The night of the Amity attack, Weiss couldn't stop remembering the words. She turned them over and over in her head so many times, twisting and squeezing, wringing every last drop of meaning from them until they were nothing more than sounds.

"Glad to see. Glad to see. Glad to see."

They'd been slightly tinny over the scroll. She could still hear them, every little detail, the minute pauses between and the way his tone pitched and fell as he said them. Weiss gritted her teeth and clenched her blankets in her fists, shuddering at the rasp of cloth over her newly growing feathers.

"Finally. Finally."

It felt like chasing a high, or maybe picking at a wound. Because she hadn't really earned them—they were a mistake. She'd practically stolen them. He'd congratulated her for fighting Ilia and winning. She'd fought Ilia and lost.

But what was she supposed to say? That she'd failed? That she'd been completely at the mercy of a White Fang operative? That she'd done the only thing she could do with her sword still at Beacon and revealed her deepest secret, in the hope that they weren't so different after all? That it had worked?

Absolutely not.

She didn't deserve them, but she took them anyway. Took them and swallowed them and felt them settle into a hollow between her ribs.

"I'm glad to see you're finally behaving like a Schnee."

It was hard to stop wanting things when they were impossible—and much, much harder when they weren't.

Their first sign that something strange was going on was when they got a message on all three of their scrolls, asking them to meet a lawyer for the prosecution of Taurus—on General Ironwood's flagship. It came sooner than Ozpin had told them to expect, because the trial wasn't in a few weeks as he'd assumed. Instead, Atlas' council had voted to hold it in just a week, in the Atlesian courthouse.

Even considering the odd circumstances, lawyers were lawyers. Weiss expected the meeting itself to be boring. Then they opened the door to a cry of, "If it isn't the heroes of Amity!" and she had to tamp down on her instinct to turn on her heel and walk right back out again. But this trial was important, even if it was practically guaranteed that Taurus would lose, and she forced herself to stand straight and meet the lawyer's enthusiasm with a tight smile.

She beamed back at them, introducing herself as Malta Meringue and gesturing to the two others in the room. Weiss recognized General Ironwood immediately, though the man standing next to him took a second longer to place. He held a hand out for them, smiling much more naturally than the lawyer. "Clover Ebi," he said, making a point to shake with each of them.

Weiss felt a little lightheaded as he dropped her hand. She had not woken up this morning expecting to meet the leader of the Ace Ops—since when were they even in Vale? Had they been called out for extra security on Taurus, maybe?

He was nothing like she'd expected—which, admittedly, had been a slightly older male version of Winter. His wide grin radiated so much friendliness it was nearly blinding. "Nice to meet you all!"

"It certainly is!" agreed Meringue, clapping her hands together. "And I must say, Blake—can I call you Blake, dear?" She didn't wait for an answer. "It's so wonderful to have you out there setting an example!"

Blake's ears pinned back. She wasn't sure why—Meringue was a bit... grating, maybe, but she certainly wasn't being sarcastic. Weiss doubted she knew how.

"Let's talk strategy," the general said, taking a seat at the head of a small conference table that looked like it had been squeezed into the office as an afterthought. "We have camera footage of Taurus on Amity at the time of the attack, so it won't be difficult to prove he was there. What we need is to show is his intent, which is where you four come in—"

"Actually," Blake broke in, "I had a question, before we start."

"Of course. That's what this meeting is all about, so that you know what to expect when we get to the trial."

"Why take him to Atlas?"

"Taurus nearly committed a massacre the likes of which Remnant hasn't seen since the Great War. He has to be punished. Not just for him, but to send a clear message that we won't allow one man to disrupt the peace our ancestors worked so hard to create."

"I know he needs to be punished," said Blake. "He's done terrible things. But he did those terrible things in Vale."

Weiss frowned. "What does it matter where he stands trial? I'd rather talk about how we make sure he's convicted."

"Well, I wouldn't worry about that," Clover broke in. "We've got it in the bag. It's just a question of sentencing at this point."

Ironwood nodded. "I've always held Vale's justice system in the highest respect, but in circumstances like these we can't afford to show any leniency."

"You want to execute him," Blake said bluntly.

Wait. "Vale doesn't have the death penalty?"

All three of her teammates turned to stare at her. "Uh, no?" said Yang. "How do you not know that?"

"When would that have come up?"

"Yes," Ironwood broke in, with a warning edge to his voice. "That is part of why I think the trial would be best handled in Atlas. I'd have accepted Mistral as well, but with all the recent corruption scandals... we need a verdict people can trust."

Blake made an odd noise in the back of her throat. "Right. So you decided to interfere in Vale's justice system, to make sure that you controlled the trial. And to make extra sure everyone would trust it, you had to push it through in half the time it should have taken, which definitely has nothing to do with the fact that my parents are coming from Menagerie and might oppose all of this."

Clover frowned. "Look, don't you want him punished? He tried to kill you."

"That's not the point!"

"How is that not the point?"

Blake lurched to her feet and glowered at all three of them across the table. "Because I can't help but be skeptical that he would have gotten this much special attention if he wasn't a faunus," she snapped, "and that doesn't magically become okay just because it happens to be working in my favor for once. He's guilty. He's obviously guilty, you caught him on camera. He'd get convicted in Vale. There's no reason to take him to Atlas, except to remind him and everyone else like him to get in their place!"

Before anyone could react, except with stunned silence, Blake turned on her heel and stormed out of the office.

"Well," Meringue sniffed, after several despondent seconds. "That was rude."

"So. Um." Ruby pushed her seat back, wincing when it screeched a little. "We're gonna go after her."

Ironwood scowled. "We need to discuss strategy," he insisted, "If Miss Belladonna won't testify—"

"That's not what she said," Weiss insisted, as she followed Yang and Ruby to the door. "We'll talk to her."

They found her pacing back and forth in the ship's hallway, drawing suspicious looks from passing soldiers and engineers. "Let's just go," she said, when she saw them.

Weiss stared at Blake incredulously. "What? We're supposed to be talking strategy. To lock up the man who just tried to murder you, and Yang, and an entire stadium full of people!"

"Yes," Blake shot back. "While getting caught on security cameras. He wasn't trying to hide, he never does, he's already wanted in three kingdoms! We don't need strategy to get him convicted. The strategy is for getting the most out of the spectacle."

Frustrated, Weiss put her hands on her hips and said, "Oh, right, because clearly we should walk into the trial completely unprepared and wing the entire thing."

"That's not what I meant."

"Then what do you mean?"

"I meant I don't trust Ironwood!" Blake burst out. "I don't trust any of this. It reeks of someone manipulating the system to make a point, and I don't want any part in that."

"But he did it!" Weiss flailed her hands in sheer, helpless annoyance. "You saw him do it! You said he's the one giving orders to the Vale branch! You know he's guilty!"

She sighed. "Weiss, the last thing I want is for him to go free—he'd come after me the second he got the chance. But that's just not going to happen. He's been the most wanted criminal in Vale for almost two years, if they'd just let his trial go through here..."

"So?" Weiss prompted. "Why does it matter so much that it doesn't happen in Atlas?"

She wasn't sure what she'd expected—but Blake starting to tick fingers certainly wasn't it. "Atlas' legal system is infamous for being unfair towards faunus, which means a lot of us will think the trial is illegitimate, especially when there's this much obvious tampering. Interfering with Vale's authority like that is going to make a lot of people angry just on principal. Killing him will make him a martyr to a lot of the White Fang, which means more people like him coming into power. Also, this is an awful precedent to set and it's going to be a nightmare every time someone commits a crime on Amity. And I don't know what point Ironwood is trying to make, but the point plenty of humans will hear is that it's time to start killing faunus they suspect of being part of the White Fang." Blake ran out of fingers on her right hand and raised an eyebrow. "I could keep going."

"Please don't." Weiss folded her arms defensively across her chest. "I just... I don't understand how you can talk about legal precedent when he tried to kill you both."

Blake hugged her arms around her stomach. "Honestly? Part of me is scared he might escape. It's not... rational, really, but it's there. And maybe I wouldn't feel that way anymore if he was..." She trailed off, then rallied. "I'm talking about legal precedent because my feelings are complicated right now. I don't know how I feel about them killing him, if I'm relieved or upset or... I just don't know. All I know is that I believe manipulating the laws about Amity to bring him to a place where he won't get a fair trial and then executing him is wrong."

Weiss had no logical argument against that. She still didn't agree.

"Weiss," Ruby said carefully, "why are you so worried about the trial? Even General Ironwood said there's no way he's going to get away."

"Are you joking?"

"No? I'm upset too, Weiss, but I know nobody's going to let him near Blake or my sister again, so—"

"That's not enough." Her hands shook. "That man spent years terrorizing Vale. He murdered people. He murdered board members. He's everything that made the White Fang what they are now, everything I had to learn not to be. And then, he tried—" Her throat tightened, and she had to spit the rest of the words, "He tried to kill two of my teammates. I don't want him in prison. I want him dead."

She flinched a little when Yang wrapped an arm around her. "Look," she said softly. "You're hurting. That makes sense. And you're right. He's awful." She shot Blake an apologetic smile. "I can't honestly say I'd mourn him, because I wouldn't. But the thing is, Weiss... he hurt Blake a lot more than he hurt you and me. So I think we should let her take the lead on this. Okay?"

Weiss' skin crawled with the memory of how he'd talked, in the very brief time she'd been there to listen. She might know very little about romance—absolutely all of it gleaned from some combination of Blake, Yang, and Blake's books—but even she knew that the words my love should not sound like a threat. If anyone had the right to kill him...

Her shoulders slumped. "Okay."

Yang ruffled her hair, then reached out and snagged Blake with the other arm, squishing them together and kissing the top of her head. "See?" she said. "Whatever happens, we're in this togeth—ow, Ruby, what the hell?"

"You started the group hug," Ruby said defensively, as she hung off Yang's shoulder.

"And you elbowed me right in the boob!"

"Heh. Boob."

Somewhere behind them, a man cleared his throat. They jumped and whirled around, and found Clover leaning against the wall. "Figured I'd give you all a minute to talk," he said. "But you looked like you were done."

Blake glanced to either side, meeting each of their eyes in turn, and nodded. "We're ready."

Weiss spent the meeting scribbling notes, keeping track of General Ironwood's plan for the trial as best she could. The legal terminology was a bit beyond her, but she got the gist—Taurus was to be tried only for his worst crimes, without tacking on an endless list of minor offenses that would only dilute their impact. Between bombings, arsons, and murders... there were a lot of them to choose from. She watched Blake, sometimes, as the general listed them. Saw her curl herself smaller and smaller, her hand hidden under the table, clamped like a vice around Yang's wrist.

Her concentration started to slip. Every new detail she learned turned her stomach, until all she could think about was how close he'd been, how he'd talked to Blake, how her parents had gone back to Menagerie when she was only fourteen. All she could focus on was Blake's ears, pinned back like she was in pain.

And Weiss had gotten into an argument with her, because she was angry. No... that wasn't it. She was still angry with Taurus, and would happily stay that way until the day she died. But this wasn't about her being angry, it was about Blake—and she'd been too tangled up in her own feral temper to notice.

She was still doing it. Knowing General Ironwood's strategy was even more important if they were going to dismantle it, and she wasn't paying attention. Weiss clenched a fist in her lap and forced herself to listen to what he was saying. To write down what they needed to know. To shut off everything else and focus.

She'd given them all enough reasons to give up on her today.

When the meeting ended, she broke away from her team on the way back to Beacon. Yang already had Blake tucked under her arm, murmuring reassurances into her ears. She could give comfort in a way Weiss just... couldn't.

So she went to the library and gathered a heap of books—about Atlesian law, mostly, though she picked up one from Vale just in case. And a copy of the Vytal treaty, to see if anyone had bothered to write down whose jurisdiction Amity coliseum was supposed to be in. Then there was her notebook from the meeting with Ironwood, and a blank one for getting started on their strategy, and color coded pens out of some feeble hope that laying all this out neatly would make it easier to manage.

She got a few odd looks from passersby in the hallway, and quite a lot more from the second-year team that watched her step outside onto the grounds. Probably because it was already dusk, with the bite of the coming autumn in the air. But she needed privacy for this, so she found a small bench behind a stand of trees, out of sight from the Academy itself, and took out her scroll.

Weiss tried calling the courthouse in Atlas to find out who Taurus' lawyer was. She tried the public defenders' office. She even tried to contact the man himself—though she highly doubted that would have worked even if they had let her call him. In the end, she had only one option left that she could think of.

She pulled up a contact on her scroll that had gone untouched for years, and sent a single message.

— I need to know who is representing Taurus in court.

The reply came within minutes.

— Fennec Albain and Corsac Albain.

And then, after a long moment,

— Weiss, I

She shut her scroll without reading it and paced back and forth on the lawn, taking steadying breaths. Then she opened it again, to track down the Albains. Her eyebrows shot up. They were both licensed, but she couldn't find any sign of them practicing anywhere in the last decade. Both were members of the White Fang—Weiss' heart nearly jumped right out of her mouth before she noticed that it specified they were part of the Menagerie branch. She hadn't even known there was a Menagerie branch.

More frantic searching revealed that the White Fang in Menagerie had been in the news exactly twice over the past decade. Once when Ghira Belladonna—and wow, Blake's father was enormous—became the honorary head of the branch when he was elected chieftain. And once just two days ago when they'd published a denunciation of the attack on Amity.

Alright. Alright, it looked like that part of the White Fang was more or less just a poorly-named branch of Menagerie's government. This was fine. The actual White Fang wouldn't send lawyers to help Taurus, would they? It wasn't as though these two would be able to get him off the hook through some esoteric legal trickery when they'd literally never practiced law in Atlas before. If this was the White Fang's big gambit it was laughably stupid.

She turned on her scroll's flashlight feature, scribbled down the Albains' contact information in her clean notebook, and flipped the page. Then she opened the first of her stack of books and read while the moon rose, too focused on what was right in front of her to notice her aching neck or her aching wings.

There had been too many lucky mistakes in her life, these last few weeks. Ruby's, Yang's, Blake's. Father's. Too many words given under false pretenses—and too many hugs and hair-ruffles. It was time she started earning them.