's voice came, brisk and politely businesslike, and Blake swallowed. Her palms felt damp, where she held the Scroll and braced herself against the tree.

She'd reconciled with her parents before, but what flashed before her eyes was not Adam in all his blood-streaked glory, or Kali and Ghira defending themselves from the White Fang on Menagerie, but the howling Grimm-filled skies of Atlas and her prompting on Ruby's message, the short two-word sentence could very well be the only and last vestige of their daughter that Ghira and Kali had back in the…real world.

How could this be real? What was this place, if not real?

Where was she, now, and where were her real parents? Had the world turned back on itself, like a snake swallowing its own tail, and Blake and her friends were the only ones who remembered how things would go, or was this a different reality entirely, and somewhere out in the vastness of multiple worlds, a different Kali and Ghira Belladonna were staring out at the ruins of what Atlas had been, as Oscar and Nora and Ren grieved in the deserts of Vacuo?

"Hi, mom." Blake said, and at least she didn't have to fake how brittle her voice was. "It's me."

"Blake?! Oh my goodness, sweetie-" She heard hasty fumbling after her mother's excited squeal. "Can I turn the video call on?"

"Sure."

Blake pulled her Scroll away from her ear, moving to hold it in both hands at face level as the blue screen flickered, then changed to show her living room, with a close-up of Kali's face. Her mother looked…excited, barely holding herself back, but she was so clearly holding herself back, so delicately treading a line and keeping a lid on her reactions as she looked at Blake's face for the slightest hint of…something that wasn't there.

Gods. Was this what Adam had done to them, to her family? Was Blake's mother that afraid of setting her off?

Blake produced a surface smile.

"I…have a lot to talk to you about." she said.

"Of course, but –this isn't your regular Scroll number." Kali couldn't hide her worry. "Did something happen? You are okay, aren't you?"

"Yeah." Blake said with a much more genuine smile, as relief crumpled Kali's face. "I, uh, guess that's part of what I want to talk to you guys about. Is dad home?"

"I think so, just hang on a moment. Dear!" Kali's face craned away from the Scroll as she shouted into the far reaches of the house. "Blake's called us!" She looked back into the camera as Blake heard a reply, too distant and muffled to register as anything except her father's voice. "He should be along in a second."

Blake waited patiently until the camera view swerved to show her father's massive bulk settling in beside her mother. Like Kali, he peered into the Scroll view anxiously, wanting to see Blake but just as obviously trying not to scare her off, like he was looking at a wild animal. Blake supposed she deserved that, after everything that had happened before now. Caught deeply in Adam's web, she hadn't seen it at the time, but she could certainly recognize now how he had deliberately driven a wedge between her and the rest of her family, whispering his insidious thoughts into her ears until those thoughts became her own and she lashed out at her mother and father for their perceived cowardice, then fled to him for comfort when that caused arguments she hadn't seen coming.

Well, not anymore. Never again.

"I left the White Fang." she said, deciding to rip the biggest bandage off first, and her mother and father blinked, then almost unanimously exhaled in pure relief. "I- you were right. The things they did, they've been doing –it's not right. Equality shouldn't be built on fear, and we were all turning into monsters. So I left."

"Blake, I'm so proud of you." Kali said, clasping both hands to her chest as her eyes warmed. Blake thought that she might start crying. "That can't have been an easy decision to make on your own."

Blake smiled a little and ducked her head to rub her shoulder against the corner of her eye, ostensibly scruffing away the tears that probably would have been in her own eyes due to remembering that momentous decision. For Blake, however, it had been almost three years and several immense conflicts ago, and the scars from tearing herself away from the White Fang had long since healed over.

"Yeah, well…I did." she said as she looked back at the camera. "And I, I'm in Vale now, actually. Training to become a Huntress."

"That's a very noble profession." Ghira said, a smile forming over his beard. "And I'm just as proud to see that you've looked at the wrong path and decided to set yourself on the right one. Not many people have that kind of strength, and I'm glad to see that my daughter still isn't the sort of person to give up."

"I never was." Blake said, and then looked down at her knees. This next part would be both the easiest and the hardest: easiest to say, hardest to think of how to say. "I…Adam was a big factor in that decision."

"…He's always been a big factor in most of your decisions, sweetie." Kali said after a moment, her smile going a tad stiff as she took the tone of someone treading on glass.

"Yeah, well, that wasn't necessarily a good thing." Blake scoffed without hesitation, making her parents blink again. "He was…"

Her ears flattened back.

Just say it. It's not going to change anything, it's not going to protect them, but they need to know.

"…he was horrible. Toxic. Abusive. I left because I finally realized what kind of person I was fighting beside, and my friends at Beacon have helped me see the monster that he'd become."

Neither of her parents looked surprised –not at Adam's condemnation, at least. They knew very well how spiteful, how violent a person he was, and they had seen the effects of his toxicity creeping into Blake, before she left.

They did look surprised that she was the one to condemn him, and of course they did: Blake had once still held out the faintest flickerings of hope at this point in her life, a desperate denial that maybe now that she had fled, it would provide the wake-up call her partner needed. A futile hope, of course. Whatever alchemy Blake's presence worked on him, Adam had become a monster long before they had ever met. Blake didn't ask for him to come into her life, didn't ask for him to be her mentor, didn't ask for him to prey upon everything she was and twist and mold her fears like clay.

She certainly hadn't asked him to stalk her across Anima.

She definitely hadn't asked for him to keep pushing.

She had never asked to have to kill him.

"Did something happen?" Ghira asked, peering at her as though he was trying to search her face for the mark of horror. Blake stiffened a little, trying not to show the dark circles under her eyes or the grime on her hands or the –the things that weren't there anymore, of course they weren't, because she wasn't operating on two hours of sleep snatched here and there in the crumbling city of Atlas. Blake was clean and neat and new, 17 again, unscarred and as fresh-faced as she had ever been. Her hands were white and her face was clear, because she had slept long and well in a safe bed for the past two nights, and hadn't had to scrounge in a hellscape for dwindling options for hours and hours and hours upon end.

She was fine.

Only externally, of course, but Blake knew what her father was looking for and it wasn't mere external grime. Blake had made a momentous decision, comparatively speaking, and such decisions as this did not come lightly or easily. Very often, they had inciting incidents, and with the kind of life Blake had led, those incidents did not promise to be harmless. Ghira was searching his daughter's face for the hidden aftereffects of that decision, the evidence for what had caused it, and whether or not that had hurt her.

"Adam wanted to blow up a train." she said, exhaling shortly and dropping her gaze, so that her parents might not see the glassy calm there. Blake remembered that moment clearly, so clearly, but as formative as it had been, that event had also been years ago, and did not affect her as deeply as it would have now, in her first few days at Beacon. "An SDC train with people still on it. He, he said 'What about them?' when I asked about the crew members. He didn't care that we would be hurting innocent people. He didn't see them as innocent, he saw them as humans. Just…humans. The enemy."

"Blake, dear, I'm so sorry." her mother murmured. Blake shrugged a little, jaggedly, and sniffed, wiping her eyes on her sleeve again before looking up at her parents.

"The White Fang isn't what it used to be." she said. "I know they've got a presence on Menagerie, so…please be careful. Adam's way of thinking is dangerously contagious, and I don't want you guys to get hurt."

"Please, we can take care of ourselves." Kali said, her ears perking up slightly. Beside her, Ghira gave a solemn nod. "But enough of all the serious things. Can you tell me about these teammates of yours? They sound wonderful."

They sound like not Adam, is what you mean. Blake thought dryly, and then sighed, settling herself back more comfortably against the tree.

"Sure. Only, this might take a bit…"

---

Weiss stared at the stubborn blue of the Hard Light screen, refusing to admit that she was stalling. The adjustment of…being back, was difficult enough for all of them, but perhaps for her, especially. She had grown up in Atlas, even if her home had become the people she fought alongside rather than anything as ephemeral –as destructible– as a mere place.

Her…the Schnee Family Estate was hardly competition: it was more of a museum than a manor, a crystalline place full of shining and beautiful things that were not meant to be touched. It was a cold, empty display case full of delicate perfection, a place where the slightest fingerprint showed up as an ugly, oily smudge, a place where a smutch of dust –ordinary dust– was as distasteful and obvious as a smear of tar.

Cold, empty, perfect, display –those were all the words to describe Weiss's home, and the people within it had been no more lively. Her mother's slow retreat into drink, the jagged way the siblings scraped at each other until they wore all familial bonds away, Jacques –no, that was not a home, nothing but a paper-thin excuse of it.

Gone, now. Weiss found that she did not particularly care, but seeing Atlas being destroyed had not been a pleasant experience, regardless. No matter how cold and uncaring it had been, she had still grown up there, had all of her formative memories there. The loss of that familiar structure ached, even though she had abandoned it long ago.

Her finger hovered over the final button, and with a sigh, Weiss pressed it.

The screen flickered and changed, the loading wheel spinning slowly around and around as she waited for the call to connect. It might not. Her sister might be out on a mission, she might be in a meeting, and she might have been warned off by Jacques not to engage in contact with Weiss.

At the thought, the notch of her frown dug deeper, and Weiss took a moment to close her eyes and sigh, forcing her emotions to drain out of her with the movement, and smoothing over her expression. She was several years older, and wiser, than she had been when she had originally come to Beacon. She understood more, was no longer the sheltered, not-quite-spoiled heiress that had fled from Atlas.

One of the things that she had understood, which she had already taken steps on before she had gone to bed after their meeting last night, was the need to form her own private bank account. Her allowance was generous, but the longer she flouted her independence, the sooner it would be before Jacques cut her off. And she needed that generous stipend, needed it more than she ever had back when her only concern was paying for her team's meals and showing herself to be a reliable friend. Money for their weapons and the modifications thereon, bribes, buying out a place for them to train and practice or for their criminal allies to lay low –her team had need of more wealth than trainee Hunters normally had access to, and Weiss was still the SDC heiress. If she started withdrawing portions of her allowance now, claiming that it was for Dust or other such things, she would be able to tuck away an appreciable amount before Jacques decided she needed to be brought to heel. A private bank account would be conventionally untraceable, and allow her to spend freely.

But that was not the only thing she brought to the team, of course. Alone out of everyone, Weiss was the one with contacts in Atlas, the one who would be able to catch rumors and hearsay through only secondhand accounts. If the people that had been knocked off the platform started babbling about the end of the world or Salem's armies or some such, Weiss was in the best position to find out through that most secret of networks –family gossip.

The problems with that were twofold: on the one hand, Weiss would need to express her concerns in such a way that didn't expose her knowledge of the future, since this was a Scroll call and could thus possibly be retrieved by the enemy at some point.

On the other, she would have to get her gods-damned family to actually cooperate with her.

Jacques had done his work well, after all, and his three children were certainly not as united as one would expect most siblings to be. Her mother, Weiss dismissed out of hand, because as helpful as Willow had been during the attack, she was also a drunkard, and secrecy was paramount.

The call connected, and the dim reflection Weiss's delicate, haughty 17-year-old face was interrupted by the splash of Winter's, silhouetted starkly against a military grey background. If Weiss had to guess, she would assume that Winter was in her quarters, though she was fairly certain that it was later in the morning in Atlas than it was right now in Vale, where Weiss was the only person in the library before breakfast.

"Weiss?" A furrow pinched itself between Winter's brows, and with the knowledge of all that would come, Weiss could no longer find it in herself to be impressed with how marblelike Winter's expressions were, how closely she kept a rein on her emotions. "Is something wrong?"

"No, I'm quite well." Weiss said, and how easy it was to slide back into complete formality, folding her hands in her lap and staring directly into Winter's eyes as she straightened her back. Years of training had not gone to waste, apparently, not even after all Weiss had endured. "I wished to contact you with an update of my stay at Beacon."

Winter blinked –just once, but it was enough to show she was startled, and well should she be. After all, it was not exactly the Schnee way to call upon one's sibling for a friendly chat, which was essentially all this was.

"I…see." Winter said slowly, something complex flickering behind her eyes before she took a deep breath and assumed almost exactly the same pose as Weiss, folding her hands on the metallic table Weiss knew her monitor stood on in place of a more conventional desk. Her eyes were attentive, and perhaps once Weiss might have been intimidated by the piercing look of the one who had almost taken over Willow's position as her mother, but Weiss was older now, more developed in mind and perspective, and she saw her sister for what she was: her sister, who could be as human as anyone else, as mistaken as anyone else. "Well, then, I'm all ears."

Weiss was careful to keep her anecdotes to a sparse minimum as she launched into an explanation of Team RWBY, keeping in mind the fact that they had technically only known each other for a few days now. She described Ruby as enthusiastic and an incredibly skilled fighter, but acknowledged that her academic knowledge may be lacking due to her two-year skip: nonetheless, she was a devoted and excellent leader who had taken to the role like a duck to water. This segued into Yang, whom she acknowledged as a strong right arm and an excellent teammate despite her brash and occasionally abrasive personality, always ready to support the others even if she occasionally drove them to distraction with her ways. With a bit of trepidation, Weiss continued onto Blake, her Faunus teammate, and even though she had been expecting it, the immediate suspicious twist to Winter's mouth made her heart sink. She could argue that it was automatic, that even though she worked with Marrow and wasn't really racist, the appearance of a Faunus in such close proximity to a Schnee was something to be wary about, but…

Well, they had both been raised in Atlas. Weiss knew how insidious the reasons behind that thinking were.

She firmly continued, labeling Blake as friendly (though not necessarily approachable), a skilled fighter, and another excellent teammate. She expressed her contentedness in the team she had found herself with, her approval of the fact that she had not been named team leader –"It gives me room to grow and experience things for myself, whereas I believe I would take too much for granted in a leadership position."– and her general enjoyment of things at Beacon and how happy she found herself here.

Winter slowly relaxed throughout the long speech: even though she remained as rigidly formal as ever in posture, her shoulders sank a little, and an approving glimmer twinkled in her eyes.

"You certainly seem to have found your place." Winter said softly after Weiss finished, and there was something almost like wistful pride in her eyes. "I'm happy that you made it."

"Yes, well, this call isn't all about me." Weiss sniffed, trying to approximate her old mannerisms while still expressing ideas so alien to them –ideas like reconciliation and bonding with her family. "How are you doing? Has anything come up since I've been gone?"

"Not particularly." The formality came back, but Weiss didn't take offense: it was part and parcel of thinking about the job, as far as Winter was concerned. She probably hadn't even noticed how her back stiffened and her eyes went hard. "We've been occupied with plans for the upcoming Vytal Festival, but that's still quite far away, of course. Some things that are classified, and I naturally can't tell you about them."

"Of course." Weiss bowed her head slightly. She could save her further questions for later: her question had been adequately answered, and pressing further would indicate an unnatural interest in the Atlas military's activities. Perhaps later, after more than a few days had passed, she could ask if anything strange had come up in her absence, since she had currently been "absent" for less than a week. "Might I ask a favor of you?"

"…yes? Yes, of course." Winter looked nonplussed, probably speculating what on earth Weiss could want of her. Weiss was willing to bet the considerable amount already deposited in her new account that Winter had no idea of what her favor would be. "What is it?"

"I want you to check on Whitely for me."

Winter blinked, actually leaning back a little bit in her astonishment.

Weiss stared levelly at her sister as she recovered.

"I…I'm sorry, you what?" Winter shook her head a little, closing her eyes, not in rejection but in an attempt to understand the wildly out-of-character request. "Weiss, where is this coming from?"

"I…saw how Yang and Ruby interacted with each other, and it occurred to me that we did not have the most…conventional upbringing." Weiss said delicately. It was not implausible, considering how comfortable the two half-sisters were in each other's space, though the actual realization had taken much more time and several more momentous events to fully crystalize in Weiss's mind. "Looking at them, I realized that you and I, and Whitely, we don't really see each other as siblings, not properly. We're rivals to work around or someone to avoid, because you don't want to cause noise in the manor. And I…"

Her gaze lowered to the desk.

"You haven't come back to stay, have you?"

Words that would've sounded frightened coming from any other mother, resigned, instead sound fragile, hopeful.

"No." She's made her decision, and she's not budging on it. Not now, not ever.

"Good." Willow's voice is soft, but it still almost breaks. She wipes a tear away and shoves the Scroll at Weiss, taking up her Six Swans Vodka and walking away. "A…man came by. I'm afraid your father may be involved in something more dangerous than he realizes."

She slows for a moment, almost pausing, before continuing on her way to the door.

"No matter what happens, Weiss…please don't forget about your brother."

Weiss looks up from the Scroll and the video playing out there with a scoff. "Whitley wants nothing to do with me."

Willow paused with her hand on the door, turning to look at Weiss with a bitter smile.

"Of course not. You left him alone." She glances aside, and Weiss followed her gaze to the large portrait of Jacques as Willow's low voice grew ever sadder. "With us."

"I won't insult your memory by reminding you of what…father is like." Weiss continued, her tongue curling a little at the word. Jacques had not been father to her in a long, long time, and in spirit, he really never had been a father at all, just someone to be addressed with that empty title. "You had your out with the military academy, and you took it."

Winter's expression twinged a little, old guilt slipping through.

"I don't blame you." Weiss said before her sister could apologize, her voice brisk. "You saw an opportunity to make life better for yourself and you took it, regardless of what it might mean for anyone else, just like we were taught to do. It was the only way we were taught to do anything. And I…I did the same thing when I set my sights on Beacon. But where does that leave Whitely?"

Competitive as the siblings might be, as cold as they were taught to behave, Winter was not stupid. No, she was sharp and keen as the blade she carried, and her expression hardened as she realized what Weiss was asking of her.

"It leaves him with Jacques." she said, her voice as stiff as her aggressively-set shoulders. "Alone."

Weiss nodded.

"I…realize that this is asking a lot of you." she said, rubbing her thumb over her clasped hands. "But I don't want –I don't want to continue the divisions that have been formed between us. I want to at least try to become…proper siblings, as it were. It did…it did hurt, when you left us. I don't want him to be hurt like that twice over."

"Of course not." Winter agreed. "I will make preparations to visit him at once. And…do you want his Scroll number?"

"Please." Weiss said. "I'll text you my schedule, so that the both of you know the opportune times to call."

Winter nodded again –and then she smiled, the expression softening her face all over.

"I'm happy that you went to Beacon, sister." she said as her finger hovered over the ending button, her voice far more gentle than the military bark Weiss was used to hearing in public. "You seem to have grown up a lot, in the past few days. I'm quite impressed, to be honest."

Weiss stretched her face in a smile before the screen went blank again, and she sighed at the flickering blue screen.

"Winter, you have no idea." she murmured, before closing the projection with a swipe of her hand.

---

"…and the beds only look structurally unsound, though it is a bit annoying to get the books used to prop up my bunkbed." Blake finished. Her parents both looked much more relaxed, sitting at their low dining table and smiling happily as they listened to their daughter wax eloquent on her happy, peaceful life here at Beacon. Blake couldn't wait until a few more weeks had passed by and she could tell them about the shenanigans Team RWBY had gotten up to, though most of those would probably be anecdotes from their first time at Beacon, rather than now. They were decidedly more businesslike, now.

"Well, I'm happy to hear that you're getting alone with everyone." Kali chimed, looking suspiciously like she wanted to invite Blake's team over for tea and cookies at the nearest possible opportunity. Blake's feline ears perked as she heard the bells ring, however, and her mother and father both straightened. "Oh my, are you cutting class?"

"It's the morning bell for breakfast." Blake explained with a slight, reflexive yawn. This was normally when she and the others would be waking up. "They're starting to serve in the cafeteria now. I've still got an hour or so before classes start, its fine."

"Well, we probably shouldn't delay you any further." Ghira said with a sigh of regret, and Blake stiffened a little.

"Oh, um, before you hang up?" she asked, watching both of her parents come to attention. "Can you…do you still see Ilia?"

"Sometimes, dear. Why? Didn't she leave with you?" Kali asked, looking inquisitive and slightly concerned.

"No. But I…I want to talk to her." Blake said. "About my reasons for leaving. And I don't really have her Scroll number, so…"

"We'll try to get in touch." Ghira promised. "Its good that you're still concerned for your friend."

"Yeah, well…" Blake shrugged a little, unable to convey how much past concerned she was for one of her oldest friends. Ilia had come far, far too close to the edge for Blake's comfort, and her reformation had taken a lot of argument and a lot of damage, not to mention a lot of convenient in-the-moment proofs. Blake had faith in the innate goodness of Ilia's heart, but she certainly had a lot less in the universe so neatly lining up to help convince Ilia in that way again. No, she would need to bring her strongest and most convincing arguments, and yes, damn her, utilize Ilia's crush if she had to. Blake could deal with the bitter taste of being a manipulator if it meant that her friend wasn't being sucked into the toxic swamp of thinking where Adam was so determined to lead all who followed him.

"All right then. Bye, sweetie!"

"Good luck with your classes."

"Bye mom, dad." Blake answered, and her Scroll went dark. She collapsed it again, tucking the small device away on her belt before nimbly leaping to the ground. A reflexive sweep around revealed no intruders, no enemies, no eavesdroppers, and Blake felt a tension that she hadn't even realized was there go out of her shoulders slightly as she headed back inside to rejoin her team, picking up Weiss on the way as the heiress returned from the library.

Team JNPR blustered their way past as the two got to their own hallway, shooting out of their room like a four-part canon as Weiss and Blake plastered against the wall to avoid being run over. Blake watched with amusement as her team started to follow close behind, eyeing each other with an equally odd set of expressions. Clearly, they were realizing what she already knew: the hardest part of pickpocketing someone wasn't keeping the victim from noticing, it was keeping the act unseen by everyone else around you both.

Blake was willing to bet that no tokens had been exchanged yet, and tapped Weiss's wrist without even looking –the thinness of the fingers was unmistakable– as a hand dipped into her pocket.

"Drat." Weiss muttered, and the hand withdrew.

"Ruby, stop staring at my boobs." Yang said, grinning at her sister's pinched expression. "I didn't put it up there."

"But you might've! Its where Lionheart kept his!"

"If we're being true to life here," Yang ran both her hands down the slope of her chest with a wicked grin. "-I've got two big problems that he doesn't. If anyone stuffed it in their pecs, it'd be Weiss."

"Kindly stuff your ego-inflated head into a hole and die, please." Weiss said without inflection, and then yelped in startled outrage a few seconds later as Blake heard the sound of a slap. "Ruby! Get your hand out of there!"

This pickpocketing practice is not getting off to a great start… Blake thought from the front of the group, her ears drooping. It sounded more like a pack of wild lesbians than it did a serious venture into the art of thievery, complete with groping and breast allusions. She cast a suspicious glance over her shoulder, catching Yang mid-reach for her own pocket, and the blonde grinned without shame.

"Hey, if you walk at the front, you're putting yourself up as the prime target." she said cheerfully, and Blake's stare flattened.

"I'm also the one with the most experience and best hearing." she said, twitching one of her ears in indication. "Try and actually steal a token successfully, and then you can see if you can steal mine."

"That sounds like a challenge, Blakey."

"A challenge you can't afford, maybe."

"Nobody challenges Yang Xiao Long and gets away with it, partner or not…"

Bantering pleasantly, the team made their way to the cafeteria, their efforts at swiping the elusive tokens dwindling sharply as they came to places where other students were. The group's pickpocketing skills were shaky enough as it was, they were hardly eager to borrow more trouble –Yang aside– by trying to practice those shaky skills in public.

They got their trays of food and went to sit by Team JNPR, and Blake gave Jaune an appraising look as they all sat down. He looked…decent, all things considered. It was still a bit odd to see him so young and…floppy-looking, for lack of a better term, but he carried himself without any bags under his eyes and there didn't seem to be any problems between him and the rest of his team, who included him easily in their chatter. Nora was pelting Ruby with questions about how she ate her pancakes –which were, as always, a syrup-drenched monstrosity only a few minutes away from becoming a gooey slush– and Pyrrha was deep in a talk with Jaune and Weiss about weapons. Ren, of course, was quietly focused on finishing his meal, and Yang was dividing her attention between wolfing down enormous bites of her own food and interjecting on both the Nora-Ruby and the Jaune-Weiss-Pyrrha discussions.

Blake flicked open her Scroll and began thumbing out vague ideas for what to do about convincing Ilia to leave the White Fang –and slapped Yang's stealthy hand away from her pocket with the side of her fork, before stabbing it back into the slice of salmon on her plate.

Ilia had suffered enough under human rule to join the White Fang, but she was also human-passing, and Blake knew that that was an important factor in her decision-making and unconscious prejudices. She knew that Ilia had feelings for her, and she knew –the desperate way Ilia blurted the words, face streaked with the ashes of Blake's burning home and her own tears– that Ilia followed Adam's way of thinking because she wanted to avenge her parents and didn't know what else to do. If Blake showed Ilia how sowing fear to gain equality was a dangerous tightrope walk to tread, it should be easy enough to detach her from the White Fang. The problem with that was that Blake needed cold, hard evidence, and without the circumstances created on Menagerie, that evidence would be hard to procure or demonstrate.

Research was needed, and Blake made a note of that before polishing off the last of her breakfast and standing up with her team.

The rest of her day was simultaneously stressful and mundane. The classes were sleep-inducing and simplistic, compared to all that they had already learned (not to mention compared to the fact that they'd literally already taken them before), liberally spiced with moments of tension as they were called upon to demonstrate their skills in class. Ruby was called up by Professor Goodwitch during combat lessons, and Blake could practically see her counting down all the skills that she needed to minimize in her head before the bout began.

It actually wasn't that hard. The difference between a first-year trainee and a graduate was often just a matter of theatrics and experience. The longer you fought, and the tougher enemies you fought, the more you understood how to tighten your technique and slim down on the unnecessary flips and tricks that so many students developed after getting their Aura unlocked –after all, being able to boost your muscles and prevent damage as children led to a lot of ideas about super-acrobatics, and a certain number of students that visited the infirmary.

Blake, when she came to Beacon, had even suffered under some of that delusion, despite the way she had been trained. When she'd had her Aura unlocked, she hadn't spent her time trying to discover the ultimate move, but she had fought to inspire her fellow White Fang members, dashing forwards into danger and executing her moves with a bit more flourish than was strictly necessary. With every attack, she still tried to down a foe, but her swings were just slightly wider and more telegraphed than necessary, her ending poses a tad too unnecessarily dramatic. What did it matter, she'd always thought, as long as her enemies were dead by the end of it, and this way she could fire courage into the hearts of the people that watched her?

It mattered, because serious foes did not fight with such drama. Like Blake, every strike was meant to kill, but unlike Blake-as-she-had-been-at-seventeen, every move was executed with maximum efficiency. There was no room for theatrics when you were trying to kill or fighting for your life, and that closed gaps in her enemies' defenses and, if she persisted in her lifelong habits of adding just a hint of a flourish, left holes in her own. Guards for the SDC were merely hired, and their job wasn't worth their life, so the stakes were lowered to defeat rather than death –when it wasn't Atlesian robots and Grimm, whom she could cleave through without a qualm.

Fighting robots and people hired to do a job –Blake had never fought, truly fought, anyone dangerous before she came to Beacon, and it had showed in her fighting style, even when she was several levels above many of the people in her year. Flips and spins and other flashy moves –those were the marks of a trainee, and while graduated Hunters may still use those moves, or components of them, they did not do so as a habit. Blake had fought for her life for long enough, after the Fall of Beacon, to carve away all the extraneous bits of her fighting style and smooth down her technique like she was sharpening a blade, honing only the vital aspects that would keep her alive and using none of the showmanship or flair that had once impressed her comrades, until she was as practical and deadly a fighter as any experienced Huntress when she arrived in Atlas.

Turning poses into practicality –that was what this class was for, and all Ruby needed to do to show how much she hadn't grown was…camp up her style a bit, as it were. Add a few twirls and sparkly poses, and not fight with as much drive to win, or with moves that she'd learned to attack more experienced opponents. Not use her developed Semblance, not show how much more she had learned about the art of combat in her time traversing the wilds of Anima or fighting criminals in Mistral and Atlas. Not use her silver eyes, of course, but there was nothing of Grimm here, so Ruby couldn't activate those even if she tried.

Blake heard a crinkle and sharply raised her hand without otherwise moving, snatching a wadded-up ball of paper from the air a few inches away from her head. She heard snickers from behind her, recognizing the voice of Cardin and his team, and without looking flicked the ball of paper back over her shoulder at them. Juvenile idiots.

Really, what was a ball of paper going to do? It wasn't even –not that she was encouraging that– a spitball or anything disgusting. Did they expect her to crumple over the desk and weep over a stupid paper ball? Or- no, they'd probably expected it to hit her and make her whirl around, so that they could spit their mean comments and continue throwing those paper balls at her under the cover of Ruby fighting her opponent. They'd probably planned to pick at her helplessness to retaliate, make her frustrated or intimidated, and thus receive whatever warped satisfaction bullies received from that.

Idiots.

A few uneasy whispers sounded beside her, before another ball was tossed down. Blake caught it again, and without looking, handed it to Yang. The blonde grabbed it without turning her head away from Ruby's match, and then looked down, putting two and two together. She glanced over at Blake with a raised eyebrow, before shrugging and wordlessly raising her hand between them, paper ball cupped in her palm, as Yang looked back to the front. The blonde ignited her Aura, burning the innocent paper to a crisp, as Blake heard four masculine gulps behind her. Yang turned her hand upside-down, shaking the dust out, before folding it in her lap again. She was still facing the front, but Blake caught a twinkle of wicked amusement in those lilac eyes as Yang glanced at her. She smirked back, then lowered her gaze to the paper she was taking notes on, trying to write down all the points she had to convince Ilia to leave the White Fang.

---

This was fine, right?

This was fine.

This was totally fine.

Several weeks into her second first semester at Beacon (and wasn't that an odd sentence), Ruby gnawed on her lower lip as she bustled around the school weapon's lab, Crocea Mors laid out on her workshop table. She'd already spent the last two nights installing all the upgrades on Crescent Rose and helping Yang on Ember Celica, but Jaune's weapon was…different.

Well, of course it was, it was Jaune's weapon. She knew how her baby worked inside and out, down to every last gear and spring, because she had literally built it from the ground up. She knew how Ember Celica worked a bit less well, because it was her sister's weapon, but Ruby was still confident in her ability to assist as Yang –no less a gearhead than she was– upgraded her weapon back to its old(?) capabilities.

But Jaune's sword and shield?

That was his. Only he knew all the secrets of this weapon, and it was a deeply intimate thing for him to hand it off to someone else –even if Jaune didn't know a screwdriver from a wrench, half the time, and couldn't possibly install a complicated Dust upgrade on his own. Who else could he trust with this? Who else had seen how his old upgrade worked, back in Atlas? Who else could understand the sketches he gave her, the shaky blueprints based off of memory and his maintenance instructions?

No, Ruby was the only one who could work on this, aside from Yang, but that wasn't quite what she was worried about. She was confident that she could install Jaune's old upgrades, could attach all the right mechanisms in all the right places, could insert the Dust cartridges as needed, but she was not at all confident in her ability to produce an exact replica of Mr. Polendina's work. And that was the thing –this upgrade needed to be exact, or as exact as possible, because Jaune had learned how to use it and trained his body's muscle-memory in a certain way, and if Ruby got this wrong, if her mechanisms were a bit off from the way he remembered, Jaune could die.

If he used his Gravity Dust to fire at the enemy, or launch himself off, and it was even an inch away from the way it had been back in Atlas, his move would fail and he might die. If his Hard-Light shield didn't expand at the exact same speed as the first had, he might misjudge his timing during a fight and open it too slow or too fast, and he could die. If Ruby didn't put the appropriate ignition switches in the same place as before, he might fumble them during a fight and not even activate his Dust in time, which would certainly get him killed.

By letting her augment his weapon, Jaune was literally putting his life in his hands, which –no surprise!– was a bit stressful, especially when Ruby had not been the person to perform the original modifications.

Weapons were considered part of someone's soul for a reason. Just as a Semblance was a part of you, so too was your weapon, because who created or used a weapon that did not mesh well with their Semblance? They were literally the thing that stood between you and death, what made a Hunter a Hunter, and every single one was unique. Just as you trained to fight with your Aura and your Semblance, you developed a weapon that would be an extension of both, learning your way to your own unique fighting style. You weapon would be an extension and a proof of that –even with Jaune, who had inherited his!

He'd taken that old, simple sword and collapsible shield-sheathe and increased their swinging power by combining them in Anima, because Beacon had fallen and he needed to be able to fight, to hit harder than ever before, and he didn't have time to worry about shielding himself. It was a weapon shape that had carried over his mindset of the time, still raw with grief and hurt and anger and thinking that the best defense was a good offense. And then, in Atlas, he had learned that he needed to be adaptable, to have more range in his combat, and he'd upgraded his weapon again, adding just two incredibly versatile effects: Hard Light Dust so that he could expand the shield to an even-larger size, and Gravity Dust that he could release in pulses. With the larger shield, he could protect more people, but he could also be more mobile, using it as a glider, and with the Gravity Dust, Jaune could use (limited) projectile attacks for the first time.

Over the years, Crocea Mors had evolved and become Jaune's weapon, not just a weapon that he used, something that matched his problem-solving, all-rounder fighting style that had no room for specialization. Jaune's fighting was not intricate, but that did not mean that he wasn't incredibly versatile and inventive in using the few simple modifications and basic moves that he did have. He was an incredible Huntsman because of his unelaborate style, because he could adapt it to any situation and any foe, because he was the very definition of an all-arounder, whereas Ruby and other highly-specialized fighters struggled in fights that they were not adapted for.

That was what a weapon meant to a Hunter. It was something that had grown with you, something that you used as an extension of yourself, your Semblance, and your body. It was something that you had made, personalized to yourself and absolutely no one else. Using another person's weapon, even your partner's, even your teammate's, implied a lot of trust –trust that they would be able to use it correctly, trust that they wouldn't damage this important part of you.

So, yeah. No pressure at all in her modifying Jaune's weapon.

Still, Ruby had never gotten anything done by worrying, and she was quick and methodical as she laid out her tools and pulled on her gloves, getting to work.

Things had been going well –she had managed to swipe Weiss's token earlier today without the heiress noticing, though Blake still reigned undefeated in both collecting the little disks and preventing/catching anyone swiping hers. If they kept this up, they'd be able to swipe that doohickey right out from under Lionheart's nose (literally) and open the vault of the Spring Maiden. Eh, well, it wasn't the vault itself, it was…the pre-vault vault? The entrance cave?

Whatever.

As far as their other plans went, Neo still hadn't shown up to wreak bloody vengeance, Weiss was receiving more-or-less daily updates from her siblings and hadn't heard anything weird out of Atlas, and Blake was moving forward on her plans to deal with the White Fang, most specifically Adam and her cool friend Ilia. As far as Team RWBY was concerned, their plans for averting the Fall of Beacon and assorted tragedies were moving along at a cracking good pace.

As for Beacon life itself, Team JNPR had been some rowdy and fun guests at their end-of-the-week game nights, which were rapidly blooming into a tradition, and Ruby was already starting to see some improvement in their class fights. Whatever Jaune was doing with them was working wonders, though it was kinda hard to tell whether or not he was cracking at the edges under the pressure of being so…alone. After all, he was the only one who remembered things on his team, and Ruby could tell he felt isolated and afraid.

Well, they weren't leaving him to the Beowolves. Everyone on Team RWBY was making sure to check in with Jaune at least once on Friday game night, offering a shoulder and some words of comfort as Nora howled and jabbed buttons in the background over Pyrrha's increasingly flustered squeaks as she tried to operate a game system she was still inexperienced with. Ren was easier to keep an eye on. Ruby appreciated Ren. She especially appreciated how incurious he was about everything, since the Ren she knew was also one smart cookie and he probably noticed how Team RWBY was taking Jaune aside so often –unlike the two girls of his team, who were easier to distract.

The creak of the door made her look up, paranoia eased enough through several weeks of mundane complacency that Ruby didn't immediately reach for her belt, and she saw Pyrrha entering with her spear-sword-rifle.

"Hey, Pyrrha!" she chirped, drawing the redhead's attention, and Pyrrha smiled slightly as she walked over to take the bench beside Ruby, laying down her weapon. She frowned a little, though, as she saw whose weapon Ruby was working on, and Ruby cringed. It was…hard, to talk and exist with Pyrrha, but it was especially hard as things related to Jaune. Obviously they were socially-awkward BFFS for life, but Ruby was smart enough to know how things looked from the outside and it couldn't be comfortable with the budding crush Pyrrha had (Ruby was pretty sure she still had it) to see Jaune acting so much easier and happier with Team RWBY, to see how much more he trusted girls that –to Pyrrha's eyes– had a lot less of a claim on his trust than she did. She was his partner after all, and Ruby was on a wholly different team.

"What are you doing?" Pyrrha asked slowly, her eyebrows furrowing in a look of such sad confusion that Ruby cringed all over again. Ooh, she hoped she never had a crush as painful as this.

"Jaune asked me to modify his weapon with Dust, since he can't really do that himself." she said, though, looking down and picking up a tool so that she and Pyrrha weren't looking into each other's eyes and Pyrrha couldn't see her expression. "So, how are things going with Team JNPR? Jaune hardly ever shuts up about you guys, when we talk."

She didn't even have to look at Pyrrha's face to see her brighten as Pyrrha stood straighter, then moved to sit at her own desk.

"Wonderfully, thank you." Pyrrha said as she drew her weapon towards her. "I still can't believe my luck."

"Mm." Ruby made an interested, sympathetic noise as she popped open the future casing for Jaune's Dust.

"Nora and Ren are…interesting." Pyrrha continued, reaching for a magnifying lens, and starting to sweep it slowly down one edge of her sword, looking for nicks and weak spots. "It's a bit complicated. Jaune said that they've been alone together for so long that they've, uh, they've sort of grown into each other, personality-wise. He wants to try and push them to grow apart a little –not in a bad way, of course! Just, he wants to try and give them a gentle nudge towards being more independent, spread their wings, find themselves, etc. He says that it's important to help the team reach its full potential. I'm actually supposed to take Nora shopping this weekend while Jaune and Ren work on teaching Jaune to cook."

"Ouch." Ruby said cheerfully, setting a panel aside.

"Yes, I'm still not sure I'll survive the experience." Pyrrha agreed with a sigh, before returning her attention to her weapon. "But he's not wrong. They do try, but it's so clear that they're a, a unit, two people that are part of one whole. They're fantastic teammates, don't get me wrong, and I'd, I'd both consider them good friends-"

Ruby could tell that Pyrrha was savoring the words, and smiled fondly.

"-but they are still very much…wrapped up in each other. It's not even overt, it's just that they seem to feel this need to constantly double-check with each other whenever they do something, and they work together so much better in fights than Jaune and I. He is right, I think it's important to try and integrate that kind of teamwork into the entire team, but I'm rather afraid it'll be slow going."

"You guys are getting better in fights." Ruby commented, trying not to feel guilty over how much that was a self-serving interest, and Pyrrha hummed agreement.

"Jaune's a good teacher. He really understands how we fight, and training every day after school has already boosted our skills immensely." she said. "We're getting used to using each other's skills to our advantage during a fight, and Jaune-" She giggled. "With his Aura and shield, Jaune makes an excellent human target."

"You guys are whacking him all over the training ring like a piñata, aren't you?" Ruby asked absently, her eyes as steady as her hand as she wound a tiny screw with an even tinier screwdriver.

"To be fair, he volunteered for it. I think it helps Nora, especially, to have an opponent that won't fold over her hammer no matter how hard she hits him. She's learning to be more scientific and more controlled in her swings, and Jaune has had me sparring with her a lot to improve her dexterity and aim and help me practice shrugging off the harder hits. Her and Ren do the same thing, of course, but they know each other's moves so well they don't really get much practice out of it."

Ruby nodded and hummed again.

Pyrrha fell silent, not in a "feeling socially awkward" way, more in the same way that Ruby was replying in monosyllables –the "I'm busy with delicate work on my weapon" sort of silence that was intensely self-absorbed and, thankfully, had very little connection to embarrassment. Ruby should know, she'd buried herself in Crescent Rose's functions to escape an awkward conversation more than once in the past, and she'd probably do it again in the future.

"Hey, Ruby?" Pyrrha asked after about ten minutes.

"Hmm?"

"Do you think…is there a reason that Jaune likes you more than me?"

Had Ruby been drinking milk, she would have spat it across the workbench, which was probably yet another really good reason for the no-food-or-drink ban enforced in weapon workshops and other areas with volatile surfaces and surroundings. As it was, her screwdriver slipped out of its alignment and skidded several inches across the glossy steel of Jaune's inner shield with a rasp of metal-on-metal.

"Ahahaha, wh-what makes you say that?" Ruby said, cursing her slightly-squeakier voice that made that already-lackluster excuse sound even more damning. "I mean, he spends all that time with you guys training and stuff."

"But he spends a lot of his free time with your team." Pyrrha said, and Ruby nervously pulled off her work gloves to let her sweating hands cool. "I'm not- it's not an accusation, I promise, I just…I wondered what he saw in you."

Ruby glanced over at the champion and saw how she wilted, and despite being several years younger and many inches shorter, had to resist the strong urge to scoot over and pat her head. Pyrrha looked like a dejected puppy, a tall, queenly, razor-edged badass of a puppy. She was even pouting a little and everything, her brilliant emerald eyes gone dark and sad.

Ruby panicked.

Brother fucking gods, what should she say?! What could she say!? "Oh, well, the thing is, he's actually known me for a lot longer than he's known you –yeah, I know, we lied about being strangers during initiation and stuff! Crazy, right?– and we've been besties that whole time, and because you died a few years back he's kinda forgotten how to deal with you as a person, and so have I to be honest, and did you know you look absolutely amazing as a statue?"

Yeah, that would go over well.

"I think I remind him of his sister…s?" Ruby almost-asked, sweating even harder and trying to think of how to actually lie and be believed. Why was it so much harder now than it was in Ironwood's office, when there was a Relic and possibly her friend's lives and the fate of Remnant on the line?

Eh. Ruby always had done best under catastrophic pressure.

"He, um, we both really bonded over being socially-awkward losers." she continued, going for broke and pulling the truth into things. "I got really turned around when I first got off the airship, and he helped me up off the ground, and then we both got lost trying to find our way to the auditorium and had a really good bro moment over how bad we both were at conversation. That's all, honest!"

Pyrrha blinked at her rapid-fire confession, then smiled a little, looking reassured.

"I said I wasn't accusing you." she reminded Ruby, and angled her sword-spear, showing Ruby the edge. "Does this look good? While I can't deny that Jaune's training is showing results, I'm a little worried at what it does to our gear."

Ruby hitched up her stool and scooted sideways, the metal scraping loudly against the floor just a little. She leaned over Pyrrha's workbench, inspecting the vibrant gold and red metal of Pyrrha's sword-spear. A consummate fighter, Pyrrha almost certainly projected her Aura out along her weapon as she fought, but since it wasn't part of her flesh and bone, she wouldn't be able to feel when her Aura instinctively slid back to cover the rest of her body, leaving the weapon exposed to more mundane damage. It happened to even the most practiced fighters, and when you were doing Aura-on-Aura combat with someone else, a stronger swing from them and a dropped Aura on your weapon could result in damage on the sturdiest of blades.

Pyrrha's weapon looked mostly fine, with a glossy sheen that proved she went over it every night with a polishing rag and a whetstone if necessary. Ruby could see some faint nicks on that glossy surface, though, and a few ghostly scratches that proved that Jaune's victories over his teammates had not been without struggle. The fact that he could pressure Pyrrha enough that her weapon showed these scratches might have been extremely impressive for a first-year student, but, well, Jaune wasn't a first-year. As gangly as he looked, Jaune was still a licensed and professional Huntsman, albeit a fairly new one with only a few months of experience under his belt. He had two years of intense combat and strategical experience that his team didn't, not to mention a hell of a lot more live missions with high stakes. Jaune's sword fighting might still be basic and his hand-to-hand might be more "dodge while shoving the opponent at another opponent/an obstacle" than anything actually offensive, but he had earned his license as fairly as Ruby and the rest of her team. His determination and can-do attitude often carried him over when his strategy skills weren't enough.

It also made for a lot of comedic moments when his determination undercut his skills and his ability to think through the consequences of certain moves, and Ruby laughed long and hard as she drew Pyrrha into a conversation about Team JNPR's daily practice sessions, and all the ways Jaune had inadvertently faceplanted, somersaulted into a wall, taken Nora's hammer between his legs (Ruby was a girl and she still cringed and pressed her knees together in a wince at that one), and otherwise been tossed around the training ring like an oversized squeaky toy due to his insanely high Aura and occasionally-bad judgement on moves from other people as well as his own. Still, he always got back up, and he always had a word of advice for his team, and Ruby could tell that they still respected and liked him, even after so much had changed about the original Team JNPR.

---

The roar of fire was distant in her ears, sounding like a twisted version of the crowd that had bellowed with one voice during the festival, and the crackle and snap of flames seemed somehow so much closer than all the rest of the blaze. The air reeked of spent Dust, predominantly Burn and other explosive blends, and her heart was pounding tightly under her ribs as she ran through the chaos. Where were they?

It was like a nightmare, familiar shapes and sounds distorted and molded into odd and terrifying shapes, here the familiar benches of the school ripped apart for kindling or for makeshift clubs, here the familiar curve of a wall cracked and fallen by some violent attack. Figures moved everywhere, some adult, some children, some Hunters, some robots. Everything was darkness streaked with the heat and light of flames, and Semblance or not, Yang still shuddered.

Mixed with the crackle and roar of fire were sounds she didn't want to hear, shrieks and screams from people and the inhuman, keening cries of a horde of Grimm. What the hell was this? How could this be happening?! She was- they were-

The walls were like smoky mist, and she could see as a Nevermore swooped down and snatched up a student distracted by firing into a pack of Beowolves –but when Yang cocked Ember Celica and fired, her bullets hit the unwavering bulk of the dorms as she saw a distant, jagged blackness soar off into the sky behind the building. Students were crying and fighting and dying as Grimm fell upon them, dodging between Atlas robots, and gods, why did they all look so young? Why did seventeen-year-olds look like children?

Why did she have to run through this and not help?

Yang tried. Her arms pumped like she was whaling on a practice dummy held up in the air by a chain, Dust bullets screaming through the air, but she was trying to reap a field of enemies with a single knife. Students trickled and stumbled towards each other, grouping up vaguely as civilians ran wildly in any and every direction, but no one knew what to do and enemies were everywhere. Distracted and disoriented, everyone fell. Sooner or later, they were all taken out.

Yang's feet crunched on broken glass as she pounded through another hallway, an alley, a street? Had the skies above Beacon always been so…urban? She could have sworn that the main building towered over everything and everything led back to it, but then, what were the skyscrapers crawling with Grimm that she saw all around her? Why did the air taste the same, Dust and explosions and fire licked with blood? Why had no one stopped screaming?

Yang was running through a maze of buildings. She was running through Beacon. She didn't know where she was running, only that the walls around her rose high and dark and close, choking her in, hemming out the sky, trapping her as panic built in a tight bubble in her chest. She wanted to stop, go back, run, flee, but somehow, her feet kept moving, a fear pulling her on. She was here to –find someone, yes. She was here to find them and save them and rescue them and then everything would be okay.

But there was danger ahead, something hunting her that wove through the reddened streaks of flame and the thick shadows. What was here with her? Was it a Grimm?

No.

Something worse.

A gaping maw lunged at her out of the darkness as Yang screamed and swung, blasting a Dust cartridge in its mouth at close range. But the beast didn't seem affected at all as cold claws rasped into her body and she was borne down to the floor, and Yang's scream became a cry of mixed fury and fear as she grabbed that ravening muzzle with one hand and held it away from her as she jabbed her fist again, the blasts of Ember Celica roaring in the small room as she fired down that reddened gullet again and again and again. If this thing was going to eat her, it'd have to swallow an appetizer of a few dozen Dust rounds first.

The roars of the creature scraped against her ears, a dull and thunderous sound like the crashing of ocean tides. It wasn't even human, just a primal sound of defiance and fury as it bucked and twisted atop her, heavy claws pounding and dragging at her body as it sought to claw through her Aura. Dimly she heard the crunch of footsteps and the clang of metal weapons, but she couldn't focus on anything except the creature atop her right now, not if she wanted to live.

"Yang!"

Instincts honed through years of being a big sister made her whip her head up, and her eyes widened as she saw Ruby further down the hallway –just as her Aura flickered and puffed away in a sprinkling of glowing red motes. A boot dipped under Crescent Rose and flicked it away down the hall, towards Yang, and her face tightened as her blood crystalized into pure fury, seeing Adam Taurus grab her baby sister by the hood.

"You bastard!" she screamed. "I killed you! I killed you! Let her go!"

He glanced down the hall towards her as Ruby sagged in his grip, gasping and clawing at her throat, and then flashed that thin smirk that had haunted Yang's nightmares for so many months, before he was turning away.

"Yang!" Ruby choked, twisting and dragging her feet against the floor, trying to stop him, to hold him back and slow him down even when her Aura had been broken and her muscles had to feel like tar. One clawing hand reached out for her sister.

"Ruby!" Yang screamed, unable to reach back as she wrestled with the heavy, cold muzzle of the bone-plated thing above her while it snarled and pushed back, claws heavy against her sides and shoulder. Ruby kept getting dragged away from her no matter how hard either of them struggled, Adam heading for a distant point of reddish-black at the end of the hallway. He ignored Ruby's pleas and Yang's screams, even as she spit Blake's name at him, trying to get him to stop for just a second.

Yang saw a bone-pale, black-streaked arm reach out of that glowing red darkness, languid and as full of expectation as a queen, and she screamed.

"NO! DAMN IT, NO! RUBY!"

"Yang!" Ruby sobbed as Adam stopped and dragged her forward just a little, handing her over to Salem like he was delivering a sack of goods. "Yang! Why didn't you save me?"

Yang found herself looking up at the cold and heavy thing on top of her, though she didn't remember when her gaze had changed or where the others had gone. Ruby was looking down at her with eyes that poured the vile black tar of Grimm, her mouth opened in a soundless cry.

"Why didn't you save me, Yang?!" she asked again, lifting Grimm arms covered in bony plates, as she wrapped her black hands around Yang's neck. "Why didn't you save us?!"

Yang didn't know if it was Ruby's face or Summer's that looked down at her anymore.

All she knew was that it had become Grimm.

Yang woke mid-scream as the sound, which had been so loud in her dream, revealed itself to be nothing but a choked-off gasp, flailing in reflexive panic amongst her twisted blankets. T-that's right, she always took her prosthetic off before bed, she needed to account for the change in weight and balance and make sure that she hadn't woken any of the others with her nightmare, sleep was hard enough to come by already and both teams were all packed into the same room, nothing like the dorms back home-

Mid-spasm, Yang slammed her elbow into the wall with a muffled thump and froze, sensation and memory draining back into her with the soreness that prickled up the length of her flesh-and-blood arm. That's right, she was at Beacon, it hadn't fallen: they were safe, her team was alone in the room, and she hadn't lost her arm yet.

Ever. She hadn't, she wouldn't lose her arm ever. Not 'yet'.

She shook herself and inhaled deeply, moving with slow deliberation as she pulled her arm away from the slightly-dented wall and centered herself on the mattress. Yang couldn't exactly relax right now, but she did make the conscious decision to loosen up her muscles as much as she was capable of right now, exhaling out a long, weary breath.

"Bad dream." she mumbled, and heard a quiet grunt and the slight squeak of bedsprings beneath her. Good old reliable Blake –she heard a thump and she'd been on the alert, even when jarred out of sleep, and had waited until Yang confirmed that she wasn't being subtly murdered before relaxing again and rolling over.

Yang ran her fingers through her damp bangs, and ignored how they were shaking as she closed her eyes again. I killed you, you bastard, was somehow at the forefront of her mind, as the image of Adam Taurus dragging Ruby away to an uncertain fate played over and over again behind her eyelids. I killed you and you're dead and gone and you can't fucking do that, not anymore.

Except he wasn't, of course. Adam was alive and as good as he'd ever be, piece of shit that he was. It wasn't implausible that something like that scene could play out, since he did work for Salem and she certainly had issued the order of "capture silver-eyed warriors alive" within Yang's generation. Possibly earlier? Ruby had said that the guy inside the Hound –some Faunus dude with brown hair and wolf ears– had been older than them, maybe mid-twenties. Did you age when you were covered in Grimm goop? Did you age as it ate away at everything you were, until your skin was sliding off your flesh?

Yang shuddered and rolled over, tugging a corner of the blanket up over her shoulders as she did, uncaring of how it exposed her legs. Flushed with post-nightmare sweat, she needed the psychological security of a blanket and could very well do without the extra heat that accompanied it.

This was –fine. Things were fine. That kind of nightmare scenario wouldn't happen, because Yang was prepared and Ruby was prepared and Yang would die a thousand times over before allowing her baby sister to be dragged away to such a fate. So would the rest of their team, Blake and Weiss who had actually seen that damned Grimm muzzle and snout peeled away to reveal the person inside. So would Jaune, and so would the rest of Team JNPR, even if they didn't know worth a damn what they were fighting against.

Stress and PTSD manifested in odd ways. Yang knew that. She'd dealt with that already, after losing her arm. Real symptoms sometimes took as long as a month to show up, which she figured meant that the trauma from the –from everything in Atlas should be showing up right about now in all of them. She made a mental note to watch out for Ruby, who tried to compress everything negative in regards to herself into a neat ball so that she could help others more efficiently, while she conveniently ignored the seething black hole of bad emotions that was slowly achieving critical mass in the back of her mind. Yang loved her sister, but Ruby's hero complex was going to be the death of her someday.

–a black shape roaring and smashing Oscar's body everywhere like a dog with a chew toy, like a shark trying to thrash its prey to death, Oscar's panicked screams as this thing, this Grimm tried to break his Aura, knew what Aura was and that breaking it would leave him vulnerable–

Yang jolted against the mattress, muscles stiffening like she'd been shocked, before she exhaled slowly, shakily, and forced herself to relax again. She really, really, really didn't want to have to go through all this again, the nightmares and hours of no sleep and the way her body felt wound up as tight as a coiled spring, waiting for the moment where everything went wrong all over again, but…well…

She'd been feeling it for weeks. They all had. Yang knew it, and she knew that no amount of perky charm in the morning from Ruby or Weiss's impressive mimicry of her old bitchiness could hide the fact that they all remembered and felt what had happened in Atlas acutely. They each had their own memories, their own imprints of horror, and the sucky part about their particular brand of trauma was that they couldn't avoid being reminded of it. Yang remembered that, the pamphlets that her dad had conveniently left around the house after the Fall of Beacon, the brightly-colored and soothingly-illustrated magazine flaps that said that the best thing for people traumatized by certain situations was to distance themselves from similar situations. She remembered the conversations her dad had, with her closed door or to her unresponsive face, about how he didn't blame her if she never picked up the mantle of Huntress again, that going chasing after a career that had ripped her mind open like this was not a decision she should make lightly.

The problem was, Yang and her friends couldn't exactly smile and wave as they passed the save-the-world baton over to Ozpin. Ruby couldn't give Crescent Rose a fond pat before packing it all in and going on a debut tour as a movie star, or something. Salem hunted those with silver eyes, and it didn't matter if Ruby placed herself in the most prominent, most closely-guarded position in the world. Sooner or later, the bitch would chase her down, and then…

Yang shivered, and she scowled.

Maybe the rest of them could walk away –it was a decision that they were academically capable of making– but really, how could they? How could they look at the Fall of Beacon and the ensuing death toll and live with themselves if they weren't there to aid in the defense? How could they see all that Salem had done, all that she was capable of, and feel safe, in a world where they were not actively working towards her downfall? How could any of them lay down their weapons and try to live a mundane life when they knew of the kingdom-shattering machinations that were going on outside their periphery?

No. Yang and the others couldn't walk away, couldn't stop being Hunters, and thus they were placed in a position where they were forced, every day, to walk the halls that contained some of their worst memories, interact with situations that had all the trappings of their deepest traumas. Being Huntresses reminded them of their trauma, and yet they could do no less. A firefighter could quit their job when they were suffering from the aftermath of an especially traumatic fire, but Huntsmen and Huntresses could not drop their weapons and leave the gates open for the Grimm to come swarming in, no matter what they saw.

People in Yang's line of work still quit, of course, still retired and lived their lives, but only in the big cities, only inside the kingdom's walls where it was safe to lay down your weapon. Out in the wilderness, in those independent towns and villages like where Ren and Nora were from, a Hunter's weapon was one you held until you were no longer physically capable of it.

Return with your shield, or on it.

The old Mistral saying was an accurate one when it came to those smaller towns: Hunters either returned with their shield held high in victory, or they were carried in on them, dead.

So, horrible as it was to walk into class every day and look at some of her classmates and want to scream at them you need to study more, learn harder, don't you know that you don't live past the Vytal Festival, don't you know that your name's on the list of the fallen, don't you know I found your corpse –she had to. Yang couldn't run from this, because there was simply no one else to do the job. As horrible as it probably was for Ruby to see Pyrrha's excited face as she slowly mastered their game systems and think do you know how much people miss you? do you know what it was like to see you die? their team leader still had to keep her mouth shut and continue inviting her over.

Between the choices of "manage our PTSD by removing ourselves from an inciting environment" and "abandon the fight and leave the world to Salem's schemes," Yang and her friends were somewhat stuck between a rock and a hard place. It wasn't exactly like they could eliminate the main threat tying them in place, that being the hordes upon hordes of Grimm that swarmed Remnant and would undoubtedly massacre them all if the key positions of Huntsmen and Huntresses weren't filled.

That inability to quit had been the start of Ironwood's downfall, after all.

Yang had a lot of increasingly unflattering opinions on Ironwood, but there had been a good man in there, once. There had to have been, for Ozpin to consider him a good friend, and Yang did remember how desperate, if heavy-handed, he had originally been to help people that weren't his. But that was just the thing: Ironwood had all the grace and aplomb of one of his fancy Atlas battleships crashing through the ceiling, because like it or not, he had been the effective ruler of the strongest military kingdom on Remnant and the Atlesians hadn't had to fight on even terms in living memory. They'd always been able to overwhelm and overawe their opponents with a show of force, so when that hadn't happened, when that couldn't happen at the Fall of Beacon-

Ironwood had been shaken. Deeply. And yeah, Yang could understand that: he had been the biggest and baddest guy around, and suddenly all his superiority had been flipped on its head as his robots –his tools– were turned against him, causing untold destruction and making him look like a fool at best and a traitor at worst. That in itself was bad enough, but then people he cared about died. Ozpin had been friends enough with Lionheart that he was hurt by the man's betrayal, and Lionheart hadn't even bothered to show up to the Vytal Festival. Ironwood had been overwhelmingly pleased to see Oscar when he realized that Ozpin was inside the young boy, and Yang could only guesstimate at the number of direct subordinates and students that were killed during the Fall.

So, Ironwood had had the carpet yanked out from under him, something that he –with all of his inborn confidence and years groomed to believe in Atlas's might– was ill-equipped to deal with, and many of his friends and subordinates had died, and the apocalypse had stared him directly in the face as one of the Hunter Academies had crumbled and communications across the world had gone dark. Even Yang, who was determined to find a way to "accidentally" punch the general in the face the next time she saw him, could admit that the man –that anyone!– deserved to take a break to adjust and confront their trauma after a traumatic event like that.

Except he couldn't fucking take one.

Even more than Yang and her friends, Ironwood could not afford to step back, step down from his position. Hell, even if he could somehow squeeze in therapist appointments between all his many duties, he was head of the Atlas Academy and the military at the same time, two job positions that essentially shoved constant reminders of what had gone down in his face, with accompanied mundane stressors to match all day long. He was juggling three highly stressful, highly involved jobs at once, that of being military general, academy headmaster, and protecting Atlas (and Remnant!) against Salem's secret evil plans, and every single job was well-primed to constantly trigger his worst memories of the Fall of Beacon.

Obviously, that was a psychological morass well worth avoiding, but the very prominence and high-stressor nature of his jobs made them impossible to hand over while Ironwood took a break. Who the fuck could he trust to take over as "secret protector of Atlas against Salem" while he went on a mental health break? The Ace Ops? They were all his direct subordinates, and too inexperienced at the wider picture as it pertained to Remnant. Winter? She might've done an okay job as temporary leader of the military, but she was raw and inexperienced in the same broad scheme of things and one could afford no such weaknesses when dealing with Salem and her forces.

So Ironwood didn't have anyone to hand his jobs off to, didn't have any chance to take a break and breath and fucking decompress, just ricocheting from one stressor to another as paranoia and PTSD built and built in his mind with no chance of release. He kept trying to wall himself off, wall everything off and erect barriers and keep himself safe, keep everything he was supposed to care for and care about safe safe safe, take control of the spiraling sense of everything going wrong all the time –but he was engaging in an impossible task, and every time those supposedly-impenetrable walls cracked, Ironwood panicked a little more as his stress and paranoia spiked.

No wonder he was trying to control Atlas with an iron glove when Yang and the others arrived on the scene. He'd been destabilized from his hitherto-unshaken faith and never given a chance to recover and he wanted, he needed to grab at something and make it do as he said, make it orderly and neat and stable and safe. He'd blocked off the borders because this time, it would work (it had to work), because Atlas was the strongest kingdom with the strongest military and if they built up their walls and erected their barriers and dug in to protect themselves they would (surely) be safe.

They weren't, of course. Ironwood could have literally built a wall around the continent and he still wouldn't have been able to prevent a few people from slipping into his kingdom, and with Tyrian and Watts, that was all Salem needed. You could close the gates and man the walls all you wanted, but nothing, nothing, was ever truly impenetrable. That Ironwood was trying in the first place had been the first of many clues that something was wrong, that he was making emotion-based decisions that did not befit the head of a kingdom's military, illogical decisions that would have disastrous consequences.

But really –and here it was again– what could they do? Yang had remembered thinking at the time as she and the others looked at each other and wince-shrugged. Ironwood being a bit too jumpy for his proper duty wasn't exactly something they could fix, because fixing would require him stepping down or stepping out and they sure as fuck couldn't do that during the apocalypse. They had just tried to- to work with him, to try and ease the burden he was attempting to carry alone and assure his paranoia and help him calm down to, hopefully, the point where he could take a deep breath and look around and think for once, instead of just reacting by clamping down and bulldozing through everything on his way to the course of action he had decided. They had tried to remind him that he had allies he could trust and people he could count on, that things weren't bleak yet and that they could still fix everything together.

It had worked –right up until it hadn't.

Aside from the black chess piece and everything that it represented, Yang still wasn't sure what had set him off. Obviously, her and Blake going off-book and telling Robyn some of what was going on –that had broken military protocol, and even when she wasn't (technically) a solider, Yang knew something of what kind of mentality the military produced. Chain of command was everything, following orders was everything, because soldiers dealt with people while Hunters dealt with Grimm, and killing other people was something that your whole psyche fought against. It was not natural. It was the antithesis of how humans and Faunus –highly-social pack animals that their species both were– thought.

Modern militaries had learned to overcome that psychological inhibitor by conditioning their soldiers to the point where the orders of someone else took precedence over one's own rational instincts and moral code.

"You don't have to understand orders, kids." Elm said as they flew back to Atlas, answering the call that had been given without reason as Ironwood ordered them back to his office mid-evacuation. "You just have to follow them."

Soldiers were trained to trust in their commanders absolutely. Soldiers were trained to ignore their sense of right and wrong in favor of orders. Soldiers were trained to crush any feeling except anger, which could be redirected towards the enemy.

Everyone in that office, every Atlesian except for Weiss, had been a soldier. And the Ace Ops had served under Ironwood, a more rational Ironwood, for years before Yang and the others even met them. It didn't matter how jittery his behavior was or how obviously his composure was melting –when he gave the order to arrest them, arrested they would be. Orders were orders, and Team RWBY had been wrong by breaking protocol. Ironwood had shouted that loyalty always mattered, but what he meant was obedience. He had decided a way, and by the gods, the world would follow. It had to. It had to, because he was seizing control to reestablish the control he had lost and somehow that would make everything alright again, make everything work.

Refusing Salem's offer to hand over the Relics for peace was probably the last good, rational thing that Ironwood did.

Just because Yang understood the complex cocktail of negativity, psychology, and bad decisions that led to Ironwood's downfall didn't mean she forgave him, though. Whatever had happened in that office, it had been the last straw, and it had well and truly broken him. He'd dug his heels in, but the problem was that he was digging them into the wrong place and every effort to dislodge him only made him more desperate to retain his last bit of control, tunnel-visioning so hard that he was only able to focus on a single goal at a time, unable to think of the consequences or the wider picture. Raising Atlas above the Grimm –what would they do for food? For Dust to keep them warm and keep the city lit, once it ran out?

He just kept making ever-more-stupid plans, made all the more idiotic by the fact that he was actively sabotaging their efforts to help. All he had to do, literally all he had to do, was do nothing as the Schnee ships picked up the citizens of Mantle and ferried them to safety. What and how and who would that help, when he had redirected military ships from the defense solely to shoot down vessels taking civilians to safety? Did he seriously, seriously think that publicly bombing relief ships would look well on him if Atlas survived its rise? Did he think that giving a hacker who hated his guts access to tools and machines and a CCT connection wouldn't backfire on him?

No, of course not. Ironwood hadn't been thinking at all, just reacting to threat after threat and smacking it down with all the heavy-handedness and blind confidence they had come to expect from him. For all of his talk on the bigger picture, he hadn't been able to see it at all.

Yang sighed and rolled over again, looking at the glow of moonlight filtering out from underneath the red curtains. Yeah, she was definitely punching Ironwood in the face next time she saw him, but maybe with enough fancy footwork on their end, they could prevent his fall into…eh, madness? Absolute brain-sucking idiocy? She would never trust any command or any politics that came out of Atlas again, but…maybe they could keep Ironwood's hands free of direct murder, at least. Maybe they could at least stop him from becoming an overt tyrant.

Maybe, eventually, they'd be able to deal with Salem and people would be able to step back from this whole mess and breathe, someday.

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