I still don't own RWBY, and I had nothing to do today, so I stayed up late to write another chapter. Let me know what you think, reviews are love!

Chapter 2: The White Fang.

Weiss didn't hate her father. Sometimes, she had tried to, others she had tried not to and felt like she had failed. But ultimately, in her heart of hearts, she couldn't bring herself to truly hate him. Not for long at any rate. She held his gaze though, no respectful aversion of the eye, no curtsey, no deference. Weiss Schnee held her father's gaze, and felt, not hatred…but pity.

Franz Schnee's expression of nonchalance and authority had been carefully moulded over the years. He'd built his every mannerism around that powerful, yet neutral visage. It helped him appear regal and calculating in the boardroom and reinforced his proud position as the Schnee patriarch. The only downside of that image was that it made for awful parenting. Yet for all that she could tell her father was currently regarding her not unlike a business venture gone sour, with a detached, sober and compartmentalised gaze that held all the warmth of a graveyard, there was still an inkling of care in his eyes, that much was obvious even to her. It was not that her father did not care for either of his daughters; it was just that he didn't know how to love them. He had raised Winter and Weiss as his father had raised him, and as Franz's grandmother had raised his father; from a distance, through nannies and butlers, manservants and bodyguards. Everything Weiss had ever wanted had been funded by the best credit in Remnant, and provided for by the best that money could buy, from the moment she had been thrust into the world, bawling and pink, until the moment she'd refused his phonecall all those months ago at the festival. The only route Franz had taken in parenting was to lead wallet-first, and a disciplined, guiding hand…the only way he knew how.

So she didn't hate him, she couldn't.

But she was by no means pleased to see him.

"Daughter," he began, tone haughty, yet strained, as though confused that his forays into parenthood had led him down the route of teenage rebellion, as though any parent's path did not, "What shall I do with you?"

"I beg your pardon father, to what are you referring?" The words came out of her mouth before she had a chance to bite back the acid in her syllables. She stared wide-eyed at her own defiance, yet Franz did not react, save to lift his monogrammed teacup to his lips and take a practiced sip.

"I am referring, daughter," he replied, making 'daughter' sound as much like 'subordinate' as he could, eliciting a wince from Weiss, "To whatever it is that has motivated you to cross land and sea, to avoid this family." He sighed, rising from his chair and turning to face the floor-to-ceiling window behind him, staring out at the snowy, grey expanses of Atlas city. "That you wished to be a huntress I could accept, much as I accepted your sister's desire to be a soldier. That you wished to do so at Beacon, I could understand, the school's record speaks for itself and Ozpin was a good man…"

"Is."

"I beg your pardon?" He turned to face her and cocked an eyebrow, the angle of each hair communicating perfectly his distaste at being interrupted.

"You said he was a good man father. Nobody has reported Professor Ozpin dead as of yet. May we assume, please, that he still is a good man?" Weiss said, slowly, finding her courage more and more with every word. Father and daughter locked eyes for a moment, a silent battle for control of the conversation in each blink, and each jerk of the eyelids. After several seconds that felt like hours, Franz sighed.

"Ozpin is, a good man," he continued his lecture quickly so as to not give Weiss too much chance to savour his retreat, "And again, Beacon has turned out exceptional huntsmen, with that I have no issue." He turned back to the window again, seemingly taking reassurance at the sight of Atlas' perfectly symmetrical, geometrically identical architecture spread out before him. "What I take issue with, is your hurling yourself into danger beyond the ability of anyone your age, your flouting of my contact and your insistence on working with ruffians and terrorists."

Weiss was stunned, her shock knocking her back a step, she stood there, mouth agape, wide-eyed. How could he know about Blake? How could he know who she was?

"Did you think, daughter, that I would not do my research when I discovered you had been assigned a team? It was hard enough knowing that the prodigies of that drunken fool of a huntsman Qrow were around you night and day, it was harder still knowing you took orders from one of them, and the younger one to boot! But a member of the White Fang, former or otherwise, instilling her disgusting, fundamentalist, faunus ways into my daughter. That I would not sanction."

Now she hated him. She hated him with every fibre of her being. From every hair that stood up on the back of her neck in shock, to every finger that was itching to curl their way around Myrtenaster's pommel, and every atom in between.

"By what right do you judge them?" Between her consuming resentment of her situation, compounded with her disgust at her father's words and the realisation that she had actually moved to take up her weapon, however slightly, It took Weiss a good moment to realise that it was not her who had spoken.

"By what right, father, do you judge those who have stood at Weiss' side, and fought back to back with her." Winter Schnee's voice was laden with venom as she stalked out from the boardroom doorway, right up to Franz, and stared him down with a glare that could have killed an Ursa at a hundred paces. "If there's one thing I have learned from the army it's that those who will willingly share a foxhole with you are your family first and foremost. Regardless of heritage."

Winter gazed over at her sister, encouraging her on with every word and glance. Weiss had always loved Winter, regardless of how distant she could be, or how demanding, Winter had never let her believe anything less than the best about herself, because Winter had never believed anything but the best of her. She had never Weiss give up on who she could be, whether that was pushing her to master her summoning, or egging her on now. Weiss realised in that moment, more than ever before, that she may have lacked a good father, or even a father at all…but she had the greatest sister in the world.

"If someone will bleed for you, bleed with you, it matters not what blood pours forth, human or faunus, what matters is they shed it by your side, in the same trench, for the same goal, for the same cause. So I ask again, by what right…"

"By my right as her father!" Franz thundered, his fist slamming into the oaken desk, shaking Weiss from her reverie. The younger Schnee found her resolve, a fire lighting under her, her fury at hearing her loved ones slandered igniting with and strode up to said desk, planting her hands on it to steady herself, her eyes communicating a silent thanks to her sister for the backup, and that she had it from here, before locking her gaze onto her fathers' own.

"You have no right to slander my friends. You have no right to slander my loved ones. I don't care if Ruby and Yang's uncle is a drunk, they aren't. I don't care about what the White Fang did to the company, I don't care what they did to us!" Weiss could feel her father's fury being quenched with her every syllable, his practiced visage had shattered, first by his own anger at his eldest daughter's intrusion, and now again at the verbal assault of his youngest. Franz's face was a cracked mask of pure shock, bleached of colour, devoid of the cold fire that had gripped him before. "Blake stood by me, even after I drove her away once, she came back, she fought beside me, comforted me, they all did! Each member of Team RWBY has been twice the family member you have ever been! So you can call Blake a terrorist and slander her heritage, you can write off Ruby and Yang, but don't ever expect me to do so. They're my family now!"

She turned on her heel, she didn't look back. She didn't see Franz Schnee's first ever expression of defeat, nor her sister's look of pride as she herself walked away, not feeling the need to berate their already emotionally slaughtered father any further. Weiss Schnee turned on her heel and strode out the door, straight-backed and head held high, her foe conquered, her pride soaring.

All Franz could think was that despite it all, Weiss was now more deserving of the name 'Schnee' than anyone had ever been.

Adam had not answered her question, instead he had chosen to pace around the back of the command tent, his shoulders hunched like a coiled spring, a predator about to pounce. Blake's eyes tracked him left and right, she was not so much afraid of him deciding to attack her here out of hand, as much as she was simply afraid of him, period. Adam Taurus was a long way from the man he had once been, the good-hearted, if fanatical partner that she had abandoned on the train. She had seen him cut down Yang in cold blood, paying the blow that severed her arm no more heed than he would squashing a fly. He had set Beacon ablaze with the zeal of a madman, and slaughtered every innocent in his path.

Everyone on his path to her.

Yang's image haunted her, refusing to run from behind her eyes. The fire in her gaze as she charged Blake's attacker, the sorrow in her tone as she gave her the pep talk before the dance, her unbound joy as she swayed and sashayed Blake in her arms at the ball itself, drinking in the rare joy of her partner on that most beautiful of nights. Yang had been there for her from the very beginning; the girl who'd described her as a 'lost cause' when all she wanted to do was read and ignore the world, had fought back to back with her against a tide of Grimm and forged her most enduring friendship to date. The raw, untamable fury that Yang had unleashed upon Adam in that charge had been almost poetic in it's beautiful power, yet she had still been cut down almost without effort. I will kill everything you love, starting with her.

Everything you love…

It was Adam's lieutenant who spoke, his gravelly tones spelling out what Adam's silence did not care to put to words, snapping her back to her unwelcome reality. "Our plan is simple – infiltrate the kingdom from underneath and decapitate it's leadership structure. We lack Cinder Fall's resources for this mission, so we will have to be more covert than the assault on Beacon." The lieutenant looked to Adam, his expression as always unreadable behind his full-face mask, but the weight of his silence spoke of a man asking permission to continue. Adam responded only with a single nod to his compatriot before he resumed his pacing.
The lieutenant's posture eased, and he gestured Blake forward to a table at the centre of the tent, where a map of their target had been laid out; a large mansion complex, on a hill overlooking the city of Vale. Blake realised in a dreadful heartbeat that this must be the 'safe zone' that Glynda and Ironwood had established within the city limits during the attack; even though the populace had long since returned home, this mansion would still be serving as a nerve-centre by Beacon's professors to coordinate the recapture of the school.

Adam was not about to settle for a job half-done, now the White Fang would close in on more of Blake's friends. And here she was, amongst them, banking her very life on the chance to minimise whatever damage she was forced to cause, because that was better than the alternative of painting targets on her friends' backs if she ran again. She swallowed hard, and loudly, her fear escaping the notice of neither of the two men.

"We will infiltrate the mansion from the sewer-system; here." The lieutenant gestured to a cistern pipeline that ran parallel to a cellar wall. "We will force entry with a controlled explosion and fan out to secure the premesis. We can expect little in the way of enemy numbers, but each foe will be a huntsman or huntress, so we can expect casualties to mount." He pointed to the diagram of the upper-floor, which had an observatory room with a glass ceiling. "Team B will attack from above here, cutting off any chance of aerial escape, whilst Team C will force entry from the pipeline in the front driveway and block off the front door. We will surround the foe and eliminate them with superior numbers."

Blake digested the plan slowly, her mind flashing through the faces of those she was about to betray; those friends that she now had no choice but to turn her blade on. Glynda, Oobleck, Port, Yang, Velvet, Coco, Yang, Fox, Yatsu, Yang, always Yang…. Every ounce of her willpower was sapped in desperately trying to not let any emotion make it to her face, but her armour was not as strong as it used to be. It had cracked forever the moment she saw her partner slam into the ground with a thud of pure finality, her arm spinning away across the room. Blake Belladonna was on the verge of tears and still she fought desperately. The White Fang knew the emotional turmoil that she went through every night, such was her punishment in their eyes. But she had re-sworn her oaths to the cause, however reluctantly. To display doubt here, when the plan was about to be put in motion, would court death. Not only that, but Adam would see it as an open invitation to follow through on his plan to destroy everything she loved. In her mind's eye, she saw her partner again, collapsed against the concrete, slowly bleeding out, so frail, so vulnerable; it had been agony to see someone normally so strong reduced so far, an agony compounded by the knowledge that it had been all her fault.

Everything you love…

She could not let that happen again. She swallowed hard, and stared at the map, forcing her mind back onto the mission.

"What would you have me do?" She surprised herself with how emotionless she managed to sound, but even her elation at maintaining her disguise had to be suppressed, lest it betray her.

"You will join Master Taurus and myself in the assault squad, your mission will be to eliminate any Beacon students and graduates in our path, whilst we eliminate the professors. With the remaining Huntsmen dead, the Vale council will not be able to resist our forces as we take over the city."

"The first step towards our new world has already been taken." Adam had finished his pacing, arriving at her side with a measured, deliberate step, his voice was honeyed with the promise of victory, yet to her every word reeked of death, despair and bloodlust. Gone was the Adam she had known once. This was nothing more than a beast. A Grimm wearing his skin. "We will make Vale a safe haven for our people by casting out those humans who oppressed us, and the blood-traitor faunus who stood at their side." Blake's mind flashed forth an image of Velvet; Velvet the humble, the gentle. Velvet, who had so much power at her fingertips, whose mage abilities made her one of the strongest, if not the strongest warrior Blake had ever known, yet who would not even hurt a fly, who would not even strike back at her own bullies, because she couldn't bring herself to wreak harm. Blake could not imagine what qualified Velvet to be a traitor to anyone. How could you be someone's enemy by being a good person? The thought sickened Blake to the core.

"We struck the first head off the King Taijitu, now the other head falls with it. This is our moment my love." He stroked her hair with a gentle caress – she had lived for those touches once, that approval, that care – she had never loved him entirely the way he had desired her, but she had still looked up to him and craved his attention, that justification that she belonged where she was, with her White Fang brothers and sisters. Now that touched repelled her very soul, and like everything else, like every other evil word that spilled from Adam Taurus' mouth, it took her every effort not to draw Gambol Shroud and make one last show of running him through then and there. Instead, she tolerated his hand as it caressed her face, as it drew her chin up to look him in the eye.

"Now the White Fang strikes."

She felt the pain flare up her left arm, and just as suddenly it was gone; blooming forth with white hot fury, snuffed out in a second. Her gaze fell to the needle still stuck in her forearm, blackness creeping in around the edges of her vision as the numbness spread, blasting through her bloodstream like an unstoppable wave. Her legs failed her just before her eyes did, but the feeling had gone long before she hit the floor – little more than a dull sensation of having stopped moving as her back slapped against the cold ground. She saw Adam looming over her, grinning like a dervish, like a child with a new favourite toy, but with all the innocent glee perverted by zealotry and pain. She saw his leering smile, one that she knew would haunt her nightmares for many weeks to come.

And then she saw no more.

Weiss sat at the edge of her bed, unsteady hands shakily gripping her coffee mug, long after the drink had gone tepid. She stared at the ground, unwilling to meet her sister's gaze. The confidence she had displayed, the raw pride that had surged through her when she had strode from her father's boardroom, had barely carried her down the hallway before her legs sagged beneath her. She had locked herself in her room, castling herself in doubt, admitting nobody but the butler, who brought her meals, and now Winter, who had seated herself on the chair opposite, her own mug resting on the vanity behind her, her fingers forming contemplative steeples before her face. They had said nothing to each other in the ten minutes since Winter had entered, bringing a peace-offering of coffee. Weiss was glad of her company, but found herself with no idea as to how she should begin any form of conversation.

"Three days is a long time to spend alone Weiss, much less alone and deliberately cooped up."

"You should see Yang after a Friday night out, she'll spend three days asleep, forget cooped up." The humour came surprisingly easy to her, all things considered. She smiled and looked up at Winter for the first time, taking comfort in the mirrored smile etching its way across her features.

"Is that so? You should see the Special Operations Divison when we're on leave, it's a good job we get paid so well, because we drank a whole bar dry last time. I don't think I sobered up for a week."

"I find it hard to imagine you so much as touching alcohol," Weiss countered with mock chastisement.

"I found it hard to imagine you standing up to Father like that," Winter replied pointedly, reaching out a hand to Weiss' shoulder, steadying her little sister as she saw her eyes start to drop again. It was rare that Winter got to play the role of 'big sis' these days, but though she would admit it to nobody else, she revelled in it every single time. There was little in life, as she had once told Weiss, that equalled holding your little sibling in your arms and letting them know everything was alright. In a way, not even a parent could do it so well as a big brother or sister who put their mind to it, because they had faced all the same problems before so much more recently than the last generation, and knew how to deal with it, or provided solidarity when they didn't. Weiss had never met Ruby's father, but she had seen Yang gather up her baby sister into umpteen hugs, and never failing to restore a smile to Ruby's face – whether by the right word at the right time, or providing a face to use as pillow target practice. Weiss doubted that even Taiyang Xio Long, the man who'd raised her craziest teammates, could have that effect with the same rate of success.

"I had backup." Weiss meekly responded, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment, but her smile reforming all the same.

"Backup? I barely said a word. Dear sister, that was all you."

"What was that rant about foxholes then?"

"What rant?" Winter replied pointedly, with an uncharacteristically mischevious and conspiratory wink.

"I love you big sis."

"And I you, Weiss, and I you."

Drip, Drip, Drip.

The staccato percussion of water on stone slowly lulled her back to reality. Her vision swam in and out of focus, not helped at all by the encroaching darkness on all sides. Then the smell hit her, startling her into full wakefulness. The stench of human waste assaulted her sensitive, heightened nostrils with wild abandon, forcing her to cough and splutter like a drowning rat. It was her raking coughs that drew her 'comrades' attention. A firm hand slapped her on the back, startling her from her coughing fit; the lieutenant's leering mask easing into her peripheral vision.

"Welcome back Miss Belladonna" he said, his voice a sober monotone.

"Why…why did you drug me?" She managed to find her voice on the second attempt, the slur in her words dragging itself away with each breath as clarity returned to her. She cast her eyes about and found herself in a sewer, her mind being cast back through what must have been several days of darkness before she latched onto the memory of the strategy meeting. This must be the cistern they had spoken of…and yet…

…something was wrong. Her mind was still hazy, but she could clearly remember that the cistern ran parallel to the mansion's cellar…so surely it couldn't be this big? She was in a tunnel at least twelve feet wide and twice that tall; leaving plenty of room for the thirty armed White Fang militiamen camped inside. Each wall was visibly thick as an Ursa, not something a 'controlled explosion' would handle without killing them all in the process. Wherever she was, in whatever godforsaken culvert she had woken up in, it was not the cistern they had planned to strike from.

"So you're awake at last, that's wonderful to see my love," Adam's voice preceded him out of the shadows. He stalked, blade drawn, visibly eager for the hunt to come, "Feeding you through a drip for three days was getting so tedious."

She gritted her teeth to hold her silence. Wanting nothing more in that moment than to rip Adam Taurus limb from limb.

"I'm so sorry about having to take you out of the equation for a while, but I promise I'll make it up to you. I couldn't spoil the surprise."

"Surprise?" she gritted out, rising to her feet unsteadily for the first time.

"I've taken you on a honeymoon my darling" he grinned his now trademarked insane smile, revelling in the madness he was about to unleash. He pivoted on his foot and brought Wilt up in a powerful arc. Blake had just enough time to shield her eyes before Adam brought his blade down on the wall to their left, smashing it asunder with an almighty crash like continents colliding. The cistern was drowned in smoke so thick it was almost solid, everything was blasted into a darkness so consuming that for a moment, even Blake's night vision could not spy her hand in front of her face. It took a full ten seconds for the smoke to clear enough that a faunus could see through it. The nearest two White Fang soliders had been thrown clear by the blast and had hit the opposite wall, they lay face down in the slow-flowing sewage, their necks at an angle that no living thing could emulate. Adam paid them not an ounce of heed. His eyes were focussed on the breach alone, the world at his back might as well have stopped existing.

Blake cast her eyes towards her gap in the wall. The hole was six feet wide and the same tall and led, much as the original plan had suggested, into what was visibly a wine cellar, replete with newly smashed bottles of what were likely priceless vintages. Only this cellar was, like the sewer that ran parallel to it, much larger than the schematics, and every surface was painted the same steel-grey, like polished gunmetal.

On the wall opposite the breach, partially shrouded by dust from the blast, was a symbol; a family crest. A snowflake emblazoned in pure, pearlescent white.

Blake's blood ran ice cold.

"Welcome, my love, to Atlas…and to the Schnee family mansion."

She looked up from her seat on the rear porch, the noise calling her back from her daydream with the familiar melody of a half-forgotten song. Her father stirred next to her, his expression startled, but with a stony edge. Yang cast her eyes about the back garden for the source of the cry, the single, solitary note of birdsong that had snagged their attention. She was on the verge of dismissing it as an overreaction and returning to her daydream, but her father had already got to his feet. Taiyang paced out onto the grass, his face set in a grimace of flint, but his eyes smouldering like charcoal. Despite everything, Yang was scared – she was easy to anger, such was how she manifested her semblance, but her father was a slow-burner. For something to have set his features, for which a mirthful smile was never more than a hair's breadth away, this aflame, awoke a fear in her that she could never remember feeling before.

"Dad? What's wrong?" she called tentatively, instinctively activating her single remaining gauntlet of Ember Celica. The halved weapon had not left her forearm since Ruby had vanished just under a week ago, it was a source of much needed strength to her and a font for what little courage remained to her. If she was not able to go after her sister, she would make sure she could defend their home with their father, so that Ruby had somewhere to come back to.

Taiyang paced further out into the garden, and cast his eyes up at the trees, charcoal eyes burning brighter with each step.

"Raven!" He called, the name making Yang's whole world stop for a moment, then two, then three before she remembered how to breathe, "I know you're there, come out!"

As if on cue, reality tore itself open some six feet away from where Taiyang stood unflinching; a black void that seemed to suck all light and all sound into it, leeching the breath of the world around it. Out from the black depths of the tear, stepped a tall, slender woman. Powerfully built for someone so thin, she was of a height with Yang, with long, flowing black hair that cascaded down her back in a never ending tide. At her hip was strapped the hilt of an enormous katana blade that looked to be as tall as she was, and under the crook of her arm, she carried a bone-white mask, crafted into the shape of a Nevermore's leering skull. Her scarlet eyes shone forth with a powerful aura that captivated the blonde girl with a single glance, shining out from a face that could have been the very image of Yang's own.

Frozen by shock, and riveted to the ground by disbelief, Yang Xio Long stared into her mother's eyes.

"Yang, we have so much to talk about."

Next Time: Chapter 3 – Quoth the Raven.