Team RWBY & friends: What? Nooo, we love all our Ozluminati friends equally. Ozpin, Glynda, Qrow, and *squints at smudged writing on hand* Jerkbag Iwouldn't.
"Ah, man."
Roman stretched in luxurious satisfaction from where he sat in the warehouse office, one of the classiest rooms that the dumpy building managed to provide. There was even a padded chair, albeit on squeaky wheels.
"Nothing like a plan coming off successfully, right Neo?"
His partner nodded from her place sitting in the corner with both feet propped up on a crate, tongue stuck between her teeth as she gently polished the inner blade of Hush.
"I mean, I had those animals practically eating out of my hand. No offense."
Neo looked up from her weapon and raised an eyebrow. Neither of them were Faunus.
"You get what I mean, Neo." He then grinned and puffed contently on his cigar. "Oh, I've missed this. I told Cinder that Little Red was a fluke, but no, she's got to question our competence left and right. Please, like I could be seriously inconvenienced by some snot-nosed brat more than once. I mean, can you imagine me actually struggling to deal with just one kid?"
I don't have to imagine.
"Damn straight you don't!" Roman jabbed the glowing end of the cigar at her, looking smug. "Heck, even if she brought her whole damn team, plus extras, we could thrash 'em easily."
Neo nodded absently, no longer really paying attention as she ran cloth down the glistening metal of her rapier.
"Well, the Paladins are delivered and the White Fang are pleased, which means we did our job right, which means Cinder'll be pleased –or at least she'll get off our backs a bit. All in all, a successful night, wouldn't you say?"
She nodded again.
"And not an interfering brat in sight." Roman sighed in deepest satisfaction. "Speaking of interference, have we heard from our friends yet on the… flip side?"
Neo finally looked up from Hush's blade.
Even though they'd normally be crashing in on a lot of our activities to try and follow leads back to Cinder, they've agreed to back off and consolidate their own plans. I've updated them on our schedule as far as we know it, and they want us to let them know if Cinder changes anything.
"And you're sure-"
Neo raised her eyebrow at him. Roman sighed and held up both hands like he was at gunpoint.
"Alright, alright, sorry. Can't help it, you know, what with the whole life-on-the-line thing and whatnot."
They plan to do something on the night she infiltrates the Beacon CCT, so we should probably have a sparkling clean alibi for whatever we're doing that night and why we're too busy to help.
A slow grin spread across Roman's face.
"Y'know, this is why you're the only partner I trust." he said, giving her a little nod. "How about an early jaunt out to Mountain Glenn, since it's such an important location and all? Not our fault if something goes wrong and she can't call us in, since the signal's so spotty. And it'd be such a shame if we didn't clear out the tunnels in time for the White Idiots to show up."
Neo smirked in silent satisfaction.
A collection of jagged swords whirled in a perfect arc, hissing softly as the razor-sharp edges sliced through the air in harmony. That elegant, venomous hiss was suddenly interrupted by a harsh clang as the line of swords hit a kite-shaped white shield, grinding and clattering against its obdurate surface as Jaune skidded sideways just a little from the combined force.
He kept his feet, though, and with a mighty shove he shrugged through the force of Penny's strike and swept his sword downwards. The strings that she used to control Floating Array were coated in a special amalgamation of Dust to reinforce their strength, making it impossible to cut through with just one sweep, but that wasn't Jaune's aim –he tangled his sword around the loosened strings and jerked, pulling Penny off balance for long enough for him to lunge forwards, inside her range.
Penny, undaunted, resettled herself firmly on both feet and prepared to meet him, arching her knee in to slam it against his uplifted shield with a resounding boom. Her fist shot over the rim of the shield, aiming for his face, but Jaune craned his body to the side to avoid her hit.
Several meters away, there was a pop and whizz as Scarlet shot the grappling part of Hook towards the high ceiling, yanking himself out of the Aura-boosted slash from Gambol Shroud. Blake was quick to follow, hurling her shifted weapon upwards and tugging sharply on the ribbon as she launched herself off after him. At the peak of her arc, she somersaulted to bring down all her momentum and force with a strike from Gambol Shroud's cleaver-like sheath as Scarlet twisted frantically midair to block.
The force of her strike knocked him off-course, and Blake landed with catlike precision on the far wall, frozen in a gravity-defying moment as she yanked Gambol Shroud from the ceiling before pouncing at him again. Scarlet detached Hook and spun it to face the barrel towards her as he sank into a freefall, peppering Blake with shots as they both plunged rapidly towards the ground.
He flipped just before they landed, however, sticking the flintlock pistol back in his belt with the same move, and hit the floor in a fluid crouch before he lunged forward to swing his cutlass for her neck. Surrounded by the slithering fall of Gambol Shroud and its ribbon as she yanked it from its support again, Blake nevertheless moved to meet him, spinning as she did to turn aside the blow with her sheath, before her katana landed in her outstretched other hand and she could use it to block his returning backhand.
The familiar sounds of their ensuing swordplay drew Sage's attention slightly away from his opponent, a move that cost him as Weiss blasted a cloud of Dust in his direction, frosting him from head to toe.
"Pay attention!" she barked as he shivered beneath his Aura, not even deigning to notice Sun as she pelted the monkey Faunus with larger lumps of concentrated ice with a flick of her sword and a shimmer of her Semblance. "You can't win all your fights by smashing things with that slab of overcompensation you call a broadsword!"
"It's not overcompensation." Sage mumbled, wiping away some of the frost crusting his forehead as he hefted the aforementioned weapon.
"And you," Weiss said, her family's glyph blooming into pale, glowing existence as several of them blocked repeated flicks from Ilia's crackling whip. "You have the opposite problem. Your weapon's built to paralyze and incapacitate your opponents, but you need to be able to do more than give them a moment's pause! Hit me harder, if you can at all!"
"Believe me, Schnee, that won't be hard." Ilia snarled, bringing her whip back into its collapsed form with a swirl of her wrist.
Weiss only smiled in satisfaction, raising Myrtenaster and waiting as her three opponents considered her warily. A few red rose petals cascaded past from nearby, where Ruby was whirling in a tornado of movement around the remaining members of Team JNPR, all of whom were struggling to work with far more precision and force than they were used to in order to try and hit, or even at least tag, the zooming ball of rose petals.
Neptune and Yang, meanwhile, were engaged in a furious duel as he struggled to hit the blonde Huntress past her Semblance. Aiming with Tri-Hard in gun form barely slowed her down, and he couldn't hit her with the business end when in guandao or trident mode –she just moved too fast. All he could do was block Yang's own thunderous tirade of blows, and he knew that if they were fighting for real, he'd already be smeared against the wall courtesy of the sticky capsules that she could switch out in place of her regular Dust rounds.
Nevertheless, he –and the others– were getting in some damn good practice. If he'd ever doubted Team RWBY's claims that they came from the future, well, that doubt had gotten wiped out of him after their first group sparring session. The quartet –and Team JNPR's leader, Jaune Arc– fought like Huntresses, and he'd limped away from that hour of training both sore, horrified, and deeply impressed. If he could fight like that in two or three years, Neptune certainly had a lot to look forward to.
The thing was, though, that not all –or even most– of the returnees were really the kind of people suited for teaching. They'd picked up their skills from brutal experience, and passing those skills on, or helping patch up holes in Team SSSNI and others' techniques, didn't exactly come natural to them. Still, they were trying, and Neptune appreciated that a lot –sore and achy as it may leave him. After all, he was a Huntsman-in-training: fighting to become stronger was kinda his whole deal.
They were all sparring in the decommissioned Beacon training room that Ozpin had tacitly given them permission to access, which hopefully wouldn't pop up on any bad guys' radar. It was after school hours, and while normally Team SSSNI would be out gallivanting around in the new city and kingdom, with a reckless and exuberant Sun at the lead, they had instead put their focus into training with the others.
Nobody liked feeling weak, after all, and after Team RWBY had so effortlessly whipped every last one of them time and time again, Neptune knew that he wasn't the only one of the guys who felt the urgent need to improve. They all needed to get better, because in the meetings that they snatched between classes and the whispers they passed from team to team, they were weaving together a plan to stop Cinder and her minions from infiltrating the CCT on the night of the dance.
Ruby and the others had explained it –that was when Cinder had originally planted her virus, so if they distracted her teammates in the dance hall while she caused a ruckus at the CCT, they'd force Ozpin and all the other teachers to finally pay attention to how evil she was and put her under arrest. We've got to stop her at any cost, Ruby had said, and her silver eyes had gone steely rather than mirror-like for a brief moment.
But fighting a lady who had magic Maiden powers as well as gods knew how many years training to be a homicidal maniac… well, they needed to practice for that, even if Team SSSNI probably weren't going to be the ones that confronted her. The counter-conspiracy group were planning on splitting their forces, actually: Blake had the least distinctive Semblance and most practice at infiltration, so she was their main choice for confronting Cinder in the CCT itself, with her partner Yang as backup, if the teachers didn't do anything.
Ruby wanted a chance to talk to some of Cinder's teammates, and Weiss felt that she and Penny could best serve by keeping their cover and running security on the dance hall, respectively. Team JNPR would be split up as well, with Jaune Arc and Pyrrha Nikos staying on the outskirts of the CCT as further backup while Nora and Ren kept an eye on the airship docks for any reinforcements that Cinder might call in.
Ilia, naturally, couldn't show herself, but she was planning on monitoring CCT activity during the operation with an aerial that Penny had helped her construct, and Sun and Scarlet were supposed to hang around their room as her bodyguards. Sage and Neptune were gonna mingle and hopefully help distract people from the fact that a robust percentage of Teams RWBY, JNPR, and SSSN weren't actually there at the dance with everyone else.
But even if that operation went off without a hitch, even if Ozpin and Ironwood and all the other teachers took care of things without needing to call them in, Neptune and all the others knew that it was just the beginning bump in a long mountain range of further problems and challenges. Sure, they might be able to stop Cinder from planting the virus, but they'd still have to deal with Cinder afterwards, as well as all her many nefarious plans for Beacon.
Yeah. No way Neptune was staring all that down without more experience under his belt, which was exactly why he and all the others were spending almost every night getting thrashed by RWBYJ and, less embarrassingly, dueling with NPR, Penny, and Ilia.
Tonight, it ended like it usually did –with a ring-wide knockout. Blake twisted Darling right out of Scarlet's hands and bore him down to the floor with cleaver and katana crossed above his throat; Ren and Pyrrha fell to their knees with their Aura in the red as Nora struggled to even lift her hammer, gasping and damp with sweat; Jaune wrenched Penny off-balance with her own strings and stopped a slice just short at her neck; Weiss froze all three of her opponents to the floor with ice and then ricocheted between them via her glyphs, disarming each in turn with sharp flicks of her sword; and Yang landed a punch on Neptune that sent him flying back six feet, Tri-Hard clattering out of his hands and across the floor.
"Dude," he said, blinking dizzily at the ceiling as it swirled and blurred above him. "I think I'm gonna throw up."
"I will stab you if you do." Scarlet muttered savagely, before Blake slowly uncrossed her weapons and leaned up, offering a hand to pull him to his feet. Scarlet accepted, and then dusted himself off after she helped haul him upright. "Let's just keep it to the fact that we only lost, yeah?"
"You're very good with your sword." the dark-haired Faunus offered with a slight shrug. "And it's taking us much longer to beat you each time."
"Losing's a good impetus, but remembering why we're fighting is even better." Sage commented, jerking on his leg in vain for a few moments before he broke the ice with a sharp splintering crack.
"Yes, well, you're all showing improvement, and giving us something to think about in the meanwhile. Trust me when I say that none of us take pleasure in beating you lot like a drum." Weiss said, spinning the revolver in Myrtenaster before tapping the sheet of ice on the floor gently. It hissed and melted into a spreading puddle, freeing Sun and Ilia.
"Eh, I dunno." Yang drawled, grinning and pumping her fist. "It's kinda fun."
She then yelped and dodged as Weiss shot an icicle at her.
"We are not unsportsmanlike enough to enjoy pounding our less-experienced friends into the dirt." Weiss repeated pointedly, the tip of her sword now aimed at Yang. "Right?"
"Oh, take a joke, Ice Queen." Yang said, reaching down to yank Neptune to his feet as he swayed groggily. "You don't mind a pretty lady taking a piece out of your hide, right?"
She slapped his back, almost making him pitch forward again.
"You guys are getting better." Ruby said, approaching with a beaming smile as she folded her scythe up. "Same time tomorrow?"
Neptune contemplated his bed for a moment, how warm and soft it was, how many comic books he had to read and snacks he had in the dorm room.
Then he contemplated the wailing horror that'd be unleashed on Remnant if he and the others failed, and sighed.
"Yeah, sure, I guess." he said glumly.
The water hissed in the large, echoing tiled room as the flurry of showerheads activating, sluicing sweat and spent Dust granules off of the boys. The pipes creaked and whistled, but for a decommissioned building, the heating was actually pretty good, provided they moved with relative speed.
"Are we seriously getting better, though, or are you guys just humoring us?" Neptune asked as he splashed water on the soap suds covering his chest. Girls hated it when a guy smelled like sweat, even fellow Hunter trainees.
"You really think I know how to do that?" Jaune Arc asked dryly, the edge of his words burbling slightly as he held his head under the continuous spray of heated water.
"I know I'm getting faster." Sage commented, his dark tattoo stretching as he moved to scrub his hair. "And that's got to count for something."
"Still, I can't imagine losing all the time is very heartening." Ren said from where he sat on the nearby benches, drying his hair with a magenta-pink towel. There was a quiet, considerate frown on his face. "Even if it is in the name of improvement."
"Eh," Sun shrugged aloud, busily scrubbing shampoo into his tail. "At least this way we know you aren't going easy on us, man."
Scarlet snorted from his place down the line.
"As long as we don't die on our first mission, I'm good." he said. "Where there's life, there's hope, as my da used to say. As long as you aren't throwing us on the front line like we're graduated Huntsmen, we'll do fine."
There was a quiet frown on Jaune's face at that, as he finally brought his head out of the stream.
"We wouldn't do that," he said, now serious. "You know we wouldn't."
There was a small moment of awkward silence, as everyone considered this rather abrupt change in direction.
"I know." Scarlet said, being the first to move to apologize. "Sorry if that… touched any old wounds."
Jaune shrugged, dipping his head under the spray again. Neptune suddenly wondered how many showers the other boy –the Huntsman– had been able to get during his past two years, and how many of them had even been warm. Facilities probably were the first thing to go after the CCT went down and Beacon was destroyed. Nobody cared about bathing when there was an apocalypse on hand.
"Besides," Neptune said, trying to inject some cheer into the suddenly depressed atmosphere. "We're not only gonna stop the Vytal Festival from going down, we're gonna kick ass at the tournament. You think it'd be illegal for us to do any betting on each other?"
"Insider trading, and yup." Sun answered, swaying his tail a few times to flick off the water as he craned his head over his shoulder to look. "Learned that in Vacuo."
"The hard way?"
"Dude, I don't bet. Betting is for losers with money."
"And you're just a loser without money?"
"Hey!"
They all laughed, and the mood lightened a bit.
"How likely is it that Ironwood and the others'll actually manage to catch Cinder at the CCT?" Nora asked.
"Atlas equipment tends to have a lot of blind spots." Blake replied, carefully working her fingers through the hair at the top of her head to avoid getting suds inside her cat ears. "They build their codes on top of old ones, and everything is standardized, so once you have a passing familiarity with it, it's easy to break in."
"Of course, they don't make it easy to get familiar with their tech." Ilia said, conspicuously looking in the other direction with a red tinge to the back of her neck. "Not that that'll matter with Cinder, but…"
"Knowing Ironwood, he'll plan on catching her in the act, and have absolutely zero contingencies for any sudden changes in that plan." Weiss said from where she was sitting lengthwise on one of the wooden benches, half-dressed and slowly working lotion into each of her slender legs. "We'll need to keep our eyes peeled, and monitor any entrances and exits to the dance. After all, she's going to try and have an alibi, so even when –er, if– she slips past security, we can still hold her on probable cause by proving she wasn't at the dance."
"And we can create our alibis easy-peasy." Yang said, surrounded by a truly obscene amount of hair-care products from her place standing at the end of the line of showers. She reached out with her foot and poked Pyrrha, who was nearest, giving a roguish wiggle of her eyebrows. "All we have to do is say we snuck out to get handsy in the bushes with our partners."
Pyrrha flushed a brilliant scarlet that nearly matched the color of her hair.
"I-I think we should take this more seriously than that!" she squeaked, and her eyes flicked around, catching desperately on Ruby. "Did you, um, did you get any more news from Torchwick and Neopolitan?"
"Neo said they're heading out to Mountain Glenn early to make sure they don't get caught in the crossfire of this mission." Ruby replied as she tugged her shirt down over her head. "Same as when you asked yesterday…"
Pyrrha's blush deepened, but her teammate came to her rescue.
"So, let's say we do nab Cinder red-handed, and she does get arrested." Nora asked from somewhere amidst her own frothy cloud of lather. "What then? You think Salem's gonna call the whole Beacon thing off?"
There was a moment of frowning, thoughtful silence.
"I doubt it." Blake said at last. "There would have been a lot of time and manpower put into planning the attack, and Cinder would've been just one piece of it. An important piece, but still."
"My best guess is that with Cinder and her team out of the way, Salem will attempt to push another proxy forward." Weiss said. "Salvage what little she can to avoid wasting all of her efforts for this plan. The White Fang would still be active pieces she can use, possibly along with Watts and his virus, and destroying Beacon and bringing down Professor Ozpin would still constitute a significant amount of her success. We never truly knew what her goals were for that attack."
"Destroy Beacon. Kill Oz. Leave humanity vulnerable. Get Maiden. Open Vault." Yang said, wringing out her curls. "Probably somewhat around that order."
"So the biggest problem with this is not only arresting Cinder, but making sure she doesn't successfully plant the virus beforehand." Ilia said thoughtfully, and glanced over at the benches. "Penny? What do you think?"
"I think Yang's dress for the dance is very bland and not at all suited for her." Penny announced, swinging her legs gently from where she sat on the bench between Ruby and Weiss. Being a robot, her "shower" had consisted mostly of a quick rubdown with a damp cloth and soap, and she was already fully dressed again, looking at her Scroll with a decided frown.
Yang sighed.
"Look, I don't like it either, but glitzy stuff ain't really my thing and that was the last one the rental shop had in my size." she said, and then curled her arm around her chest, demonstratively hefting her breasts. "It's not always fun, being this big."
Blake's ear twitched.
"In any case, Penny, aren't you more worried about the mission?" she asked, glancing over her shoulder.
"Of course!" Penny saluted promptly. "I am combat ready!"
Then she slumped back down and poked musingly at her Scroll.
"But I still do not see why we can't try to have a little fun at the dance. Some of us will be mingling and trying to pretend that everything is normal, right? We should be discussing our gear and our armaments for this mission, even if it is fancy dresses and makeup."
"I'll wear whatever I can kick ass and look cute in." Nora said.
"See! Nora understands."
"In that case –I'm not wearing the heels again, Yang, and you can't make me." Ruby said immediately. She folded her arms and glowered at her sister, scooting closer to Penny on the bench. "I'll wear combat boots or something."
"Combat boots and a prom dress?" Pyrrha asked, raising her eyebrow slightly.
"If it really is that much of a problem, there are a number of stores outside your usual budget that I can make a quick run to." Weiss sighed in irritation, twisting a little to apply the lotion down across her back. "We should be focused on nothing but the mission, after all, and you can't do that if you're distracted by a thousand minor discomforts."
"Pfff." Yang snorted. "Says the girl who spends twenty minutes after each shower lubing up with moisturizer."
Weiss's eyes narrowed in her teammate's direction.
"I don't want to hear that from someone who can fill the boot of a car with her hair-care products alone." she said pointedly.
"Hey! You wanna fight me over it?"
"You'd have to kick your way through the fortress of shampoo bottles first." Weiss sniffed. "I think I'm safe."
"Speaking of maintenance, my father sent me a message about your brother." Penny chimed in, breaking up the pseudo-argument. "He has settled into his job as my father's assistant in Atlas and seems to be enjoying it immensely. He only gets to come three days a week, but he is learning quickly and seems very engaged."
"I've heard." Weiss said, and although her tone was still a touch sarcastic, her smile was fond. "He spent most of our last video call talking about it. I don't think I've ever seen Winter so surprised by something he's done."
And wasn't that a nice thing, to watch her sister's better impulses take control as she offered to set up several men –discreetly, of course, and off the record– to ensure Whitley's safety if and when he wished to increase his education by spending time with Professor Polendina in Mantle.
In their original timeline, both she and Winter had been so wrapped up in their own private miseries that they had fled the Schnee mansion as soon as they could without looking back… and then each of them had eventually realized just what she had done by abandoning the rest of the family to Jacques's tender mercies.
Winter, who had seized her chance to escape via the military with both hands, had done her best to help raise and train Weiss like a second mother. She had known that Jacques would tolerate no weaknesses, no imperfections, and so had done her best to make Weiss strong, strong enough to face the challenges ahead. But Weiss had been the one to catch her attention first, and her father had quickly noticed what Winter was doing; Whitley had been discouraged from ever even picking up a blade, less Winter's influence taint him.
And then Weiss had used her knowledge and her skills to escape in her own way, shattering her father's control even more completely and leaving Atlas in its entirety. But although she had broken free two times –both before attending Beacon and after the Fall– it had been a break, a decisive splintering of the bonds and the communication between her and the rest of the family. She had been too young to realize that while she was freeing herself, she was leaving Whitley alone in their empty, echoing house that was the furthest possible thing from a true home.
No wonder he had sneered when she returned.
But Weiss was older now, and at least some vague degree of wiser –or at the very least, she had the benefit of hindsight. She would not abandon Whitley in this timeline, and neither would Winter.
"I'm looking forward to the day when he meets up with the Happy Huntresses." she said, chuckling a little. "Though I'm not quite sure it's with dread or anticipation."
"Eh, why not both?" Nora said breezily. "That Robyn lady would probably squish his sense of superiority like a bug."
"Joanna would just squish him." Yang snorted.
"I feel like May would probably settle for eviscerating him with her tongue." Weiss sighed.
"Fiona would be nice…" Ruby mumbled.
"Would she?" Yang said with an amused scoff. "I bet she'd steal something goofy out of his pockets and then carry it around, waiting for him to notice."
"Who are you guys talking about?" Ilia asked, her forehead scrunching up. "You do remember you haven't mentioned everything, right?"
"Oh! Uh, right, yeah. Well, you see, there's this group of Huntresses in Atlas…"
"So, how's our staff looking the night of the dance?" Qrow asked.
"The men who were originally meant to be guarding the CCT have been reassigned." James replied, folding his hands behind his back. "I have put Winter and several of my other top specialists in the tower in their place. Their orders are to be discreet and keep themselves hidden until and unless Cinder Fall shows herself on location, then move in for the capture."
"Mm." James caught the suspicious glint in Qrow's red eyes when he looked down towards his flask again, and his heart sank.
That suspicion was reasonable. James told himself sternly. If he heard that Glynda took over Beacon during Ozpin's absence in the future and installed a disciplinarian regime that crushed the students to powder beneath her heel, he too would be eyeing her warily in the present moment. It was normal and natural to hear about something horrible and then suspect the person who would enact it.
All the same, it was truly galling to be judged for something he hadn't even done yet –and something he certainly did not condone.
No, James did not condone the things that had been in the copious (handwritten) notes that Ozpin had given the other guardians to read after explaining the supposed miracle that had occurred. It seemed ludicrous… and yet, if he was being fully honest with himself, it also seemed terrifying, precisely because it was so… predictable.
He could admit, even to himself, that he had a tendency towards both caution and overkill during his military operations. Atlas had not fought a war in living memory, but the memories of war still lingered –and so he was trained to thoroughly crush any insurgents, any problems, with an overwhelming application of brute force. He had brought his ships to Vale for precisely that reason: anyone who thought to try anything would be sharply disabused of that notion the moment they looked towards the sky.
So if he closed his eyes and tried to think out what he would do if the future was just another campaign… he had to admit, his actions would look very similar to what Team RWBY and their friend had reported. Failing to protect Beacon, their own robots turning against them… the natural solution would have been to pull his forces back, consolidate a place of refuge in Atlas. Their citizens would have needed the reassurance, and his duty was to his people first and Remnant second.
So he probably would have closed the borders.
And with the Dust embargo; and telling the Ace-Ops, Penny, and Winter about the Maidens; and the plan to lift Amity Arena… it all made so much sense, until he arrived at the sudden decision to abandon Mantle to their deaths and all the rest of his catastrophic slide into madness.
That, he felt guilt over. He owed it to Winter and the others to have been better, to have kept his cool and been the leader that they could have counted on. He should have been someone they could count on, rather than watch in horror as he spiraled into maddened paranoia.
But it was chilling to stand here even now and recount the story of the future in his head, and have it all sound so reasonable until it abruptly didn't. He wasn't that madman, and yet… it was all too easy to imagine how he could be.
James did not like that feeling. He was not that person, he wanted to shout at his allies, he was not, he was not, he was not –but even he could see how he could be, and that knowledge choked his arguments to silence and coated his tongue in the bitter ash of self-revulsion.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
"In any case, if Team RWBY and their friends have given us accurate information, being able to apprehend Cinder Fall during this operation would set Salem and her forces back significantly." James continued, pretending like this was any other report in any other meeting. "Her minions are all of significantly less importance and strength, and without her as a lynchpin, most of their plans to attack Beacon will fall apart."
"According to our reports, the White Fang are stirring in Vale." Glynda said, adjusting her glasses slightly. "If they're gearing up to tackle a Hunter academy, they won't back out if their liaison gets caught. After investing this much into it, such an organization would have to commit to the attack and either sink or swim on their own."
Ozpin exhaled softly through his nose, and James saw the weariness flickering in his eyes. He knew that feeling –part of him would have been absolutely overjoyed if this had turned out to be one grandiose hallucination from Team RWBY and their friends. But everything was lining up exactly as they had said it would.
"Speaking of allies…" Ozpin said, and although his voice was level, James watched him draw in a breath, as though prepared for a blow. "What of Leo?"
"I've been poking around some in Mistral." Qrow rasped, swirling the contents of his flask as he stared down into the dark hole of its neck. They had been friends for long enough for James to know that that in and of itself was a deeply bad sign. Qrow might enjoy his drink, but he rarely clutched it like his fingers were fused to the flask. "On the surface, nothing's really wrong… but if you dig deeper and know what to look for, well…"
He tipped the flask back and took a long, long shot.
"Hunter fatalities are up." Qrow said when he resurfaced, his knuckles white around the silver of the flask. "Not enough to cause suspicion, but more than they should be, and a lot of those missions were posted by Leo Lionheart directly. I tossed some Lien to the more discreet information brokers, and there's been plenty of sightings of someone matching Tyrian Callows's rough description in the areas around the deceased Hunters' last known settlements."
An icy silence fell across the room. While Ironwood had certainly done a lot in the future that hopefully-now-wasn't, he had never worked with Salem. He had never fallen that far. And to send the people that followed him to their deaths…
Metal creaked as his hands clenched into fists –both of them.
"One thing at a time." Glynda said, but her eyes were diamond-hard –and sharp. Her jaw clenched. "Firstly we will ensure that this Cinder will cause no harm to Vale or any of our students. On that note, James, I believe that we can work with Team RWBY and their friends in their positioning around the dance…"