Chapter 10: Wise Words from the Uninformed

"But women are cringepilled. No woman will ever be able to understand how I feel about life."

— 19 —

Every city had a scent to it once you got down in the mud. Even the districts within it had a different smell, often unpleasant compared to what you were accustomed to ignoring. It was something you could only notice when you left your room. Weiss couldn't recall what Atlas was to her nose, but she could remember Mantle, and the district the locals affectionately knew only as the Gash. She'd thought they were just unclean places at the time.

It hadn't really clicked until she'd really left home. She could have gone straight to Vale on an airship, but her family had a lot of influence over those. Radio traffic control was a job explicitly for the Atlesian Air Force, where her father had an undeclared influence due to some interservice rivalry with the Atlesian Army. Long story short, it was just another subtle act of rebellion to take a ship. A pleasure cruise, to be exact, because what use was Schnee money if you weren't going to spend it?

Argus had the quaint smell of snow and sweat. It was the city that once conquered all of Mistral and placed the Argead dynasty on the Mistrali throne. And before that, pioneers from its people had settled Solitas with colonists from Vale. Then there was the industrial fortress of Byzantion, the northern heart of the Mistrali war machine once upon a time, with the smell of ash and songs on the wind. The air of Lastlight on the island of Vytal had tasted of despair, the region never recovering from a massive war with the Grimm and a faunus worker uprising nearly a decade ago. Then was her last stop before Beacon, the city of Five Wives, capital of Patch. Named after its legendary founding by three husbands and five wives in the semi-mythical age of the Final Empire, it was from whence the former ruling dynasty had ruled before conquering Vale and bringing with it its aristocracy and language to the mainland, the same language Weiss now spoke as her first. It had smelled of barley and the same kind of Scotch her father had drank near exclusively.

And finally, Vale. It was a… big city. Atlas and Mantle were vertical places, the most efficient way to manage heat and power lines. Only Vale's commercial heart stretched into the sky, its captain of industry reaching higher than Atlas itself. The rest of it just extended up into the mountains, lousy with districts. From Damecrown, center of the government, to Les Jardins, where people like the Schnees maintained a mansion. All the way down to the urban sprawl of Catchfire, whose industry alone was greater than Atlas' and had the odious reputation as the birthplace of the twin poisons of republicanism and communism both. Or socialism or materialism or whatever they branded themselves today, it was all the same drivel.

It was hard to imagine such a place existed out across the water from where Weiss was standing, looking out across the mouth of the great Valean Riviera. Behind her, the better part of downtown was preparing for the Vytal Festival. And her team. Thursday had been a good choice to go out on the town with her team, she had to give Jaune credit for that. Mostly because it meant he must have known the week's scheduling for class. Thursday and Friday weren't class days exactly. Students were encouraged to go out into the town to help with the Vytal Festival preparation. Getting a first hand look at the new students coming into the city, complete with a dose of community service to Beacon's patron city. Really getting their presence out there to remind people that the Huntsmen were here for the common folk.

Aside from that? Well, Weiss supposed she could try getting along with her team. They were all together by the Riviera, after all.

She took a breath. "And thus, this is your card!" she said, forcing a huge smile.

Shamrock gave her a flat look. "No."

Weiss felt her face fall. "What? But I did the trick you showed me! You picked the card, and so I knew what it was. I turned around to make sure I could shuffle them and pull out the one I specifically tricked you into picking! How did I ever get it wrong?"

Shamrock shrugged his shoulders. "Dunno. Anything's possible when you lie."

Weiss stammered. "You tricked me!"

"You were trying to pull off a card trick," he said with a wink. "Turnabout's fair play."

"Yeah, well—!" Weiss folded her arms and pouted. It didn't get any better when Shamrock smiled at her. "We shouldn't be playing cards. We have to get ready for the Vytal festival."

"Smooth save there, Weiss," Jaune said, approaching the railings near her and leading out, his eyes to the harbor. Once again, the boy had changed up his outfit. The jeans were still there, but now he was wearing some kind of light brown jacket with an open face, exposing just enough of his bare chest to show the long scar running down his chest. He had done away with some of his armor, just wearing a couple pads. She had to admit, it did look stylish. She'd seen more than a few girls staring.

She very, very consciously ignored his jab. She wasn't going to let Shamrock get to her, and she sure as heck wasn't going to let Jaune ruin her mood, like she always let him do. "I know, right? I can't believe we get to help with this. Did you know that there'll be dances, parades, and finally the tournament? It's only the biggest event of the year, and we get to take part—celebrating the cultures of the world!"

"I wouldn't have pegged you for someone who cared about the culture of the world," Blake said mildly from beside Jaune. It seemed like the two of them had been attached at the hip all day. The whole week, really. She'd seen the way they'd killed those two ursae back in the Forever Fall Forest a couple days back, fighting together like a real pair of Huntsmen.

Weiss gave a kind of sideways motion of the head, somewhere between a nod and a shrug. "I mean, some cultures are clearly better than others. My Father used to say that culture was like a smog. 'To experience it is to breathe it in, and inevitably become contaminated.' And there was a lot of smog in Mantle, though not as much as across the harbor there in Catchfire."

Jaune squinted, looking out across the Riviera. Out past where the great river Espérance emptied out through the commercial heart of Remnant, le Delta. "What's with all the cargo ships just sitting in the water?"

"The Débardeurs' Union is on strike," Shamrock said, making a hand gesture that Weiss recognized as Vaudou. "They're refusing to take any foreign ships into the harbor."

"Débardeur?" Jaune asked. "Idn't that a kind of shirt, like a wifebeater?"

"It's a local word for, like, longshoremen or dock workers," Blake said, cringing at the incredibly outdated word wifebeater. "A lot of the locals, especially Union-Labor, like using the endemic terms."

"Unions," Weiss said, rolling her eyes. "Sure. Just stop working. Expect people to care about your pet cause. What are they even trying to do?"

Blake was giving Weiss a look, making her feel oddly self-conscious. "Protesting the Vytal Festival."

"Why would anyone want to do that? The amount of planning that goes into an event like this is utterly breathtaking. If things start going wrong, it'll collapse. Don't those idiots know what they're doing?"

"That's exactly what they're trying to do," Shamrock said, adjusting the collar of his red fighting suit. Now that Weiss thought about it, it did have a slight resemblance to a playing card in colors. She wondered if that was the point.

Weiss shook her head in disgust and started walking. Trying to get away from the scene. Find something productive that her team could do to help the festival. Or, at least catch sight of incoming new students, and learn how they ticked so the team could eventually kick their butts in the tournament.

After Jaune shrugged and went after her, the rest of the team followed. "I'm not sure I see why people are upset about the festival."

"Exactly, thank you!" Weiss said, feeling her scar itch from having just thanked Jaune for anything.

"I found one of their newspapers in the library, Las Vêpres," Blake said, hands behind her back as she walked with the group. She didn't exactly pronounce the old Valean R correctly, and the word came out sounding a little bit too much like flipper to be taken seriously. "Union-Labor thinks all of the money spent on this festival and tournament would be better spent on welfare programs or something. They feel the resources that went into building Amity Colosseum and getting it airborne were a huge waste."

Shamrock looked off to the side, holding his hat in his hands. "It's been one of their party platforms ever since the Council voted to unban socialists and let them run in the elections. If you go out near Catchfire, it resonates a lot with people."

"It's like they've never watched any of the parades or the Vytal Tournament itself," Weiss huffed. "If they did, they'd know why it's so important to the entire world, everyone in Remnant equally. Places like Vacuo are a wreck and even they care about it. What makes some people in Vale so special?"

He kept tapping his fingers on his hat, drumming them to some invisible beat. "Lots of folks can't even afford a TV license to watch the tournaments or anything in the first place. It's just needless to them." He made another Vaudou gesture towards the harbor.

Weiss made a distasteful noise. Looking up at a banner across the street celebrating the Vytal Festival and welcoming foreign students, she said, "Yeah, well." She sucked on her lips, unhappily. "The mere fact that they're selling a newspaper is proof they've lost. The Vytal Festival is happening and that's that."

"How does trying to reach people with a paper mean they've lost?" Blake asked.

"Is the paper free?" she asked mockingly.

Blake frowned, shaking her head.

"Then there you have it," she said with a gesture, finding a sense of control again. She could actually make a point here instead of grasping at straws of frustration. "Selling their work means they're already operating from a point of failure. Like it always does, capital has subsumed its enemies and forced them to work within its own confines in order to resist it, tacitly acknowledging its complete victory." She folded her arms and smiled, feeling smug.

Jaune whistled. "That's a pretty heavy assessment with some pretty big words."

She tsked. "If they want to use big words to sound smart about being idiots who don't know how to run a civilization, then I can use big words too. I'm actually educated, remember? Meanwhile, they forget that they had an entire revolution about this and it failed hilariously."

The boy frowned, not really looking like he knew how to reply to that. Or maybe just thinking better about trying to argue politics at this hour. So instead, he turned to his partner and said, "Kind of weird you're reading a newspaper. I thought the only thing you read was porn."

"What did I tell you about that?!" Blake snapped, punching him in the arm.

"Oh, my mistake, you only read hentai, because it's art."

"I don't read anything the Kipts put out."

"Who?"

"Kipts. Mistrali. The entire country is trash."

Kipts? Whoa! Even Weiss had to cringe at that. It was an incredibly outdated racial slur for people from Mistral. The only place it was still in common parlance was Vacuo because they just didn't care for politically correct language and, she believed, Menagerie, because the faunus had long memories and even longer grudges against Mistrali. Their equivalent term for people from Atlas was Jonie (the J was pronounced like a Y like in a lot of older Atlesian words) or, amusingly, Schnit, a kind of portmanteau between Schnee and shit that always struck Weiss more like playground bullying than an actual slur. The word had never really bothered Weiss, since you couldn't exactly use language to hurt people in a stronger position than you. It was why words like bourgeoisie would never make anybody with money cringe and cry for human resources.

Still, she hadn't exactly pegged Blake for coming from Vacuo. But then again, neither had she guessed that was where Shamrock was from. She wondered if maybe she should pay more attention to the details of her teammates. In a real sense, she didn't even know where Jaune was from, despite his incredibly old Valean name.

Jaune gave Blake a significant look. "What you got against Mistrali?"

She returned his expression with a kind of disbelieving, one armed shrug. As though he shouldn't be this stupid and not understand it, but he continued steadfastly not understanding. But to be frank, Weiss didn't really understand where she was coming from either. Well, no, she did. Mistrali high culture always had some weird nostalgic tinge of a more glorious past that wasn't ever real in the first place. Idealizing a time of honorable warriors and when women were seldom seen and never heard that only existed in their fantasies.

Still. That didn't mean what was currently out there wasn't worth being explored. Atlas might have gotten things right, but that didn't make other places any less interesting. Take Vale, for instance. Once the center of the entire world, now just holding dominion over culture and finance. And as the ships currently stuck out in the harbor proved, even that probably wasn't going to last forever. Only a handful of them seemed to be able to get to port, although even she couldn't ascertain why those were allowed and others weren't.

"Whoa, hold it. Check that out," Jaune said, interrupting whatever conversation she and Jaune were having. Blake blinked, following his finger.

"Ooh, a fish. Didn't notice you there!" Blake said. To Weiss' mild discomfort, the girl hunkered down and grabbed a fish that was just kind of crawling on the ground exactly like fish weren't supposed to do.

"What are you doing?" Weiss asked. "Why is there a fish crawling all over the place?"

"It's a mudskipper," Blake said. Then her eyes narrowed: "They're horrid creatures that don't know they missed the boat to evolve a million years ago."

Even though Jaune was her partner and pretty much the person she talked to most in the world, he didn't exactly seem to be paying attention. He was looking out at the docks to one boat, watching someone run off of it. A blond boy wearing a white shirt undone in the same style as he was wearing.

"If they're awful, why are you touching it?"

"I have to push it back into its filthy water to teach it a lesson," she said. The fish she was holding flailed around. Blake gave it an underhand throw back towards the water, only for it to hit someone on the pier below.

"Ah!" a boy screamed, followed by a splash as he and the fish landed in the water.

"Oh, crap—sorry!" she said, rushing over to the railing.

The boy she hit on the pier looked dazed as his head poked out from the water, trying to figure out what had just happened to him. He looked up and met Blake's eyes, his faunus tail coming out from the water and curling into the shape of a question mark. Right before the two men who looked like police officers that had been chasing him caught up to him.

The boy made a gesture, touching at his forehead with his tail that Weiss recognized as extremely obscene, before he ducked under the water and swam for all he was worth. The police gave chase, but they could only go left or right on the piers, and the boy was swimming out and around them.

Blake watched with a slow sense of horror. "He'll be fine. He's fine, right? I didn't just nearly get some faunus boy arrested."

Jaune looked lost and confused. At first he started counting something off his fingers. Only to look over his shoulder down the street, looking like was doing some serious visual calculus. Towards what Weiss had originally missed, but was clearly a police line closing off a broken Dust store. Another team of freshmen students were over that way, though Weiss couldn't place them at this distance.

He was giving the direction this weird look, before his face contorted in a kind of pained expression.

"Jaune, no," Weiss said. "We are not getting involved in another crime fighting spree."

He blinked, looking surprised to find her there all the sudden. He rubbed his eyes before speaking. "Ugh, yeah, no, agreed. Smart call. I just see team CRDL over there."

CRDL? Oh. Them. Cardin Winchester and his partner, the silent and perpetually uncomfortable Lie Ren. Sky Lark and someone else, Dovetail something or other. She only really knew their leader, Cardin. A complete jerkwad who had asked her out no less than three times. Not the kind of boy who seemed to take no for an answer.

"You know them?" she asked.

"Cardin and I spot each other at the gym as of late. His cardio sucks, though. He's convinced it'll ruin his gains and oh Jesus they're walking off to the left down that street." He inhaled sharply as the biggest of the students waved at him and shot off a pair of finger guns.

Jaune waved back, teeth grit. "I just destroyed the world and it is not my problem. But, y'know, to fuck around is human, to find out is divine. And I ain't nobody's personal Jesus."

"You want to try to put that in words people can understand?"

"Uh, yeah. Sorry, Penny. But, let's just say we are not going down the same way they are."

"Agreed," Weiss said, shivering at the thought of that big idiot leader of theirs hitting on her again. He wasn't as bad as Jaune, but at least Jaune had given up after the first pass back during their first night at Beacon. As for everything else, it was just Jaune being Jaune. Lots of nonsense he probably thought was funny or quirky, but wasn't.

Blake was still frowning and watching the police trying and failing to figure out how to catch the swimming faunus. Shamrock of all people tapped on her shoulder. "I'm sure he'll be fine," he told her. "See that weapon on his back? Looks like a Huntsman and not a local. You can apologize to him later at school."

She stepped back, folding her arms. "I, I guess."

Jaune was rubbing his eyes again. When they came away, his eyes were glowing again with that faint hint of Aura that Weiss didn't like. His fingers went to his nose and he squinted. His fingers were clean. "Guess over sushi," he said, and sniffed. "Not far from here."

"Maybe," she said, and hissed as soon as she realized her mistake. "No! Don't you dare say it, Jaune!"

"…is a baby who always says yes," he said very quickly under his breath, his eyes issuing her a challenge.

Blake rolled her eyes hard enough her body moved with it. "Oh my god I hate you."

"It's a classic!" he whined.

"So is me strangling you!"

Weiss sighed, shaking her head. She ran a hand through her hair, adjusting her ponytail. It was going to be a long day.

— 20 —

"Since when could you do that?" Weiss asked, staring at the Blake just standing there at the front counter.

Beside her, the real Blake shrugged. "Since always? It's really useful to just set one up the night before some big book release or whatever and go collect in the morning. Skips the whole line."

Part of Weiss marveled. The sushi bar that Jaune had wanted to take the team to was actually rather crowded at this hour of day. Seemed to be a popular spot to be. To her amazement, it was one of those places where sushi traveled around by means of a conveyor belt to all of your tables. They charged by the plates after the fact instead of ordering upfront. She hadn't actually thought places like this really existed, for whatever reason. They just seemed conceptually too out there for her. It might have contributed to why people stayed here for so long, nibbling on sushi that came by their way for hours. It made sense to her. But that also meant the line was long to get a table. And if you sat down by the chairs offered to relax, you weren't in the line, and so you were forfeiting your opportunity to eat by relaxing. Either stand for like half an hour like an idiot, or sit down and lose your place in line.

Blake's Semblance solved that issue in the weirdest way possible. She called it her Shadow, this ability to leave a kind of still clone of herself. It didn't do anything or fight, and if you tried hitting it it would just evaporate into dust. But Blake had just plopped one down and let it hold their place in line for them, occasionally picking it up and moving it when things started to get going. It meant the rest of the team could just relax the offered chairs, watching the aquariums in the sushi bar. She wondered if they were going to eat the fish that they were watching play in the water. A mantis shrimp looked out at her placatingly, and all Weiss could do was shrug.

"Gonna be real," Jaune said, opening and closing his mouth to mimic a little eel he was squaring off against in the tank. "Literally all of my thoughts for a permanent Shadow clone are weird. Because here I was, thinking it was just a combat tool."

Blake shrugged. "Most of the uses I can think of it are pretty stupid, yeah. Like if I'm out in the field and need to take a bath, I can just use my clone as a towel rack and keep my clothes dry on it. So long as I don't need to make another clone for whatever reason, they'll pretty much just stick around if I forget about them."

Weiss glanced at Shamrock, a thought hitting her. "I bet it would be pretty killer in a card game."

Shamrock seemed to sense Weiss was doing. She adjusted her top hat. "Put on one face, set up your clone, use the motion to hide. Permanent poker face." She nodded approvingly at Weiss.

Blake considered. Until the line moved and she had to go readjust her clone. That's how they got to the front of the line.

Weiss stood up and made her way to the front counter. A faunus boy was manning the register, and a couple other people by the counter. Collecting plates and calculating tabs.

"Hey, garçon," she said with her friendliest smile, using the colloquial term to sound more hip. "There was an empty table over there and we're ready to take it."

The boy's cat tail bobbed. "Don't call me that," he said, and then pointedly ignored her to continue on with his duties.

Weiss frowned deeply. "But there's a table right there and it's free, and we're in line and first."

The boy set a bill on the table for a couple that was just leaving. He would have continued to ignore Weiss, except for Blake evaporating her shadow clone, and the sudden motion startling him. The cat boy reappraised Weiss, giving her this kind of disbelieving look.

"Yes," she supplied primly. "We're Huntresses, and our manservant, Jaune."

"I heard that!" Jaune said, tearing his eyes away from the eel he was harassing.

"Weiss Schnee," the cat boy said dubiously.

Her scar itched. "I see my reputation precedes me. Good! The sooner we can eat and leave, the sooner we can get back to assisting the Vytal Festival. Now, please seat us?"

The boy gave her a level look. "If the table is free, seat yourself. It's not some fancy restaurant where you need me to guide you in like an airship."

"Oh." Weiss blinked. Add this to her list of firsts for her. She had never before been to a seat yourself restaurant. Suddenly, getting Blake to use her Shadow clone felt really dumb.

Shamrock was giving her an oblique look, like she had just embarrassed her somehow. Jaune, on the other hand, was giving her a smug little look, smiling at himself like he knew exactly what hadi just happened. She froze her spine and gave an indifferent shrug.

In the next few moments, the entirety of team BASS had a table, chopsticks, and some soy sauce. Most of it had already been prepared for whoever took up arms at the table.

And that's pretty much where all of the steam ran out. The pairs of partners sat across from each other at the little table, taking bits of sushi that interested them from the conveyor belt. It was actually a fairly novel experience. An endless parade of raw fish and rice. For some reason, it reminded Weiss of an old song she'd once heard as a child. Robot parade, robot parade, robots obey what the children say.

That was kind of the problem. After arguing politics, fish, and discussing how Blake's special ability worked, Weiss had kind of figured that the team was learning how to talk to each other. It wasn't exactly easy, not when you had someone like Jaune. And Blake seemed clearly sympathetic to the kinds of people Weiss did not like. They had just almost seemed human for a moment. But sitting down across from each other like this, looking at each other, all they could really do was eat in awkward silence.

She wanted to say something, but she had no real topics in mind. Nothing that wouldn't sound forced in her mind. She looked around at her teammates, trying to figure out something to say. Maybe someone was doing something stupid and she could make a joke. Maybe they'd like to learn card tricks? She wasn't very good at them yet, but she was learning, and the best way to reinforce what you learn is by trying to teach others. But the longer the silence went on between them, just the clacking of wooden chopsticks, the harder it became to break. The quiet became a barrier in and of itself to conversation. The first person who spoke would receive three sets of expectant eyes waiting for them to say something interesting and spark a conversation to life.

Weiss imagined it, and suddenly she found it very hard to eat. She couldn't help but think that she had a raw fish in her mouth all of a sudden. Raw fish and cold, sticky rice wrapped in seaweed. It wasn't exactly that it tasted bad, not exactly. But thinking of trying to break this silence poisoned her tongue. She had a sudden, overpowering urge to spit everything out. But if she did that, the eyes would be back on her, just staring at her, expecting her to make some excuse for what she was doing and feeling. Against her will, she tried chewing the fish. All she could do was stare at her little plate with the tuna rolls on it, growing more and more conscious of the fact that her teammates appeared to be eating fine. That there was raw fish unchewed in her mouth, resting on her tongue like a weight.

What was wrong with her? This was as much her idea as Jaune's. She had gone out on a limb to get Shamrock out here. It had been easy to talk on the way here, about this and that and nothing and everything. But now that they were finally at their goal, all she could do was stare unhungrily at the food she had been waiting for all day. Not even talk, just stare. She looked up at Shamrock, chewing her food and twirling her chopsticks, her eyes looking out the window. Blake had at least three plates of sushi in front of her and seemed content.

And Jaune? She looked into his eyes and the faint glow within them, and swallowed. Down went the sushi she had been unable to eat before. It didn't go down easily. It got stuck in her throat, a lukewarm mass of half-masticated sludge. She couldn't even breathe. Not as it crawled down her throat. Raw fish and cold, sticky rice wrapped in seaweed.

She kept thinking about her rigid diet back home under her father's watch. Strictly controlled portions. Strictly controlled diet. Strictly controlled fitness training. It wouldn't do to let his daughter look like anything but the best. The most presentable heiress to the Schnee Dust Company possible. Poor people and the sick-minded ate whatever they wanted. Poor people and the sick-minded got fat and ugly and everything a Schnee couldn't be. She was choosing her own meals now. Choosing how to spend her life. Choosing on her own to eat—

Raw fish and cold, sticky rice wrapped in seaweed.

Jaune was staring at her, as if expecting her to say something. She opened her mouth and then closed it quickly, worried that maybe she still had something uneaten in her mouth. That he'd see how she couldn't chew. Couldn't even swallow properly.

She looked away, her eyes pleading with the cat-boy waiter as he passed by. She wanted to say something, to ask for a refill of water. But that would mean being the first person to talk. Breaking the silence and bringing everyone's attention to her and her inability to eat. Then she would either need to force it all down her mouth and pretend everything was normal, or… or something worse. She didn't know. She'd throw it up, maybe. And everyone would see. Everyone would know.

"Thanks for taking a chance and coming out here with us, Weiss," Jaune said. And just like she feared what happened to her, three sets of eyes went to him for daring to break the silence. He didn't seem to mind. He never seemed to mind anything.

She reminded herself to breathe.

Weiss made her face curve into a smile. She licked her lips. Then she realized it was probably the wrong order of events. It looked weird. And worrying about just how weird it was stopped her from replying.

Jaune continued. "I know your idea of fun is something like, I don't know, good posture and good manners, but it was pretty cool of you to show up here."

She tried not to overthink that, and failed. But instead of letting the thoughts overcome her, she just said them out loud, "One of my old tutors used to make me practice those for fun. I'd have to balance a book on my head all day, even through dance lessons."

It felt so awkward to say. She wanted to tell him it was wrong. She totally knew how to have fun like a normal person. By the way he looked at her, it made her shiver. The way he just seemed to know things about her. Like her relationship with her father, how she could sing, and how practicing good manners and posture was at least once upon a time her idea of fun. Things she would never have told him before, but he just seemed to intuitively grasp. It gave her the sense that she and him had had several heart-to-hearts before, but that she had simply forgotten them all.

Shamrock interjected, tapping her chopsticks on her little plate of sushi like a drummer. "I never really got the point of manners. It just seemed like some fancy high Valean stuff to me. What's the point of having seventeen types of forks when they all do the stabbing stuff equally?"

Looking at Shamrock gave Weiss the excuse to stop looking at Jaune. "There's not seventeen types of forks," she said slowly, trying to get her thoughts off the food and towards her team, "there's only about fourteen common forks, but only twelve in the practical sense." She folded her arms unhappily. "Legally speaking, sporks and disposable forks don't count."

Blake gave her a flat-eyed look. "You really do know how to make boring things sound exciting."

Weiss scoffed. "Well, sor-ry for trying to spell out the difference in forks. You wouldn't want to use an oyster fork to eat grapes."

Jaune's eyes were glazing over like donuts. "Dude, do I look like the kind of boy who can afford oysters?"

"I don't believe they're that expensive," Weiss said, poking at her sushi with one chopstick. She still couldn't bring herself to eat it, not anymore. Not yet. "Best paired with a sauvignon blanc. They're a potent aphrodisiac, I hear."

That got the boy's attention. "I'll keep that in mind whenever I want to seduce a girl with raw shellfish instead of my raw masculine features."

Blake laughed. "Please. I'm pretty sure I'm more manly than you." She held up her arms, flexing them at him. There really wasn't much muscle there. "You want a piece of this, bitch boy?"

Jaune puffed his chest at her, squaring up against her. "The only piece you got is cake. And I don't do that high carb shit."

Weiss sucked in a breath through a grimace. "Y'know," she said slowly, hesitantly, "I guess you two do make a cute couple."

Blake blinked hard, cheeks going red. She dropped her act with her partner to hold up her hands placatingly towards Weiss. "No no no, we're not—he and I are partners, not partners. Don't, I mean—"

It was such an awful job of faking it that Weiss actually laughed. She got halfway through the noise before she noticed Jaune looking a lot more gloomy. The humor died in her throat.

"She's not exactly my kind of Mississippi moonshine," he drawled. He shrugged one hand, using the other to try to pick up the sushi with the chopsticks. Of the four of them, he was noticeably the worst with them. Able to use them, but not quite right. Having all the grace of a child.

Of all things, that seemed to offend Blake. Wrinkling her cheeks, she asked, "What's that supposed to mean?"

Jaune gave her a flat look. "You want the serious answer or the answer I'm actually going to give you?"

Weiss frowned. "So, speaking for real here, you two aren't actually dating? Because it looked so obvious to me." She had this feeling like she had misspoken again. It was almost like that time she made a joke in the card game room, and instead of it landing, it had flopped, and now was about to create some kind of argument. She looked to Shamrock for support, and the girl in the top hat actually returned a slight smile.

"I ain't interested me none in girls I can't afford to lose," he said with a compressed sigh. "Haven't had a fling with a girl that wasn't toxic. Love that wasn't the killing kind. That didn't go from I love you to never talk to me again in about a month. I actually kinda care about Blake, no homo."

"What," Blake deadpanned.

"You too, Weiss, Shamrock," he said. "And even if legally speaking, I'm not the team leader, we haven't really figured out someone to replace me, and all of you still came here at my urging. That means I'm still in a leadership kind of role. Any relationship would inherently be a one-sided abuse of power. I'm too old for this shit. I don't want that."

To her surprise, Shamrock spoke next. "Yeah. I guess I kind of know what you mean." She held the chopsticks in her hands, idly bending them just until they would have broken but stopping at the last second.

"Yeah, I'm way too whiny and needy," Jaune said flippantly. "Into the rough stuff, too, due to a few exes of mine. Couldn't do that with someone I actually liked." He winked.

Blake was suddenly giving Jaune this weird look whose meaning Weiss couldn't place.

"That, I don't know. And not exactly the leadership thing, either." Shamrock hesitated. "Bad romance stuff. I hear lots of teams break up after their four years at a Huntsman Academy because of love gone wrong. Lots of hormonal kids and life or death situations together, they get together, and then they figure out it was a mistake and have to live with it until they're legally allowed to separate. People I've been with, y'know, I know I wouldn't want to spend four years with."

Blake made a noise in her throat, low and unhappy. "I feel the same. I, I don't know. Used to love someone too not very long ago." She made a pained expression. "I know how it can hurt. I'm not really interested in poking at those wounds before they've even scarred over. The heart wound, I mean. In a way, it's just good to have, you know, just a friend you can rely on. Haven't really had many of those before who weren't trying to get into my pants."

Shamrock snorted. "Most people get intimidated thinking about what's in mine. Hard to maintain a relationship when you're not even sure you're attracted to the other person a hundred percent of the time."

Blake gave a kind of sideways smile. "Find someone who loves you for you?"

"You and I both know romance starts physically," she said with a sigh, her body morphing until he looked a bit more gruff and masculine under his burgundy suit.

"Yeah," Jaune said, sipping at his water. "I guess no love story ever began with the words 'Damn, androgynous individual, I sure do appreciate your personality'."

Shamrock threw his chopsticks at Jaune, laughing this laugh that had just a smidgen of real humor to it. "Shut up, dude. You suck."

He held up his hands to deflect. "I suck so hard that one time my dad was the one who swallowed."

"Gross!" Blake said with a chuckle, punching her partner right in the ribs.

The mood of the conversation was difficult to understand. It was as if everybody but Weiss just revealed something about themselves. Weiss looked down, feeling the weight of the conversation on her shoulders. They had just been having a normal chit chat, and then somehow it had come to this. She had expected this to somehow turn things super awkward and worse than it was when it was silent. Instead, everyone was just giving each other crap over it. They had bared their souls, and no one had taken it seriously from anybody else.

"I, uh," she said, and floundered. "I guess I once had a crush on some boy but then that was it. Pretty tragic, huh?"

Suddenly Blake laughed. "Oh my God, Weiss, you sure do know how to ruin a conversation."

"What?!" Weiss protested. "What did I do?"

"You got us on to some sad story and that's the best you can come up with?" Jaune asked, handing Shamrock a fresh pair of chopsticks in a little paper sheath.

Weiss huffed. "Everyone must have been thinking it, about you and Blake. You go from hating each other one day to suddenly becoming best friends. It's not my fault everyone decided to take that and just become so serious."

Shamrock held up his chopstick packet to his mouth. He blew into it, sending the little tube of paper right into Weiss's eye.

"Ow, what the heck, you jerk!"

Everyone laughed. But it wasn't like they were laughing at her. They were just kind of, and she knew it sounded cliché, but laughing with her. It was hard to make sense of, hard to put words to. But for this weird little moment, it felt like she belonged with these people. The moody Blake, the often unsettling Jaune, and the incredibly confusing Shamrock. They were her team. She didn't really understand them as people, hardly got them at all, but right now, they were all laughing. Even she couldn't help herself, not totally.

It was dumb. It was completely illogical. Incredibly childish.

Weiss was having fun.

And she was finally able to eat again.

End of Volume 3

See you next week for Ça Ira!