pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq
(Weiss POV)
I wanted to cover myself up with my hands. Instead I took a deep breath and brushed my ponytail back with them. I could tell Yang wasn't all that comfortable, either despite her bravado and Ruby was blushing like the virgin she wasn't. Nora was the only one who seemed relaxed, but only just so. She seemed ready more than anything.
The outfits were tight all over and were really, really revealing. Nora, Ruby, and I had to do some trading of the fuzzy brassieres to get us each in some that would fit over ourselves. Even a two piece swimsuit possessed more substance than these bras did. The only apparatus covering our backs were the tiny blue wings and some thin wiry straps.
I may as well have been naked for all the good it honestly did.
When I came out of my room into the living room both Oscar and Jaune had stared at me. Oscar had looked away but Jaune just cocked his head on the couch and drank in the sight. I wanted to smack him or something for it. I wanted something bad to happen to him over it. He really should show some modesty or grant me the same. He was with Ruby. And Ruby also looked pretty good in her outfit. Wearing barely anything in her developing body. Jaune was right. Who did she think she was?
We'd given up trying to hide a wire on our persons. No clothing to hide it behind. And with all that in order, we walked in through the back entrance Ren had spotted in the Honey Bee Inn.
Yang's black and yellow prosthetic only matched the outfit and it seemed likely that she'd be the one chosen for the Don's perversions and this could all be over and done with. Her violet eyes were bright and her unnatural beauty stood out even amongst our quartet of huntresses.
"Ah, here they are now. You must be the new girls." A woman inside distinctly not wearing a bee outfit noted us. She ran down a clipboard and frowned but made no protest of our arrival. Girls probably came and went here. "Good, the Don is already here and waiting in the presidential suite."
Yang's arm earned a once over but nothing more. Prosthetics were rare and expensive which would explain why a common and otherwise beautiful girl was here in a place like this. Debt was a thing even down here and a girl theoretically had bills to pay. That I did understand.
I realized I was partially covering myself by rubbing one arm with the opposite hand and stopped. It was a nervous habit, unbecoming of me.
My own meager chest was not much compared to Yang's or Nora's. Even Ruby was more buxom than I. It was unlikely I was going to be selected and I needed to relax. I was here to provide support for Yang with my semblance should the worst come to pass.
I was even more naked without my trusty weapon. Without it I was exposed and knee deep in enemy territory. But at least I had my glyphs. I was thankful that I wasn't Ruby or Nora who were truly weaponless. Though Nora was strong enough to lay an ordinary person low. The woman with the clipboard led us past a bar and up a flight of stairs in the corner of the tavern.
We were strung out there like a rack of meat on display. The orderly took her hands to us and arranged us neatly in a line for the Don to choose from. He evidently didn't allow men in his company whilst he was unarmed. Jaune had learned that from rumors and hearsay yesterday.
The sexism did us favors, I suppose. I would have been more than happy to let Jaune take care of the whole mess if he could. Instead he waited outside, armed and opposite the Don's own men who had pulled up in a truck to secure the establishment for their boss.
He had all of our weapons tucked under Qrow's chair in the bar we ourselves had taken up just the other day. They were ready to provide support but it would take something obvious to get their attention. No wires. Qrow hadn't been happy about that. But we were big girls, we were together, and we could look out for ourselves.
Had to, even.
The Don strolled out from the presidential suite. He was a large man with a tiny handlebar mustache and little teeth. Now when you're the sort of person who had small teeth and beady eyes to begin with it was important that you didn't have a little handlebar mustache or be this kind of overweight. It was like the Gods had dealt the Don a bad hand and Corneo had gone all in with it.
He'd greased his hair back in an ugly massive cowlick. His shirt was open wide to expose a harry chest and I thought Ruby was about to gag. Ugly cigar smoke accompanied Corneo as he'd excited the suite.
Even Yang's picturesque smile faltered for a second.
The tavern, for it's part, was as beautiful as a thing on the lower floors could be. It was mostly clean, not matching the slightly dinghy exterior or the dark grease of the backrooms we'd entered through.
"Hmm. Good, splendid choices this evening. Splendid choices indeed." He paced slowly before us. "Now which girl should I choose? This one maybe?" He stopped in front of Ruby. I could almost feel her shudder through where our aura's overlapped.
He stepped in front of Yang. "I do like a blonde but… damaged goods is damaged goods." I winced at that. Even from something like this Yang didn't deserve that. She was still healing. She kept a bright face, though, and gave the Don a dazzling smile.
She really did rock the outfit. She looked like a supermodel… except for the arm.
The rest of us would never mind such a thing, this creature evidently did.
He paced in front of me and I looked away. He tried to meet my eyes and I looked the opposite direction again.
"Ooh I've made up my mind!" He sounded giddy. "My choice for tonight is this beautiful girl." He was standing right before me. There could be no mistake and dread welled up in my stomach.
"Now wait just a moment…" I stuttered out. My shyness just seemed to confirm it for him.
"Oh I just love it when they play hard to get." His grin roared across his face. "The rest of you can go entertain my men downstairs!" He shouted the last bit and it was met with whoops and hollers from the first floor. They'd seen us come up, of course.
At least four of them, all armed.
"Now come with me, my pretty."
I shot a sideways glance but Yang just gave me a solemn but encouraging nod. I breathed out slowly and followed the Don into the presidential suite.
"Ahh finally alone." I shuddered in disgust. Suddenly Jaune's polite, almost afraid, advances during freshman year didn't seem so untoward. "Come give daddy some sugar."
I threw up in my mouth a little. I had no intention of giving him any of my sugar. Or anything else for that matter. Instead I held out a hand and my semblance flared to life over it.
"Come on, come give me a kiss."
Yang and the others would get the memo when he started screaming. I pinned him spread eagle to the wall with my semblance, a tiny glyph at the far end of each of his four appendages.
"Wha-whats the meaning of this?"
"Shut up. I'll be asking the questions."
"You're a huntress!"
I twisted his arms in their sockets and he screamed. I winced at the noise. The sound bothered me far more than the implications of what I was doing.
"Shut up or I'll do even worse to you."
I heard the sound of Yang's gun going off and Nora shouting outside. Ruby's adorable little grunts followed and some gunfire. My friends would have my back and together we'd get the situation under control.
"I want your scroll communication encryption key," I informed him. "You're going to give it to me or I'll get creative with my semblance."
"What do you mean?"
"I'll rip them off," I informed him with the sweetest voice I had given him so far.
"I can't give you that. I'll be ruined!"
"I'm going to ruin you one way or another. The choice is yours."
"Alright, alright. I'll talk." He was resigned as he hung suspended over the bed. "The private key is 'There once was a girl.' one cap and spaces like a sentence."
"And how do I know you're not lying? Give me a good reason or I'll chop it off."
I twisted his legs uncomfortably until one of his knees popped in its socket. He screamed again, louder this time.
"No, not that. Take my scroll," he sobbed. "The key is on there, I swear it! Please!"
It was good enough for me. I snatched it off the bedside table. There were also some drugs on the table in little lines of powder. The lines had been twisted and disturbed as I'd flung him back into the bed, however. I looked down at him in disgust. Hyper was a hell of a drug.
Yang's arm punched through the door behind me, she ripped through the door and grabbed the knob from the inside and yanked the door open. It wasn't even the robotic arm, either. She was just that strong, I was surprised she didn't rip the door off of its hinges.
"You got him," she observed. "You alright?"
I exhaled a stuttering sigh but nodded. I just needed a long shower after this mess. I felt exposed and naked and filthy and exposed.
"I got the key and his scroll." I waved the sweaty device. The mere touch of it against my bare skin set my teeth on edge.
"His men inside are indisposed. The trap worked," Yang informed me.
The man moaned from the bed and I felt absolutely disgusting.
"Let's get out of here." I bemoaned, suddenly tired.
"Can't just yet. It's turning into a shoot out with the men outside. Some of the girls who actually work here are hurt. Jaune'll bust us out though. Ren and him already engaged them outside."
The gunfire must have clued him in to start fighting. Speaking of, the gunfire hadn't stopped. I suppose it was coming from outside. The boys had their actual weapons though. They'd be fine. I wanted out of this freaking outfit.
I heard short bursts of Stormflower and Jaune cry out as I descended the stairs again. Nora had both hands on the bleeding stomach of a young girl who had been shot in the crossfire. Blood welled from between her fingers as she tried to put pressure on the wound.
Another girl had been shot in the calf and Ruby was shushing her as she tried to apply a tourniquet. She was sobbing from the pain. Ruby, ever the empath, had tears in her own eyes as she worked.
A man leaned against a wall with his skull crushed and another lay beside a machine gun with a shotgun blast in his stomach. Blood leaked over the wooden floors from the corpses I could only guess Yang had left behind.
I peeked out of one of the windows with Yang beside me as Jaune and Ren tore into the Don's men. Some of them had aura, some did not. A flash of red aura here, and blue there. Jaune and Ren could hardly pick and choose and the violence was pure. Blood dripped from the broadsword and from both of Ren's daggers as people out in the street screamed and made room for the fight.
Jaune had been right about keeping violence off of the street. I could only imagine the fallout as one of the Don's men opened up on Jaune with an assault rifle, military grade with hard light rounds. Jaune deflected the bullets off his sword and his thick aura and rushed shooter. He cut the man in half beside one of the two Jeeps in a spray of blood.
"Clear," Jaune's voice boomed as the last man fell.
A burp of bullets from Stormflower and Ren echoed him, voice much louder than normal. His eyes were wide at the bloodshed while Jaune just looked exhausted from my view out the window. One of the downed men reached out towards Jaune with a hand and Jaune whipped him in the temple with a heavy boot. The man's head snapped back hard enough and fast enough that it might have broken his neck.
I looked away.
Jaune entered the place, eyes wide and searching over us for injuries. He took note of the injured girls and downed men with a world weary sigh. "You girls alright?"
"We're green," Yang replied. She looked and sounded shaky herself. Her bionic arm soaked in blood and a bit of brain.
"Load up those girls in the Jeeps. Let's get them to a hospital," he ordered.
"Jaune…" Ruby murmured, looking at the bloody edge of Crocea Mors.
Jaune bent down and picked the girl Ruby had been helping up and carried her outside without a backwards glance.
"What about the men outside and in here?" I asked. I followed him closely.
"Law enforcement is slow on the lower levels but not that slow. They'll get here for them." 'Or they won't' went unsaid. Jaune looked like he didn't particularly care if those men bled out in the street and I supposed there was nothing he could do about it anyways.
His glowing eyes looked as untouchable as antarctic mountains, and just as cold.
pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq
Ren looked worse than I felt when we finally made it back to the hideout. Suddenly I felt like I wasn't the one who's done the dirty work of the operation. His eyes were wide as he tried to relax and wipe down his blades.
I'd have to wait on my turn for the shower. Nora and Ruby had been covered in blood and despite how dirty I felt internally I felt I deserved to wait compared to that.
It was meditative, watching the slow practiced way Ren cleaned them but his hands were shaking slightly.
"It gets easier," Jaune promised. That was all he said. His own blade required the attention of a whole towel. The inner mechanisms were sticky with blood and Jaune worked the edge of the towel into them and sprayed the whole thing and his breastplate off with the hose outside.
"I-" Ren stuttered. "I don't like it. I'm going to be sick."
"Yeah," Jaune murmured. He hosed himself off too, water and blood making his clothes cling to his masculine form in the warm Mistrali breeze. "It's like that."
"How do you do it? It's nothing like fighting the Grimm."
"I don't know," Jaune breathed over the pour of water from the hose. He started to strip off the blood stained clothes and I looked away. My chest felt tight. The blood and carnage outside the Honey Bee Inn had been unlike anything I had ever seen. "I just can."
I threw up in my mouth for the second time that day when I remembered the dismembered and bullet ridden men.
They simply hadn't been prepared for our assault or Huntsman-class weapons. It wasn't like fighting Atlesian Robots, something I'd done for training before Beacon. Only these weren't robots.
They were people.
Too dangerous for local law enforcement or able to skirt the edges but not more dangerous than a focused team of huntsmen. Jaune still shone with aura like he had during the fight and I struggled to look away, even though I should.
I stood up and left the boys to their tasks.
Yang's arm was soaking in the sink and she sat on a couch inside, bare stub set out to the side with a thousand yard stare. If Yang had been chosen then I would have had to be the one to kill those men downstairs at the Inn.
"Are you alright, Yang?"
She reached around with one arm and hugged me close. "I was so scared for you when you were chosen by the Don," she trailed off and I let her hold me. "Then...then I thought those guys had aura and I just…"
"I saw." I murmured. "Had you ever… like Jaune…?"
"No. I'd never killed anyone." Yang muttered back. "All the gangster's I've fought had aura or… or I got lucky. I'll be fine. Just worried about Ruby, you know? And Jaune, he's got this dead look in his eyes."
I knew what she was talking about. Jaune had been so casual and so brutal. He'd greeted the violence like an old friend. Or at least a familiar acquaintance.
It was concerning. This had been the plan. It went off with relatively few hitches. We had the key. We had his scroll. We had everything we needed to get Qrow walking again.
Why didn't it feel like a victory?
"Ruby's strong. She'll just fret over the rest of us once she's out of the shower."
"But what about Jaune?" Yang pressed. "Ren looked bothered about it but you saw how Jaune took it. He took it like a champ. Except it was murder."
"I saw," I confessed. "He was used to it."
"You don't just get used to that kind of thing, do you?"
"I don't think we know Jaune's full story. He didn't seem to like it. He was just resigned to what was happening."
"He was cutting people into ribbons," Yang protested half-heartedly.
"And you crushed a person's skull."
"But-"
"What should he have done?" I wondered.
"He should be as shocked by it as the rest of us."
"He's been shook up before." I found myself defending Jaune. Even that moment when he kicked the down man. "He did what he had to do. Just like the rest of us. Just like Ren."
"Ren looks battered."
"So does Jaune. Just a little deeper."
"I just don't know how he can feel so little while I'm here feeling so much." Yang looked fit to sob. "I'm so happy you're safe."
"I'm safe," I murmured comfortingly. My own thoughts choked up with affection for the older girl. My sister, by rite if not by blood. "Ruby's safe. We're all safe."
But for how much longer? We'd be in such situations again, hopefully with our weapons but Yang had to accept she couldn't keep everyone under her wing forever.
I heard footsteps behind me and found Ruby dressed in her PJs. The PJs were oddly more flattering on Ruby than the bee outfit had been. "Yang…" she greeted us, the sight of her crying sister drawing her attention. We were still in our outfits, even. "Shower's ready for you, Weiss."
I nodded and took my leave, giving the two sisters the room. I striped out of the bee clothes in the shower with a fresh set of my own relaxing clothes on the sink in the bathroom.
The shower water felt heavenly. I scrubbed out the aching knots in my shoulders and let the water rush over me. I hadn't realized I'd been so tense but I'd just felt so empty without Myrtenaster and in that skimpy outfit.
I moaned as I let my hands run over me. I felt no more naked now than I had before the Don. I knew that that wasn't what sex was supposed to be like. I could hardly imagine that Ruby and Jaune engaged in something like what the Don had had in mind for me.
Nothing had ever been so good as the mercy of the hot water. I heard the sound of Nora's own shower ending and then the piping starting up as the next person got in and got ready.
I let out little sighs as I scrubbed my long hair.
I let my focus wane and almost found the warm water washing me off to sleep standing, still.
I shut the water off and wrapped my hair in a towel as I dressed in my own comfort clothes.
We all deserved some little comfort after all this.
pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq
-WG