Chapter 7: With Open Arms
Her team is in bed, presumably asleep. Likewise, JNOR—after entirely too long and entirely too much energy spent getting caught up to speed and worrying over Weiss—have retired to their room.
Weiss alone is awake. She lies on her bed and stares through the dark at nothing. Perhaps she could sleep if she closed her eyes, breathed through the pain pulsing behind her ribs, and endured her fears in silence for an hour or two. Perhaps, in that time, her relentless tossing and turning would not wake everyone else.
Or, perhaps, she could use the freedom granted by the investigation's completion to walk around, tire herself out, and bring her relentlessly circling thoughts to heel. Something that sounds, at the very least, marginally less unpleasant than waking her team and worsening their worry.
As quietly as she can, she slips out of bed and into the hallway. After the door closes with a click that makes her wince, she hesitates. Left or right? It doesn't matter, really. She chooses left and starts to walk. In just socks and sleepwear, her hair cascading loose down her back, she knows she cuts a picture of impropriety that would horrify Winter.
Well, so be it. She's hardly feeling her best and there's no one around to see her like this.
At night, with moonlight trickling through the high windows and open doors and the dimmed evening lights, and without the quiet murmur of conversations and report of boots on the polished floors, the halls are hauntingly empty. Large and striking in the daytime, they're vacant and cold at night.
Weiss hugs herself and walks a little faster. She's had enough of opulent, empty halls to last a lifetime. To escape the echoes of her shuffling footsteps—even her socks can't render her footfalls completely silent—she ducks into an empty room. A conference room, she judges, based on the long table ringed by chairs. The far wall is one big window with an absolutely breathtaking view of Atlas.
Looking out over the city like this, and past the city to the moonlit snowscape of Solitas stretching out to the mountains breaking up the horizon, it's hard not to feel small. She's just one person in this city and this is just one city on one continent of several.
Her chest aches and she hisses in pain.
She's small and she's dying. What a lovely view indeed. If she rests her forehead on the glass, enough of a chill makes it through to leave her shivering.
In the whirlwind prep for her surgery, they'd let her get a look at the aura transfer machine. Per Jaune, it's nicer than what they had under Beacon. Slimmer, sleeker, whiter. The pod where she'll lay back even has cushioning inside it. For your comfort, Pietro had said, as though there's anything comfortable about any of this.
Staring at it that afternoon, Weiss hadn't been able to get over how intimidating it looked. How small, again, she was in the face of this machine that took up the entire back wall of one of Pietro's secondary labs. Even just the memory now has her hugging herself and shivering hard enough that she backs away from the window and leans up against the table.
This time tomorrow, it'll all be over. One way or another. Rather than the comfort she'd found in the thought before, it now sends a fresh wave of pain washing through her chest and, of course, there's one person who doesn't know it's now set in stone.
It takes more effort than she cares to admit, and it turns the ache into a sharp stab for a single breathtaking second, but she manages to summon Adam in this little conference room lit only by the moon.
When the frost of his arrival fades away, he blinks and takes in her, the room, and the view, before looking back at her.
"What do you want?"
"I don't want anything."
"Yes, you do, or I wouldn't be here."
She purses her lips and then tells him about the machine, the surgery, the time he has left. He nods when she's done.
"Good."
That's all he says. She waits, but it's truly his only word on the matter. "You'll be gone," she pushes, "permanently. The way you died…is there anything you want done? Any final words or last requests?"
He frowns at her and then turns to the window. Weiss can see the lights of the city as blurry points visible through him.
"I threw everything away," he finally says. "No one is going to miss me."
It dawns on her, then, that she knows next to nothing about him. She knows his rage, she can guess at the scar on his face, she knows he led the Vale White Fang and was once close with Blake, but family? Other friends? Anything or anyone he might care about? "No…no family, or anyone?"
She can't see his face but there's a twist of something wry and bitter in her chest to match the smile she knows is playing on his lips. "No."
"What about Blake?"
She doesn't know why she's so desperate to have him admit there's something tethering him to life, or at least to the shadow of it he's got left. He's an awful person, a murderer, a killer who terrorized her family and humans around the world for years. But that ache in her chest sharpens and his shoulders hunch just slightly and she realizes it's not wholly her own rogue sympathy fueling the feeling.
"If you want something to say to her so badly," he says, sounding like he has to force the words out—or maybe he's trying to stop them—"then tell her I'm sorry it ended like that. Like this."
"Is that it?"
His silence is answer enough. Weiss's chest feels so hollow it might as well be caving in on itself. What they share resonates and sharpens in the overlap of their souls until it stabs them both. Adam flinches but Weiss doesn't dignify her own pain with a gasp or anything besides a minute twitch, because she knows this pain. She knows its particular blade all too well.
She knows loneliness.
He looks back at her with the shattered moon haloing his silhouette. His voice is soft in a way she knows she doesn't deserve, a way he wouldn't have spoken without her semblance twisting him up inside.
"Give me death, Weiss."
When the time comes, she's left alone in a small changing room. Her Atlas Academy sweats are exchanged for a blank, soft gown. At least she's able to keep her socks on, which spares her feet the chill of the floor.
Leaving her things folded on the one chair to be collected later, Weiss ducks out into the hallway. Her friends stand waiting a short way away, with Ruby nervously pacing up and down the floor.
"Atlas can and will charge you for wearing a rut in their floors," Weiss warns. Ruby's head shoots up and she manages a shaky little smile.
"Heh, yeah, they would. How're you feeling?"
Unlike her team leader, Weiss knows how to put up a front, and though her chest is caving in on itself and her eyelids scrape like sandpaper, she sets her shoulders and smiles firmly back. "Ready for this to be over."
Seeing the look in Ruby's eye, she raises her arms from her sides in a silent invitation that Ruby takes without hesitation, rushing into the hug hard enough to make Weiss step back to keep her balance. One by one the rest of her team joins in. They hold her tight and she leans into them, closes her eyes, and tries to fix this moment in her mind.
It'll all be over soon, she thinks, and she can't tell where that thought is sourced from.
Squeezing them all one last time, she pulls herself away. "I don't want to keep them waiting."
"We'll be watching from the observation room," Blake says.
"And we'll be there the second it's over," Yang adds.
Ruby is the last to let her go. "Be strong, Weiss. I know you can do this."
"Thank you, all of you. I'll talk to you again soon."
They offer reassuring pats on the arm, back, and shoulder as she walks by. JNR are the next in the line between her and the lab. Nora wraps her in a bone-creaking hug that squeezes a squeak out of Weiss, much to her embarrassment. Ren pats her on the shoulder. Jaune hangs off to one side until Weiss rolls her eyes at his awkwardness and gives him a brief, but genuine, hug.
"No matter how this turns out," she tells him firmly, "it was not your fault."
He swallows and nods. "Right, right, of course. You'll do great, Weiss, I know it."
Everyone knows, she thinks and doesn't say.
Qrow and Oscar are the last, Maria off keeping an eye on Pietro's shop in Mantle. Qrow pulls Weiss into a one-armed embrace that she knows he only does because it annoys her, but thankfully, he lets go as soon as she starts to resist.
"Knock 'im dead," he says tactlessly, and she scowls at him. He's unphased. "The general can't make it, but he's pullin' for you too. Don't make it awkward and die on us, alright?"
"I have no plans to do so," she snaps.
Oscar, by comparison, is considerably more pleasant. "I…I haven't known you very long, but I hope this turns out well. For everyone. Um. Good luck, I guess. I don't really know what to say, to be honest."
She chases away the last of her ire with Qrow and smiles. "Being honest, neither do I. But thank you."
No one else stands between her and the lab. At some point during all the talking, her shoulders dipped down. She once more squares them and then steps inside. It looks the same as when she saw it the previous day: sleek, spartan, and soulless. She swallows and nods at the team assembled by the machine taking up the back wall.
That team is just Pietro, Penny, two nurses, and Winter. Winter had politely but firmly declined Pietro's offer to watch from the observation room with everyone else, and no one had the authority to overrule her.
"We are all set to go whenever you are, Miss Schnee," says Pietro.
Weiss activates her aura and tries to take comfort in its familiar white light for the moment it's visible. She ignores how it seems to set her chest on fire. "I'm ready."
He taps away at his tablet. One pod of the machine slides open with the near-silent hiss of hydraulics. "Penny, do you mind?"
"Not at all!" Penny approaches Weiss and holds out an arm. "I'll help you up."
Weiss wants to refuse, but the longer she looks at the machine, the less she trusts her ability to walk confidently toward it. "Thanks."
With Penny's arm laced through her own, Weiss can't back down. She reminds herself to breathe when she gets close, to breathe as Penny helps her clamber up into the pod, and to breathe as Penny straps her limbs down under the supervision of the nurses.
"Is that really necessary?" Winter asks.
"She could hurt herself if she has a seizure or other uncontrolled muscle contractions during the procedure," Penny explains. "It's not likely," she adds to Weiss, who is trying to pretend like she's not feeling more faint the longer this goes on without getting started. "One moment, I'll get the mask fitted."
The mask is a simple clear plastic piece that Penny—this time with another nurse physically helping—fits over Weiss's face. The two make sure Weiss is comfortably leaned back while Pietro explains what's to come. Most of it washes over Weiss without making much of an impact; she heard it all in the days leading up to this, and it's not like she'll be in any position to care exactly how things are going to happen when they're busy carving up her soul.
Pietro, his explanation finished, sighs. "I do wish we could fully sedate you, but extracting aura from someone who is unconscious and therefore unwilling is far more dangerous. Just continue to breathe nice and slow, the gas will keep you relaxed and take the edge off things."
Taking the edge off is a decent way to describe it, Weiss thinks. She still feels perfectly in control of and aware of herself, but there's a new distance between her mind and her body. If she wants to move her fingers, it takes a second of concentrating on that before she climbs the wall and does it. Far easier to sit back, close her eyes, and drift while Pietro and Penny and the nurses seal the chamber and turn the whole world muffled.
It occurs to her that she won't know when things are starting if she's zoning out like this, but that worry proves to be unfounded. She knows exactly when things start because the machine starts to hum and her aura flares bright enough around her that it shines through her eyelids. What begins as a faint tingling along her extremities grows and thickens to a prickling numbness she normally only feels when a limb falls asleep, only this is even sharper.
Grimacing, she tries to shift as much as her restraints allow, but moving makes the feeling far worse. She presses her head back into the cushion behind it and tries to seek out that distance she'd had before.
"Remember to breathe, Miss Schnee," says one of the nurses, her voice coming through a small speaker, and Weiss realizes she's been failing to do so.
One deep inhale, two, thr—
Something impales her through the chest. Her inhale cuts off with a strangled scream and she flails, tears gathering in her eyes and coursing down her cheeks when the thing gets bigger, the heat of it scorching her heart and lungs and everything else as it bleeds into her veins and carries to every bone and muscle fiber in her body.
"Almost there," she hears Pietro say as the burn turns sharper, refines, like a blade being taken to her flesh as an autopsy but she's still alive, she's still alive, she's still alive—
Penny's voice breaks through the haze: "Dad, I can't keep it stable. It's self-destructing!"
Head lolling while the loses the fight to stay conscious, Weiss can almost see it: a void inside herself pulled outside herself, an unstable plane that holds self within herself torn away and cast out. And with that piece—
Though she isn't aware enough to know she's speaking, the words slip free anyway: "He'll kill me after all."
He has no voice to scream. Even if he did, his mouth wouldn't move. His jaw wouldn't open. His lungs wouldn't empty.
There were flavors of agony Adam hadn't yet experienced. Blunt force trauma, he knows; cauterization, he knows; even soul-rending torture, he knows. But this, this…this alienation from a home he had not realized was a home, this biting cold that sinks deep and then deeper still, this sense of loss that bites into him and hangs on like a dog starved of all affection, this…this he had not known.
Over and over again he fights against that sinking feeling but it is a losing fight. The cold keeps coming and his strength is flagging. If his efforts make a difference he can't tell, and when exhaustion creeps up in the hollow tank where desperation once burned, he lets it claim him.
When it drowns him, he opens his eyes to light. Calm white light that carries warmth to his skin. He looks down and his hands are flesh and blood and covered in familiar black gloves. He looks up and Weiss is there in the white void, watching him. Waiting. For thanks, he wonders, or an apology? She'll get neither. This, he feels, he knows, is a way out.
Heedless of the soothing light falling away around him, he draws Wilt. Ignoring the cracks shooting across the floor, he strides forward.
He reaches her, takes her by the shoulder, and runs her through. Catharsis sweeps through him as the blade punches through flesh, a painfully quick cauterization of open wounds. She lets out a choked gasp; he yanks the sword out and steps away as her body collapses and tumbles backward into darkness. There's a smile on his lips when he turns his gaze to the breaking sky.
He knows oblivion. He welcomes it with open arms.