Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The forest bore her name.

Emerald swung and twisted through the brilliant green branches, the late summer wind pushing her hair from her face, the chains of her shiny new Thief’s Respite holding her aloft.

It had taken a while for her to be able to bear using the shiny, olive-green guns and their brilliantly polished blades. To accept, finally, that she would never be able to reassemble the rusty old revolvers that her new weapons were doomed to replace. Marcus godsdamned Black had sliced through the chains and shattered the chambers.

He’d shattered a lot of things.

It didn’t bear thinking about.

After the hits she’d taken and the throats she’d opened to win a chance at a decent future, Emerald wasn’t going to spend that future dwelling on the past.

Everything was different now, but—most of the different was good.

The haircut, for instance. Emerald had parted with the long locs she’d worn for all of her childhood—had one too many nightmares of Piper seizing her by the ponytail and chucking her across a warehouse and had marched into a salon the next day. Her hair now bounced in bright green curls around her chin, and with the constant weight at the back of her skull that she’d never thought to question gone, her headaches were fewer.

She’d thought about leaving a couple braids hanging down, a memory of the pigtails she’d worn as a kid. But she wasn’t a kid anymore, and she wasn’t leaving her enemies with anything to grab.

Her enemies—those were different, too. Emerald retracted one of her chains and landed in a crouch on a high, sturdy branch, careful to keep her weight on her left knee as she peered down into the understory.

A lumbering pack of Ursai, four all told, was crashing through the underbrush, their movements ungainly but uncanny in their speed. There were no minds behind those bone-white masks. No insecurities to jab at or pride to exploit. Just alien, implacable hunger.

A shiver crept up Emerald’s spine, and every one of those pallid masks turned to face her.

Bring it.

All four Ursai sprang and levelled the conifer that Emerald had been perched in, but she was ready, flipping and twisting in midair and then raising her arms to fire straight down at the ground, her bullets glowing green with earth dust that would make every hit that landed burst and tear through viscera with stone.

As her feet swung back around beneath her, she fired out a chain toward another tree, dragging herself out of reach of the Ursai. One of them leapt up after her, its fanged mouth stretching wide, and Emerald just managed to hook the blade of her kama around its thick neck and fire for recoil, lopping off its head before those fangs could sink into her hip.

One down, three to go.

She was improving. She just hoped it would be enough. With no semblance, one fully functioning knee, and no experience fighting Grimm before the past month, Emerald knew that the odds of becoming a worthwhile Huntress were against her.

But, well. Emerald and the odds were old rivals, and so far, they’d never beaten her.

She trained the sights of her pistols on the monsters rearing up at her, and fired. She kept up the attack pattern she’d developed over her past few weeks of covert trips out to the Forest for practice: Fire, slash, retreat. Fire, slash, retreat. Never move in quite the same direction. Never let their jaws snap shut.

She got bolder, this time, as another tree splintered and fell beneath her, because two of the Grimm had been considerate enough to line up behind each other. She pinwheeled to the ground, catching her weight on her hands, and then slid into a crouch and launched herself straight at the Ursai, the recoil of her revolvers lending her speed. On her knees, she raced forward, bending her back just in time to duck the jaws and then slashing up with her kamas, the curved blades sinking into an unguarded stomach and carving through guts. As the first Ursa collapsed, Emerald shot onward to the second one, blades and bullets eating through its torso.

Its body dissolved into smoke and nothingness, the blackness giving way to sunlight through leaves as Emerald twisted up to her feet and tried to ignore the twinge in her right knee. The hinged brace she’d taken to wearing over said knee had loosened a bit, and she ducked behind a tree to buy herself a split second to tighten it again.

That was how she found herself eye-to-eye with the Taijitu. Both of its scaled heads were drawn back, chins lowered to strike.

In a reflex as old as her memory Emerald reached for her Semblance and threw a blinding flash of light in the Taijitu’s face—

And felt nothing but a searing burst of pain through her own skull.

Another old reflex threw her into a cartwheel, out of the range of the Taijitu’s strike.

Not fast enough.

Fangs dug into the aura over Emerald’s shoulder as the tree at her back exploded into splinters. She hurtled through the air, caught by the collarbone, her aura being sliced at by a thousand papercuts. Her right-hand revolver was gone, and she just barely mustered the presence of mind to fire her left-hand one backwards, into the face of the Ursa, knocking it away before it could tear into her legs. The jaws of the Taijitu crushed down on her clavicle, fangs seeking to pierce her aura as Emerald’s feet dangled in empty air.

In a blur, she whipped her left hand around, firing a second time and catching the Taijitu’s second head just before it could latch its mouth around her waist and rip her in two. The white-scaled serpent, the one holding Emerald, tossed its head back, like it was trying to swallow her, shaking her like a rag doll.

Adrenaline lanced through Emerald’s chest, and she bent with the motion, flicking out the blade of her kama and stretching her arm upwards as far as it would go, hacking uselessly at the scales once—twice—

Her blade sank into an eyeball, and Emerald fired, wrenching it toward her and slicing half the Taijitu’s face in half. Its jaw went slack, and Emerald dropped to the ground, her right knee keening in protest as she landed.

Gods, she was being sloppy. A year ago, she could have sprinted circles around this thing, forced one of its heads to bite the other off, swung and flipped effortlessly, never letting it land a hit. A year ago she’d made a murderer frame himself for bank robbery with nothing but skill and semblance and well-timed acrobatics.

But then her life and her body had fallen to pieces, and as it stood, the Taijitu’s tail slammed into her with the force of a freight train and coiled around her legs, because she didn’t quite have the strength to leap out of its grip.

Emerald’s right knee screamed, and she did, too, as the Taijitu’s massive form crushed in on her legs. Its heads loomed over her, the white one dead and bloodied, the black one hissing and foaming for revenge.

Yeah, losing your partner sucks, doesn’t it.

Emerald wasn’t losing hers again. Not fucking ever. Especially not to some stupid snake that couldn’t fathom how much she would do, how much she had done, to win herself a home.

As the Taijitu’s fanged maw stretched wide and raced toward her, Emerald raised her kama straight up.

She fired six rounds down its gullet, and when its jaws tried to spring shut on her arm, it drove a blade through its own chin. With a cry and a wrench of her arm, Emerald split its mandible in half.

The coils around her legs loosened, and she and the Taijitu both slumped to the ground.

Grudgingly, Emerald unholstered the green-trimmed cane on her back before her feet could touch the grass. With a scowl, she let it take her weight.

Aw, Sippy Cup, I’m hurt. Are my gifting capabilities really that lackluster?

Roman Torchwick’s gifting capabilities were a godsend, in fact. The shotgun-cane was the most useful item Emerald had ever owned. She owed it her life.

Didn’t change the fact that Roman Torchwick was the latest in a long, long line of grown-ups who had pretended to give a shit about Emerald Sustrai and then bolted the second the wind changed.

On the other side of the clearing that the battle had punched into the Emerald Forest, the final Ursa was lowering its head to charge, its glowing red eyes locking onto her with more intent than should have been possible for a mindless thing.

Reclining on her cane with a feigned ease that would have made Torchwick proud, Emerald scowled right back and leveled her revolver.

Those red eyes had caused her more than enough pain for a lifetime.

Unnatural. Thieving.

Little beast.

Emerald’s aim was perfect, the bullet finding the tiny gap in the Ursa’s armor and piercing through to its brain, blotting that little brand of red out forever.

The Grimm-Eyed Girl of Copperfield Safe Home blew smoke from the barrel of her gun and turned to leave.

“You aren’t meant to visit the forest before initiation,” said a voice from the trees beside her. Emerald turned to see Headmaster Ozpin emerging from the ferns, the green of his suit camouflaging him. “In fact, I believe Dr. Lydgate was adamant that you weren’t to be cleared for combat for another two weeks.”

There was no judgment in Ozpin’s voice, but Emerald still found herself tightening her grip on her kama. He was holding her other revolver, she saw now, in the hand that he wasn’t using to maneuver with his own cane.

Emerald raised an eyebrow. Though her illusions were long gone, ripped from her skull by Marcus Black’s semblance, she was still a master of appearances, and right now, she took a page from her partner’s book, slouching and smirking to conceal her unease.

“So, am I expelled?”

Ozpin cracked a smile. “I think the offense can be forgiven, just this once.”

It hadn’t just been once. This was Emerald’s fourth outing into the forest. She’d told no one that she was going, or where. She didn’t need Mercury’s eyes going all soft and silvery with worry, like she’d shatter and vanish the minute she left his sight, or Lav and Daily listing off all the rational reasons why it was a really bad idea.

She just slipped out of the house while Mercury was at the bakery and the others were on grocery runs, then snuck past the guards at the edge of the academy district and into the forest.

She needed to be better than she was, and the only way to become that was to work at it, some slip of paper from Beacon’s physician be damned. She couldn’t afford rest, not with the start of term just a month away and her form still a mess from half a year of lying on the couch in her friends’ house doing nothing but nursing her wounds and limping out for P.T. three times a week.

Emerald Sustrai was going to be a Huntress—strong and necessary and loved. Emerald Sustrai’s corporeal form was just going to have to get in line with that fact, whether it liked it or not.

Emerald didn’t let any of that show on her face. She just gave a shrug and said, “Thanks for understanding.”

“I do,” Ozpin said, taking a few more steps into the clearing and holding the other half of Thief’s Respite out to her, handle-first, “understand. The time it takes to heal can be a difficult thing to accept.” He tapped his own cane ruefully.

“Suppose I don’t have any time?” Emerald said testily, holstering one of her kamas and then reaching out to take the other from Ozpin. It burned that she was still too unsteady to stand without Torchwick’s cane.

Another rueful smile. “You have time enough, Miss Sustrai. Do try not to jump too quickly into the role of a hero. At your age, heroes have a tendency to die.” A shadow crossed his face. “And that does quite terrible things to those who love them.”

“I don’t want to be a hero,” Emerald said.

Ozpin just looked at her for a long moment, as if he was thinking of saying something more, and then shook his head. “I passed by Axcross Bakery on my way here. Mr. Black seems happy.”

Emerald’s shoulders slumped. “He is. I—I think he is.”

When he’s not getting jolted awake by me dreaming about bullies or staring at me like I’m made of glass. Emerald was getting better at telling herself that that line of thinking was bullshit, that half the time it was Mercury who woke up trembling, who got dragged home in a shopping cart because he’d made an impulse run to the corner store without checking the new repairs to his prosthetics first.

Mercury was happy, a decent amount of the time. And a lot of that was because of Emerald.

Okay, guilting her into not getting killed was an annoyingly sound strategy on Ozpin’s part.

“Go home, Miss Sustrai.” Ozpin said. “Mr. Black has finally perfected the art of the cheese danish, and I suspect he’ll be eager to share it with you.”

“So, the Headmaster of Beacon Academy thinks that snacking on pastries is the best possible use of a prospective student’s time,” Emerald said, even as she started to follow his directions.  

“He does,” Ozpin said quietly. The strange, eons-old sorrow that Emerald had glimpsed once before clouded his eyes. They fixed on the Ursa’s corpse, as it shriveled away to ash and left a black stain on the once-green forest floor. “There will be time for this soon enough.”

Chapter Text

Mercury knew that they’d catch up to him sooner or later. Just a matter of time, really.

And, well, Mercury had never been patient.

That was why, on Sundays, when the bakery didn’t open till noon, Mercury still got up in the three a.m. blackness and slipped out of the house alone.

“You’re gone when I wake up,” Emerald had said once. “You’re always gone.”

Mercury had thrown on a smirk. “But you like it when I come back with brunch.”

“That’s bribery, asshole. I—I miss you.”

Since then, whenever he had to disentangle himself from the warmth of her arms and shift himself out from under the covers of their bed, he’d taken to leaving a kiss on her temple, a small reminder that though he was going, he didn’t want to be gone.

If Mercury had his way, he would keep her folded in his arms every morning, until the sun crested through the window and turned their room gold and woke her gently. He would let his face, scarred and lopsided as it was, be the first thing she smiled at every morning, since it seemed to make her so happy.

But Mercury’s fingers jumped, and Mercury’s chest went tight when he laid still.

The bill comes due.

Watts wasn’t finished with him. Marcus, even dead as a doornail, wasn’t finished with him.

So Mercury woke up in the dark, tucked the covers back in around Emerald, and set out at a run.

Watts would come for him, Mercury knew. The least he could do was be ready.

Beacon’s training facilities were extensive—all gleaming metal and state-of-the-art hologram technology and absolute fucking dogshit. Alarms dinged whenever somebody’s aura broke, and the holograms flickered out as the lights faded back in, and it was such a sterile, perfect lie that Mercury had actually doubled over cackling the first time it had happened.

“What’s so funny?” One of Ozpin’s other strays, a dark-haired boy with pinkish eyes, had asked.

Mercury had managed to straighten himself up and stop wheezing just long enough to say, “You ever see a fight end like that in real life?” 

“No,” he’d said quietly, and a long silence ensued that reminded Mercury why he didn’t talk to people who weren’t Em or Lav or Day.

Now, in the few minutes of humid cool that preceded a summer sunrise, Mercury ran toward the glassy, useless rectangle where most of Beacon’s prospective students trained. He moved at a sprint, arms pumping at his sides. As long as the world was a blur of speed and the wind lashed past his face, he could be sure that the thudding in his chest wasn’t caused by Marcus.  

It wasn’t quite like the days he’d spent running through the woods with Fenri as a kid, but it was as close as he was likely to get—unless Em was serious about getting him a dog after graduation.

Assuming they all lived that long.

Mercury phased through the shiny door of the training facility, not even bothering with his scroll.

Ozpin had been either kind or manipulative enough—same thing, Mercury figured—to set him up with some more honest training.

Mercury made his way to one of the innermost rooms—he wasn’t interested in publicizing his fighting style for any townie walking by. It was a spare, white chamber with panels set into the walls and the floor—larger than most of the other training rooms combined, and shaped like an oval. His footsteps echoed in the stillness.

“Mercury,” Ozpin had said to him a few weeks back, “I get the impression that our training facilities are… less than satisfactory to you.”

“Gee.” Mercury had kicked aside the last holographic shard of a Deathstalker’s claw and watched it dissolve into dust. “What gave it away?”

Ozpin had just smiled, in the indulgent way that Watts sometimes did when Mercury was being trying. “I may have a solution. How would you like to help me settle a bet with an old friend?”

The largest panel in the floor slid open, and Mercury settled into his ready stance as a towering machine rose out of it. Four panels in the wall receded up into the ceiling, and four robots—white with black-glass faces—emerged from them, firearms raised.

Mercury smirked as he slid into a deeper crouch and then launched himself forward.

He liked the calm that baking brought to him. He liked the quiet of playing cards with Daily.

But he couldn’t deny that a spark ignited in his chest when the world gave him something solid to hit. Maybe the wolf-tooth grin pulling at the corner of his mouth made him a monster, just like Marcus, but the satisfaction he felt, as he swept the legs from beneath the first mechanical soldier and then shattered its face with his fist, was complete.

His hair stirred, and he rolled forward in time to duck the bludgeoning arm of the—Ozpin had called it a paladin, but Mercury thought of it as the giant fuck-ugly deathbot. He guessed paladin was easier to say, but he thought his own term was a lot truer to the spirit of the thing. Maybe he should look into an acronym.

It moved more quickly than should have been possible for a two-ton hunk of metal with assault rifles at the ends of its arms.

One of said rifles took aim, and as Mercury bent backwards to avoid being decked by the sudden one arm, the other fired at him. One bullet caught him in the hip, but he managed to catch himself on his hands and bring himself up into a handspring, firing off two bullets as he did, both of which caught the GFUD square in its hulking excuse for a chest. The second he landed on his feet, he took off, sprinting along the curve of the wall as bullets ate up the floor at his heels.

The smaller robots were firing at him, too. They didn’t fire as quickly as the automatic rifles mounted on the GFUD, but they were smart enough to aim in front of him, forcing him to serpentine and vary his pace, making it easier for the spray of bullets from the GFUD to catch up with him.

But the two seconds he spent running were all Mercury needed to size up the enemy. The smaller bots, the knights, could harry him and make taking down the GFUD harder, but they’d crumple in just one or two hits. Tough luck for them.

Mercury sprang from the wall and caught one of the knights by the gun arm, twisting it around behind its back. The GFUD whipped around ninety degrees to fire at him, but not before Mercury brought the knight up in front of himself like a shield and let it be riddled by bullets. Sparks burst from its skull and its spine as it went limp.

A high-pitched whine went up from the GFUD, and Mercury tensed. He’d fought these things for a few weeks—Ozpin’s bet with his friend was apparently undergoing a hell of a lot of updates—and he’d learned enough to know that it making a new noise never boded well.

From its shoulders, two panels slid back, and two batteries of missile launchers appeared, because of fucking course they did. A missile flew from each, and from the arcing trajectories, they must have been heat-seeking. Great.

Mercury rolled forward, letting the knight he was holding crumble to pieces on the floor as one of the other’s bullets struck him in the shoulder. He didn’t let the dull pain that thudded through his aura stop him. He just slid straight through the GFUD’s legs—like a really heavy, ugly chicken’s, they bent backward—and let the rockets slam into the floor in front of it, aborting their course before they could strike the GFUD itself.

The impact rocked the chamber, and Mercury rolled with it as it tipped the remaining knights across the floor. Perfect.

It was a dumb, showy move that left him exposed, but Mercury couldn’t really resist catching the nearest one by the arm, spinning low, and using it to sweep the legs out from under the other. The GFUD was spitting bullets at him again, but Mercury kept in motion, somersaulting forward and snapping the knight in half with a boot driven through its wiry guts as he did.

He hadn’t even had to fire a shot yet. And against electronics, his semblance was really just cheating.

The robots were better than the holograms, but Mercury was fully aware that Ozpin giving them to him to fight was the Huntsman trainee equivalent of giving a zoo tiger a pumpkin full of raw meat to keep it from mauling the attendants.

Still, he couldn’t help but revel in the splintering of hardened plastic as he shattered the last knight’s leg with a single shot before it could regain its footing. He brought his other foot up with a snap and fired another bullet into its skull, bending backwards at the same time to slip beneath another hail of bullets from the GFUD.

Another high-pitched whine, and Mercury snapped himself upright and sprinted toward the source of the noise as another volley of missiles launched from the GFUD’s shoulders. He was weaving forward, dragging the missiles off-course, when fast as thought, the GFUD turned, and its giant metal fist slammed into Mercury’s ribs.

Mercury’s body careened through the air and slammed into the rounded wall of the chamber.

Right. The fucking thing learned. It matched patterns and punished repetition.

Well, Mercury thought, as he hit the ground and managed to keep his prosthetics under him, that’s nothing new.

Telegraphing again, boy—not fast enough by half, boy—lucky I don’t break your wrist, boy—lucky your wrist is all I broke—

Mercury growled and doubled up his fists. “Try it again, you piece of shit.”

As the GFUD—ugh, fine, the paladin’s—second arm drew back for another punch, Mercury fired off two air rounds from his greaves and launched himself straight up. The paladin’s big metal fist crunched into the wall as Mercury tucked in his limbs and curled himself into a flip, the soles of his boots skimming the ceiling. Those damned heat-seeking missiles were already starting to rise out of the paladin’s shoulders, but, well, the rising itself gave the game away.

No reason to have them locked under layers of metal if they weren’t vulnerable.

Mercury snapped out two kicks and two bullets with pinpoint precision, and then the blast of the missiles detonating in the paladin’s back snapped his trajectory in half and slammed him into the ceiling.

He at least managed to land on his feet—heavier on one than the other, though, the stance imperfect. Marcus would’ve—

Before he could complete the thought, a bruising pain echoed through his back, the memory of Marcus’s steel baton making him flinch forward as the paladin reeled and circled its smoking, pitted torso back around to face him. Fine. This rickety pile of bolts was nothing to what he’d survived.

Mercury doubled up his fists, poised to dodge, shifting his weight as the paladin hurled itself forward—

And his right leg crumpled.

Mercury lurched, firing a single shot from the left leg of his greaves and barely launching himself out of the paladin’s path. He crashed into the far wall with nothing to land on but an unresponsive twig of metal dangling from a residual limb.

A rapid-fire hail of bullets tore across his aura as the paladin swung its arm in a big, wild arc that never would have hit Mercury if he’d had both working legs. He gritted his teeth, looked down to try and pinpoint the damage, but he couldn’t see his damn legs through his pants, and it felt… strange.

There had been no clank of a bolt falling out of place or crackle of a servo giving out. His prosthetic had just—stopped.

Like somebody, somewhere, had flipped a switch.

The chill that ran up Mercury’s spine didn’t burn away when he twisted up on his hands like lightning and fired a shot into the paladin’s laser sight with his left greave. The paladin charged again, a brawler in a closed space

Mercury braced his hands against the wall and teetered on his right prosthetic, fighting for balance as he raised his left leg to fire again. He kicked out blindly, the bullet pinging uselessly off of the paladin’s armor in a stupid waste of a shot.

He didn’t have a chance at another. Without so much as a whisper, his left prosthetic went dead, and Mercury’s stomach lurched as he fell, but he didn’t hit the ground.

No, the paladin’s fist caught him in the chest and slammed him up into the ceiling, making his aura flicker and crushing the air from his lungs. Mercury ground his teeth together, without enough breath to cry out, and he tore at the metal of the paladin’s arm, but there were no loose cords to tear through, and his legs ached as his prosthetics tugged at them.

Too weak to win without your crutch, even after all this time.  

Right, you mean the one I killed you with, asshole?

Mercury closed his eyes as the paladin’s arm whirred in preparation to pepper the space between them with bullets, and he let his white-knuckled grip on his Semblance loosen. Silver flowed through him like creekwater, and he phased, drifting down through the paladin’s arm and then its chest, electricity dancing around him as he slipped between currents and shorted out circuits.

With an undignified clank, he hit the floor, and he just managed to roll aside, dragging the cold steel weight of his prosthetics behind him, as the paladin did the same. The heap of metal next to him sparked a couple times and went still.

Mercury went still, too, a toy soldier cast aside by some asshat kid. In his ears, his breathing was too loud. Blotches of color floated across his vision, staining the sterile white ceiling. He was six months younger, lying on a cold metal table, a medical gown making his shoulders itch and an ache where his legs met the steel that had just been grafted to him.

A smug voice drifted through his head.

“A fascinating case study.”

Watts’s bill was in the mail. In exchange for Mercury being his pet attack dog, he’d given Mercury back his speed, his bullets, his mobility—

But Mercury had broken his leash. And now Watts was owed.

Mercury tensed the muscles in his stomach to bend his knees and drag himself up to sitting, and then his legs whirred to life on command, as if nothing had happened to them.

Stick. Carrot. Mercury knew the fucking deal. Maybe Ozpin’s flunkies could help, but then again, opening his mouth in front of Ozpin’s flunkies might make Watts flip a bigger switch.

Fuck, was he watching? Listening? When Mercury walked to the bakery in the mornings and crawled into bed with Emerald at nights and cussed out Lav when she caught him cheating at cards?

Mercury forced himself to his feet, feeling too much like the boy who lived in a grey room in the suburbs, with a door ripped from its hinges and a drunken shadow drifting across it. The smell of whiskey hit his nostrils, too sharp and bitter not to be real, and Mercury didn’t hesitate. He drove his foot backwards in a mule kick with all the force he could muster, and triumph clogged his throat like smoke as his boot met the telltale give of a stomach and spat a bullet into it.

The world was a blur of memory and adrenaline, but Mercury still managed to spin with the kick in a follow-up, driving an elbow and then a knee into—Marcus’s—jaw?

“Ouch, kid!”

Mercury was already drawing back his offhand for a punch when the gruff voice knocked him back into the present. Marcus never used kid. Just boy. Always boy. Probably because there was no such thing as a kid to Marcus Black.

“You.” Mercury wasn’t going to apologize. He stayed right where he was, fists doubled up, legs planted, as Qrow Branwen stumbled back a step, gripping his own jaw. For once, the fucker hadn’t managed to catch Mercury’s hits before they landed.

Guess the training’s paying off.

Qrow rolled his eyes. “We’re not arch-nemeses, kid, we don’t greet each other with ‘You.’”

“Whatever.” Mercury lowered his arms to his sides and kicked a loose scrap of paladin across the floor. “I’m done anyway.” He brushed past Qrow, making for the door in the far wall.

“You all right, kid?”

“Stop calling me kid.”

“Ahem. Impressively skilled young man, are you well?”

Mercury made his shoulders lower. The mass of nerves in his chest jittered and screamed, louder than when he’d arrived. With a quick swipe of his scroll, the wall in front of him opened, revealing, beyond the glass, a sky that was still pitch black. The dawn wouldn’t be here for a long while, yet.

“Never better.” Mercury cast his sharpest smirk over his shoulder and let the night take him before he could hear a reply.

Chapter Text

Lavender stalked the rooftops in search of her quarry, the noonday sun soaking into the black jacket whose sleeves she’d sliced off with her knives. It was the first time she’d left the cute little enclosure of the academy district since Ozpin had taken them all in like they were a batch of those fucked up shelter dogs with buggy eyes and missing teeth.

She had a knife ready in one hand, and the page from the newspaper that she’d ripped out before Daily could see it clenched in the other.

The story was buried between a Pumpkin Pete’s ad and a report from the subcommittee on urban planning. It wasn’t a big headline: Former Signal Student Re-Enrolled at Pharos After Stint in Juvenile Detention.

Five months in kiddie jail and academic probation for abetting a murder and participating in a hate crime.

Sounds about right for a rich human kid.

Said rich human kid was still rumored to loiter around his gang’s old haunts downtown, like he thought he was still something worth fearing. Maybe he would be, if he got full Huntsman training and the authority of a license to back it up.

But Lavender was going to make sure that didn’t happen.

She’d taped the article to her bathroom mirror, broken out the brand of eyeliner she’d seen Torchwick apply once, and put on her game face.

Ever since Marcus Black had shattered her right arm and beaten in her best friend’s ribs and she’d spent the next few days being drugged and slapped and strapped down and drugged again, Lavender had started investing in makeup. Dark sparkly eyeshadow and black lipstick and thick mascara. Every fun, shiny way she could find of writing Do Not Fucking Touch Me on her body in big bold letters. She’d even started braiding her hair back out of her face, so that her horns couldn’t hide in it, and traded all the cream in her wardrobe for black.

Lavender hopped from one rooftop to the next, not bothering to use her Semblance. She wanted it at full strength for what she had planned. The plaza beneath her was coated in soot, streaked away in a few places where the city had made some half-assed attempts at cleaning up the crater Green had made there a little over a year ago.

A smile tugged at the corner of Lavender’s mouth. Green was an idiot sometimes, but damned if she didn’t know how to make a splash.

She’d been searching for three hours now, long enough that her the two curls of hair that hung at the sides of her face had started to stick to her cheeks and smear her foundation. But now, a couple blocks from the ruined plaza, ducking out of the empty doorway of an abandoned apartment complex, she saw her target: a head of curly black hair, a bow slung over his shoulder and a gaudy silver belt around his waist—a perfect replacement for the one she’d stolen from him.

He had a couple friends with him—a boy and girl in Pharos uniforms, who must have either been stupid enough to believe he’d turned over a new leaf or too racist to care one way or the other.

Their reasons weren’t Lavender’s problem. She shoved the newspaper into the pocket of her skirt and drew another knife.

Lavender leaned forward and let gravity carry her over the side of the building and into a slow somersault, and she landed in a crouch that would’ve made Wolfboy proud, stance low, knives akimbo, right in the students’ path.

“Orion Janus.” Lavender smiled, and wished she had fangs. From the way Orion’s eyes went wide and his hands went to his bow, she might as well have. “Just the person I was hoping to see.” She nodded at the Pharos students. “You two can go now if you like.”

The girl—skinny and tall with an asymmetrical blue haircut that had probably cost a stupid amount of money in a salon—stepped forward, a hand nearing a cyan-trimmed scimitar at her waist. “What do you want from him?”

Lavender shrugged, keeping her eyes on Orion. “I’m thinking an ear. Whaddaya say, ‘Rion?”

“I say we keep this between us.” Lavender had to hand it to him. He nearly kept his hands from shaking. “Saiph, Rigel, I’ll catch you later.”

The boy, stocky and blond, was already sliding on silvery brass knuckles with a gleam of fire dust in them. “And leave you alone in an alley with some freak? Yeah, great plan.”

The girl, Saiph, Lavender guessed, drew her scimitar. “People can change, you know.”

In the same posh, self-righteous tone as Saiph, Lavender replied, “He made my friends cry for fun, you know.”

She was done with the chatter. If Orion’s little pals wanted to make this three on one, then that was what they’d get. Without so much as a theatrical twirl of her blades, Lavender sprang.

She went for Rigel first. It would take Orion a second to draw and aim with his bow, and it would pay to have one of the melee fighters out of commission by then. Her Semblance slammed out from her in a wave, catching up Orion and Saiph and dragging them into the air. Rigel’s stance was off—he’d been shifting to protect Orion, so it was comically easy to drive both knives into the aura over his chest and pull the new triggers she’d had installed in her knives, making electricity dust crackle into his ribs.

That godsdamned dust had knocked her on her ass when she’d been fighting Marcus Black. It had shorted out her vision and made her helpless. It had let him grab her arm and shatter it and beat her until she was too useless to keep Daily safe.

She’d decided, when Ozpin offered to help them all upgrade their weapons, that she’d never be on the wrong end of that power again.

Rigel stumbled back, stunned, and Lavender drove two punches into his face and then a knee into his gut, which bought her time to spin back around and intercept the two bullets that Saiph, clinging to the roofline had fired at her from the long-barreled, blade-tipped, impractical-ass pistol that had become of her scimitar. They pinged uselessly off the blades of Lavender’s knives, and Lavender grinned as she spun one into a reverse grip and drove it back into Rigel’s gut before he could recover.

Who’s helpless now, bitch?

Who the bitch was, Lavender didn’t really know. Maybe just life.

Boom.

Oh right. Orion’s fucking arrows exploded. Her Semblance stuttered off. Heat seared Lavender’s aura and blasted her backwards, but she caught hold of Rigel’s wrist as she went. Clearly Orion didn’t give that much of a shit about his new friends.

“Fuck! Sorry, man!”

Fucking Brothers, Lavender thought as she twisted in midair so that she landed with Rigel beneath her and her elbow in his throat, if we went around making rookie mistakes like that, we’d be dead by now.

Rigel was in luck though. When his aura shattered in a flicker of yellow under the blades of Lavender’s knives, all he got was a quick kick to the head that put him out cold.

As soon as he was down, Lavender spun on the spot, eyes narrowed. Saiph and Orion were perched on the rooftop of a three-story building half a block distant, her firing her stupid pistol over his shoulder while he knelt to take aim.

Lavender laughed, because after the last time she and Orion Janus had fought, he really should have known how this was going to go.

She banked her Semblance at a ninety degree angle, dragging Saiph from the roof of the building. But Orion only rocked in place, and as Lavender let her Semblance tug her up into the air, she saw a tether running from his belt to the roof, and she had to twist in midair to slice his arrow in half with her knives before it could strike her between the eyes. Another caught her in the hip and exploded into ice crystals, sticking there.

The bastard had learned.

But Saiph hadn’t had the chance. Exactly one of her bullets pinged against the aura over Lavender’s shoulder before Lavender rammed her horns into Saiph’s stomach and caught her by the gun arm, flipping her around and driving a knee into her spine with a burst of aura as they plummeted upward.

“Crazy bitch!”

Lavender answered that by letting Saiph fall sixty feet to the pavement. Saiph, in a move so patently unhinged that Lavender honestly kind of respected it, opted to keep firing straight up, driving herself faster and faster toward the ground and riddling Lavender’s torso with bullets before leaving a crater in the cobblestones and knocking herself out cold.

Lavender gave a nod of grudging admiration. “Crazy bitch.”

She brought herself to a slow halt, fifty feet above Orion’s perch on the roof. Keeping herself hovering in space like this made sweat bead on the back of her neck, but she knew how she would look to Orion. A floating, horned devil of judgment, the sun casting her shadow over him and catching on her knives.

Lavender had read that that look was in this summer.

Even at this distance, she could see that Orion’s eyes were wide as he loosed another arrow in her direction. She switched off her Semblance, falling out of its path, but it detonated in midair five feet from her, the explosion eating into her aura and blasting her off course. She just managed to slow her fall with her Semblance enough to keep herself from re-splintering her left arm as it slammed into the concrete. The damn thing still ached in places, and she had to stretch her shoulder before fights to keep it from seizing up on her, especially with how quickly she’d built the muscle around it back up.

When she got to her feet, the joint was screaming, but she didn’t bother to roll the feeling out. Orion Janus wasn’t going to see a second’s weakness from her.

It wouldn’t have mattered. Orion Janus had his back turned. He was running away—the thing his brother had died doing, sprinting right into the barrel of Marcus Black’s shotgun.

Like twin, like twin, Mom had always sighed, on the vanishingly rare occasions when shiny, bright little Vi and quiet, moody Royal actually both got in trouble for hollering during one of Dad’s campaign dinners.

Lavender didn’t wonder if she still gave the twins little coordinated outfits, and if Royal—he’d be fifteen now, right?—had finally succumbed to an emo phase and started cutting them up. She didn’t wonder if Dad still made lemon-scone strawberry shortcakes for special occasions, and let them have extra if they kept their elbows off the table.

Lavender had eleven years’ practice in not wondering, so she was good at it now. She let the world fall away until its center was the stupid little midnight blue archer emblem on the back of Orion’s jacket and gravity bent to pull her toward it.

She was eating through her aura dangerously quickly, hurling herself around like this, especially with that salvo of bullets Saiph had emptied into her stomach, but Lavender refused to give a shit.

Orion Janus wasn’t getting away.

The boy who had gripped Daily’s arms so tightly that his fingers had left bruises, who had snickered as his buddy had cut her best friend’s ear from his head, was going to pay the price the courts were too cowardly to exact from him.

And this churning feeling in Lavender’s gut was going to leave her alone.

She crashed into Orion’s back horns-first and then bowled over him, landing in a crouch before him as his chin hit the cement of the roof.

She decided to give him the courtesy of fumbling for his bow, reaching for an arrow, even as she braced herself to kick it from his hand.

“The fuck do you want?” Orion scrabbled backwards on his hands, and disgust gripped Lavender by the jaw. He barely had a hold of his bow. He wasn’t even trying. “You people already killed my brother.”

They hadn’t. That had been all Marcus Black’s doing.

But Lavender leaned down and showed all her teeth in a grin and said, “And what are you going to do about it?”

Orion snarled and sprang at her, an arrow gripped in his hand, and relief punched a hole in Lavender’s chest as the point drove into her collarbone. This was what she’d gone looking for, she thought, as she drove her forehead into Orion’s nose and a knife into his stomach.

His bow cracked across her jaw and made sparks burst across vision, and finally she was getting what she deserved. For standing useless on the pavement as blood clotted in Daily’s hair. For kneeling motionless on the floor as red spattered from his mouth. For breaking and telling Marcus Black exactly where he could find his son.

The useless, itching rage that had been seething under her skin for months finally had an escape, and Lavender sheathed her knives to let it out.

Orion’s punch left him overextended, and she gripped his bow arm in a vice grip. She spun to the side and dragged him forward, driving a knee into his gut and an elbow into his spine. An arrowhead dug into her bicep and twisted, and even through her aura, it hurt, and an animal sound came out of her throat as she punched her knee into his gut one last time before stumbling back.

The second his arms were free, Orion perched on the edge of the roof and fired at her. Lavender just twisted out of the arrow’s path in time.

Her aura was running on fumes, but she punched out a hand anyway, making gravity grip Orion by the shoulders and drag him over the roofline before letting him fall. She burst into motion as soon as his feet left the concrete, springing into the air and flipping, spinning gravity to keep it pulling at the soles of her boots so that when they landed firm on the vertical face of the bricks, she could catch Orion’s flailing body by both arms and use every muscle in her back to slam him through the plate-glass window at her feet. She curled herself through the window after him.

Glass crackled beneath her combat boots when she landed. Orion lay in the shadow she cast against the sunlight, curled into the fetal position with blue aura flickering over his skin.

Lavender didn’t give him a second to regroup. She threw a kick into his ribs that made that thin layer of blue scatter to the wind, and then she slammed her boot down onto Orion’s wrist and wrenched the bow from his hand.

The effort of shattering it over her knee made her aura flicker purple.

"It's pretty," Emerald had said once, when they were thirteen and sparring. "Like summer lightning." Green was poetical that way.

There were tears on Lavender’s face. She wasn’t sure why. She dashed them aside and let them smear her eyeliner before Orion could recover enough to see them.

He looked up, dark blue eyes muddled but defiant. “Fucking animal. You’re—”

“A monster,” Lavender said. “I know.”

It was a comfort at this point. A warm blanket that Lavender wrapped around herself at night when Green or Daily looked too still and fear laid a cold hand over her spine.

She had played the princess when she was small. She had shushed Vi and Royal before they could get in trouble, and made her bed up nice every morning, and never gotten mud on the little black patent leather shoes that Dad had given her for campaign events.

She’d gotten fuck-all for her troubles. Those shoes had left blisters on her heels that had made her bleed through her frilly little socks when she’d had to walk herself to Vale alone, and she’d only gotten eight lien for them from the pawn shop owner who’d looked down his nose at her budding horns.

The monster would have beaten the miser bloody and taken his whole cash register and slept better for it. Lavender showed its teeth.

“You won’t be going to Pharos this fall.” Lavender took a step forward, and Orion shrank, his wrist bleeding where the glass embedded in Lavender’s boot had dug into it. “Do yourself a favor. Drop out. Become a fry cook or something. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll think about letting you live out the rest of your spoiled little rich boy life.”

“You can’t scare me.” Orion swallowed—fucking liar—and raised his chin. “I’ll do what I want, and the cops are going to make you pay for this.”

A coldness gripped Lavender’s chest. The little rich girl with the starched shirt was in there, somewhere, begging her to run, begging her to beg him not to tell, she was sorry, really, and—

And Lavender fucking hated that girl. The one who stood and sobbed and did nothing. She took another step forward.

“I don’t think they will.” The coldness deepened, turned sharp. “I don’t think you’re going to tell them a thing. I think you’re going to realize what’s good for you, and you’re going to keep your mouth shut.” The smile that stretched her mouth made her stomach lurch. “Because you know that if you don’t, I’m going to find you, no matter where you run. No matter how many bars they put me behind.”

“Bullshit,” Orion spat, and Lavender brought the sole of her boot down on his knee and made him cry out, because terror had turned her insides to ice.

What are you going to do? Marcus Black’s voice, his boot pressing into Daily’s ribs, her boot pressing into Orion’s knee.

Lavender was scared of the answer. Her hand closed around the hilt of her knife anyway. She wasn’t a coward. She wasn’t going to be afraid anymore.

I’m going to get what I came for.

There was no fog in her mind. No blur of adrenaline or tumble into memory, just a queasy feeling in her stomach as she gripped the cartilage of Orion’s right ear in one hand.

“Ow, ow!” Orion struggled, clawing at her wrist, but it didn’t do him any good. “What are you—you’re insane, you—you wouldn’t—”

Why not? You did.

With her other hand, Lavender brought her knife to the base of Orion’s ear, and sliced upward.

Orion collapsed, trembling, on the grubby carpet of the abandoned apartment building, clutching at the flat of blood and torn flesh where his ear had been. It fitted in the palm of Lavender’s hand, blood making it stick to her skin before she shuddered in disgust and let it bounce to the carpet.

“One word to the cops and it’s your head next.” Lavender said. Her voice came out just as blunt and cold as she’d hoped. “Make sure I never see you again.”

Orion nodded, tears streaming down his face, and—and good. Any second now, this hollow ache in Lavender’s chest would fill in with triumph, and the ice in her stomach would warm, and she would pat herself on the back for a job well done.

Any second.

Lavender backed away from the sobbing wreck of a boy she had left on the ground, away from the blood seeping between his fingers and matting the curls of his hair.

She didn’t know why she found it so hard to breathe.

Lavender climbed out the window and dragged herself onto the roof, and for a moment, she lay still there, on her back, staring up into the empty blue of a summer sky—not so different from the ones she’d looked up at on days when Dad had taken her for picnics when she was little.

And then she stood up, a Faunus criminal, given to rage, covered in blood that wasn’t hers. Everything that Dad had ever feared when he’d first seen the horns sprouting from her head.

Good.