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they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more
-isaiah 2:4
On the tenth anniversary of the day it all ended-- Salem, and the Brothers; the pools of grimm; the war that they gave their adolescence to-- Weiss turns off her alarm and stares at the ceiling and decides not to get out of bed.
It’s a spectacle every year, in equal parts a celebration and riddled with protests; for a world that had been godless for millennia before they destroyed the Brothers, some people really seem concerned about the world being godless now, as if it’s any different than it used to be. There are ceremonies to attend, celebrations that they’re all expected to stand up for, parties and meetings and parades to make appearances at.
Yang is already up, like always; she rises before the sun in Solitas and is normally already back from the gym with coffee ready when Weiss drags herself out of bed at a still-unreasonable six o’clock. Blake is a crapshoot, sometimes gone when Weiss wakes up and sometimes curled around her in a vice grip that Weiss has to wrestle her way out of, even if she’d rather stay warm under the blankets with Blake every time. Today Blake is already awake, the sound of the shower running in the bathroom giving away her location, just as the clink of pots and pans in the kitchen gives away Yang’s.
Weiss scrubs at her eyes and sighs, lets her arm flop out across the enormous bed. There’s a scuff on the ceiling, barely visible, and she’s not sure she wants to know where it came from. She should get up and get started on her day; just because it’s a holiday doesn’t mean that she gets the time off. She has three meetings before the first ceremony, and then their team has an interview, and then a parade of huntsmen and huntresses to be honored, and then a formal dinner with the Vale council to discuss kingdom defense strategies and contracts.
The last time she took a vacation, it was for their anniversary-- her and Blake and Yang, eleven years and counting-- and they’d spent a week on a beach in Mistral, collecting sunburns and hickies and lazy afternoon naps. It’d been nearly six months since then, and she’s worked every weekend since then. Having Blake at her side as the chief of Solitas security had tempered the worst edges of it, and Yang taking over as headmaster of the academy had involved her in more meetings than not, but still. Still.
There’s a click of the door opening, and the mattress dips. Weiss rolls her head over to one side, raising an eyebrow at how Yang’s sprawling across the sheets until she can rest her chin on Weiss’s bicep.
“You’re gross,” Weiss says flatly, even as her hand curls up into Yang’s sweaty ponytail fondly.
“You’re gross,” Yang counters. She pushes up and leans forward, drops a kiss onto Weiss’s shoulder. “But I brought you coffee, so you have to be nice to me.”
“If I must,” Weiss says with a sigh. Yang leans closer, kisses her, bounces up like she didn’t just spend two hours working out.
“Breakfast is ready,” Yang says, bouncing on her toes and stretching one arm across her body. It’s infuriating, sometimes, how boundless Yang’s energy is.
“Is there bacon?” Blake yells from the bathroom, the shower shutting off.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Yang says with a sniff, just loud enough for Blake to hear, and Weiss rolls her eyes and smiles in spite of her exhaustion. Yang winks at her and holds out her hands, waiting for Weiss to grab ahold of them so she can be hauled out of the bed. “Come on, babe, let’s get some bacon before Blake eats it all.”
“I heard that!” Blake’s head pokes out of the bathroom, hair dripping onto the hardwood as she glares at Yang. “If you eat it all--”
“You snooze, you lose, Belladonna,” Yang says cheerfully, and Weiss yawns, waves one hand lazily, shrieks when Yang hauls her up into her arms and sprints out of the bedroom.
“Put me down!”
“You love it,” Yang says, kissing her cheek wetly and bounding down the stairs at a breakneck pace. She deposits Weiss at the kitchen table with a flourish and a bow, grin wide and cheeky, and Weiss fights the urge to climb back into her arms and stay there all day.
There’s an omelette on her plate already, a full cup of coffee waiting for her. “I love you,” Weiss mumbles, mostly to the coffee, and then pats Yang on the arm. “I love you too, don’t worry.”
“You better,” Yang says, kissing the top of her head and pivoting back over to the stove and cracking three eggs into the skillet in rapid succession. Weiss takes a small sip of her coffee, and then a longer one, and closes her eyes as it warms through her chest and out towards her fingertips. She props her chin in her hand and stares at Yang’s profile as she cooks, dumping bacon and cheese into the omelette on the stove.
Blake shuffles in when the omelette is half done, fingertips trailing over Weiss’s shoulders as she claims her own seat at the table, a pot of tea waiting for her.
“This is fancy,” Blake says blithely as she pours tea into a cup. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“It’s a long day,” Yang says with a shrug, not turning around as she flips the omelette over. “Like, a shit long day. Gotta make sure we’re all fueled up.”
Blake sighs into her tea and nods, inhales some of the steam. “Memorial day is the worst. As if security isn’t a big enough pain in the ass. How many times can they give us the same damn medals?”
“Maybe after this one they’ll get over it,” Yang grumbles. She slides the omelette onto a plate and stretches absurdly across the kitchen, plate dangling from her fingertips and heel hooked precariously under the countertop for balance until Blake leans forward from her seat to accept the plate.
“Wouldn’t count on it,” Blake says, already digging into her omelette and groaning inappropriately.
“Hey,” Yang says suddenly, dropping into the third chair and nudging at Weiss’s foot. “You good, babe?”
“What?” Weiss blinks slowly.
There’s a click as Blake sets her fork down, exchanging a glance with Yang and then the both of them turning back to Weiss.
“What?” she says again, more defensively.
“What’s wrong?” Blake says, softly, soft like she only is when they wake up from nightmares of Salem or the void they’d lost six months to, Haven and Beacon and the cratered ruins where they’d faced down Salem and the Brothers; soft like she was when Weiss went back to the flooded ruins of Atlas after the war and stared into the sunken lake that, somewhere, held her cruel father’s dead body.
“Nothing,” Weiss says. There’s no way it’ll work, and they exchange another look and then focus back on her, and there’s only so much she can do against the both of them and the concern written plainly across their faces. “I’m just--tired, is all.”
“Yeah, no,” Yang says with a scoff. “You’re cranky when you’re tired--”
“I am not!”
“--and this isn’t that,” she finishes, ignoring Weiss entirely. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m just tired,” Weiss says again. She rolls her eyes when the both of them glare at her, and sighs, rubs a hand over her eyes. “I really am. I’m just--I hate today.”
“Yeah,” Yang says softly. “Me too.” There’s a distant shadow to her tone, the one that drags her down every year when the parades and ceremonies happen and their medals are presented yet again and the huntsmen and huntresses who died in the war are honored, but the deaths of so many who didn’t die directly in the war-- Summer and Raven, Pyrrha, too many friends to count-- are skated past.
“It’s not for us,” Blake says, carefully. “It’s for-- you know. Everyone else. Cross-kingdom unity. People are already starting to forget what it was like.”
“The newest kids at the combat academy don’t remember it at all.” Yang hums in agreement. “There will be grimm for years more, even with the pools gone, but the kids just-- they were barely aware of what it was like. So is everyone else.”
Weiss stares down at her coffee, at the omelette Yang had made for her-- peppers and chorizo and hot sauce, her favorite combination-- that she hasn’t had the stomach to touch yet. Her entire day today is either politicking her way through military and defense strategy, or standing smiling with a sword at her hip and medals on her chest so people can feel safe. She’s tired.
They’re all tired. It’s the same tired that had weighed them down when the war first ended, when Ruby went off on her own for the first time and the three of them went to Patch to rest and recover, when they knew where they were headed for the future but were too exhausted from years of constant fighting to start. She’d thought, maybe, that once they had a routine, a home, a life-- their house in the newly rebuilt Solitas, Yang at the academy, Blake at Weiss’s side every day while she fought through the nastier politics of reconstruction and designing an more equal and equitable kingdom out of the ashes of Atlas-- they would find their rhythm, their calm, the rest of their lives.
There is a rhythm, and it is calm, especially in comparison to the cascading crises of the war, but it’s not what she’d hoped for. She’s happy, to be sure, waking up every day to Blake and Yang and curling into bed with them every night, dinners with Ruby when she’s in town, weekly coffee with her family. She’s happy, but only in comparison to when she’d been mired in a war. Surely there’s more to living her life than this.
“Weiss,” Blake says. She abandons her tea and leans across the table, taking Weiss’s coffee out of her hands and winding their fingers together. “What’s wrong?”
Weiss stares down at their hands, tenses and relaxes under the feel of Yang’s hand falling to her knee under the table, looks between them: Yang’s concern shows in the way her heel bounces silently on the floor under the table, the crease in her brow; Blake’s, in the tilt of her ears and the downturn of her lips. She’s spent more than a decade with them at her side every morning and every night, even longer on a team with them; she knows how to read every flicker of Blake’s ears or slant of Yang’s mouth.
“I want to retire,” she says without meaning to.
The reaction she gets is immediate: Blake’s hand goes slack in hers, and Yang sits up straight so quickly that her knees bang the underside of the table.
“You what?” Yang’s eyebrows have nearly disappeared into her hairline.
“You,” Blake says slowly. “Want to...retire. You. Want to retire.”
Weiss huffs out a sigh and yanks her hand back, sitting up primly in her seat and glaring at the both of them. “Maybe.”
“The last time we were on vacation we had to literally padlock your scroll into a lockbox so you wouldn’t work,” Blake says.
“We’ve been trying to get you to take another vacation for months and you’re always too busy--”
“Maybe that’s why I want to retire,” Weiss says with a frown. She winds her hands together in her lap, picks at one of her fingernails.
“You don’t have time for a vacation so you want to-- retire,” Yang says haltingly. Her eyebrows crease, forehead wrinkling, and Weiss flushes under her scrutiny. Blake is the one who most often sends people running out of the room with her appraisal, but no one has ever seen through Weiss the way Yang has, not since she was seventeen years old. “What’s really going on?”
“I’m tired,” Weiss says, insistent, almost childish, a split second away from stamping her foot on the ground. Instead she pushes up to her feet and paces towards the stove and back, twists her fingers around one another. “I have three hours of meetings today about kingdom security. Defense contracts. Reviewing weapons technology. Fighting with the other kingdoms over who gets what and when and--”
“Hey,” Blake says, cutting gently into her ramble. She doesn’t stand up, leaning back in her chair and tilting her head to one side. “Do you want to stop working, or do you want to stop working at the council?”
Weiss stops mid-turn, mouth half open with a retort already on her tongue-- of course she just wants to retire-- and then pauses. Blake’s eyebrow lifts, and Yang glances from Weiss to Blake and back again, props her chin in her hand over the back of her chair.
“I-- don’t know,” Weiss says haltingly, frowning.
“What are you tired of?” Yang offers. She pops out of her chair and covers the distance between them in one long stride, hands curling around Weiss’s wrists and pulling her fingers away from where they’d been twisting around one another, pulls her back to the table.
Weiss lets herself be guided into the chair Yang had been sitting in, the one in the middle, and lets out a mild huff at being manhandled into the middle. Even if it is comforting, having them on either side of her, steady bulwarks between her and the rest of the world.
“I’m sick of the council,” Weiss says eventually. Blake’s tea is closer than her coffee, and she picks it up and takes a careful sip, wincing at the bitter taste. It’s oversteeped, because she derailed their morning. “And always talking about fighting, and war, and defense.”
“It’s not all war,” Blake says, careful and delicate. “There are the faunus reparations bills, and infrastructure, and--”
“It’s mostly fighting,” Yang says drily. Blake shoots a glare her way and Yang shrugs, throws her hands up dramatically. “What? It is. You two come home like every day talking about some defense contract bullshit.”
“Fine, it’s mostly fighting,” Blake says with a frown.
“I thought it’d be different, is all,” Weiss says absently. She takes another sip of Blake’s tea and scowls at it, and Blake grumbles and swipes it out of her hand. “I thought-- it’s a new city, and a new government, and with the pools gone the grimm will be gone in our lifetime. I thought it would be more about-- building things, not fighting. But it’s still always about fighting.”
“Yeah, well,” Yang says with a snort. “After centuries of fighting grimm, and the only thing that survived Atlas being the warehouses full of paladins, it was sort of inevitable, unfortunately.”
“Don’t remind me,” Weiss says, dropping her head into her hands. “I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with those for years.”
“At least you kept the Cordovins of the world from claiming them and building her own army for bitter old assholes,” Blake offers.
Weiss groans into her hands, pushing the heels of her hands into her eyes until starbursts of color show behind her eyelids. “If I don’t find a use for them soon someone is going to do just that.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t retire, though,” Blake adds on. Weiss’s head snaps up, blinking rapidly into the bright lights and whipping around to stare at Blake. “Seriously. You’ve done so much with the council already. You don’t have to give your whole life to it.”
“Besides,” Yang says. “We know you, babe. Your idea of retirement is going to be, like, starting a whole new business within six months.”
“It is not!” Weiss says indignantly.
“Yes it is,” they both chorus at her.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Weiss folds her arms over her chest and glares moodily at the both of them, getting nothing but a sly smile from Blake and an outright guffaw from Yang in response.
Her surely-scathing retort is cut off by her scroll pinging. She automatically picks it up from where she’d left it sitting next to her coffee like every morning, glancing down in expectation of another meeting request to go over yet another defense contract.
Instead, it’s from Pietro, with questions regarding a series of permits needed for his food supplement foundation’s next build site, and she freezes in place.
“That’s it,” Weiss says suddenly, standing up so quickly she upends the entire table. “That’s-- yes.”
She darts out of the kitchen, sprinting up the stairs and into their bedroom, past the still-unmade bed and towards her closet. She’s already halfway to dressed when Blake and Yang tumble into the room, confusion clear on their faces.
“What is it?” Yang says, hands on her hips.
“The foundation,” Weiss hurries out. She twists around awkwardly trying to zip up her dress, barely noticing when Blake swats at her hands and zips it up for her. “The paladins, that’s-- that’s what we can use them for.”
“The paladins?”
“You lost me,” Blake says slowly. Weiss darts into the bathroom, dragging a brush through her hair once and then giving up, throwing it up into a ponytail.
“The paladins!” Weiss says impatiently. “The agriculture industry is still struggling even in warmer areas of Solitas, even now, because so much of the machinery was lost during the war, and the land that wasn’t damaged isn’t level enough for crops even if the soil is arable--”
“Weiss,” Yang says over her. “You’re doing that thing.”
Weiss freezes, toothbrush halfway to her mouth. “What thing?”
“The thing where you’re thirty steps ahead and no one knows what you’re talking about,” Blake says drily. She plucks the toothbrush out of Weiss’s hands and balances it on the edge of the sink, steers her by the shoulders back into the bedroom and forcing her to sit down on the bed. “Pause, breathe, start at the beginning.”
Weiss glares up at her, arms folded over her chest, and looks to Yang for backup; Yang leans against the dresser with a shrug and points at Blake wordlessly.
“The paladins need to be used for something,” Weiss says impatiently. “Pietro’s foundation has been trying to replicate healthy food sources, since the war wiped out so much of the food supply, especially in Solitas.”
She pauses, glancing exaggeratedly between Blake and Yang, and is rewarded with an eyeroll from Blake and a dramatic go ahead from Yang.
“There’s arable land, even in Solitas, that isn’t being used because it hasn’t been a priority to level it properly, and because it’s still far enough out from the central areas of the kingdom that people are scared of farming it.”
“You want to turn the paladins into farming machines,” Yang says slowly.
“Exactly,” Weiss says. She pops up to her feet again, pacing the length of the bedroom and back, turning over regulations and figures in her head. “There are nearly seventy paladin squads still in storage north of the ruins. If we assume we can only use half of them, and then delineate one unit for defense per two units repurposed for agricultural use, we could have--”
“More than two hundred solar-powered super strong agricultural powerhouse machines,” Blake finishes for her. There’s a gleam in her eyes, the one she gets when they’re up late in Weiss’s offices, hammering through faunus rights and reparations legislation details.
“It would be a significant up-front investment, but probably half of it would be covered by what would otherwise by the annual upkeep and storage and security costs we’re already incurring,” Weiss says hurriedly. “Plus whatever we would save from the agricultural import costs. It wouldn’t take away any existing jobs or supplies because no one is actually farming in Solitas right now and it would actually create jobs--”
“Weiss,” Yang says over her, cutting her off, but there’s a fond look in her eyes, a gentle slant to her mouth, the one she gets when Weiss has showed up at the academy to bring her lunch, or Blake surprised them with dinner reservations. “Does this mean you don’t want to retire?”
“Oh,” Weiss says faintly, excitement fading briefly. “I--don’t know. No?”
She picks at her fingernails for a moment, considers Blake and Yang and their life together; the council; the foundation; the people of Solitas who she’s tried so hard to support.
“I think I still want to leave the council,” she says eventually. “Maybe not full retirement. This project will likely take a while to get off the ground--”
“But you could do it from within the foundation,” Blake offers, and Yang points at her sharply, a toothy grin spreading on her lips, and Weiss nods.
“Yeah,” she says after a moment. “I’d have to talk to Pietro, but-- yes.”
“So you’re going to step down?” Blake settles down at the foot of the bed, pulls Weiss down next to her. Weiss leans into her side automatically, fingers gripping absently at the material of her sweatpants.
“I think so,” Weiss says.
“When?” Yang says. She pushes away from the dresser and flops down on Weiss’s other side, one arm dropping around her shoulders lazily.
“Today,” Weiss says before she can stop herself. “I think today.”
“Really?”
“Don’t you need to have someone in mind to run for the seat first?” Blake says reasonably. “I know it’s not required, but it’d keep you on the good side of the remaining members.”
“Nora,” Weiss says without thinking about it. “She’s been thinking about it and waiting for a seat to open up, and she’s-- Nora. She’d been an excellent member.”
“Ren will never know sleep again,” Yang mutters, even as she nods in agreement. “But yeah. She’d be great at it.”
“The council won’t know what hit them,” Blake says with a laugh. She presses a kiss to the side of Weiss’s head. “So, turning war machines into farming tools. That’s your next project?”
“I think so,” Weiss mumbles, tilting into her shoulder. “Do you think that means we can skip the festivities today?”
“If only,” Yang groans out. “Ruby will murder all of us if we don’t show up.”
She’s right, like she so often is, and Weiss lets herself be pulled up to her feet and frogmarched into the shower. Blake’s already showered, but she follows them in anyways, dismissing Weiss’s worry about being late by grabbing her scroll and canceling the meetings Weiss had before the first ceremony.
Hours later, when they’re paraded out in front of the Memorial Day crowds to deafening applause for the ceremonial presentation of their medals, Weiss has a bruise on her throat aching under the high collar of her jacket, and there’s a matching one that she knows is hidden on Blake’s collarbone, a bite mark on Yang’s hip. She stands at attention with one hand on the hilt of Myrtenaster and tunes out the speeches, thinking instead of the sword at her hip. A weapon of war, hopefully one day to be a relic of harsher times; a machine of war, just like the paladins, that can hopefully one day serve a happier purpose.
She grips the hilt of her sword and swallows a smile as the medal-- the one she was first given ten years ago, in a slipshod military proceeding on the edges of a days-old battlefield and a new lease on the world-- is once again pinned to her chest, just like every year, imagining a world where she can hang up her weapons forever, one step closer already.