Chapter VII - Embers of a Fire Long Dead
Weiss
“You know, I really saw you as more of a half-milk, half-coffee kind of drinker.”
Weiss tented her fingers around the steaming cylinder of her mug, the percolator still bubbling on the nightstand. Dark steam curled off the surface of her coffee, the rich scent filling the room. “An influx of milk,” she said, “adds unneeded supplements and can lead to dietary issues. Besides, straight black coffee simply tastes better.” She took a sip, the familiar buzzing jolt of energy humming into her veins. It really was far too hot to be drinking, and it scalded her throat on the way down, but with classes looming in less than a half-hour, she couldn’t find the energy to mind.
Yang grunted and crossed her arms behind her head, propping her feet on the headboard of the bed, her feet pressing against the varnish. “Well, at least you’re not a tea drinker. People who can drink tea willingly freak me out.”
Blake looked up at her, folding down the edge of her book with an offended air. “Yang, I drink tea.”
“Yeah,” Yang grinned into her palm and stuck out her tongue at Blake, “and you freak me out. Your point?”
Blake rolled her eyes, propped herself up on her elbows, and turned back to her book. There was a more friendly edge between them now, a bantering lightness, and Weiss suspected that Yang had probably given another one of her infamous motherly pep-talks to the other girl. In any case, most of the rifts between the team had been resolved, and she frowned against the lip of her cup, because she had been the cause of the first splitting divide.
She had more than wanted to be leader, and not even for the high regard it would afford her. She had sat down at one o’clock in the morning, thoughts running rampant in her head as moonlight shimmered coldly through the window, listening to the gentle breathing of her teammates, and struggled to pen up something to Winter and her father. By the morning, the wastebasket was so full of crumpled up sheets of paper that it was brimming at the rim, and she was half-exhausted with lack of sleep. She had sent the letter after debating for days, because she knew of the anger that would meet her, with no retribution. They had pushed her to be leader, and she had failed— to a fifteen year old, no less. Her father’s angry words still bounced in her head, sharp edged and cruel. Failure… lazy, good-for-nothing daughter… you’ve let me down.
She set her cup down, her appetite reduced. She’d tried to be furious at Ruby, to no avail. There wasn’t anything remotely satisfying in taking her anger out on the smaller girl because she never did anything to retaliate, and Weiss had known for one of the first times in her life, the crushing weight of guilt. She’d gone ahead and taken her anger out anyways, because something sick in her dared her to, just to see if she could.
“Dammit, Weiss, she’s said your name five times now.”
“Yang!” Ruby said, but she was laughing into her cup of hot cocoa. “Language.”
“Pardon.” Yang cleared her throat before singing out in a falsetto high that was probably meant to imitate Ruby, but instead only made her sound like she had sucked in a helium balloon, “Gosh diddly darn-it, Weiss—“
“What?” Weiss said, nettled.
“I said pass me the schedule.” Ruby flopped over the side of the bed, her arms dangling, chunks of choppy dark hair falling into her eyes. Weiss thrust the crumpled schedule at her before draining the last of her coffee.
“Darn it, we have Professor Port again—“
Yang sputtered, choked on her coffee and swore loudly, eliciting a chuckle from Blake, a glare from Weiss, and a yelp from Ruby as she covered her ears and gave a dual glare at Yang. “Taiyang told you to watch your mouth at home, I don’t see why it’s different here—“
“Aww, did you get in trouble?” Blake snickered.
“Whatever,” Yang said, but she was grinning as she crumpled her Styrofoam cup into a ball and tossed it into the wastebasket, where it arced gracefully before landing on top of other papers with a crackle. “All he ever did was take away Ember Celica for a few days.”
“I heard from team CFVY that he’s partnering us up and making us fight Grimm to assess our skills,” Ruby puffed, swinging herself back up into her bed. “Bit stupid, really, if we’re here for a reason. We must be capable.”
“Not all of us are tiny crime-stopper centrals,” Yang said, rising from her bed and shifting her gauntlets onto her wrists with an audible clicking pop. “Besides, I’d really like to see Cardin wipe his stupid face on the ground. Maybe he’ll get creamed by an Ursa. It’s a shame that Jaune played hero back at Forever Fall, if you ask me.”
Weiss rolled her eyes. Simple-minded fools, every one of them, she thought idly, though she didn’t mean it. It wasn’t even him. It was Pyrrha that stepped in and prevented disaster. Much as she disliked the vapid leader of Team JNPR, she wasn’t going to spill Pyrrha’s secret, because it wasn’t hers to tell.
After they had departed their room, falling into a familiar flank formation, the hallways were bustling with more students than usual. She felt a prickle of excitement— as the Vytal Festival approached, the school was filtering in with a diverse array of other Students— unkempt Vacuo, easygoing Mistral, diplomatic Atlas, and the bulk of the student body, the disciplined Vale.
The Vytal Festival was a chaotic venture that Remnant had taken, the endeavours of it containing great risk, but it was a time of aching happiness to simply be alive. She’d been going for as long as she could remember, the blurry, hazy memories of smoky alleys strung with fairy lights and fairgrounds that smelled sticky and sweet, of trees turning to burnished colors of flame, of looking down from the soaring grandeur that was the Amity Colosseum and seeing people traversing the grounds below, like bustling ants in a tiny anthill. She’d felt happy then, with Winter by her side and her parents behind her, before the White Fang had started their ambushes. Before people had started going missing.
Before her father had changed.
And she liked it because it served a monument to happier times, where she ran with her youth and did not have the weight of worlds on her shoulders.
It had changed when she was twelve, the year the Schnee Dust company went into questionable ventures and she’d been forced out of her childhood much earlier than she should’ve been, growing up while others were simply growing into their world. Those years when her father had remained in his study late into the night, and swinging between vicious moods and darkly muttering tirades had been a permanent scar on her mind. Sometimes the slash on her eye still gave a phantom twinge, as if it, too, harbored the memory of agony—
Her nails carved half-moons into her palms, stinging. She would not go there. Schnees didn’t allow themselves to reign so freely in fickle emotion. Shutting down the memories of dark rooms, and staring at her gaunt face in the mirror, she continued on down the hall.
A loud, angry voice— Weiss rolled her eyes as she recognized it as Cardin’s— soared through the air. “If those damn Faunus show their faces around our dorm, I don’t care what Goodwitch says. I’ll take care of them like the animals they are.Yeah, they are, Dove - fucking freaks.”
Blake pulled up short and stiffened, and for a moment Weiss saw through the Winter-like chilly facade to what was underneath, and it was dark and agonized and reminded her more of her own eyes in the mirror than of her sister’s.
But then Yang put her hand on Blake’s shoulder, ducking to whisper something into her ear, and Blake relaxed at her touch, though the frozen memory of a wild, writhing panic still shadowed her eyes.
Predictably, Port’s class went disastrously. The inevitable mess that partners in duo combat trials against caged Grimm— Ruby and she had handled it with perhaps a bit more flair than needed, Blake and Yang had dispatched theirs in a matter of moments, Ren and Nora had almost blown up Professor Port’s desk with their combined energy, and Jaune and Pyrrha had, unsurprisingly, been drastically different in skill levels— left them all tired and disheveled, and Weiss could feel exhaustion shuddering through her veins.
“Did you hear Cardin?” Yang said as they wandered out past the fountains. “What an entitled little brat.”
Blake shot her a furtive look, and Weiss briefly wondered what her problem was, before Ruby spoke, worry in her voice.
“Well, he’s going to keep saying those awful things about the Faunus— you saw the news, the White Fang have been— well, they’ve been more active lately, haven’t they?”
“The White Fang,” Weiss growled. “They had better not disrupt the Vytal Festival.”
Blake spoke quietly, her voice gritted. “There’s no reason to assume they would attempt to sabotage it. There’d be no point.”
“The Faunus,” Weiss snapped back with anger fizzling inside of her, “are born to violent tendencies.”
With a low growl, Blake turned and stalked away, dark her hair trickling down her spine in the icy cut of the wind, and with a worried look at Weiss and Ruby, Yang hurried after her as wind skittered mournfully across the courtyard. Ruby gave a sad sort of sigh before trudging off, too, Weiss narrowed her eyes, the image of a bloody corpse— one of her father’s bureaucrats, a disciplined and stern man— flickering behind her eyes. It was the Faunus that had done that, and a part of her was still the little girl that felt the stinging lash of her father striking her across the face. As if in agreement, her scar rippled with a twitch of pain, and she swallowed back molten hot anger.
You’re a failure, Weiss, a tiny voice hissed at the back of her mind, but she couldn’t tell if it had the voice of her father, Winter, or herself.
Yang
Yang shivered.
She was perched in a tree, but she was too embarrassed to leave, because really the whole situation was awkward, and it was all Ruby’s fault.
They had been horsing around in the courtyard during a class, and Ruby had shot her gauntlet right off of her wrist, leaving her skin smoking from the friction, and it had wedged itself into the twisting fork of a tree. She couldn’t very well scale the tree during class, so she’d snuck down here at night… and she had heard footfalls while she was wrestling with trying to yank Ember Celica from the prongs of the branches. To her surprise, she’d craned her neck back and seen Blake, staring up at the night sky— starless; the abundance of lights drowned it out, and the moon was a tuft of white in the distance— with a look of such forlornness on her face, Yang had felt like she would be violating something, something sacred, if she revealed her presence.
The moonlight played in sharp, singing notes between them, dark shadows spilling across Blake’s jaw. Blake swirled towards the moon in silence, held it in her eyes. They turned to a molten silver, two tiny, rippling pictures of the night sky. There was something dark there, something that made her think of the dilapidated barn where she and Ruby had almost gotten killed. If people could emit colors, Yang thought, a black mist would be shading Blake, because Yang could feel the anguish that lived in her partner, that slept like a serpent in her veins.
She didn’t say anything. She could have well been a statue, for all she moved, carved of sharp hard rock. Yang could almost imagine a sculptor poised with a pick in their hand, viewing the image of a girl in a marble block.
“Yang,” Blake said after a while, almost making Yang fall from where she sat, “I know you’re there.” She didn’t move for a second, but then her head turned, two eyes like golden fire scorching into Yang.
Yang wrenched her gauntlet from the tree with a grunt and dropped down almost sheepishly, leaves rattling and drifting down with her. Blake eyed her warily. “Why are you out here?”
“I could ask you the same question,” she challenged, wriggling her weapons back onto her wrists, but she instantly felt guilty at the look on Blake’s face, and she reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. Blake stiffened, but didn’t draw back, and Yang gave her a faint smile.
“We’re friends, remember. Partners. You can talk to me anytime. You know that, right?”
Blake didn’t smile back, but Yang thought she saw the darkness in her eyes lighten a little bit, the mist turning from black to gray. She reached up and gently took Yang’s hand off her shoulder, fingertips lingering. “Yes, Yang,” she said, and there was something sad in her eyes. “I know that.”