Chapter 8: Bulls on Parade

"After careful consideration, I have decided to become worse."

— 21 —

If you asked, his name was Haroun ibn Yousef. It was a good, strong Vacuan name. And even if Haroun was in Vale, there was enough cultural cross contamination that no one would look too seriously at Haroun. If someone saw a bald man in a Vacuan coat, with a turban riding low over his face to obscure the eye he'd once lost; at most he'd probably get a smug "Welcome to Vale!" The headgear helped him move, too. Fewer people in the wrong part of town would take kindly to a faunus walking in their midst, but those were his favorite haunts in all of Vale.

Haroun had only been to Vacuo once, despite the disguise he preferred. There, he'd stayed as the guest in a temple of the Yamin Allahi, the so-called Right Hand of God. They were a strange people who claimed God as their own right, and insisted with perfect frankess that unbelievers would spend the afterlife drowning in sand, clawing through it as it drowned them over and over, and would only find release if they realized the truth of their One God. Despite that, they didn't demand your conversion, and openly protected and housed all travelers in Vacuo, be they human or faunus. It was why he'd sought shelter there.

Religion had never sat right with Haroun. That was why he'd never fit in right with the Menagerie branch of the White Fang. While he idolized the work Ghira Belladonna had done, Haroun never shook off how creepily the people clung to their pagan gods. You didn't have to be a convert, naturally, but after Sienna took over, she leaned too heavily into the religious aspect for Haroun's comfort. Where Haroun was born and raised, God was dead. It was Atlas' policy. You were no more valuable than the meat on your bones in Atlas. The afterlife didn't matter; it was just an opium to make you accept suffering in this world for the promise of something better and incredibly vague when you died. You had to focus on the here and now, this life, and the people around you. You had to make life better on this rock for your people, no matter where they were.

But right here, what he was doing now? That mattered more than promises of divine pleasure.

"Hey, Haroun, what took ya?" the girl with the squirrel tail asked as she saw him enter.

He took the apron she offered and smiled. "Got sidetracked, Marianne. The snow is lovely out there. We got enough food?"

Marianne blew a strand of strawberry bangs from her face. After a thought, she put on a hairnet, one for her head, and one for her bushy tail. "And then some! We might even have some left over for us today."

Haroun walked into the kitchen, looking over the workload for the morning. Stoves, pots, and everything else they'd need in nearly industrial quantities. The eggs and bacon alone could feed a smaller army. And milk and cereal too, but the low-sugar, high-fiber kind. This was supposed to be a healthy breakfast to keep the kids going all morning.

One of the faunus in the kitchen met Haroun with a fistbump. "Sup, nimma?"

Haroun met it back. "Nothing much, man." He saw the pistol tucked into the man's waistband, and made a gesture. The guy realized and adjusted his apron to hide it. There wasn't anything wrong with them being armed here, but it was better not to look like it in public. Haroun's own sword was carefully hidden under his jacket.

"How's classes doing, Marianne?" Haroun said, getting to work on the meat.

She was loading eggs into a giant pot to cook. "Terrible!" she said happily.

"Why's that?" he asked, frowning.

"Winter break's over," she said with a huff. "Now I gotta actually study again. C'est nul!"

"Education major, right?" Haroun asked.

She nodded. "It's not like I gotta remind you every time."

A bell rang as someone entered the front of the building. Marianne looked over past the kitchen to the room beyond. "Ah, crap. They're early. Vite, cassons-nous, guys!"

Standing there in the front, looking lost, was a faunus kid no more than maybe seven. His backpack looked nearly twice as big as he was, his winter boots a little ragged. He was here for the White Fang's free breakfast. It had come to the White Fang's attention that faunus children were falling behind, even in especially poor regions like here in Catchfire where the humans didn't do very well themselves. It hadn't actually been his idea, this kitchen, not at first. That had been her idea once she realized the kids couldn't pay attention to class because they were starving. So the solution was community outreach. Although they weren't technically the White Fang here, everyone in the know understood what was going on. That was why the mix of volunteers were people with the White Fang, people who just wanted to help, and even the odd uptown college girl like Marianne. It counted for the community service hours she needed for her major, the girl said.

The Fang had worked to get a couple of kitchens like this up and running, siphoning off money and donations to provide a filling, healthy breakfast for the poorest faunus kids in Vale. The White Fang needed to build communities. If the government was going to let its faunus suffer, the faunus themselves had to band together to provide for each other. Even the niceties of the "compassionate conservatives" in power didn't really care to help the faunus. The humans would always try to placate the faunus with symbolic victories of no particular importance, while ignoring actual issues of equity and economic justice. That was why they had to do it themselves.

Haroun sometimes wondered what other ideas they might have had if she hadn't left them. How else they could reach out and help their fellow faunus in need.

He closed his eye and let out a breath. And then it was back to preparing kids the food they needed to do good in school. By the time the first batch was ready, the line of kids and sometimes even their parents was out the door. Marianne took the first shift at the front counter, providing trays of hot food, a little box of cereal, and a carton of milk to the kids. Something about the near universal squeak in their voices as they thanked the girl made Haroun smile. It helped banish the memories of different times.

There were a lot of kids in this part of Cathfire. Only most of them really spoke the official government language. Marianne's native Valais came in great help. It made Haroun wonder if he couldn't work on something to help the kids pick up the official language better. If they were well fed and could actually understand all the material, they'd probably be able to outperform their human peers.

Sometimes, Haroun found himself speaking in his native Mansk by accident. In Atlas, a faunus worker was supposed to speak in the same language as your taskmaster. If the foreman couldn't understand Mansk, he might presume you were planning to unionize, an unthinkable sin in an SDC factory. For him, learning Vale's language came at the end of a whip; or, as the general tried to improve working conditions, at the end of a docked pay. Over the years, he'd lost most of his mother language, and didn't even have a notable accent anymore.

"Uh, Haroun?" Marianne asked, shaping him from his thoughts as he fired up the ham and bacon. She was grimacing as she looked over her shoulder.

He looked over to see the children on the other side of the counter. It was a little faunus girl holding hands with a human boy. The girl looked more scared than the boy did.

"Please?" the girl said, bouncing back and forth on one food. "I know you feed faunus, but my friend is really hungry too, and his mom can't afford breakfast, and school food is super expensive, and you have food, and please?"

Marianne frowned, looking at him. Or maybe it was more a pleading grimace. Her tail looked a little thinner. "We have enough."

Haroun thought on some level there was something scummy about anything as young as that kid being terrified by words like "expensive." But still, the White Fang operated this for their own people. Haroun never had any human friends. People stuck to their own kind most of the time. Even if there wasn't a legal rule for it, self-segregation was the rule anywhere you went, and the laws just reinforced that. Even in Menagerie, the artificial homeland for all faunuskind, most people stuck to faunus like them.

He looked at all the food they had today, and sighed. "Yeah, go ahead, Marianne."

The girl beamed, her large tail bushing up as she served both kids a breakfast.

The breakfast rush took a full hour to get through, and Haroun's team were fast at what they did. Kids, sometimes alone or accompanied by their parents, had been helped as best the White Fang could. In the end, as the team was closing up shop for the morning, Marianne sat down beside Haroun and handed him a plate.

"Here. Like I said, enough for us today!" she said, shoving lightly salted eggs into her mouth.

"Don't you have class to get to?"

She swallowed, shaking her head. "Nope! You can choose classes in university. I only go to class Tuesday and Thursday, with a language class Friday. Saves a ton on fuel money, which, y'know, really important on a student's budget as the prices go." She made a sound like artillery, arcing her finger through the air, before making an explosion with her mouth.

Haroun looked away, idly chewing on some ham. "Dust getting that bad for people these days?"

The girl shrugged. "What, you don't have a car?"

He shook his head. "I walk most places. Where I live the streets are old. Too small for a motor carriage."

"So you are a local!" she said with enough enthusiasm that Haroun had to scoot away. "Bet you don't get out much, huh?"

"I get out," he said, folding his arms.

"And I'm the Queen of Vale," she said, rolling her eyes. Another bite of bacon. "Hey, I'm off today. You wanna, I dunno, go somewhere? Do something? Better than sitting around being grumpy all day, Haroun."

"What's there to even do in Vale?"

Marianne scoffed theatrically, putting a hand to her breast. "Why am I glad you ever asked! I don't know either!" She leaned towards him and whispered loudly, "I was hoping you'd be the kick in the ass I needed to flex my improv skills."

Haroun laughed. "Oh no, awful date ideas, my one weakness. How did you know?"

She pretended to be shocked. "Date? I didn't say that word. That is the least likely word I'd ever say. I just said hanging out, getting lost in the city, probably causing problems, and then agreeing to never speak to the police about whatever we do." Marianne beamed, her tail looking like she'd touched an exposed outlet. "Normal stuff!"

He finished his breakfast and smiled back. "Love to, Mary."

She frowned, puffing her cheeks out. "I'm sensing a but."

Standing up, he said, "But I actually have work to do today. Not all of us can schedule a day off. Some of us have to do stuff if we want to afford food."

Marianne blew air through her lips. "I'm going to interpret that not as a no but at face value, and will try again later. You cool with that?"

Haroun grabbed her empty plate and tossed it in the garbage. "Don't think I could stop you if I wanted. Think about the weekend. You have my number." Then he left for the dumpster out back with a tied-up trash bag.

In truth, he doubted he'd ever find time for Marianne. For one, he was still lying to her by omission about who he was and what he did. You couldn't build a healthy relationship with someone if you weren't being honest with who you even were with them. Marianne was a sweet girl who didn't deserve that. For another, far worse reason—well, there was her. On some level, he knew it was ridiculous. It'd been over half a year. Haroun should have been over her. But even as he left the morning shift and tossed the garbage out, even as he ran his hand over the sword he had hidden on his person, he couldn't forget her. Even saying her name felt painful.

What was worse, he knew it was pathetic. They hadn't even really been an item, not really, not exactly. He'd known her since they were kids, but he'd only really been paying attention to her father, his hero. The man who built the White Fang into what they were today, before more aggressive leaders took charge. So when she had come to him, asking to join, wanting to help, he'd only seen her father behind her eyes. And had been happy to take her in and teach her everything he knew.

All he asked was that she wear the Grimm mask he'd made the uniform of his branch of the White Fang. His people wore Grimm masks not because he identified with Grimm, but as a symbol. It made him faceless. It let other faunus imagine themselves behind the mask in his own place. They were all equals in the White Fang, all wearing the same face, the mask, the same cause. As far as Haroun was concerned, any other symbolism was merely a happily adopted accident.

Haroun remembered his own training not long after escaping Atlas and joining the White Fang. They were an international organization, but the local branches all operated radically differently. In Atlas, a faunus named Logan Rawne was the terror of the kingdom. But even Haroun couldn't stomach an organization so angry, so desperate, that suicide bombing was a valid tool in their arsenal. There were limits to sanity.

Like that Cinder bitch.

He got back to walking. It was maybe a half hour's stroll to his next destination for the morning. And the crisp winter air helped remove Cinder from his thoughts.

He wondered what the Wolf would think of him if he knew he was working with Cinder and her cronies? What would Sienna or Ghira or Ghira's daughter think? Haroun knew he hated himself every moment he let that woman live and influence him and his people. All but the Wolf would probably be ashamed by what he's been forced into. The Wolf would probably laugh at him.

The Wolf had the head of a beast, the body of a man. One of those rare faunus more bestial in nature through some fluke of the genetic lottery. He had called Haroun "Meat" and took him far to the northwest, a place many faunus claimed to come from if they were hiding their race, so that Adam could see what humans were really capable of. Atlas was still alive. But the city of Misery? He recalled following the Wolf through a bombed out city destroyed in the Great War, running past the giggling shadows of children the Godhammer had turned to ashes, and trying to survive the mutant Grimm who called those ruins home.

Haroun had come back from Misery a changed man. Broken in some ways, reformed in others. The Wolf had said it was like the Mistrali art of Kintsugi, where you repair something broken with gold, making it better, repurposing something destroyed for your own reasons. That was what good training did. And it was using what he learned in Misery that made him a success, the terror of the Royal Army out on the Sanus frontier, and eventually the leader of Vale's branch of the White Fang.

Haroun had broken the White Fang and reforged it with gold. Making it into something stronger than Ghira ever could have. Able to bare its teeth and strike from the shadows against the worst atrocities, and then provide food for the hungry another minute. Sometimes they were big acts, like destroying a train; and sometimes they were small, like insisting no faunus in Vale buy tobacco from anywhere other than from companies based in Menagerie.

Haroun made it to the White Fang compound down by the Catchfire docks. It was in a warehouse that they had bought and then repurposed into a kind of barracks command center. Out of the way from any kind of police department, only the local Catchfire Citizens' Militia actually came out to try to enforce law in this part of town. And the local precinct were all sympathetic faunus. He knocked on the right door, gave the password, and entered. The inside was a rather claustrophobic warren that they had built with prefab structures arranged into a kind of building within a building.

So many of the soldiers seemed distracted by something on their scrolls. Most of them weren't in uniform; there was no reason to don the combat garb outside of official hours. A lot of them lived and slept in this place, just like a lot of them were volunteers who showed up when there was work to do. Haroun passed by the recreational room, seeing the gorilla faunus and his feline friends sitting around the pool table smoking cigarettes and watching something on the news. It just seemed like a normal day without any serious work to do. No one even had their masks on hand.

But that was going to change tonight.

Haroun found his office, his bedroom and armory, and removed his turban. And with it his entire assumed incognito personality. As soon as it was off, Adam Taurus saw himself in the mirror, with the SDC brand over one of his eyes turning it into a ruined mess. One last scar from the old homeland. Adam disrobed and found his armor next to the documents on his desk.

According to this, tonight there was a Dust shipment coming in from Atlas to be loaded into Harbor 3. He had gotten this information from a leak in the Débardeurs Union. But that was to be expected. The White Fang knew when the Dust was entering the city and where it was from thanks to their connections with the socialists. It had been an interesting case of corruption that Adam was happy to exploit. The exact opposite way he felt about what Cinder thought of him and his people.

Adam remembered sitting down with one of the most important men in Union-Labor in a secret meeting somewhere in Catchfire. Everyone had arrived in secret, and Adam had been surprised to learn it wasn't some kind of corrupt functionary he was meeting, but Twinblue Sokolov himself, the twin brother of the official leader of the party.

There had been rumors about this, Adam knew from his connections in the underground. Twinred was the irreverent revolutionary who was the face of the party. The poor son of a millworker who rose to power the correct way. Organizing and speaking and assisting labor disputes that had been illegal to address before socialist parties were allowed back in elections. But in the right circles, the most important member was his twin brother. The man who got the dirty work done. Who helped cover up the lynching of an abusive factory taskmaster. Who helped with voter suppression and gerrymandering in contested districts. And who had no problem meeting with men like Adam to get things done, to put pressure on the electorate, and increase voter turnout.

Twinblue had sat down across from Adam, adjusted his Szolacs jacket, and spoke without any preamble. "Until every last faunus is free and equal, no one will be. The system is broken and would like us to think that you and me are not the same. Keeping us divided means we can't put a united front against the bastards that put us where we are in life. Can't put them on the end of a rope where they belong. How can we help you, Mr. Taurus?"

For a human, the man wasn't bad. That kind of naked hatred was something Adam could relate to. And in exchange for nearly anything Adam could want, from getting a little extra money for his pet projects, to the information on Dust shipments from Atlas, all Union-Labor asked was that they keep their relationship secret, and that Adam did his part to ensure faunus districts voted White when elections rolled around.

Someone knocked on the door as Adam was cinching his pants. "What?" he asked.

A man opened the door by a crack, looking at Adam with wide eyes. Adam recognized him as one of his lieutenants who had been with him since the frontier days. "Hey, Adam, you seen the news?"

"I try not to. It's better for my mental health."

The man grimaced, thumbing over his shoulder. "I think you really should. This kind of affects us."

"Are we in trouble?"

He shook his head. "It's somebody we used to know. And it's real bad."

Adam grabbed his coat and followed the lieutenant out. He was still putting on his coat and buttoning it up when he entered the recreation room. The men inside had smoked their cigarettes nearly to the filter. One of them made space for Adam, gesturing his head towards the television.

At first, Adam didn't know what he was looking at. It looked to be aerial footage from some kind of natural disaster. Some city in ruins, until he saw the Grimm. It made him unconsciously go and rub the mask over his eyes.

The lieutenant pointed. "There."

The other men in the room didn't seem to understand. They hadn't been with the White Fang that long. They didn't know the old demons.

But Adam did. He saw her on the screen, Blake Belladonna, and felt his mouth go dry. At first he thought maybe it wasn't her. Maybe it was just a girl who looked like her. With that hair bow on, maybe it wasn't—who was he kidding? He recognized that outfit, that build, even the hair bow he had once bought for her as a gift to help infiltrate a settlement. Blake didn't look good, beaten and haggard and ragged. And fighting Grimm down a city street that was practically on fire.

What the hell was she doing out there? Honestly, a part of Adam had convinced himself that Blake was dead. It was just easier that way not to think about her. It was a faux pas to speak of the dead; that helped him control the thoughts he had about her and the way she had betrayed everything they worked for in a fit of sentimental hypocrisy. But there she was, on the city street, almost acting like a Huntress.

Any doubts he had ended as soon as he saw the people beside her. Adam watched as Blake used her weapon and the ribbon attached to it to wrap around the arm of a heavily armored boy. Together they practically launched themselves like a bola against a storm of Grimm. She would land and use her sword, and then jump away with her shadow clone. The boy would cannonball into the horde next, using his body and sword to rip them apart.

Then he saw the other girl. She was wearing what had once been a white dress, now stained brown and black and filthy from combat. He knew this girl from paintings, from pop culture, from his old homeland. From the brand over his eye.

Weiss Schnee summoned a glyph, catching Blake and the boy in midair, just in time to block the projectile from some Grimm. A fire bomb went off in the background.

Blake became a Huntress? he thought.

And then: Blake Belladonna is working with a Schnee!

"Sir?" his lieutenant said.

Adam thought for a very long moment as he watched the disaster unfold on television. Saw the airships flying over the city, the soldiers trying to keep control of the streets, and the Grimm rampaging through the streets. A card at the bottom of the screen said Unfolding Grimm Attack in Montluçon.

"Contact our agents in Montluçon," he said, teeth grit. "Now. We have people in the city who need help."

— 22 —

Once upon a time, a man named Oz had taken a knife and carved it into himself. It began with One. The left shoulder every time. And with every new face, he added to the tally.

When he was a young man attending Beacon Academy, Ozpin's partner Glynda Goodwitch had asked him why he'd gotten a tattoo of a 73 on his arm. Back in those days, tattoos were still ghastly things, considered a more humane way of branding slaves instead of self-expression. With the Great War and the great emancipation of men and beast still in recent memory, why would one of the rare and powerful Huntsman have the mark of a bonded servant on himself?

But the truth was… complex.

The average human for most of history rarely lived past his twenties, so conventional wisdom went. But that was always an aggregate of life expectancy. Most people in history died as children. If you lived past that, your forties or even sixties weren't hard to reach. Doubly so if you had your Aura to knit your sagging, torn-up flesh back together time and time again. If he died here at forty-three years in the flesh, that'd be an average lifespan. Over three thousand years, one way or another.

73.

The number of faces who'd stared back at Ozpin in the mirror. The number of times he'd marked himself just to keep track since the bronze age. The number of mothers he'd forgotten, the families he'd lost, and the times he'd been denied release of the death all men but him were promised by birthright.

The Number burning a hole in his shoulder.

Ozpin could do nothing but let the tattoo fester on his arm as he stared numbly at the footage on his scroll.

"Only I can hear your prayers here, sweet children. And I am afraid I shall not answer them."

Officially speaking, tapping scrolls and electronic communications was illegal without a warrant. That was the official government policy, and in an abstract way Beacon was part of the royal government. But that only applied to private citizens and their private devices. Every student at Beacon was given a scroll and a call plan free of charge. The same went for the other academies. Which meant that every single scroll a student had, everything they texted or looked up was a matter of record that the headmaster and certain relevant professors could examine. It was all spelled out very explicitly in the privacy agreement that every student legally claimed they read and agreed to when first booting up their scroll. The official policy was that it allowed the staff to monitor students' health, making note of their Auras, their locations, and other things that would be useful to keep them alive out in the field.

In practice, it usually meant Glynda and Ozpin sometimes had to look a student in the eyes and try to pretend like they didn't know what their penis looked like.

The video came from Velvet Scarlatina's scroll. The V in Team CFVY. He had been trying to keep abreast of the students he had sent to Montluçon since the entire city exploded, and getting this video meant that she was back in the network, meaning she was alive. He could monitor her Aura and confirm that. It didn't take much digging from there to locate them on a map, and Team BASS as well, separated and looking worse for wear, but most certainly alive. Really, that had been his original intention, locating his students so he could coordinate efforts to find and keep them safe, not spying on their cloud storage. Until somebody had texted him this very video.

One of his allies close to Kieran LaChance had reported the Monster of Montluçon getting his hands on this video. A video of two dying teams deep underground, a conversation with a strange blonde girl Ozpin couldn't help but feel was eerily familiar, and Jaune Arc bringing that magical feather to an old altar. The architecture was ancient. It didn't belong in this time period. It belonged in the place he was from. But the questions about ancient archeology didn't really matter. What mattered was that someone was apparently tapping his CCTS tower, saw the video, and forwarded it to LaChance one way or the other.

Ozpin thought about the soldiers who were stationed on campus to repair and do maintenance on the tower. And he thought about Jaune Arc, who pulled weekend shifts there as a form of detention, and so had had intimate access to the network. The same boy who had done something and brought about her appearance. Too many things were lining up, and right now he didn't know what to make of it. Nothing except to just watch it happen helplessly.

He felt numb. As if someone had opened a pit in his stomach, and he was falling into it. Tumbling end over end into an abyss that never seemed to stop. Because at least if there was ground, he could splatter into it and maybe die.

Before him, on the television live streams from his various monitors, he watched the rest of the world fall apart.

Team VYPR, especially Ruby Rose, defending General James Ironwood from a crowd. Trying to escort him to safety to his airship as the entire city turned into a panicked riot, looting stores, burning property, and refusing to heed the curfew. Montluçon becoming a battleground between soldiers and Grimm, with official Huntsmen from Vale hours away, and military units from outside the city converging on its location. Reports of agitated Grimm and smaller attacks all throughout the region.

Parliament was no better. It looked about ready to turn into a street brawl. Of the five-hundred-seventy-six members of the House of Commons, fully one third of them were reported dead or missing in Montluçon, mostly from centrist Tories. While the Conservative Party continued to have legislative dominance in Damecrown, the little white dots on screen representing Union-Labor MPs were nearly equal. The ominous black dots showing everyone who was missing loomed in the center between them and the Tories' blue dots. No one could agree to anything, between how to deal with the massive riot, Grimm, or Montluçon. A huge number of the people currently arguing in parliament, like Kieran LaChance, were only present through hologram. A majority of MPs were local to Vale or Patch; only representatives from distant places like Eranstan, Vytal, or Graad tended to use holograms.

He watched the entire government paralyzed with inaction and factionalism. Ozpin poured himself a glass of bourbon.

He watched the Whites' leader, Twinred Sokolov in his Szolacs jacket, accuse the government of treason for allowing Atlas into Vale, claim he and his party would personally end the riots in violation of constitutional convention, and then storm out of the House of Commons. Ozpin ignited a cigarette.

He watched the remaining Tories pass a vote of no confidence to remove his friend and ally, Martin Gladstone, from the position of Prime Minister. And as a frantic Gladstone rang Ozpin's scroll, he let it go to voicemail, and took his first pull of alcohol.

Cheeks rosy, he laughed mirthlessly as the surviving Tories rallied behind the Monster of Montluçon, voting the colonial hologram to leadership of the party and de facto prime minister, and watched as a man who mistrusted Ozpin and knew of Salem took control of the government. Ozpin exhaled smoke into his third glass of bourbon to flavor it.

"Ozpin!" Glynda shouted in a panic. He hadn't even noticed her arrival in his office. She'd always been able to run even in high heels, something that no matter how many faces Ozpin wore, he'd never been able to master. There was once a time when high heels were male fashion.

She rushed to his side, a tablet in her hands, and quickly looked at the screens he was watching. Her eyes fell down on his scroll, and the video that kept repeating of Salem.

"I believe I have miscalculated terribly," he said mildly, smoke rolling through his teeth.

Glynda looked at him for a moment that seemed to last eternities. She didn't need to be told what was going on. The woman had been by his side for over two decades. She knew more than most anybody else. But what she knew and what she thought she knew were two entirely separate matters. He didn't know what he'd do if he lost her because of the truth.

Weakly, he offered her his tumbler of bourbon. She gave him a look that could wither away the balls of lesser men, men who were still capable of fearing for their lives, and backhanded him across the face.

"Get that away from me!" she hissed, grabbing him. He dropped his bourbon, the alcohol spilling across his suit.

Ozpin blinked, moving his hand up slowly to rub the mark on his cheek. "I thought we agreed years ago it was better for both of us to keep our hands off each other."

Glynda looked down at him, adjusting her glasses, and gave him the barest hint of a smile that was all teeth. "Please. I'm not attracted to bad decisions anymore."

He picked up his glass and put it on his desk, tossing his cigarette into it. "Attracted, no. But still making them. After all, here you still are." He shrugged with one hand.

Glynda rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I know. I miss the simple days when the only messes we were cleaning up were mine."

"Those were far more entertaining," he said, his eyes going to live news feeds from Montluçon and Huntsmen staging grounds here in the city. "The world didn't try to end nearly as many times."

"I don't know about that one," she said, crossing her arms and watching the screens with him. "I like to believe I died that night of the school dance when we spiked the punch bowl and I threw up in the middle of the building and everyone saw. Everything that followed has been a persistent, ongoing nightmare."

He eyed his decanter of bourbon mournfully. "I'm glad to see I've been a permanent fixture of that nightmare ever since."

She sighed, running her hands through her hair. "Don't be. Knowing you has kept me consistently traumatized on a daily basis."

Ozpin looked down at the video repeating on his scroll. "I believe I have an ex or two who would agree with you."

"Why am I not surprised?"

"Because you know me."

"Hm," she said, and nothing more. They both continued in silence, watching Vale come undone before them in real time. From the soldiers in Montluçon, to the socialists now attempting to resolve the riots to merely only target foreign owned businesses, to scenes of BASS and CFVY struggling to make it through a war torn city.

"So what do we do?" Ozpin finally said.

Glynda cocked an eyebrow. "You're asking me?"

"I value your ability to tell me what I'm doing is stupid," he said, licking his teeth.

"That requires you to first be doing something," she said. "I'm afraid I'm not much help when you're about to perform your best Qrow imitation."

He drummed his fingers on the desk. "Is he assisting the attack in Montluçon?"

Glynda picked up her tablet and looked at it. "No. He's still in Patch at the moment. Professor Port was the official liaison for Team CFVY on their mission. He's currently in charge of whatever Huntsmen happen to respond to the all-call mission. I've sent him the children's scroll data to track and rescue."

Ozpin tapped his fingers harder, lost in thought. "And James?"

She gestured to one of the live feeds, showing Team VYPR arriving with the general to his docked airship and its accompanying troopers. It was hard to miss the people who watched them go by, jeering and occasionally throwing things at him and the escort. He shuddered to imagine just how terribly it must look for Taiyang's kids out there.

"I somehow doubt the people are going to look favorably at anything he does, helpful or otherwise," she said.

"Contact him all the same. We've lost our strongest ally in Damecrown," he said. "The new government isn't going to ask for help and look weak. Ask him to provide escort and any other services to Montluçon and the Huntsmen going out there. We might be able to salvage some goodwill out of this debacle."

"Even if that makes politics worse? We're acting independently here. That doesn't bode well for what should be a politically neutral academy."

He took a breath. "Normally, I'd care. But right now, we've just witnessed the entire government collapse and reform around someone known as a monster. We're sitting on the largest collection of professionally trained Huntsmen in one solid location anywhere in the city, and they answer to me. I could hardly give less of a damn right now about political handwringing when my students are in danger." He sat up a little more straight. "While we're at it, request the assistance of any and all professors on hand able to help. We're going to need all the manpower we can get to solve this situation and get those kids out."

Glynda nodded approvingly. "Consider it done."

"And get Doc Croaker out of bed or wherever that old mercenary is," he said. "Tell him to get the intensive care units ready. If not for the students when we recover them, then for anyone else who gets hurt out there. Offer our services to anyone. From the riot, Montluçon, anyone."

She tapped on her tablet, nodding. "And then?"

He looked down at his scroll, and finally touched it to make the video pause. It ended on the screen of Jaune touching the altar and summoning an image of Salem. An action which couldn't have been accidental. It had to have been deliberate. Ozpin had seen the feather, had sensed the magical potential inside of it, and he hadn't known had to act. He had continued to let the boy amble around in the CCTS Tower because the soldiers there hadn't minded him, and now the video had leaked from within, and it was a miracle that only the ultranationalists in Parliament had gotten their hands on it instead of it spreading like wildfire on VidTube. Now Ozpin saw what the feather must have been for.

Throughout all the chaos, all the uncertainty, things were starting to come together in his head.

He looked at the world collapsing around him, and knew Jaune Arc was somehow in the center of it. From this video getting to LaChance, to the burning of Montluçon, to the way the boy had consistently worked to make ties with and undermine Ozpin's influence over the most prominent students in Beacon.

"And then we do what we do best," Ozpin told her. "We improvise."

The truth was, Ozpin needed to do everything in his power to save Teams CFVY and BASS. He needed to debrief them and truly understand what Jaune had done to them. Try to guide them to less destructive interpretations of anything they had learned. And because he needed Jaune Arc back under his thumb if he wanted to finally confront the boy and get the answers to the rest of his myriad little questions ever since the magical pulse months ago that had knocked out everyone with an activated Aura. He needed to focus on what he could control, what he could save, and what he could destroy to stop Salem in her tracks.

Ozpin needed to finally confront the boy and cut the head of this hydra once and for all.

After all, if it saved the world, what was one more dead child to a man like him?