Author's Note: Well, this took a hell of a lot longer than it should have to finish, but frankly, it can be a little distracting when you're working your ass off and worrying where you're going to live for a decent portion of a year. Hopefully I won't have another pause in updates this long. And maybe at some point I'll do some edits to the first two chapters to make it fit the direction my head wants this story to go.

Chapter 3

The first thing Blake noticed in the morning was the lack of Yang's snoring. On one hand, it was probably the most restful sleep she'd had all week. On the other, it felt strange that her partner disappeared for a ridiculous amount of time with little more than a "be seein' ya". She wasn't sure what she was expecting from a partner, but Yang was..surprisingly hard to figure. Laid back and relaxed on a day to day basis, but she went to battle with a pair of shotgun gauntlets, which implied a hell of a lot more aggression than she showed outside of battle.

Of course, that might have more to do with the fact that most people she met were so easy to categorize. Racist bigot, fresh recruit, angry veteran, teacher, shop keeper, flirty guy, jealous girl. Occasionally, those last two were switched. Far too many people she knew were predictable, easy to read and understand better than she'd care to. Up until she arrived at Beacon, the only person left outside of fiction that seemed too complicated to mentally sort around was Adam, and she'd severed that bond rather effectively. Of course, the fact that she was an extreme introvert probably had a major hand in her isolation. It's hard to see the layers of other people when you don't interact with them that often. And pretty much everyone in Beacon was a puzzle to fully understand. It was actually quite the interesting mental exercise trying to figure out as much as she could about everyone around her while keeping a nice, safe distance.

In the corner of her eye, she noticed her scroll flashing silently, indicating she'd recieved a few messages. Most likely spam from the school trying to convince her to join one of the many clubs. Strange how she received more of those messages than any of the other members of the team. Whatever, she'd probably delete them without even looking. She already had a plan for the day. Shower, read, eat lunch, read, eat dinner, read, go to bed. Possibly throw in some random exercises, and at some point this weekend she should probably take some time for her weapon as well. Both regular maintenance and just doing some katas with it..assuming kata was the appropriate word to use when the routines weren't actually anything she was taught. It was mostly just a series of linked-together movements she came up with on her own that looked similar to some of the repetitive things she'd seen martial artists do.

Before she even bothered grabbing her towel and soap to really start her day, she took a moment to consider which book to pull out of the shelf. Always a hard decision. Should she begin a new series that seemed interesting, or go back to an old favorite? Of course, despite how many books she brought with her, she'd probably run out of new material before the school year ended. Kind of a depressing reason for that choice to become easier, but based on her usual reading speed and the likely delays caused by school work, it shouldn't be an issue for around three months. She'd deal with it when it came to that, probably by checking the school's library or something.

Just as she picked which book to go through next, her ears caught the unmistakable sound of running water..shit. Nobody went to the showers this early in the day when they actually had 'classes' to go to, why would someone be in there before six in the morning on a Saturday?! Maybe she should start showering at night..no, someone might ask why she went from morning to night showers, and the entire point of waking up this early was to 'avoid' questions. Since she wasn't going to take the risk of whoever else was in the shower noticing her 'extra' pair of ears, she wasn't going to bother with a shower at all today..it's not like anyone around here would notice a difference. Humans weren't nearly as good with their noses as faunus anyway.

Weiss was the first of her roommates to wake up, around nine. Angling her book so she could watch without looking creepy, Blake couldn't help being facinated. She knew it was 'wrong' to look at someone else like some exotic animal, she'd be pretty pissed if someone else did the same to 'her', but it was hard not to. 'This' was the heiress of the Schnee Dust Company? This cute, if at times spoiled, girl who at a glance seemed as fragile as a glass statue?

For the longest time, she bought into the White Fang's image of what the Schnees were like. Sadistic slave-drivers that treated even their fellow humans as low-life peasants born to serve them at best. And faunus? Treating them like barely tolerated pests that needed to be put down, and the only reason things weren't worse was because the Schnees always followed the letter of the law, though they had ways to bend it in their favor. It's not like she saw any evidence to the contrary before now.

Now that she was in the same dorm room as Weiss, Blake couldn't tell if fate had a sense of humor or was just a sadistic bitch. The similarities between the two of them were..disconcerting.

The biggest similarity so far was that both tended to keep to themselves when they weren't working. Though Weiss seemed to like giving herself more work to do, such as turning a three hundred word essay based on something in the textbook into a three or four page research paper with an extra pair of sources. Her surprise that she was the only one to go that far, while amusing, was probably the most blatant sign of what kind of life Weiss had led before she arrived at Beacon. While Blake had never gone through the sort of scrutiny that Weiss must have, over the years she'd become rather..pragmatic. And a good deal of that pragmatism required she be her own harshest critic, because frankly she was the most reliable person she knew at this point.

All the other things she'd noticed were barely important things. They both tended to go through showers quickly, considered Yang's singing and taste of music in general to be borderline auditory rape, and they preferred to be early when they had to be somewhere. She didn't bother trying to compare her own past and reasonings with why she thought the heiress did the same with things that petty. There were more important questions, and not nearly enough answers.

What was it that made her go from an adorable young woman that seemed to hold her pillow like a teddy-bear to a constantly tense girl that seemed genuinely confused that others weren't conditioned to go the extra mile? And why was the change so easy to see that you could literally time it? There's the yawn, the arm stretch, blinking several times to adjust to the light..and with each blink, her almost trademark, permanent scowl became more prominent. Some small part of Blake wondered if her own start-up of each day was just as visible and drastic.

Weiss gave a quick glare to Yang's bed, mumbling under her breath, "Of course, she didn't come back last night at all..I don't know if I should feel sorry for whoever she slept with, or just disgusted."

It was more out of a sense of obligation than anything else that prompted Blake to reply, "Being out all night doesn't automatically mean Yang's sleeping around."

Based on the light blush and the full-body twitch, the silver haired girl didn't expect anyone to hear her. Huh. Didn't think of her as the type to talk to herself. It didn't take long for her to recover enough to say heatedly, "Well, why else would she be out all night?!"

Blake could think of several dozen reasons. However, most of them involved having a rather..loose interpretation of the law. And since she was trying to defend the honor of someone she'd known for around a week, throwing some of her more wild guesses into the air would probably be counter-productive. "I'd prefer to have more facts before jumping to any conclusions. Maybe Yang slept with a relative in town. Maybe she missed the last shuttle back to Beacon and had to go to a hotel. There are plenty of possibilities."

Getting out of bed and grabbing her various toiletries, Weiss dismissively growled, "Yang didn't tell us what she was doing, and she didn't come back last night. And I have enough problems with her without adding 'disappears on a whim' to the list."

As the door shut behind the heiress, Blake felt her grip on her book tighten a little. On one hand, what Weiss said wasn't 'unreasonable'. It was common courtesy to tell your roommates when you expect to return, even if you didn't want to say where you were going. Hell, she'd been concerned enough about Yang's disappearance on Thursday to ask Ruby about it, and something just didn't feel right that her own 'sister' seemed to have no idea where she was or what she was doing, and was very used to not knowing. On the other, Weiss seemed seemed a little too quick to judge other people. Really, acusing her of being a slut right off the bat? It was almost enough to make Blake want to..wait, no, that would have been something the old White Fang Blake would have done. She shouldnt' go into the slippery slope of beating someone to a pulp in an allyway in an attempt to open their eyes, at best it just made people do the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Returning to her book, the raven haired girl entered the fictional realm again, letting the worries of the outside world fade away.

It wasn't until lunch, around one in the afternoon, that Yang showed up. Her face was surprisingly hard to read. Sort of a combination of pleased with herself, and disappointed either at what she left or that she had to leave it. Hard to tell. The fact that she came to the cafeteria with her gauntlets on was somehow more worrying. Either she was the type who felt naked when unarmed, which would indicate a rather rough past, or she'd been too lazy to take them off when she got back. Lazy felt more likely, but again, Blake didn't know her that well. And based on the combined scents of some very cheap brands of alchohal, sweat, burnt dust, and blood on her, she'd certainly gotten some use from them last night. Hard to tell if she fought in a bar or just clashed with a more pathetic class of hobos than Blake was familiar with. No scents that could be attributed to sex, though, so that certainly threw Weiss's idea out the window, but Blake somehow doubted that was admissible evidence to the heiress.

Weiss didn't seem to notice or care about the fact Yang was armed in the school cafeteria. "Just where were you? 'Again'?"

The blond's smile took a more playful air. "Aw, worried I'm hanging out with a bad crowd? How sweet."

"I'm not worried about 'you'. I'm concerned that somehow the activities of one of my teammates will reflect badly on me and the team as a whole."

Blake felt an ear twitch in annoyance. Granted, their team had only recently been formed, but the fact that Weiss felt the need to reference herself as a seperate entity? And she referred to herself first?

"Come on, it's the first weekend of the school year. Lighten up, it's not like we've been given anything long term yet. At best, we've got..two or three bits of homework, easily done in fifteen minutes."

"Well, I see where Ruby gets her work ethic from."

Ruby made an indignant noise at that. "Hey, I've been working and you 'know' it! You brought me 'coffee'! 'Twice'!"

That made Weiss blanch, Yang chuckle, and Blake internally clap. Perfect timing, excellent derailment of the Schnee Disciplinary Board. Granted, this wasn't the end of the topic yet, but that probably closed it for the day, and it was already grating on Blake's nerves..probably because she had a short fuse when it came to people thinking the worst of others right off the bat.

She felt herself tuning out whatever other conversations sprung up, just took the occasional subtle glance at Yang while letting her brain organize what she knew of her. The blond seemed pretty relaxed, which in itself confirmed that she wasn't in any trouble. She certainly enjoyed fighting. The way she handled those Ursa back at initiation proved that. However, she didn't feel like a fight junkie, not the way she played with those Grimm before they touched her hair. Every fight junkie Blake had ever met acted like they were hollow inside if they had to go extended periods of time without some violence, and when danger came they'd 'immediately' dive into the fray. Yang didn't feel quite that..rabid, for lack of a better word, though admittedly that might be premature to say after only a week of knowing her. The fact that she treated a few strands of hair cut with the same level of impotent rage as someone sexually assaulting her was strange, but might just be an extreme amount of vanity. Her interests..well, as far as Blake knew, it just involved pretty-boys that looked good on posters, anything that involved her sister, jokes that were just as likely to get chuckles as groans, and eventually becoming a huntress. Actually pretty sparse.

So while Ruby started talking about some new movie she'd heard about and was excited to watch, Blake made an admittedly hypocritical decision. Since Yang wasn't saying what she did in her weekly disappearances, Blake would have to find out by following her the next time she left. Hopefully she'd be more forgiving than Blake herself would be if someone invaded her privacy. Seriously, she was curious, Yang wasn't saying anything about it, and Blake might be able to learn where she went without even being spotted. She had about a week to plan out how to tail her new partner, it shouldn't be too difficult.

Author's note
So, read, review..and hopefully I'll get a comment or two that's more encouraging than what corrections I need to do.