AN: Thanks to Cent for looking over this chapter as usual!
Treaty Week was over. Soon enough, Team PASL was back at Atlas Academy's student barracks, carrying their luggage.
Penny stepped out of the airship with her teammates—Alyssa, Ciel, and Laurel—and walked along, but trouble was already brewing.
A month ago, there would have been at least some words about what's up or why they're there. Things were already tense between Alyssa and Laurel, considering how they were put on the team, but things got ugly when they started really arguing. Penny didn't dare speak up around them, for her own words had set them off in the past. After all, nobody wanted to start another argument simply by asking how their day had been.
It stayed like this in the main hall, in the elevator, in the hallways, in their dorm.
Eventually, it was midnight: Alyssa and Ciel were fast asleep, but Penny and Laurel were wide awake. Indeed, Penny was looking out the window when Laurel's familiar voice called to her.
"Penny," Laurel asked, "may we speak for a moment?"
Penny turned around to see her teammate, dressed in standard-issue Atlas Academy pajamas. She took one quick look at Alyssa, who was still snoring, then back at Laurel. "Yes."
The two walked inside the bathroom. They shut the door behind them, locking them to make sure and keeping their voices down so that Alyssa wouldn't hear any of it. Laurel took a deep breath as though she were bracing herself.
"I'm not sure if you've heard," Laurel began, "but I am getting away from my past, not embracing it. It's true that my parents killed Faunus. But, that was due to an unforeseen collapse of the theater, not a premeditated arson."
Penny thought to herself, 'So this whole time, it was not the fault of Laurel's parents that the theater collapsed, killing those trapped inside.'
She put her hand on Laurel's shoulder. "I'm... sorry to hear."
"It's behind me now. So I hope," she said. "And I hope people can see me, not my past." She sighed. "Unfortunately, some people beg to differ."
'It's Alyssa,' Penny figured. "Well, you are here. That's what matters."
"Really..."
"Yes. What we do after the past is what matters. There is no further point otherwise."
Laurel nodded, then yawned. "I'll be off to rest now," she said, beginning to walk to her bed.
"Okay, goodnight!"
. . .
"Penny. I can't keep doing this forever."
"What do you mean?"
Ciel took a deep breath. "You're our team leader, and you need to set examples for us to follow. Avoiding important issues should not be one. I've just stopped them from arguing for the second time, and it's already taken 12 seconds longer than the initial 10. If this continues, I'm not sure I'll be able to defuse further situations." Penny frowned. "Please. Think about what you'll do."
Penny hesitated.
She shouted, "I can't say a wrong thing, Ciel! If I do, what will happen?"
"Best case scenario, you can recover from that," replied Ciel. "Worst case scenario: from that point on, it'll be up to them."
"I understand."
"Anyway. I will continue to keep my eye on those two like you asked."
As Ciel walked away, Penny nodded with a frown. Then, as she started walking in the opposite direction, her Scroll rumbled, ringing its ringtone. She answered.
"Hello?" a familiar voice rang. "Hey, this is Yang. I need help. Now."
Just like that, the perfect opportunity to replace what was lost came. Penny's eyes lit up.
"Salutations!" she greeted. "What do you need help on?"
"Well, I've been having trouble studying for my finals, like I know a fair bit about Combat Training and Field Cooking, but the rest, I'm kind of lost." Yang chuckled rather awkwardly. "Well, for Construction and Engineering, I'm still confused on the final steps of building a quick home from scratch for longer-term missions. Then for Plant Sciences, there's the parts of a leaf that would flourish the brightest, as well as the real, scientific reason Forever Fall is, well, Forever Fall."
"How many subjects do you have to study?" Penny inquired.
Yang sighed. "A lot: Grimm Studies, Construction and Engineering, Cooking, Plant Studies, History, and Combat Training. Good thing it's Finals Week and not Finals Day, or else I'd be in a lotta trouble."
Penny nodded. While noting mentally, she asked, "What are you doing to study?"
"Dunno, just reading it over and over until it makes sense, and even then, I still barely understand any of this. Luckily I got two weeks until I have to actually take my finals with my grades on the line. And Weiss, Blake, all my friends are all busy. Even Ruby has been spending all night trying to study, and I can't disturb my little sis because I'm so dumb." She shook her head. "I just don't know where to go."
Problem found: Yang was working harder, not smarter.
How does Penny solve that? She had learned good study habits from her father, but to teach someone else how to study? She knew to write it down, quiz herself, to study a couple hours per day, yadda yadda. It was one thing to learn that, but to teach it was another. She still remembered when she said "Change starts with a talk," and how she herself can't even think how to apply it herself.
So, she decided she would teach Yang the first thing that came to mind.
"Write down what you read," Penny began. "Reading the textbooks is not necessarily useful, especially if it's a technical subject. You may not understand the material now, but if you take notes, you will. If you can break it down to fewer words with the same details, that's better."
"Right, but what if the professor will use different words than me?"
"We use the language your professor uses."
"And if I can't understand all that?"
"We decode it together."
Decode it? Actually, that was easy to understand; basically, Penny had said to break down exactly what the professor meant by their language.
"Ohhh..."
"Do you get it now?" asked Penny, leaning in with a smile.
"Y-yeah!"
"Great! Let's start with Grimm Studies."
Yang took a deep breath. "Okay. So, I know that people, animals, and Grimm share physical traits, specifically at the legs, but the behaviors..."
And so, this went on for the next several days.
Penny gave Yang more advice with the occasional life lesson from Dad. One of those life lessons was that the wrong choices can seem right and the right choices can seem wrong at first. Obviously, she related it to when answers to questions seem really similar with one small difference, but that resonated with Yang.
She had taken days away from taking care of Ruby to look for her birth mother, even when those days were bad days to leave her alone with either a blackout-drunk uncle or an emotionally bedridden father—or every once in a while, both.
In hindsight, looking for Raven was rather boneheaded. All that searching and club destruction just to turn up with next-to-nothing for years.
Nonetheless, Penny and Yang continued to study together. Some days, they couldn't do that at all, but that was okay. Neither of them were in any particular rush, anyway. In that time, Yang had gotten even more used to Penny's mannerisms and eccentricities. In fact, she found a few of them rather endearing; almost as though they reminded her of Ruby.
However, as Penny continued to teach Yang, the former was having doubts about the future of her team. The arguments in the background kept getting more heated, more volatile every time, and every time it did, more and more life story details came out. In fact, she had learned through another argument between the two that Laurel went to Browning Academy, a secret, immoral academy for raising future assassins and killers. This reached a point where even with the speaker grills and video only showing Penny, Yang heard arguing.
"Penny, what's going on behind you?" Yang asked.
"Nothing!" Penny hiccuped.
Yang raised an eyebrow. "Well, an argument sure doesn't sound like nothing, now does it?"
Her friend opened her mouth to speak, but froze. She hadn't planned for this, but now that the issue was firmly shoved into her face, she had to do something. She couldn't just try to shift the topic; Yang would see through that and further press her on the matter.
The only choice was to reassure her, so that's what she did.
"...Ciel will take care of it."
"Errr... you sure about that?"
"Yes."
"...Okay."
A small cause for celebration. Indeed, Ciel did get Alyssa and Laurel to stop arguing not too long after. Thus, Penny pressed on, even if it meant going somewhere else so she and Yang wouldn't have to listen to those two. Even when Yang got visibly concerned by the arguing in the background, she'd swiftly reassure her, then change the topic like clockwork.
The show had to go on.
Eventually, the two took turns teaching each other. For example, Yang suggested that Penny ask her professor questions during office hours and after class, to which she gladly did. That was quite the boon. Then the two started quizzing each other. Penny, analyzing past quizzes Yang either recalled or provided , gave her friend practice sheets to digitally fill out on her Scroll. Yang, meanwhile, would quiz her back with flashcards she bought for a fistful of Lien.
This was all going well, and by the final day, Yang had learned most of what had flown over her head.
"...and that's how Forever Fall got its name."
"Wow!" Penny exclaimed. "19 out of 20 questions right? That is well within passing grade range!"
"Couldn't have done that without'cha," Yang remarked. Then she sighed, and took a deep breath. "Hey, Penny?" Yang smiled. "I think you're cool, actually."
"Like, chilly?"
She chuckled. "I dunno, your hug felt so warm that night. Oh, and I guess you're cool as a friend to have as in, 'great to have as a friend.' I knew you'd help and all, but... you went above and beyond."
"And you're a great student, Yang!"
"...Thanks for... quite a lot, actually, holy shit."
"No problem!"
"Now, I gotta get ready for bed." She watches her yawn over the video call. "Alright, goodniiight~!"
Blip.
Penny smiled to herself, knowing she and Yang had made significant progress within a few weeks. However, that was the last bit of relief before the return to the crushing reality that was her team's disintegrating dynamics.
Ciel was declining Penny's requests to study together to try to mediate things between Alyssa and Laurel once again, and she was recording the time it took to defuse such situations.
45 seconds had become a minute and 21. Then 3 minutes and 5 seconds. Then 5 minutes and 45 seconds.
Then 11 minutes and 27 seconds.
Both of them knew it was unsustainable due to the nature of the arguments, but Ciel had to keep defusing arguments over and over due to not only Finals Week, but also how it'd reflect on their assignment and their ability to be a team to General Ironwood.
"Penny."
She turned around to see Ciel standing up, having put her textbook and study materials in a small backpack. Along with her blue beret, she was wearing her Atlas Academy uniform—a gray, semi-sleeveless jacket-dress on top of a black vest and white stretch shirt, a black tie, white stockings, and black knee-high mid-heel boots—in contrast to her leader's usual attire. "...Ciel?"
"I'll be over in the library if you need me."
"Sure."
Ciel started walking out of PASL's student barracks, but then she stopped to turn to Penny. "One more thing. May you have good luck for the week." She smiled, then exited.
Just then, Alyssa walked in, sighing. "Pine," she began, "may I have a mo' with you?"
Penny swiveled in her chair to her, but she didn't say anything. This had reminded her of a pattern she'd noticed.
Sometimes, after an argument, Alyssa or Laurel would meet with her somewhere quiet and tell her a few personal details about themselves. Usually, this detail would be heard out-of-context, spoken by the other person in a particularly bad light. She was content with it at first, but later, she felt... weird about it. She couldn't put her finger on it, but she almost felt that they were trying to win her over so that she would pick them over the other.
"Pine."
"Yes."
Penny took a deep breath, then stood up and followed Alyssa out.
. . .
Finals Week went by. Penny had seemingly aced her tests, especially during the field exercise on the last day of finals. The physical trials were a breeze despite her small stature, and the village defense assignment she and dozens more students were assigned to was almost as easy. Shiny prototype Atlesian Knights dressed as civilians? Safe. Horde of Grimm? Slain. Even the Megoliath charge was thwarted with only moderate difficulty. Sure, Penny was doing almost half of that legwork even without the laser beams, but she didn't mind. It was necessary practice after all.
Meanwhile, Alyssa and Laurel had gone silent around each other.
At first, Penny thought that things had finally calmed down... but when she asked them if they'd made up, she witnessed the seething rage on a scale never before felt from their glares. At first, she couldn't process what was going on; if those arguments stopped, shouldn't they have apologized to each other and agreed to work together as a team? If so, why did they look at her like that?
It was at that moment she realized: it was the worst it'd ever been.
. . .
"Penny, please," Ciel pleaded, "the last time I went to stop them from arguing, they were agitated with me."
"But it still worked, right? Nothing will blow up, is that true?"
"We're still delaying the inevitable either way. This temporary solution was never meant to be our modus operandi," she replied, her voice slightly sharpening towards the last syllables.
"But one time should still work, right? ...Right?"
"..."
"Ciel?"
"...Very well." She huffed, then stepped towards Alyssa and Laurel, who were arguing once again. "I will do as you asked."
. . .
Penny had trusted Ciel to get that argument between Alyssa and Laurel under control. But she couldn't.
"Ciel?" Penny asked.
She shook her head. "They ignored me," she said, her tired voice devoid of her usual energy.
Penny gulped. "Where are they right now?"
"I saw Laurel storming off somewhere on my way back from the library. That was several minutes after I had tried to stop them."
Just then, Alyssa came through the door, but nobody else was beside her. Her breaths were held, her fists clenched, and she was staring her team leader right in the eyes as she went right up to her with a hateful frown. Penny froze in fear.
"Time's come, Penny Polendina," she stated. Penny noticed that she was mere inches from butting heads, so she tried to back away, only for her to close back in. "One of Team PASL has to go."
Penny's pupils shrunk; Alyssa had now brought the issue out in the open and directly to her. There was no more avoiding it. She had wanted to start change with a talk as she'd said to Yang a good while ago in Vale, but now she wasn't sure if she even had a chance to now.
Because right here was a different, long story.
"Whoever goes, the team'll be better off without them or you. You for tolerating and being complicit with Laurel; me for Gods know what; Ciel for her complicity; or Laurel for hiding some seriously screwed-up secrets—and an insidious side to her!"
Oh. No.
Penny had hoped she wouldn't get dragged into this whole mess without a plan, but now her worst nightmare had come. Now she was at risk of being overthrown. Now she knew trying something not only didn't improve things, but just made the situation worse.
Penny opened her mouth, but no words came out. What if she said the wrong thing right here? What would happen?
"Look. I'm not going to hold back from saying that you've been trying to dodge an important fuckin' issue—because you have been."
"Penny needs time to think," Ciel cut i—
"She'd enough of it. You tell me right now that this spineless 'leader' is someone to trust with all the time in the world." She then looked at Penny, giving her that same stare from Finals Week. "So who'll it be?"
Before Alyssa could speak further, Laurel entered the room. "What's going on?" she asked.
Alyssa turned around to glare, then stepped up to Laurel. "Would you like a lie, or the cold, hard truth?" she asked.
"Cold hard truth."
"'Cold hard truth.'" Alyssa took two more steps forward. Laurel took one back. "One of us is going for a very good reason."
Laurel immediately knew. "...You don't mean—"
"You're going," she began. "You've shown time and time again that you don't care about people's feelings, no matter if they're right or not. You've been projecting your own problems onto me, and guess what? I can do what Penny's too cowardly to do, and show you the door with a call to the General saying that you've been up to no fucking good. Oh, and if they find out you've been hiding some serious skeletons in the closet—"
"How many times do I have to tell you, 'You know nothing about me'?!" she snapped back. "You've been looking to cause trouble, and every time you do, I have had to clean it up!"
"And then you turn around to make your own messes—"
"So what if I do—"
And then it was a flurry of words thrown at each other. This time, Ciel stepped back, shaking her head, then looked at Penny.
"Penny. The fate of Team PASL is now in your hands. Choose wisely."
Penny looked at Ciel, then at Alyssa and Laurel.
She knew that it was going to get to that point, but she didn't want to admit it until it was too late. Part two: choose between two of the teammates, or become the sacrificial lamb herself. Her understanding of the issue at hand was great, but the know-how to deal with it was rather low, which left her in a very awkward, uncomfortable spot.
Then she realized: weren't they assuming things based on what they don't know, just like Weiss?
Now that she thought about it, it's likely that what Alyssa and Laurel were assuming about each other? It was probably false. Laurel certainly wasn't coming home with Faunus blood on her clothes, and neither was Alyssa returning with suspicious-looking money bags every day. But she didn't know when the time was right... until she saw Laurel pull out her Scroll.
"Stop."
To say that Alyssa and Laurel were caught off-guard would be putting it lightly.
"Do any of you know what your teammate does in their spare time? Is what you assume the other one's doing based on what you don't know?"
"Well what if she—"
"Wait, wait—"
"I said 'stop,'" she reiterated more firmly. "It's bad enough that you automatically think that the other was up to no good, but were you seriously going to get each other kicked out just because of that?! Why?"
This time, Alyssa and Laurel went quiet. It was clear to them that Penny had finally stepped up to the leader role. Who knew? Maybe she would have taken on that role anyways, but for now, they watched.
"We are a team, Alyssa and Laurel. We're here to hunt Grimm together, study together, and have fun together, not self-destruct. So for once, let's move forward not just on an individual level, but as a team."
And so, she waited.
Had she done the right thing? They weren't snapping back, but they weren't dropping to their knees to apologize, either. She knew, though, to stay silent. She had made one bold decision—one she struggled for a while to make—and she didn't want to risk all of it going out the window.
At long last, someone broke the silence. "I'll do what I can, ma'am," Laurel said.
Penny looked at Alyssa, who then spoke up next. "Okay," she said.
"Great!" She smiled. "Now let's start moving forward!"
. . .
Alyssa and Laurel were finally learning to get along.
They were still awkward around each other, but they were slowly returning to speaking terms. Of course, Penny's talk with them meant that Penny had come to action, and they had no choice but to behave themselves. After all, it was either learn to get along, or get kicked out of a long-term assignment.
That said, the fact that they even got to that level was already a success story to Penny. Taking up her responsibilities had finally paid off, and if she were being honest, she was embarrassed from not having done anything earlier. Reassurances from Ciel, Ironwood, and even Alyssa and Laurel themselves helped her take her mind off it, but she still wasn't sure if she had been successful or not. Thus, further distractions were in order.
Speaking of distractions... Well, she wanted to call Yang. After all, she still didn't know what grades her friend got.
So, she pulled out her Scroll to call.
"Sal-u-tations!" Penny exclaimed.
"And salutations! I got all 7s!" Bs in Atlas Academy's terms. Good news right off the bat. "Usually, I'm more of . . .inda student, but hey, all 7s!"
"Wow, really?!"
"Yeah." She chuckled. "Again. Thanks for everything, Penny." Yang sighed, then smiled. "You kinda saved me, didn't you?"
Penny nodded; she finally had closure on whether her advising and teaching had worked, nothing more and nothing less.
"Well, I think I'm gonna keep celebrating with my friends."
Oh, this reminded her: Yang was cool to hang around, even with the limited time she had. She was showing her around town, teaching her a few things and having fun along the way. She even showed her around Beacon, a Huntsman Academy.
"By the way. You're free to come whenever. Just not right before classes start again." She winked.
"Affirmative!"
"Well, if you do look forward to going, lemme know, 'kay?"
"Okay."
"Cool, cya."
And then the call ended. Penny, with her eyes closed, shut her Scroll and held it to her chest with a smile.
Later that morning, she would announce to her team a trip back to Vale.