Atonement: Lincoln Clay

Episode 6: For what it's worth

A/N: Okay so I know some people may not like this decision, but don't be mad please. I'm doing my best but I'm spreading myself too thin trying to write this, and Mad Max, as well as come up with ideas for my Zeta Gundam/Titanfall story. Unfortunately, this story will have to go on the back burner for a while until I can get back to it. So please don't get mad at me. I just can't keep up with it all right now.


[Review Dude: Yep, he is. I just felt like he would take a shine to her. That's hard to say how it would go with those two until I make it happen.]

[Ronmr: Thanks, yes Lincoln with aura would be akin to turning him into doomguy in my opinion. We'll just have to find out the answer to that later won't we? Yes that was both fun and cute, plus who better to teach them than a man with experience in such things than Lincoln Clay? :)]

[Ice: Your welcome.]

[Guest 1: Oh you meant Burke! You confused me when you forgot the H.]

[Javier The Wordsmith: Oh well thank you very much for your support dude.]

[Tauntsup3rs3t24: I'll explain that in due time man, have a little patience. Okay maybe a lot of patience. I will get there, but I want to flesh things out a bit before I do.]

[Guest 2: What Oz doesn't know won't hurt.]


-SEVERAL HOURS LATER: VALE HARBOR DISTRICT-

The group had been dropped off at the Vale docks by Locus who'd mentioned that he had other matters to attend to. Everyone bade farewell for now, and Donovan mentioned he might have a job for Locus later, to which he received a simple nod. They proceeded through the warehouse district until they reached a Bar that Donovan happened to take ownership of. Lincoln gave a skeptical look to the sly CIA agent who shrugged in response. The kids looked at the plain looking building with curious eyes as they observed its exterior. The place was concrete gray with a few windows and a blank white light up sign that hung near the door. Donovan unlocked the door and everyone proceeded in side except for Lincoln who hesitated for a moment at a flash of memories before shaking his head and walking inside.

"So, mi casa is su casa." Donovan gestured to the empty bar.

"*cough*This place is really dusty." Ren coughed as he inhaled some of the dust.

"Well I only recently bought this place and I figured I'd store most of my booze here, including my lucky bourbon." The agent joked as he and Lincoln made their way to a back room.

"Look, I'm a dust angel!" Nora shouted as she played in apparent pile of un-swept dirt on the floor in a corner.

"Nora please stop, you're getting dirt everywhere." Ren asked calmly.

"There's already dirt everywhere." Nora pointed out the fact that most of the bar area itself was covered in loose dirt.

"He means you're getting dirt all over us doofus." Emerald said in an annoyed tone.

"I'm not a doofus, you are!" The hyper ginger said while she pointed at the minty haired pickpocket.

"I know you are but what am I?" Emerald retorted in an attempt to silence her fellow orphan.

"Doofus, Doofus, you're a big doodie eating doofus!" Nora didn't give in like Emerald had hoped and launched an insult offensive.

"Shut up!" Emerald growled fiercely.

The insult broadsides continued for several minutes until Ren decided the time had come to put a stop to it for their own good. Getting in between them, he placed fingers on both sets of their lips and shushed them. "Before this gets any further, do you both want to make Lincoln mad again?" He asked as he tilted his head towards the back room.

Taking a moment to consider their options, both girls deflated and relented. "NO."

"Good." Ren said in his calm voice as the apparent one of reason between the three of them. The children found various ways to entertain themselves while they waited for Lincoln and Donovan to come back. The boy in the green jacket kept both girls in line as they did their own thing. Being slightly curious himself, Ren walked over to the counter and climbed up top to get a broader view of the room. The bar's layout was fairly simple as there were a few tables scattered around with their chairs flipped upside down. The walls had a cream-colored paint and needed to be cleaned like many other things in the place. He then spotted Nora and Emerald messing with a broom and dust pan. Shaking his head in grief, the boy went over to convince them to help him tidy up a bit.

-MEANWHILE-

"Alright so let's layout the town before we get to the pros and cons. Then it's decision making time." Donovan said as he set up a map with pins of interest. The agent then pointed to a pin near the heart of the city. "First up, this is signal academy, basically it's the local huntsman high school. The official term is combat school, but it might as well be a high school. We need to avoid this place; the teachers are huntsmen/huntresses and they will react if we don't." He then pointed his hand to another pin near the ocean. "Next up we have the dockyards/warehouse district. We're right here just inside the district, we can set up as a legit business front and get plenty of income from the local dock workers. Believe it or not, there's not too much competition in this town when it comes to slinging liquor especially in these parts. The only other watering holes I've been to are a night club in downtown and a place called the crow bar."

"That's not a bad idea, the revenue from the bar would cover up any kickback we receive. Plus, there's also a drink around whenever we need to get wasted. Not to mention the fact we'll need legit funds for groceries in case our efforts run into some problems, considering I've got kids to support now." Lincoln said as he crossed his arms while he sat down in a chair.

"My thoughts exactly amigo. Those little tykes even save us a buck on taxes, not to mention I've taken a shine to little hyper out there. She kind of makes me wish I had my own kids." The CIA agent took a drag on a cigarette.

"I knew you would get along with her. Here I used to think you were a heartless bastard." Lincoln chuckled at his friend's affinity with the little ginger.

"What can I say, becoming a father figure changes your perspective on things." Donovan jokingly shrugged as he leaned back in his own chair.

"Amen." The former soldier agreed.

"You know, I bet the padre would be proud of you for doing that, giving them a place to call home." Donovan remembered the priest's disdain for him and the kind nature of the man.

"I'm not sure what he'd think. Looking back on it all, we did some messed up shit back then. Since this is a fresh start, part of me wants consider this a chance to make up for it all. Do some good for a change." Lincoln sighed and took a more serious tone as he thought back to his life as an almost ruthless killer.

"Well that's why there's option 2. From the chatter I picked up, these guys we might want to work with are on the 'right side' of the law." Donovan stood up and patted Lincoln on the back.

"So, it's either a choice of remaining lawless or going back to being lawful." The larger man turned his head to the agent.

"That's the size of it, not to mention we'll be going against huntsmen and huntresses if any of them catch wind of us. Once we make that choice, there's no going back." Donovan warned his parent in crime of the consequences of their choice.

"If memory serves, they have more freedom to investigate than cops." Lincoln recalled his friend's description of the local heroes for hire.

"Yep, when they catch a criminal, odds are they will go to jail. Back to the board, there's also the transit hub, residential sector, slums, uptown, and downtown. There's even another industrial district with a rail yard at the center of it that connects to tracks that run across the continent to Vacuo and a few other major towns." The agent then got back to pointing at the board, pointing out several strategic locations on the map of Vale.

"What's this place over here?" Lincoln pointed to a location on the map that was covered in lines. The term dead zone was stamped across it in large bright red letters

"That my friend, is a failed expansion to the city known as mountain glen. It's what happens when the Grimm get riled up enough. When the place was overrun, people hid in the subway tunnels below. But it turns out there were more of the bastards in the caverns surrounding the tunnels. Total bloodbath, no survivors to speak of. It's risky, but if we have no other choice, it'd be a great place to hideout and lose the heat if we have to torch this site too. No one goes out there unless they absolutely have to, and in force, otherwise the Grimm will toss them right out." Donovan explained the dark and foreboding nature of the abandoned dead zone that had once been an ambitious plan.

"It's a ghost town basically." Lincoln summarized his partner's explanation.

"Yep, the slaughter was 100 times worse than the battle of Hue city." The agent referred to their time in-country during the war's Tet offensive at its height.

"I remember that, we even ran into some SOG guys back there." Lincoln recalled his encounter with members of the elite MACVSOG program.

"Mason, Woods, and Bowman. Their operation was nuts and that's just from the heavily classified shit I could dig up before we did our thing in new Bordeaux. Far as I could tell, the handler for it all was a guy at the company I knew, Jason Hudson, a real ice cube. He served in Korea and the senior spooks offered him a job opportunity. But all that history is moot at this point since we're here and not there." Donovan revealed the small amount of info he'd dug up on the whole black operation in his spare time.

"Either way, we should get back to the matter at hand." Lincoln returned to the more important subject that was the decision to choose to be on the side of orderly chaos, or chaotic good.

"Right, so how are we gonna play this?" Donovan deferred his judgment to the man of action, who put a hand to his chin in thought. For several minutes Lincoln was silent as he sat down and considered the severity of both choices. He knew this was his chance for redemption, it was all up to him to take it or waste it.

Finally coming to a decision then former military man went for a more pragmatic approach. "We need to plan this out carefully, because if we make contact with that group you mentioned, we'll be on the map."

"True, cause right now we're off the grid. If we contact them we might as well be telegraphing our presence." Donovan agreed with Lincoln's reasoning on the matter.

"Yeah, like you said, if we join them we'll be playing by the rules again…" Lincoln trailed off recalling his partner's thoughts on the matter.

"If we don't, we can throw out the rule book and rally the lawless around us. But then again, we'll be facing guys with aura and semblances, and we both know how that turned out when you faced off with Tyrian. Not to mention the fact we'll face off with Locus, and I'd say you two are both capable one-man armies. So yeah, we may want to avoid his bad side. I know if you did have aura you'd have kicked seven shades of shit out of that twisted bastard Tyrian." Donovan gave his opinion on the battle between the assassin and one-man army. It was fairly obvious that Lincoln would've won if the playing field were on level ground.

"You're going to have to tell me more about him some time. But that aside, how we do even do it? Turn on our auras." Lincoln asked curiously.

"All in good time buddy, he's told me a few things here and there, but right now we have more important issues to focus on. Okay from what I've heard, we can get it activated if we run into someone who has it, and they're willing to help us turn it on. But the major thing is that we're from another dimension, so I don't know if we even have a chance of getting it to begin with. As the old saying goes, nothing ventured…" The sly CIA agent coolly told his partner in crime to wait for an explanation on the local mercenary/vigilante. He then crossed his arms after dropping his cigarette into an ash tray trailing off his rundown on aura.

"Nothing gained." Lincoln finished.

"Exactly." Donovan then took a swig from a nearby bottle of bourbon and offered some to Lincoln. The larger man accepted the drink and they downed their glasses of alcohol. "Now it's decision time Lincoln. Good or bad, I'm with you to the end of the line brother, that's a promise."

"Let's make a phone call then." Lincoln gulped down some more bourbon.

"You absolutely sure?" Donovan asked for confirmation.

"Positive. Besides, who says we can't get some loot in the process?" Lincoln teased the idea of a ton of loot.

"I love the way you think, if you're thinking what I'm thinking." The sly agent started to grin at the idea of riches, or more accurately, the spoils of gangland warfare.

"Kill bad guys and jack their shit, then sell or use it for ourselves. If this whole thing falls through, we can always go back to plan A and run this town. It'll just be rougher than the first time around." Lincoln confirmed his friend suspicions.

"Definitely liking that plan." Donovan then fired up his comms terminal and contacted the man on the other side of the line.

-BEACON ACADEMY: OZPIN'S TOWER-

The wise headmaster was overlooking his school with a tired look. He'd lived many lives and made more mistakes than anyone who'd ever lived in the world of remnant. The existence he led was more than fulfilling, but it had ground him down throughout the many ages of his reincarnations. As he was continuing to ponder the choices of his life, the desk began to ring. Unknown caller appeared where there would normally be a caller ID. Usually he never received calls of that nature unless it was from his associate Qrow. But he knew the dusty bird had reported in recently and usually goes silent for extended periods. After a moment of waiting, the very old professor walked over to the desk and pressed the answer option.

"Hello?" The wise headmaster asked as the call went through.

"If this is who I think it is, we might want to have a friendly chat with each other. Otherwise if it's not, then don't yank my chain and just hang up." A snarky voice replied over the phone that wasn't who he was expecting.

"That depends on what you want to discuss." Ozpin tried to be cryptic as usual.

"Hey, pay a-fucking-ttention, I said 'no' chain yanking bullshit on your end. Do you want to talk business or not?" The snarky voice clearly wasn't in the mood for such tactics. Seeing no other alternative, the wise headmaster of Beacon decided to try the more diplomatic route.

"Very well then, this is professor Ozpin, I am the current headmaster of Beacon huntsmen academy. Now may I know as to whom I am speaking with?" The professor said in a calm tone befitting his demeanor.

"Finally, now was that so hard? You can just call me Doe for now." The man now known as Donovan replied.

"Very well mister Doe, what did you want to discuss?" Ozpin asked the mystery man on the other end of the conversation.

"Oh, just a little something along the lines of a pretty nasty witch problem. Not to mention some serious animal control, if you catch my drift." Donovan spoke in code that Ozpin understood all too well.

"Then you have called the right person for such matters. I believe we may have much to discuss." The wise headmaster said with a smile on his face.

-END CHAPTER-