Be warned: chapter contains goatboy.
The days before the trial passed in a frenetic blur.
Weiss only dimly registered what was happening in Beacon—the transfers from other schools had been offered a choice between sticking around for a couple of weeks while the coliseum was repaired, and going back to their home kingdoms until the festival reopened. Sun and Neptune chose to stay. So did Penny, according to Ruby, but she was overruled.
The thing about trying to stop the execution of the most obviously guilty man to walk into an Atlesian courthouse in decades was that it was exactly as difficult as it sounded. Weiss didn't even bother trying to figure out a way to stop the conviction itself, because that was a foregone conclusion and it would be an even worse disaster if they succeeded. No. What she needed was precedent. Another defendant, preferably a human one, with a similar enough list of crimes, who hadn't faced the worst penalty Atlas had to offer.
Blake tried to help, but she often had to stop halfway through. She would come back hours later, a little quieter and a little jumpier, try again and leave again. Weiss had no idea how to help with that. So she trusted Yang to handle it, while she hunted through hundreds of pages of old legal documents for a worse person than Taurus, and Ruby kept in contact with his lawyers.
It was a good thing, too, because Weiss was not good at dealing with the Albains. Her first impression of them was that they would have done very well in the upper circles of Atlas, if they had ever been allowed to participate in them. She distinguished them at first by ears and tail, and then by the fact that Corsac called everything Taurus had ever done "regrettable" while Fennec preferred to talk about the "hard decisions" he had to make. She expected they probably hated her, but they were so oily it was difficult to tell.
After several days of research, just when she'd finally managed to make some modicum of progress, Yang pulled Weiss away from her stack of books. "You need to get some sleep," she said. And then, before Weiss could protest, "I made Blake promise she'd go to bed if you did."
"Fine," she said grudgingly. "Just let me write this down." Yang waited with her—which was annoying, but admittedly fair—while Weiss scribbled down a note about a disgraced scientist who had apparently committed treason and tried to murder the kingdom's entire research and development team in a fit of pique. With good behavior, his sentence would be over in about thirty years.
Every night from then on, Yang made the same deal and shooed her into bed at the same time. Weiss might have been annoyed by the delays, except that she didn't actually care what happened to Taurus—she cared about Blake, who could definitely use the extra sleep.
This might have solved the problem, in theory, but there was only so much anyone could do to get Blake from in bed to asleep. Weiss often woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of bedsprings creaking as she tossed and turned. The noise stopped on the night she started sleeping in Yang's bunk, curled up on her side with her face buried in the crook of her neck. According to Ruby, cuddling up to Yang was the single best cure for insomnia in the world—Weiss would have to take her word for it—but eventually even that wasn't enough.
The night before the trial, Weiss was pulled out of a shallow doze by a sharp intake of breath. "Sorry," Blake whispered. "Go back to sleep."
Weiss was confused for a moment—she hadn't really moved, so she wasn't sure how Blake knew she was conscious. But then she realized that Yang was moving, mostly to try and wrap an arm around Blake's middle as she sat up. Calling her awake might have been a bit of a stretch. She turned over, her hand flopping over the side of the bed as Blake hopped to the floor and went for her bookshelf. She didn't bother turning on any lights.
"I know you have night vision," Weiss whispered, "but that still can't be good for your eyes."
Blake winced. "Did I wake you up?"
"I've been thinking about tomorrow," Weiss said—which was true, except as an answer to her question. But never mind. "Here." She scooped a book off her bedside table. Another one of Blake's. She hadn't touched it in almost a week. Crossing over to the window, she lifted the shade so that a square of moonlight fell across the floor, and sat down cross-legged to read by it.
"That does make it a little easier," Blake admitted, seating herself a few feet away. "But, are you sure—?"
Weiss wasn't wearing the bindings. She glanced out the window and saw nothing but sky and the distant outline of the ballroom. "We're on the fourth floor," she said. "It's fine."
They were quiet for a while. Weiss tried to read, but the light wasn't very good—she kept accidentally skipping lines. So she mostly just sat there, staring at one page, listening to Blake's breathing. It was alarmingly fast. She glanced up, and saw that she'd curled her legs against her chest, her chin resting on her knees, her ears flat.
"Are you okay?" she whispered.
Blake shook her head. Which was a very clear answer, that left Weiss open to say... what was she supposed to say?
"Is it about tomorrow?" she asked, which was a profoundly stupid question.
Blake hugged her arms around her knees. "I don't want to see him."
"Oh."
What. Was. She. Doing?!
"And they're going to ask me all these questions, and if they do a background check..." Her fingers went white with how tightly she held herself. "I don't know how much they'll find."
Weiss groped for something, anything she could say that might make this better. Nothing came.
Blake stared at the window-pane grid of moonlight on the floor. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to dump all that on you."
"Did it help?"
"A little."
"Then I'm glad you did."
Blake managed a tiny smile. She closed her book, set it gently on her nightstand, and pulled herself back into Yang's bed. Weiss stayed on the floor a few minutes longer, staring sightlessly at the open book in her lap. Then she closed it, took a deep breath, drew the shades, and went back to sleep.
They traveled to Atlas in style. The kind of style that meant being escorted by the Ace-Ops themselves, apparently. A smiling Clover greeted them at the airfield, ushering the four of them and Headmaster Ozpin aboard. There were other witnesses, too—mainly security guards, probably including the man Weiss had found being used as a door-stopper—but they were taking a commercial flight.
If Ironwood had thought this might reassure Blake, he'd miscalculated. She was tense and jittery, her ears flat as she stared out the window of the small airship as if the Valish countryside below was the most fascinating thing she'd ever seen.
"Don't worry," said one of the operatives, a young man with a dog tail. "Sienna Khan already condemned the attack. Nobody's coming to help him, this is all just a precaution."
"If you take her word for it," muttered one of the others.
His tail drooped slightly. "You know I'm the last person who's going to defend her, I'm just saying it wouldn't make sense to do that if she was planning on breaking him out."
"Serial arson isn't the most logical thing for her to do either, but here we are!"
"Easy, Hare," Clover said, leaning casually on a bar set into the ceiling. "She can't help him without bringing even more hell down on her head, and he's not useful enough to be worth it. She's not that stupid. Really, we're just here to stand around and look pretty." He tipped them a conspiratorial wink—it was probably for the best that Blake was too busy looking outside to notice.
"It seems like your talents would be better spent looking for Ilia," Weiss said tartly.
He laughed, in the careless way of someone who had just consciously decided not to hear an insult. "Well, I'd love to. Unfortunately our intelligence says she's still in Vale—we need permission from their council to go in and look for her." He turned his friendly smile on Ozpin, who didn't even blink. "Besides, Taurus planned the operation. Dealing with him is the most important thing."
Blake curled a little closer to the window. Yang shot Weiss and Ruby a look. As one, they barraged Clover and the other Ace-Ops with the most banal questions they could think of. Well, Weiss and Yang did. Ruby mostly interrogated them about their weapons. Over their entire nine hour flight, she never ran out of steam or even appeared to slow down. Weiss wasn't sure whether to be impressed or horrified.
The three of them surrounded Blake like an honor guard on their way into the courthouse. Her ears pinned back at the sight of it—and Weiss couldn't exactly blame her. It was domed Goliath of a building made of pale marble, with a way of looming that made an observer feel tiny and insignificant. The double-doors in the front led down a wide hallway at least the length of Beacon's ballroom, flanked on either side by doors leading into various courtrooms. They headed to the very last one, at the far end of the hall, which was flanked by half a dozen soldiers.
Blake grabbed Yang's hand to steady herself and curled the other into a fist. Weiss glanced at it, hesitated, chickened out completely, and watched Ruby reach out to take it. Ozpin held the door open for them, and they walked into a room packed to the brim with people.
Taurus, thankfully, was nowhere to be seen. The judge was also absent, though there were four chairs set up behind the bench he would soon occupy. General Ironwood sat in the seat to the right of the empty one, and Weiss recognized Councilors Camilla and Sleet on the left. Meringue, the prosecutor, and the Albains occupied opposing benches. Behind them stretched rows upon rows of seats, divided halfway across the room where the witnesses ended and the spectators began. The very back was given over entirely to the media, and the two cameras in the room fixed on the four of them the moment they walked in.
She scanned the crowd as they passed, glossing over a woman who bore a suspicious resemblance to doctor Marigold before she spotted Penny. She was waving from the far end of one of the aisles, where some empty space had been left to accommodate the wheelchair of the man beside her. He smiled and tipped his hat at them. Probably Penny's father, then. Ruby waved back with both hands, dragging one of Blake's along for the ride.
The four of them clustered together on a witness bench very near the front. Blake took the spot by the aisle, her hands twisting around one another in her lap. Yang put a hand on her knee, just in time for the doors at the back of the room to open again.
Weiss knew immediately who it was. The room fell into a hush as every conversation died all at once, then erupted into dark muttering. She craned her neck to see. He was wearing the same patch over his eye, but someone had obviously given him a new set of clothes, all in neutral greys and whites. They were ill-fitting, and not just in the sense that they were far too tight at the shoulders. His hands were cuffed in front of him—illegal, usually, except for a provision exempting certain kinds of criminals with active auras.
Another half-dozen soldiers escorted him down the central aisle, where he would pass by their row on Ozpin's side instead of theirs. Even so, Blake tensed up the closer he got, her shoulders going rigid when he slowed to a stop less than ten feet away.
"Move," snapped one of the soldiers.
He looked at Blake. "You're here." And then, when another soldier shoved the butt of her gun into his back, "Let's see how long it takes for you to run away." They hustled him forward, grabbing him by both arms and dumping him unceremoniously in the seat beside his lawyers.
Not long afterwards, there was the final call to rise for the judge, who strode in with the air of someone beginning an unpleasant chore he was looking forward to getting over with. He sat down and read off the charges. It was a long list, crowned by the most recent attempt to knock Amity Coliseum out of the sky. "How do you plead?"
"Not guilty." He stood up, prompting one of the soldiers to point a gun at his back, and turned to glare in Blake's direction. "I refuse to lie down and die so you cowards can forget about me." Corsac Albain pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered something to his brother, who nodded and scribbled down a note.
"Our client has been given no incentive to submit a guilty plea," Fennec said. "If the state is so desperate for blood, it will have to make its case... and face its own complicity in this tragedy." An angry ripple passed through the room. Weiss could see eyes narrowing along the judge's bench, and caught a snatch of incredulous swearing coming from a spectator.
"You are on very thin ice, Mr. Albain," the judge said coldly. "This was a malicious and premeditated attack on thousands of innocents. Blaming the court for your client's actions is in poor taste."
Corsac nodded to Taurus. He reached up with his cuffed hands and ripped off the eyepatch. There were sharp intakes of breath from the very front of the room, a jolt of shock that spread as he swept around to face the gathered crowd. Brandishing the mark of the SDC someone had burned into his face.
Weiss' scar itched.
"You're all here to judge me. You." He spat on the floor. "You bloodsucking leeches who break our bodies in the dark to line your own pockets. You spineless scum that sit on your hands and do nothing." His lip curled. "I don't care if you kill me. My only regret is that I can't take every single one of you with me."
Silence fell. A heavy, uncomfortable silence, one that set Weiss' stomach churning. Her hands were shaking almost as badly as Blake's. She felt like dry tinder staring down a bonfire. An inch closer, and she was sure she would catch.
Meringue cleared her throat. "Are you sure that was meant to be a not guilty plea, Mr. Taurus?" she asked sweetly.
The tension snapped. Laughter broke out in the assembled crowd, and Weiss clenched both fists. She glanced around, trying to memorize faces—but there were just too many of them. Even General Ironwood chuckled.
There was a nervous undercurrent to it, and he was being dramatic to the point of absurdity. She knew why they were laughing. But when he surged towards the prosecutor and had to be restrained by his half-dozen soldiers, when he thrashed in their grip and screamed curses until spittle flew from his mouth, when they kept laughing...
She hated them as if they'd been laughing at her.
"Enough," the General called out, slamming a hand on the desk in front of him. "Mr. Taurus, if you can't get a hold of yourself—"
"Shut up!" He wrenched his head from side to side, his eyes wild, flickering feverishly from face to face. Weiss' heart leaped into her throat. She realized exactly what he was doing—he was searching for a mug, a plate of pancakes with chocolate chips in the shape of the words We're Sorry, a sketch of a pair of pristine wings. Something, anything he still had the power to hurt.
It didn't take long for him to find what he was looking for.
"Is this what you wanted, my darling?" he demanded. "Was hurting me really worth abandoning our cause?"
This time, when stunned silence descended on the courtroom, nobody laughed. They all looked where he was looking, dozens of pairs of eyes all fixing on Blake trembling in her seat. She lurched to her feet.
"Miss Belladonna," Ironwood blurted. He didn't sound angry—at least, not yet. He sounded like he was trying to reconcile this unhinged rant with everything he already knew, and was teetering on the verge of drawing a horrible conclusion. "What—"
Blake dissolved into shadow.
Yang lurched into the aisle, shouting her name—she was already halfway down the room, bolting past wide-eyed spectators. One of the soldiers raised his gun, and Ozpin barked, "Stand down!" and that was the last clear thing that could be heard before the crowd erupted into pandemonium.
Weiss scrambled off the bench, not to chase after Blake herself but to get out of the way, because Ruby couldn't use her semblance when she was stuck between them and the Headmaster. Then there was a rush of wind and the scent of roses, and Weiss and Yang were pelting after her, ignoring the confused shouts and calls for someone to catch the White Fang girl, damn it!
They burst through the doors and bolted down the length of that long hallway, and found Ruby just outside turning in helpless circles. Blake was already gone.
"Absolutely not," Weiss decided.
Yang grabbed her arm, her face lighting up with desperate hope. "Can you find her?"
A month ago, the answer would have been no. She'd spent the better part of seventeen years doing everything she could to ignore her sense of smell. They were in a city, and like all cities the scents of Atlas were overwhelming. Food and Dust and steel, sweat and trash and everything Atlas liked to pretend it didn't have, all of it crowded around in her head until it swam. She would have had a hard time finding just about anything.
But she wasn't looking for anything. She was looking for Blake. This wasn't Ilia, someone Weiss had encountered only once and tried to find by memory alone. This was someone she lived with, a scent as familiar to her now as her own. So she screwed her eyes shut and breathed in. And when instinct told her to go left, she followed it.