Chapter 1 – Don't Cross Double Yellow Lines
You just might hit someone.
Thunk!
That…That didn't sound good. Yang was the first to admit, she probably shouldn't be driving Bumblebee when it was this dark, and she really shouldn't be making sharp turns around back roads where visibility was poor, and maybe she hadn't seen those double yellow lines on the road until she'd flicked on her turn signal, but could you really blame her?
It's not like I had a choice. I have to get home somehow. It's not like I can just sleep overnight at the five and dime, so…y-yeah.
In her heart, she knew that driving over there had been a mistake, or maybe it was losing track of time when the sun started to set, but once you put aside that stuff, it was hardly Yang's fault. Because, once she was already there and it was pitch black outside when she left, there was literally no realistic alternative. Yang had to return to her house, and there were only about eight roads on all of Patch, none of which were great to be on at night in terms of lighting and such, meaning that at some point, she would have to do something risky.
I chose to minimize it, Yang reasoned with herself as she slowed down her bike, wincing at the unanticipated whirring noise coming from the rear tire. I was driving under the speed limit. I can't change the fact that there's a hairpin turn to get on the street I take back home, and I was already midway through it when I noticed those road markings.
She'd driven over something after making said turn, and it had probably messed up her motorcycle real good. At this point, she was almost sure she'd popped a tire, or at least punctured it.
Damn, I must've hit something really sturdy if it poked through the rubber. I always buy the high-end tires, and they can practically take a gunshot.
Still, it wouldn't do to panic. Instead of skidding to a halt and throwing herself off of Bee, Yang just eased down the brakes until she gradually slowed down to a suitable speed.
Ka-clink-ka-ka-clink-ka-ka-clink-ka-!
"Damn it," Yang said aloud as she finally stopped. That sounded like internal damage, also known as expensive damage.
At this point, she was probably a good 100 feet away from the site of the turn and whatever she'd hit, and it was far too dark to make out her surroundings. Again, was it really Yang's fault, or the people who built this road? They had to have known people would need to drive it at night, so paving it here where the moonlight was too weak to penetrate the trees was really an act of negligence.
What Yang couldn't see, she could feel and smell, and that was the heat and odor of exhaust. It wasn't indicative of a fire, but it did tell her a bit about the extent of the injury to her precious vehicle. If fumes were leaking out, that meant that the puncture was downstream of any combustion, making it still safe enough to stand near the bike. Riding it was out of the question, but there was no need to call the fire department or sequester the bike from tall trees.
It's the small victories, I guess. But what the heck did I even hit?
When her bike was finally fully stopped, Yang switched it off and turned backwards to see if she could get a look at the roadblock that had launched her nearly five feet in the air. She'd been moving too fast to get a good look…well, to get any look at it with only the weak moonbeams and her one borderline-burnt out headlight (she didn't usually drive this late and hadn't realize the poor shape it was in).
And, of course, it was still too dark. The lighting situation hadn't changed from the roadblock to her current location.
I'd better go remove it from the road. If someone else come around that same turn, they'll go right over it, and there's no telling if they'll be a huntress who can afford a little motor accident like me.
It wasn't necessary, strictly, nor did it do anything to absolve her of her poor adherence to the Valean Driver's Handbook, but as a prospective huntress, Yang felt obligated to at least bother. She had no intention of becoming the kind of huntress, or the kind of person for that matter, who skirted around the rules and obeyed the letter but not the spirit. Besides, what did she have to lose but half a minute and her unfulfilled curiosity?
It's a lie to say I'm not curious. Were it a tree branch, like I would expect, I don't think it would have survived. Whatever it was didn't crunch under my wheels, and it certainly didn't leave any residue aside from a pin-prick of a hole.
Whipping out her scroll as she stepped closer, Yang flicked it twice to engage the quick-activate flashlight. Scanning the ground in front of her, she saw nothing at first.
When raised upwards, though, to illuminate further down the road, that changed.
"Shit," Yang said.
That's a – d-did I just –?
No, she hadn't. The person, though lying down and clearly unconscious, had aura flickering over their skin. Her skin, rather.
It was a pale white – both the aura and the skin, and also the hair for that matter – but Yang barely had time to consider any of that. The aura might've been there, but it was also fading and looked like it might shatter at the faintest touch.
She had a pulse; that was the first thing Yang (gently) checked. Once that was confirmed, Yang quickly held the backside of her scroll to the person's nose.
Okay, she's still breathing. It's fogging up, so this isn't the absolute unthinkable worst case scenario.
But that didn't meant it wasn't still pretty damn bad. She wasn't drunk or texting, but she'd still hit someone, and that was a criminal action. Plus, the double yellow lines meant she was at fault in an insurance and legality sense. On top of that, this white-ish chick had only survived because of her aura. Had she not raised it, that would've been it for her, and Yang would've taken her first life.
Frick, hypotheticals aside, I'm still probably gonna lose Beacon when I call this in!
But what else was there to do but help this lady? Yang couldn't just leave her there, and she wasn't safe on her own. Her only choice was to somehow get this woman to a hospital and then report this whole thing to the police. Hit and runs were against the law and against basic decency, after all.
Bye-bye, education, but it's my own fault…mostly. Whatever my role in this was, she was lying down in the road when I drove over her. I would've seen a person in the way and felt the impact of knocking them over, but instead I just felt my wheels bounce like I'd rolled over a log. If she was already unconscious and down…
Maybe this girl was drunk? She looked a little young for an alcohol addiction, but you could never tell.
Or maybe Qrow's influence was biasing her, and it had nothing to do with alcohol.
She is a huntress herself, or at least an aura-user since she's awfully young. Maybe she's even a academy recruit like me? This particular neck of the woods tend to be sparse on Grimm, but they do have them, and what else could knock a huntress unconscious?
I guess I'll just have to ask her when she wakes up. To the hospital, I guess?
Except…
Bumblebee is busted, and the only Patch hospital is waaaaay too far to walk in the dark. If she is a huntress who got overwhelmed by Grimm, I don't know that it's safe to be wandering around after dark. She has aura, and there're no visible injuries or signs of internal ones on her body.
Home was just around the corner. If Yang flopped the body over the top of her bike and pushed it, using it like a pack mule to carry her safely back, she could get this chick out of the cold and into shelter far faster. When day broke, it would be safer to travel, and maybe she could fix Bumblebee by then.
Dad was out, and he'd given the ol' 'no friends while I'm out,' but Miss Roadblock here wasn't a friend, and there was no way on Remnant that Dad would ever object to Yang not just leaving her here.
Yang really did hope that she didn't run into anyone, though. For one thing, it would be awkward as sin to explain exactly why she had a corpse flopped over her motorcycle, and for another, there was no way to explain the situation without it sounding like she was trying to cover something up.
The girl just bounced up and down with every turn of the now uneven wheels, as the popped tire was only losing more and more air. Yang considered putting a pillow underneath her head to make sure she didn't get brain damage as the duo made their way up Yang's multi-mile long driveway, but she decided against it. For one thing, the girl's head was bouncing against the footrests and there would be no way to wedge in a pillow without it immediately falling out at the first bounce. For another, Yang had no pillows.
I hope she's not sore when she wakes up, Yang thought as she pushed her idle bike.
All of the shaking up and down with every rotation of Bumblebee's wheels, coupled with the bike going over a rock but only with one tire, caused the roadblock-ette to unexpectedly start to roll forward, and Yang's hand shot out like a rocket to catch her before she fell onto the ground. That would cause brain damage for sure.
Yang's hand caught her by the scruff of her jacket, but she hadn't anticipated the girl's arms starting to slide out of the article of clothing as she held it from the back. Grunting as she shifted her weight, Yang had no choice but to improve her hold on the girl by letting go of Bee entirely and gripping the girl by her arm.
"Hup," she said, accepting the imminent fall. "Here we go…"
THRNKKK!
It pained Yang to let her bike go tumbling down and probably get even more broken as she relinquished her hold on it altogether, but she really had no choice. The alternative was to drop the girl, and a bike was never worth more than a person's well-being, no matter how sentimentally important or physically valuable it was. She would probably have to pick up a summer job to fund its repairs, though.
Even with both hands, Yang's grasp was poor, so she wasted no time in bending her knees and slowly crouching down to the floor in order to safely put the girl down once she was low enough. When Yang felt the weight in her arms finally disperse as the girl's back touched down and visually confirmed that her head wasn't going to go splat on the pavement (it was against her dangling arm so that her ear was pushing onto her shoulder), she let go, and her victim of circumstance slumped down onto the ground and rolled onto her stomach.
No brain damage, and not even a scuff on her. I think I salvaged that pretty well.
It was then that Yang noticed a blade on her hilt – nothing exception, just a sheathed sword with a thin blade that might've been the same dimensions as a needle scaled up. That must've been what popped her tire when she drove over her. It looked nice enough, albeit kinda scrawny.
I guess she really is a huntress if she carries a weapon. That or a bandit, but I find the later rather unlikely, at least for Patch. We're not Mistral or something.
Rolling over had also emptied the pockets of the girl's jacket, but the only things that came out were a few mixed colored lien chips, probably about eighty hundred in total from first glance, and a small Dust shard in a cylindrical glass holding chamber. It was no bigger than a roll of tokens at the arcade, and similar in shape as well.
It's just Dust, easy to come by, and not even that much, at that.
Yang scooped up the more valuable money and slipped it back into the girl's pocket. Heaving her upwards in a bridal carry, she…immediately put her back down upon realizing she would need to lift her bike up first.
When Bee's kickstand was lifted, Yang picked up the girl in a bridal carry and then plopped her down onto the seat of the bike. This time, though, she kept one hand on the girl's back to press her against the seat as she pushed her vehicle, to avoid any future drops or shifts. Yang made sure to not push too hard, as she knew that her strength would be enough to pop this girl like a grape if she so chose.
Not that she wanted to, though; there was still the slim possibility that this might work out. It wouldn't be great for anyone, of course, a driving accident never could be, but the girl was already lying down on the ground, presumably unconscious, when Yang rode right over her without rousing her. That means that a) she hadn't felt the injury and b) hopefully wouldn't blame Yang for it.
If she was in some danger, she might be thankful that I pulled her out of it. We're both huntresses, after all, and roughly the same age – that might count for something. It's just as likely she'll sue me for everything I own, which would be fair given how I did bulldoze her, but I'd like to avoid a prison sentence or punitive measures if I can.
It would be up to the girl, in the end. If she woke up with no particular recollection of the accident, Yang might just make it out of this without a revoked ticket to Beacon. If she didn't…well, that was that.
In spite of her life potentially being ruined, Yang felt an alarming lack of alarm. It was probably just the rush of her head not yet catching up to what she was supposed to know at this point. That said, there were a few sprinkles of relief mixed around in that head of hers.
Even if I did screw up, she's still alive. I think I can go through with anything but having taken a life because of my own negligence. This girl gets to live, so I'll live with the consequences.
This girl…as Yang looked at her closer, she realized it wasn't just any girl. She wasn't wearing the usual outfit from media appearances, instead garbed with a scruffy pair of shorts and a white tee, neither of which looked suitable for nightwear in a forest, but the young woman slumped over the seat of Bee was someone famous. The Dust in her pocket…
I recognize her. I know I do, even if the name's getting past me. It's that lady, the bitch with the Dust. Wait…SDC…
Well, that was one half of the mystery solved. Last name Schnee, first name…something. Started with a V, maybe?
Yeah, I'm almost certain its pronunciation starts with a hard V sound. Violet, Veronica, Vicky, Vesper…that last one sounds the closest to whatever it really is, if I had to guess, but it isn't exactly Vesper.
Yang could just look it up on her scroll when she got home. There were only so many Schnees in the whole wide world (no more than 5, if Yang recalled correctly), and all of their entire lives were public information on display for the entire population of the planet to know. Yang couldn't imagine living like that, with every man, woman, and child from her to Mistral reading up about her daily exploits in the tabloids.
How could you survive daily life in such a circumstance? Maybe it's all just a front they present. Yeah, maybe their family is secretly naughtier on the inside and just hides it well from the reporters? Given what I've heard about every other celebrity and their fifteenth drug or sex scandal, that's probably true.
Huh…Vivian Schnee was a huntress, as she certainly wasn't a bandit. Yang hadn't known that. Yang belatedly realized that this girl's status of notable fame sort of recontextualized almost everything around her.
It's not just a drunk in the street; it couldn't be. It's a famous celebrity who was passed out in a remote island hundreds of miles from her homeland. And she has aura, in spite of being some tycoon-mogul type's daughter and successor. I would've expected her family to have just paid bodyguards rather than dirty their own hands with grunt work.
The unlocked aura and the sword…maybe that could be explained. Maybe, instead of being a businesswoman, Verity here was forsaking that for a career in Atlas' army…getting a few years of life experience under the belt, or building up a storied career of service like nobles used to back when Vale was a true monarchy. It was possible this whole huntress thing was just because she was important and therefore a target for possible assassinations; rich folks learning self-defense just in case was rarely taken this far, but it wasn't beyond the realm of believability.
But what was she doing out here? Patch was nowhere in the grand scheme of things. Its only claim to fame was being the home of a semi-decent primary combat school, and that wasn't even the biggest. These woods were full of nothing but slightly elevated Grimm numbers and trees so tall they blocked out the moonlight.
I know she doesn't go to Signal, so she isn't a student. But why would a…
It didn't matter. Yang could ask Victoria Schnee when she recovered, because they'd arrive home.
Next Chapter: Dumping Ground
Weiss learned long ago that pride never matters as much as life.
With this fic being the inaugural member of a new tradition, I present to you the Ruby suffering tier list. Dust Bitch will be receiving the D-rank, in which Ruby's suffering is minor or nonexistent:
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If you don't want to look it up, here's the text version:
Origin Story
Origin Story
S (torment)
The Murderess and Her Brain
K
Remnant's Greatest Villain
A (anguish)
The Empty Seat
B (strife)
Remnant's Greatest Hero
Jacques Schnee's B- Parenting
C (inconvenience)
Living the Dream
D (no suffering)
RWBY But Worse
Job Security
Dust Bitch (that's a-me)
No Appearance
Can I Make it to Summer?
You, Me, and the Tuna
Author's Notes
Welcome aboard, Rat's Nest. No reason to beat around the bush:
Main ship: Freezerburn aka Yang Xiao-Long/Weiss Schnee
Genre: Adventuring/Travel
Chapters: 36
Wordcount: 120,000
Updates: Wednesday
Copyright: I don't own RWBY. At this point, I'm starting to wonder if I ever will.
Comments: always welcome, feel free to ask clarifying questions
This entire fic was originally going to be titled Don't Cross Double Yellow Lines. I don't know why, and I don't know why I changed the title either. Regardless, I changed it to Dust Bitch because that fit better, but I wanted to keep a nod to my original title, so the first chapter is now called that.
Happy rats, and don't do crime!