[5-B] Working in His Study

Weiss hesitated at the door—that was all it took. One of the guards stepped in front of her and blocked her way out.

"Don't bother," Father snapped, as his fellows moved to chase after Blake. "She'll be found eventually, and you have other duties."

Weiss tried to shove the soldier aside, but she lost the brief scuffle and was forced back into the center of the room. It didn't sit well with her, the way she was surrounded on all sides, but she faced the desk—better to turn her back on them than him.

"What did you do?" she demanded.

"I asked some pointed questions." He narrowed his eyes in disapproval. "Questions you obviously ignored. I'd expected better."

For half a second, she wondered if Blake really had let someone die. If she'd even wanted them dead, deep down. The look on her face...

"The innocent never run."

The knot in her stomach loosened. "I've learned from experience that it's best to ask her first." She shot a glare the way Blake had gone. Sure, she trusted that it wasn't as bad as he'd made it out to be, but being left alone like this was still vexing.

Father heaved a put-upon sigh. "You're committed to this madness, aren't you."

"What madness, exactly?"

"You let a stranger into the garden."

A little chill went up her back. "You called it that before. You hate gardens." That was an exaggeration—he paid about as much mind to plant life and what mother did all day, the two mental categories into which Weiss filed gardening, as most people did to the ground they trod on.

"Not a garden in that sense. A metaphorical garden. Your garden."

"...Mine."

"Of course." He smiled warmly, and hair rose on the back of her neck. "I am here to help you tend it. Outside influences, especially ones like that girl... they can't be tolerated."

"What exactly will be tolerated in this 'garden' of yours?"

"Purity." His eyes glittered. "Productivity. Order. And it's our garden."

She tried to reconcile the words, the tone, the look on his face... all with the mental image of her Father that she'd built up over the past seventeen years. "What's wrong with you? Why are you acting like this?"

A thin, needle-sharp smile. "Because we're in the garden."

He stood up, walked around his desk, and took her chin in one hand. She wanted to step away, but didn't. He studied her face for a long moment with a critical eye. Then, looking strangely sad, he produced something wrapped in cloth from one of the drawers in his desk.

"I had hoped this wouldn't be necessary, but the garden must be kept clean." He held it out to her. "You must be kept safe."

She bit back the first retort that popped into her head—that she had been far safer before she'd been taken here, thank you very much—because she wasn't sure how he'd react. Instead she took the cloth bundle. He beckoned her to follow him and strode out of the room. She unwrapped the thing as she walked, and found that it was a simple porcelain mask.

"What...?"

"Put it on."

She hesitated a moment, then slipped it over her face. For an instant she regretted it—there was something unsettling about the way it molded perfectly against every dip and curve of her face. But the second she took her hand away, she found that the weight of it was oddly comforting. With one hand she traced its surface, noting with detached confusion that it didn't seem to have any holes to see or breathe through.

"Come." Father turned a corner, beckoning her. She followed him step for step, glancing dispassionately at the walls around them. Soon they were standing near a line of people, and to her surprise she found that they weren't all human bureaucrats or businessmen. There were faunus, children, old men and women, and from their clothes they were from every walk of life. The only thing they had in common was that they were all wearing masks like hers.

Who are they? she would have asked, but she couldn't open her mouth with the mask on. Instead she joined the line. He guided her forward with a hand at the small of her back. Then she turned and saw the look on his face—a mix of relief and grief, so strange that she reached out to him instinctively. But he was turning away, and the line was moving, and she stumbled forward without meaning to.

She passed into a hallway, cramped and narrow, made of pale white brick. The only sound was the rustling of clothing and the gentle shuffling footfalls of the crowd. Weiss touched the mask again, this time at the spot over her eye where the scar would have been. Nothing there, just smooth, cool—

Weiss drew her hand back with a start. A drop of blood welled up from her fingertip, then beaded and fell to the floor. She stared, transfixed. Seeing the vibrant red, she realized that everything else had gone grey. She craned her neck to look at her scarf and found it was faded almost beyond recognition.

A pang of something reached her. She tore the mask away, flipping it over in her hands to stare at the spot that had cut her. The red there highlighted a tiny chip in the porcelain that had been invisible to the naked eye. Her throat constricted, and Weiss flung it to the floor and felt a vicious, primal satisfaction when it shattered.

No one else noticed. She stopped, looking over her shoulder for a glimpse of Father, but there was no way back through the press. Soon the people behind her were grumbling wordlessly. They couldn't move their mouths, but they were making their displeasure known with disapproving hums and shoves. So she started walking again, casting her eyes around for an exit.

That was when she went around a bend and saw the first person disappear. At first she thought it must be some kind of staircase, but no—they were there one moment, motionless, and then they dropped out of sight. She tried to move backwards again, more urgently this time, but she couldn't get past the towering man behind her. She tried to force the line to a halt, but soon realized that the ground itself was moving, pulling them all slowly but steadily towards the drop.

Like a conveyor belt.

She balked and gave the man a hard shove. His head cracked against the wall, dislodging his mask, and suddenly she could see his eyes—a bright indigo almost as startling as her blood had been. They were glazed over, as if he was half asleep.

"You're holding up the line," he grumbled.

"Let me through." She pushed him again, then shot a panicked glance over her shoulder and realized there were only four people in front of her now. One dropped off. Three. "You can cut past me, I'll just—"

He shoved her back, and she stumbled into another person, a faunus woman with an auburn tail winding behind her. "Stop!" Weiss shouted, grabbing at one of the walls and finding it worn smooth. "Stop! I have to get through, just move out of the—"

The woman in front of her fell away. Weiss turned, and for the first time she was close enough to look down. And there, about fifteen feet below her, were the whirling metal teeth of a grinder.

Weiss jerked back with a shriek, bounced off the man behind her, scrabbled for purchase on the walls. She tried to form a glyph, failed. She clung to whatever she could reach. Then the ground slipped away beneath her, and she fell.

The air rushed past her, her stomach lurched, and then her whole front was on fire and she saw a flash as her head cracked against something solid. All that was secondary—in her hands, she could feel something else, soft and warm and alive, and she clung to it so hard that her fingernails broke skin.

Her feet, when she got up the courage to glance down, were hovering inches above the jaws of the machine. Jaws that were still immaculate, shining silver.

Then she was moving upwards, and as soon as she was able she let go of the arm and grabbed a fistful of a familiar black vest. Blake was staring, her face several shades paler than normal. Weiss clung to her upper arm, more carefully this time, already feeling a little bad about the marks she'd just made on her forearm.

"You're back," she said, a bit stupidly. She thought she could be forgiven considering the circumstances.

"What—You—What the hell is that?!"

"You think I know?!" Weiss got her feet up onto the lip of the machine, just in time to watch the big man fall. He dropped without a sound, leaving no trace, as if he'd just vanished.

"Come on!" Blake tugged on her arm. They raced down the ladder, stopping at the back of the grinder and staring at the steel tubes feeding it. Neither were armed.

Weiss, not knowing what else to do, kicked one. It only barely dented, but it did dent, and then she and Blake attacked it in a frenzy, twisted at it, ignored the sharp edges that dug into their palms. When it finally broke a gout of steam went up, making both of them flinch away, and there was a horrible mechanical groan as the machine started coughing up smoke. The whirring of the blades stopped. There was a thump, then a cry of anger and dismay. Suddenly one of the porcelain masks was poking over the edge, and hands were reaching for them—not to thank them, but to throttle them.

They bolted. Blake took the lead—she must have come this way before, there didn't seem to be any other entrances. Weiss noticed the mannequins only as they were sprinting past the first curtain, and her stomach twisted when she realized that their faces were just like those masks.

They didn't pose much of a threat besides fear, though. Their movements were stiff, slow, and awkward. Weiss dodged easily through a group of three, and the way Blake was weaving between them it was like they weren't there at all. More danger came farther on, where they were having their faces painted on. That was infinitely worse, not only because it was harder to evade them but because they seemed so alive. Either they'd stayed that way throughout the entire process, or they were now faking it well enough that Weiss could not possibly have told the difference. She wasn't sure which possibility was worse.

Soon they were surrounded by soldiers still struggling to get their uniforms on, which might have been funny if it weren't for the few that were struggling to get their faces on instead. More dangerous were the ones that were dressed but unarmed, and worst of all were those that were swarming back into the building after hearing the commotion. They might have been overwhelmed, but Blake always led them unerringly through clumps of the faceless ones that were easily dodged, or the half-dressed ones that were too tangled up in their own sleeves to try and grab them.

They burst into the sunshine of the open city. There was a crowd of about thirty of the soldiers following them now, about half fully equipped. Weiss already had a stitch in her side. Blake jumped at the wall of a building across the street, grabbed a fire escape, then pulled herself onto the platform above and pelted up the stairs. Weiss managed to follow her example, much less gracefully. She scraped her hands badly enough to draw blood and had to pull her feet up to avoid the reaching hands of one of the soldiers.

Once they were on the rooftops, the going was... different. It involved much less straight running, and they moved faster than the mannequins mostly by taking implausible shortcuts. There was also a lot of jumping, climbing, vaulting, and rolling. Blake turned out to be very good at navigating an urban environment in ways Weiss never would have considered—at one point she even crossed the street by jumping down onto the hood of a car and then scaling the face of an apartment building.

They lost their pursuers quickly—none of them were agile enough to follow on the rooftops, and the few who tried got stranded quickly. When they finally stopped, Weiss sank unceremoniously to her knees and was too out of breath to speak for a very long time. Blake sat next to her, both of them hidden in the space between a water tank and an air conditioning unit.

"I'm sorry." Blake leaned both elbows on her knees and stared into her lap. "I shouldn't have run off like that."

"No, you shouldn't have. Though you did also just save my life."

Blake brightened a little at that. Weiss waved a finger in her direction. "But honestly, isn't that exactly what I told you not to do the last time this happened?

She flushed. "Sorry."

"Well?"

"What?"

Weiss rolled her eyes. "Last time I didn't let you explain, which turned out to be a mistake."

"Oh."

After giving her a moment, Weiss coughed expectantly.

Blake stared down at the ground and mumbled, "He killed a guard. The man I was working with."

Weiss tensed. "Did you want him to?" She was trying to be patient with Blake, but that patience didn't reach as far as phrasing things delicately.

"No! No, I... I don't even think he meant to. The guard was... I think he was going to kill me, and it just... happened. But he'd already been causing a lot of injuries, things he used to say were accidents. Then he started saying they were justified, that it was their own fault for getting in our way. When I realized he was doing the same thing after killing someone..."

"That was when you left?"

"Not right then, I had to wait until our next mission. I wanted to give him another chance. He decided to blow up a train, and when I asked about the crew..."

"So... he killed them, too?"

"He would have. I uncoupled the cars he was standing on."

Weiss let out a shaky breath, then glared at her. "That's the sort of thing you lead with, Blake."

She winced and looked away. Weiss sighed, weighing the story in her head. It wasn't good, but... well. If some White Fang guard was about to kill Blake—or any of her teammates—she might have done the same thing.

"Remind me never to let you represent yourself in court. You'd be calling for a death sentence before the judge even got in the room."

Blake winced, both ears curling down against her head. Then she managed a little grin, more sheepish than ashamed. "So... we're okay?"

"Of course we are." Weiss folded her arms and glared again. "It's not as if I'm to blame for what people I happen to know claim they're doing for my benefit.

"Speaking of which—I don't know what that thing in the office was, but I'm almost positive it wasn't Father."

Blake gaped. "You—what?"

"He kept talking about 'purifying his garden,' which is both off-putting and very out of character for him. It's... he cultivates the company, but it's for power and control rather than purity. I don't know. It's hard to explain." Most of her evidence came from the instinctive revulsion she'd felt seeing him smile, the way his eyes turned hollow when she looked at them from a certain angle. It just... wasn't him.

"I agree." Blake's brow furrowed. "But I'd been thinking more along the lines that even Jacques Schnee wouldn't try to grind up his daughter." Then, when Weiss cringed, "Sorry."

"No, you're right." She managed a weak smile. "He's not exactly the nurturing sort, but I don't think he'd try to mulch anyone, even an enemy." She didn't mention that she expected his real reaction to a machine like that would have been to point out how unnecessarily messy it was.

After a while, they climbed down to look for a way out of the city. The adrenaline had long since faded. Weiss had a hard time gripping the rungs of the building's fire escape with her hands scraped raw, and there was a deep gash in one of her palms she hadn't noticed until now. Must have been from breaking the grinder. She shuddered.

Blake winced when she dropped to the ground, and Weiss realized with a guilty pang that there were marks all up and down her right forearm where her nails had dug in. Several were bleeding.

"I'm sorry about..." she trailed off. "We should find something to bind that up with."

"Don't be." Blake grimaced. "That was..."

"Yes. Yes it was."

"Let's walk around the wall," Blake suggested, pointing to the horizon. "There has to be a gap in it somewhere.

Weiss was less and less sure of that the closer they got. It was massive, standing nearly twice as tall as the complex they'd just escaped, and built from uniform white bricks. Looking at it hurt her eyes. It was too much of the same unbroken pattern, without anything to focus on. There was also nothing they could use to climb it.

Blake lay her palm flat against its surface. "I wonder how thick it is."

"Very. It'd have to be to support its own weight."

"Well... left or right?"

Weiss opened her mouth to answer, but before she could answer she glanced into an alleyway and saw someone she recognized―the redheaded faunus from earlier.

"Hey!" She raised a hand and waved. The woman's eyes went wide. She backed up a few paces, but didn't turn and run.

The two of them approached the alley's mouth. The woman stared at them for a moment, mouth slightly open. Then she grabbed Blake in a hug that was, as far as Weiss could tell, neither expected nor appreciated. "Thank you so much. If you hadn't distracted them..."

"Um... you're welcome," Weiss replied. She wasn't sure how else to respond to someone thanking you for something you had absolutely no control over, so she decided to take it as an apology for running off and leaving them behind.

Blake smiled. Now that she wasn't being half crushed, she seemed a lot happier to meet the woman. "I'm glad you're okay. Are the other two...?"

"They're safe at home. I was just out to look for my bag, but... it's probably gone by now."

"What's your name?"

"What―oh! I'm sorry, I'm still a little frazzled. Cassie."

"I'm Blake, and this is Weiss."

Weiss gave her a small wave. They locked eyes. The color drained from her face.

"You're..."

"It's alright!" Weiss said hurriedly.

"But you're the―"

"We're on the run, too," Blake assured her. "It's... complicated, and we're not sure how we got here, but we're not going to hurt you. We're just trying to get out of here."

Cassie gave her an odd look. "What do you mean?"

"We want to leave the city." Blake pointed, when her blank expression didn't clear. She stared at the wall for a moment.

"You mean... outside?"

"Yes."

"Oh, no. That isn't done." Cassie smiled. "It's safer in here."

Blake's mouth open and closed soundlessly.

"You were just chased through the streets!" Weiss burst out. "How could outside possibly be worse?!"

"You two must stay with us." She forced a smile, her ears folding back tight against her head. "It's the least we can do."

"I... okay?" Blake pointed to the wall again. "But do you know if there's a door?"

"No." She started walking down the alley, a little quicker than was natural. "I'm sure my husband will love you two."

Weiss glanced at Blake, and the two of them shared an incredulous look. There wasn't much else to do. They followed her to one of dozens of tiny rundown shacks that were squeezed together in the shadow of the wall. The hammer insignia the guards wore was spray-painted on the door.

Cassie's husband, a blond man with a lion's tail, turned out to be a lot taller than Weiss had thought. She had to crane her neck to look him in the eye, and again to smile at the little boy sitting on his shoulder. He peered down at her with wide blue eyes, reached out, and tried to grab a fistful of her hair. She leaned out of the way.

"This is Linus," the father said, patting him on the head. "I'm David."

Blake and Weiss both introduced themselves, stopping only to assure the man that yes, she was that Weiss, and no, she wasn't going to report them to her father. Cassie ushered them towards an overturned crate that served as their kitchen table. It was much too small for five people. She served tiny portions to herself and her husband, a heaping one to Linus, and the remainder was divided between the two guests.

"You don't have to―" Blake insisted. "I mean..."

Cassie smiled. "We wouldn't be here if it weren't for you two. Eat."

They were too hungry to argue much. The food was... questionable, to put it mildly. (Weiss couldn't recognize most of the ingredients, but she hoped the strange lumps were grains of rice.) It was still the nicest thing a complete stranger had ever done for her.

Talk began in an awkward, stuttering sort of way, broken up by long silences while they all bent over their meals. Finally, David brought up the elephant in the room. "I know why we need to hide," he said, gesturing at himself, his family, and Blake. "Why do you?"

Slowly, with a lot of glances towards Linus and carefully censored details, Weiss told the story. When she finished, she glanced between the two adults. "I... there were people in line with me. All sorts of people. I don't understand... why would anyone volunteer for that?"

Dead silence fell. Blake kicked her in the shin, hard. Weiss glared at her. It wasn't as if it was an unreasonable question.

Cassie nudged Linus and urged him to keep eating. Blake asked about the layout of the city, and for a moment it seemed like the conversation might be about to reboot.

"We're not allowed in the inner city, but... I can..." Cassie trailed off, and Blake jerked to her feet.

"What―" Weiss started to ask. Then she heard it. Somewhere in the distance, shattering glass.

Cassie grabbed David's arm and pulled him to his feet. "They're coming this way."

Weiss' hand went for a weapon that wasn't there. "What?"

"They're coming down the street, we need to go... take the back way..."

"To where?!"

The distant noises were getting closer. Even Weiss could tell it wasn't just one house―it was all of them. She backed up instinctively, looking for an exit. Blake was already at the back door, her hand outstretched, but the moment she touched the knob it was kicked open. The front window, the only one still unboarded, exploded inwards. Soldiers poured into the house.

David roared wordlessly, grabbed the stool he'd just been sitting on, and hurled it at the nearest man. He went down. Another sprang up behind him, club in hand.

"They're in here!" Someone shouted. Weiss twisted her fingers, made it halfway through the gesture before the unformed glyph slipped away from her. Then there were hands on her wrists, forcing her arms back, and she was being pressed against the wall. She twisted her head, found Blake a few feet to her left.

It was efficient, as arrests went. Within minutes they were cuffed in the back of one van. Cassie and her family were loaded into another, along with several of their neighbors. Before the doors of the vehicle slammed shut, Weiss caught a glimpse of several nearby homes burning. Then there was darkness, and silence.

"Blake?"

"Still here."

"Can you see?"

"Yes."

Her eyes adjusted as they drove. Blake was fiddling with her handcuffs, twisting at an uncomfortable angle to get a proper look at them. "Can you pass me your hairpin?"

Weiss tried, but couldn't reach it. "Well," she sighed. "That... could have gone better."

"Do you think they'll be okay?"

She bit her lip, but didn't answer. No amount of tugging or wriggling got her hands free, but she kept trying even after it became more of a nervous habit than an escape attempt. We broke it, she thought, whenever she started to picture the grinder. We broke it, that's not going to happen.

"Everything will be fine," she said aloud. "Ruby and Yang will find us, or..."

"If we manage to get out of this van, let's just look for a rope and solve this the old fashioned way."

"What exactly are you planning to tie it to?"

"Your dad. Or... the thing that's pretending to be him," Blake suggested. "We throw him over the top of the wall and use him as a counterweight."

It really, really shouldn't have been funny. She smiled anyway.

The van kept driving. Blake brought her knees up to her chest. Weiss felt the absence of the other half of their team like a physical weight. More light came through the crack between the two doors, and they jerked to a halt. Both of them slid on their benches.

Then the doors opened and they were squinting at the silhouettes of two soldiers. They were half dragged, half carried outside. The van was parked in an open plaza, tiled in those same white bricks. There were guards all around its edges, and a crowd of what looked like civilians―all of them human, and all dressed crisply in black suits and white evening dresses.

Weiss and Blake were led into the center of the plaza, opposite a small podium. There was a small man standing on it, wearing the standard guard uniform. He leaned forward.

"How... do you plead?"

Weiss and Blake exchanged a look.

"Well," Weiss said, after a long pause, "you haven't read us the charges yet."

"The charges?" The judge puffed up, enraged. Then he puffed up even more, his chest swelling grotesquely, his eyes bulging. There was a horrible squelching noise as his torso burst open, revealing two more heads. One was pitch black, horned, with glowing red eyes and lines on its face like a Grimm's. The other was alabaster white, blue-eyed, with spines jutting from its forehead in a mockery of a crown. More emerged underneath them, shrunken and misshapen and making small, pathetic wheezing sounds.

"Treason!" both main heads shrieked in unison.

"Associating with filth!" The pale head hissed.

"Kneeling like a coward!" The other roared.

"Turning your back on your family―"

"―your people! Hiding who you are!"

"Letting them see! Have you forgotten everything I've taught you?"

"Everything I've done for you? What they've done to us?"

"What they'll do if you give them the chance? Letting yourself be used―"

"Letting yourself be a slave! Pretending to be human―"

"Pretending they don't want something."

"Spitting on the world we were going to build, turning your back on everyone who ever loved you and becoming another tame pet!"

"Running off like a fool, abandoning the company and leaving yourself wide open to a flock of obsequious vultures!"

They were talking faster now, shouting over one another, until the words blurred together. Spittle flew from their mouths as the pack of smaller heads shrieked and gibbered. Weiss heard only snatches, fragments, until they both went silent all at once.

"Unforgivable!" they bellowed.

"We'll have to scrap it and start over," the pale head decided.

"Burn it to the ground!"

"It's too far out of shape, now."

"Surrounded by too much scum."

Thick black slime oozed from the mouths of the smaller heads, pooling at the judge's feet. Weiss shied away instinctively, only to run into the soldier that stood behind her.

"A loss, of course," the pale head crooned. Its eyes fixed on her, and she glared back.

The black head turned towards Blake. "A shame."

"It was a beautiful thing―"

"―a fine dream."

The sludge poured forth in a wave, cresting and then rolling over their ankles. It reminded her of Grimm ichor, but thicker and oilier. She jerked her shoulders forward, pulling against the guard. It was up to her knees, now. She looked around, realizing that what had once been a flat plaza had bent and dipped into a bowl. Bricks rose high above their heads, pale white meeting inky black.

Blake's head hung. "I'm sorry... I don't..."

"Stop it!" Weiss lifted her chin. "That thing doesn't deserve the oxygen it's breathing, let alone an apology."

"Sorry? Sorry?" Red eyes rolled in their sockets. "You think you're sorry?!"

"Brat," the pale head sneered. "You've gone rotten."

They were both up to their waists, now. Weiss blinked hard, swallowed, but she kept staring into the monster's eyes.

"I'll make you sorry! I'll make everyone sorry!"

"Unfortunate. Next time I'll do better. No one will take what's mine."

Weiss could feel the oil at her throat. She turned her head to look at Blake. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "To you. Not it."

"What?"

She was going to go first. After everything, done in early by her height of all things. That meant she wouldn't be alone when she went, but Blake would.

But there was no time to explain all that, and anyway she was sorry for a lot more. Should have apologized to Ruby for doubting her when they first became partners. To Yang, for all the times she'd picked fights when she was just trying to help. But Blake was here, and they weren't. One out of three would have to be enough.

This would be the time to say something terribly profound. But then the oil was over her head, and everything went dark and silent and strangely calm. She could hear her own heartbeat.

I always thought I'd get more done than this.

She breathed in.

This one is a reference to Pink Floyd's The Wall. Also, I first wrote most of it so long ago that I had to change the red lining on Weiss' jacket to her red scarf. :I