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Chapter Text

“Are you serious!?” Standing in the shuttle building for the short-range airships of Atlas, a sixteen-year-old girl with white hair pulled into a loose bun, and pale blue eyes that narrowed at the scroll in her hand. Winter Schnee, Huntress in training and a graduate of the only combat school in Mantle, Pedestal Academy. Winter Schnee, the winner of the Atlas combat tournament for juniors, a near-perfect student, Winter Schnee… Neglected to charge her scroll this morning.

Shaking her head and mentally chastising herself for her foolishness, Winter put her scroll in the pocket of her dark blue, hooded wool jacket. Fall was in full swing by now, which meant constant snow in Mantle and chillier weather up in Atlas. Winter had to wear her dark blue coat over her usual white long-sleeved shirt with a bright blue button-up vest over that. She still had standards, but she also didn’t dress nearly as fancy as the rest of her family. Hence, she only wore normal-looking skinny jeans on her legs and simple white and blue sneakers on her feet.

Without her scroll, she had no idea when the airship she needed to be on would arrive. She only knew which airship she had to get on, so here she stood, waiting for her ride to downtown Atlas.

“Winter!?”

Three familiar faces stepping off the airship that traveled from Mantle to Atlas greeted Winter. Robyn Hill, Fiona Thyme, and Joanna Greenleaf. Fellow graduates from Pedestal and aspiring Huntresses as well. And, if only technically speaking, some of her best friends in the world.

“How is my favorite Schnee doing?” Robyn asked with a teasing smirk as the three of them approached Winter.

Winter, fully knowing who she was asking about, rolled her eyes. “Ruby is just fine. She and everyone else already left for their vacation in Mistral.”

“Is that why you’re taking the poor people transport?” Joanna joined in on the teasing by gesturing to the airships.

“Partially…” While yes, most of the Schnee staff were taking time off because of the family vacation. Winter could call Klein to take her to her destination since he insisted on staying at the manor just in case. But the Schnee didn’t want to admit to her friends that she forgot to charge her scroll. “But what are you guys doing here?” She skillfully changed topics.

Fiona and Joanna’s cheery expression soured slightly while Robyn glanced away from Winter nervously.

‘Ah,’ Winter quickly caught on. “H-How is… Um… How’s she doing?” Even though they were inside one of the busiest shuttle buildings in Atlas with dozens of people around them, Winter felt like the whole world went silent to add to the awkwardness.

“You know,” Robyn started, continuing to dart her eyes away from Winter awkwardly. “May is May, she’s always been moody. We were coming to check on her since she hasn’t called in a while and with that storm coming sometime soon… We wanted to make sure she was okay.”

Winter wanted nothing more than to drop her luggage and offer to go with, checking on their mutual friend. Of course, she didn’t. She couldn’t.

‘It’s largely my fault Mic- May is avoiding us,’ Winter thought sadly, making sure to correct herself on her friend’s name. If she couldn’t physically help her friend, Winter would do the next best thing though. “If she needs somewhere to go, Klein is still at our manor and will certainly let you all in. I and everyone else shouldn’t be back for a couple weeks.” Winter raised her eyes to see Fiona and Joanna both giving her small, appreciative smiles.

“Thanks Winny. We’ll keep it in mind,” Robyn responded softly, with her own smile. Exhaling the tension away, Robyn moved the conversation forward with more teasing. “You still going to that fascist hotel or whatever?”

“It’s not fascist, it’s expensive,” Winter corrected with a chuckle. “It also has a name.”

“The Glass Unicorn, right?” Fiona guessed. “The one that didn’t allow Faunus guests until last year?” She continued, not with any anger, but with a hint of sadness.

“Sounds pretty fascist to me,” Joanna added.

Winter threw her head back in exhaustion. “Okay, maybe it’s not a paragon of morals. But I have the voucher from the same competition you all participated in, too.”

“I only participated ironically,” Robyn said with her head held high. She’d never admit it, but everyone knew she wanted to win too. A fact that Fiona was quick to point out for Robyn.

“Uh-huh. Is that why you tried to get Winter to take a fall in her match against you? Ironically?” Fiona had crossed her arms and looked at the others with a scowl.

Joanna returned Fiona’s scowl with a smirk. “Hey. You competed too Fi-Fi.”

The sheep Faunus went a little red at the mention of her nickname. “W-Well, that was just because I wanted to see what they would do if I won.”

“Mm-hmm. Shame you got knocked out in the second round,” Joanna continued, smirking even further.

“By you! That was only because you cheated!” Fiona screamed, pointing an accusing finger at Joanna. The tall and dark green-haired girl yelped as the smaller Huntress leaped at her, causing the two to start wrestling. Robyn shook her head, and with Winter’s help, separated the two fighters before it could escalate to the point of drawing security. It wouldn’t be the first that happened to Winter and her friends.

After getting them apart with only a modicum of hair pulling, Fiona crossed her arms and pouted while Joanna just laughed and nursed a new bruise on her nose. Robyn sighed and looked back at Winter to resume their conversation. “Anyway, do you have any plans for what you’re going to do?”

Winter rubbed her sore shoulder from where Fiona accidentally kicked her. “Most likely just relaxing. Maybe do some shopping and look around the hotel. With that snowstorm coming in, my options are a bit limited.”

Robyn leaned in suspiciously to whisper, “Ooooo, going to get up to some mischief?”

“Hardly,” Winter scoffed. “Who do you take for me?”

“A girl who stole all the vanilla pudding in the school for her sister?” Robyn pointed out with a raised eyebrow.

“The girl who snuck out of class to put an Ice Dust popper in Nolan’s locker?” Joanna added, her voice being altered by her still holding her nose.

“Someone who commanded her summon to bring her a soda because she was too lazy to do it herself?” Fiona stopped pouting to add her own story.

Winter threw her arms up in surrender. “All right! You’ve all made your point! Still, I’m not going to start anything at the most famous hotel in all of-”

“I’ll let you borrow my lock kit?” Robyn offered.

“Why would I want that? I just said I have no plans to mess with things.” Winter shook her head.

Robyn pulled out her small brown and green bag that looked almost like a strapless purse. “Oh, come on. Nicest hotel in Atlas, has minimal staff, and only recently began to allow Faunus. You can’t tell me you aren’t a little curious about what secrets that sort of place might be hiding?”

Winter let her friend’s words soak in. She would be lying if she said she wasn’t at all curious herself. After all, what kind of hotel only employs a skeleton crew all the time? Especially one as popular as The Glass Unicorn. Sighing, Winter held out her hand to take the kit.

“Ah ah ah,” Robyn tutted, pulling the kit out of Winter’s reach. “You have to promise to bring us something back from the Unicorn.”

“You’re a child,” Winter deadpanned at the blonde.

“And you’ll be committing a B and E in one of Atlas’s finest hotels. What’s your point?” Was Robyn’s rebuttal, handing the kit to the blue-eyed girl to place in her suitcase.

Winter zipped up her suitcase again right as a small bus-sized airship began to pull into the nearest landing dock.

“I think that’s yours, Winny,” Robyn noted, nodding toward the airship.

Standing up and facing the airship, Winter turned her head back to her friends. “If you can… Let me know if May is all right.”

The three nodded their heads and waved Winter off as she climbed into the commercial airship. She found a seat and set her suitcase on her lap. She packed light, only enough clothes for a week, intending to do laundry as need be. The heaviest things in her luggage now were her sword and Robyn’s lock kit. She was only bringing her sword at her mother’s request; she didn’t actually think she would need it. Her mother did tend to worry, though. She also had a good point. A Huntress should always have their weapon handy.

Without her scroll to pass the time, Winter recalled Robyn asking about Ruby, and found herself thinking about her family and just how crazy it was. First, there was what happened to her father five or six years ago. Getting arrested for multiple accounts of embezzlement, insider trading, and of course, emotionally abusing Winter’s mother with many of his actions. Driving her to mental breakdowns and he even began to treat Winter harsher when she said she wanted to be a Huntress. Thankfully, her mother found Roxy, a mid-tier accountant in the SDC, who helped expose Jacques for his crimes. Roxy and her mother eventually settled into a relationship together after Jacques was arrested and they’ve been together since, effectively leaving Winter and her three siblings with two mothers who actually cared about them, unlike Jacques.

That was another aspect of her family that had changed a few years ago. Before Roxy, it was Winter, Weiss, and Whitley Schnee. Three children born from Jacques and Willow Schnee, all white-haired and blue-eyed. Then, a few months after Jacques’s arrest, Willow and Roxy came home with a dark-haired child with bright silver eyes named Ruby. Her mother said she had lost her home somewhere in Vale and would be staying with them for a while. Winter was okay with that, and even quickly found herself being as sisterly to the dark-haired girl as she was to her blood siblings.

Winter smiled to herself. She loved her family and was already starting to miss them. Then again, the last couple of months had turned into something of a sibling rivalry between Weiss and Whitley, with Winter and poor Ruby caught in the middle. That portion of the family taking a vacation together in a new and exotic location will hopefully do wonders for repairing whatever feud Weiss and Whitley have gained.

A small tone sounded throughout the airship and told the girl that she was near her destination. The hotel shouldn’t be far from her stop if she remembered her scroll map correctly. First thing Winter was going to do when she got to the hotel was charge her dang scroll.

The airship slowed to a halt and landed at its designated landing pad that sat above the streets of downtown Atlas. Winter collected her suitcase and headed off the airship into the building that connected to the streets below. Maneuvering past the small group of people now boarding the airship, Winter made it to the escalators that would take her down to the ground level.

Winter stepped out onto the busy streets of downtown Atlas at noon. She didn’t have to look far to find her hotel at least. Just by exiting the small airship docking building, Winter could see her destination just down the road. Many of the Atlas buildings could look the same, all tall, skinny, and gray, with windows dotted throughout the structures.

The Glass Unicorn did a remarkable job of standing out. While it was still all gray, the windows were far larger and had a warm glow emanating from them, making the front entrance of the building look inviting and remarkably extravagant. With its pillars that ran up around the outside of the building and the overhang that held the sign with the name of the hotel that must light up at night. Winter only had to walk a short way to find herself standing in front of the four-story hotel.

A well-dressed couple brushed past Winter as they climbed the few steps up toward the double doors made of frosted glass. Winter followed them up and caught the door before it fully closed from the couple entering. She pushed it open the rest of the way to reveal the interior lobby.

Now, Winter was used to lavish living. She lived in the largest manor in all of Atlas and her family still had access to an exorbitant amount of money even after Willow and Roxy spent much of it on donating to the various charities throughout Mantle. But the front lobby of the Glass Unicorn was quite a sight to behold, even to her. A dark brown wood trim ran around the edges of the hotel, while the walls were covered in an intricate design of golden triangles. The flooring was some sort of golden-looking marble. Massive, long red carpets guided guests to the front desk and then split off in two directions, one going right and leading to the elevator and stairs to go up to the other floors. The other went left and led to a bar behind the wall of the front desk.

Winter, feeling moderately impressed by the hotel, walked forward along the red carpet toward the front desk with her luggage in tow. She looked at the small tables that surrounded the lobby and felt a little uneasy at what rested on each of them. Placed in the center of each of the tables were small glass sculptures that were shaped to resemble the creatures of Grimm. She never understood the fascination with immortalizing the image of man’s greatest enemy. Her father had also commissioned similar statues for the manor. Roxy and Willow had them all removed after Ruby got frightened by them during a game of hide-and-seek with Weiss a few years ago.

It was awful seeing the young Ruby get frightened, but Winter couldn’t help but smile to herself at the memory. Ruby had asked Winter to stay in the room with her and Weiss when she went to bed that night. Winter was barely in her second year of combat school at Pedestal, but if it made them feel safer, she was always happy to be there for her siblings when they ever needed it.

“Hello there and welcome to the Glass Unicorn.” Winter startled slightly at the sudden calm and refined voice in front of her. She never stopped walking while reminiscing, and now she was standing just a couple of feet away from the front desk. Behind the desk was a tall woman, around the height of Winter’s mother, Willow. With dark blonde hair cut to below chin length and swept to her left side, covering her left ear and having the right side tucked behind her ear. The woman had a pair of dark green eyes and a thin smile as she looked back at Winter.

Winter shook her head to focus on what the woman had said and brought her suitcase closer to open it and search it for the voucher for her stay here at the hotel. “Hello, I’m-”

“Winter Schnee, yes?” The woman interrupted with her smile growing slightly wider and rested her hands on the front desk calmly. Winter paused in her search to look back at the woman with obvious confusion on her face. “It would be a small shame if I didn’t recognize the winner of the tournament a few weeks ago. Especially seeing as I’m the owner of this fine establishment that has served as your prize.” The woman gave a soft laugh at the surprised look on the young Huntress’s face before continuing, “You may call me the Madame.” She extended her hand over the counter toward Winter. Standing up straight again and accepting the handshake from The Madame, Winter sought to explain herself.

“A pleasure to meet you, Madame. I have the voucher here in my bag… Somewhere,” Winter finished quietly, taking her hand back and kneeling once again to sift through her luggage. Weiss always teased her for her poor packing abilities and that was really starting to become apparent to herself right now.

Pulling her hand back, The Madame chuckled some more at the girl’s panicked rifling of her bag. “Oh, that’s quite all right, child. You needn’t worry about some silly piece of paper.” The Madame dismissed Winter’s worries with a subtle wave of her hand that drew the girl back up and away from her bag. “Of course, I know it’s you and not some elaborate scam. Beyond knowing you from the tournament, I’d be remiss if I didn’t recognize one of my dear friend’s own children. How is your lovely mother doing?” The Madame asked while lowering her hand, withdrawing a red keycard with gold decorations.

“You know my mother?” Winter asked immediately, with a small tilt of her head. Sure, it wasn’t too surprising that this woman knew her mother. After all, Willow Schnee was a very big name in Atlas high society. What surprised Winter was the use of the word ‘dear’ friend. Implying they knew each other more personally.

The Madame shook her head lightly and clarified. “I suppose to be clear, I was more acquainted with her husband, the dreadful man,” The Madame uttered with a scowl that Winter mentally agreed with at the mention of Jacques. Ridding herself of the scowl, The Madame looked at Winter with a far more sympathetic smile. “I only shared a few brief conversations with your mother, but she seemed a remarkably strong woman. My sympathies to you and your family for having to endure such a terrible ordeal.”

Despite the woman’s high society accent that reminded her of Jacques, Winter felt touched by the woman’s words. Not many of those in Atlas’s upper echelon of society agreed with Willow’s decision to divorce Jacques. As if any of them were allowed an opinion on who her mother should or should not marry. “Thank you, Madame,” Winter nodded her head as she thanked the woman for her kind sentiments.

The Madame returned the polite nod and moved the conversation along. “Of course, dear. Now, we’ve already prepared your room. You’re on the top floor, the last room on the right.” The Madame laid the card atop the counter with a kind smile while also raising her arm to summon someone. “This is one of my daughters, Kristall.” The madame introduced, gesturing to the teen girl approaching the front desk with a similar smile to her mother.

“Yes, mother?” The girl greeted, crossing her hands at her waist. Winter guessed the girl was around her age with shoulder-length, bright blonde hair that curled at the end, and a pair of pale turquoise eyes that, despite the girl’s kind smile, inspected Winter with poorly hidden judgment and disgust. They were looks that Winter was used to getting whenever she and her friends would hang out around Atlas. The sight of a Schnee and a Marigold spending time with such ‘Mantle scum’ as some would put it, tended to get under the skin of Many Atlesians.

“Kristall, would you be so kind as to help Winter here with her bag?” The Madame asked of her daughter, pointing to Winter’s single bag.

Feeling more than a little unnerved by the daughter’s apparent disapproval, Winter was quick to decline as politely as she could. “Oh, that won’t be necessary. I can manage on my own I believe.” Winter took the red keycard for her room and grabbed her luggage in her other hand.

The Madame bowed her head respectfully. “Very well. The bar and restaurant just behind me is fully open to you as well, whenever you’d like. Entirely free.”

Both Winter and The Madame’s daughter widened their eyes at that. “I don’t think that was mentioned in the voucher, Madame?” Winter wondered aloud. She had money and was prepared to pay for various food services during her stay. This level of generosity, especially from an Atlesian was almost suspicious.

“Call it compensation for all the good that your mother and her… Companion have done for the businesses here in Atlas.” The Madame then pointed down the hall on Winter’s right. “Down that way are the elevators and stairs. I hope you have a truly wonderful stay here at the Glass Unicorn.”

Winter followed The Madame’s gesture and thanked the woman before taking hold of her suitcase and making her way to the elevator. The Madame and her daughter watched the young Huntress step into the elevator and waited for the golden sliding doors of the elevator to close. Once they did, “Mother!” Kristall was quick to whisper shout at the older woman. “Free access to the restaurant? What are you think-” The teenage girl was halted from her baffled rant by her mother thwacking her with a sealed envelope.

“Silence!” The Madame scowled at her disobedient daughter. “I know very well what it is I am doing and you would do well to trust my judgment girl.” The Madame adored her daughters, but as they got older, they started to gain a defiant streak that she certainly did not appreciate. “Where is your sister currently?”

Kristall rolled her eyes. “The kitchen. Our ‘rat’ refused to leave the basement again no matter what we did, even when we threw-”

“Shh!” The Madame had to silence her daughter’s explanation for being far too loud and leaned closer to her daughter for them to resume their talk. “Was she at least doing laundry still?”

“Yes but,” the daughter let out an annoyed sigh. “I don’t think that ‘thing’ is even worth keeping anymore. She spends most days simply curled up and unresponsive unless one of us is down there with her to ensure she does what she’s told.”

The Madame shook her head and rubbed her eyes. “I fear you may be right my dear, but we can’t do anything about it right now.” The Madame raised the envelope in her hand and passed it to her daughter. “Have this delivered to Mr. Jaeger at once.”

Kristall took the letter with an affronted expression. “In this weather?! You can’t be serious?!”

“Yes! In this weather! It is imperative that this is delivered as soon as possible. Now go!” The Madame urged her daughter who relented with another annoyed sigh before leaving to don her winter coat.

With her daughter leaving to accomplish her task and seeing the main lobby clear of any other patrons, The Madame attempted to rub a migraine off of her forehead. She knew this was going to be messy and would draw negative press, but would all be worth it in the end.

Then she would have to deal with the ungrateful parasite in her basement.

Chapter Text

Nothing is indestructible. Not the oldest Grimm, nor the most advanced armor from Atlas tech labs, nothing. Despite what Huntsman propaganda might tell you, not even mankind’s ‘indomitable’ spirit is truly unfailing. Sometimes, even the most well-seasoned soldiers or Huntsman themselves can have their spirit or willpower shattered against the horrors of the Grimm. But in reality, it isn’t even the soulless monsters that tend to reduce powerful men to husks, it is their fellow man. Torture, abuse, and even enslavement. All terrible sins that many throughout history have committed in pursuit of some goal that they believed justified their actions.

If some of mankind’s greatest defenders couldn’t withstand these atrocities, then what hope did a young orphan girl have? In an orphanage outside some random village in Mistral, that young girl with dark, ashen black hair and bright amber eyes, shone with a look of hope despite her position.

“Rat!” the large brute of a boy screamed at his target on the muddy ground, just out of both earshot and sight of the orphanage they all grew up in. Not like any of the ‘faculty’ would do anything about this anyway.

His two cohorts weren’t far behind in their ridicule. “Yeah, do what you do best and clean up the dirt!” one of the other smaller boys yelled from the sidelines of the ordeal.

Their victim, the ten-year-old girl with black hair and hope-filled amber eyes, clutched her stomach as she weakly pushed herself onto her knees. This had become all too regular of an occurrence for the girl. “Come on Cinder! Why don’t you do something!?” the other smaller bully picked up on the teasing by spitting the girl’s name out like the insult it was.

The girl, Cinder Fall, put up with this abuse weekly if not sometimes even daily. She had tried speaking with some of the caretakers at the orphanage about it, but even her bruises and split lips weren’t ever proof enough of the vicious mockery Cinder was subjected to. Had to be caught in the act for them to even acknowledge the pain Cinder dealt with. Sometimes, even that wouldn’t be enough since most of the staff at the orphanage had become accustomed to Cinder’s work and the bullying from the other children tended to keep Cinder in a place that the staff preferred.   

Growing up, being the youngest in the orphanage meant Cinder was always last to everything. The bigger kids were all faster than her and stronger than her. This meant they got to dinner quicker, leaving Cinder and a few of the other younger kids to fight over what food was left. With Cinder being so much slower, she’d never attend proper lessons in the one classroom they had, as it would always fill up with the other children far before she could ever make it. This left the poor younger girl to rotate with the other children who missed the lessons that day. Doing the menial labor around the orphanage, laundry, dishes, and general cleaning.

It was difficult and even soul-crushing, Cinder was left with blisters and calluses on her feet and hands almost daily as even the other kids who missed the lessons would force their duties onto Cinder and threaten her to do them.

But, honestly speaking? She got good at it, and it ensured that she always got good food from the head of the orphanage even if she missed dinner. The head of the orphanage, Mr. Oran, always tried to teach every one of the kids the same lesson. That hard work and dedication are always rewarded no matter what that work may be. The day Mr. Oran gave her a proper meal after a full day’s work of doing laundry was the day Cinder understood that lesson. Regardless of the loss of a family she never really knew, regardless of being so much weaker than the other kids, Cinder had the slimmest of hopes for an improvement in her life, as long as she kept working and improving. While others learned things such as reading and writing, she dedicated herself to the simple jobs that needed to be done and almost learned how to do every one of those tasks perfectly.

It was a shame that all this skill she had garnered didn’t earn her any friends with her fellow orphans. It had the opposite effect actually, as the food that the head of the orphanage would give her made it seem like she was getting special treatment, which only increased the bullying. Such as now.

That largest bully, Cinder never bothered to learn his name, was winding up for another kick to knock the girl back down when he was stopped by his fellow bully calling out. “Hey, we should get back to the house! Mr. Oran said he would lock the door early tonight!” The boy’s panicked yelling did catch his friend’s attention as the larger bully sighed exhaustedly.

“Fine, whatever,” the brute groaned as Cinder tried to get to her feet. Seeing an opportunity for one of his favorite ‘jokes’, the large boy smiled deviously. “Who said you could get up, Cinder… Fall!” The boy accentuated Cinder’s last name with a quick yet still powerful kick to the back of her knees, sending her back to the ground and hitting her head, leaving her dazed.

Cinder could barely register the boys laughing as they ran back toward the orphanage. The sun was over halfway below the horizon when Cinder composed herself enough to stand and make her way back to the same building as her bullies. The long, single-floor structure, was the only thing Cinder could ever consider a ‘home.’ With the sun fully set and still reeling from her run-in with the bullies, Cinder stumbled toward the door that led to the massive sleeping room filled with bunk beds. She didn’t expect to get one of the beds of course, she almost never did, but the wood floor of the room was still more comfortable than sleeping outside like she had to on occasion.

Reaching her hand up to the handle of the door, Cinder pulled on it, only for it to not move and instead jiggle in her hand. She was late… Again. The staff of the orphanage tended to lock all the doors at night for fear of wild animals and thieves in the night. They’d never admit it, but it was also an attempt at teaching the children to be punctual since if they were too slow, they’d be left to find sleep outside and on their own. They always made an exception during the winter months, but as with everything else in the orphanage, it wasn’t because of altruistic desires from the staff and instead simply wishing to avoid any investigations into the work they did at the orphanage.

This was far from the first time Cinder had to deal with sleeping outside her ‘home.’ Instead of being angry or upset, the young girl sighed and made her way around to the back of the building where a familiar green dumpster resided. Cinder had taken the trash for the orphanage out so frequently that she was used to the stench that emanated from the trash receptacle and had even turned this spot into her personal hideaway of sorts. The dumpster was on wheels, but the dirt and grass it sat on didn’t make pulling it away from the wall any easier for the young girl. She didn’t need to pull it far at least, just enough for her to squeeze into the small gap between the building and the dumpster.

After struggling to pull the dumpster away enough, Cinder smiled upon seeing one of her favorite things in the whole world right where she left it. Resting on the grass in the now-opened space behind the dumpster was a red and gold quilt. It was one of the only things Cinder had from her actual family, one of the only things to survive the fire…

Cinder shook her encroaching thoughts away, and set about crawling into the small gap that she frequently called a bed. She grabbed the quilt and pulled it over herself. It had holes and stains, as well as being too small to completely cover herself with. But Cinder didn’t care, this one little thing gave Cinder a sense of peace she thought could only be found in dreams. It made her feel safe and loved, as if her parents were still with her and protecting her. As Cinder lay on the ground, wrapped in her quilt, she could almost picture what her parents might have looked like, big smiles and bright eyes that gave her a feeling of love that she couldn’t get anywhere else. Every time Cinder closed her eyes, she believed she was one day closer to being rid of this horrid place.

Then it happened. What she believed to be the reward for her hard work. Years of being inferior to everyone else around her, years of working her hands to the bone just for a chance at life. It all finally paid off when The Madame arrived. Her chance at a proper home and a place where she might finally be cared for instead of cleaning up the other’s messes.

A young ten-year-old Cinder got to leave the orphanage in Mistral and instead see the Kingdom of the skies, Atlas. The floating Kingdom sounded straight out of a fairy tale and Cinder wasn’t convinced it even existed. But as The Madame rested a comforting hand on her shoulder and urged the young girl to look out the window of the airship they rode, Cinder’s doubts vanished. As if by magic, the clouds that obscured the Kingdom parted to reveal Atlas. Buildings that reached so high in the sky, Cinder thought they might fall over under their own weight. Clean streets made of concrete and steel instead of dirt and grass, as well as people wearing expensive clothes that Cinder could only dream of wearing. These people would be her neighbors, this was now her Kingdom, her home.

But just as quickly as the excitement of leaving the orphanage came in, the excitement at the sight of her new home faded. The reality of what exactly was expected of her set in. Cinder’s life did not improve. It went from being a daily struggle to a waking nightmare. The Madame didn’t adopt a young troubled child in need. She ‘employed’ a ten-year-old indentured servant who already knew how to clean and would be easy to control.

The Madame wasted no time putting Cinder in her place at their new ‘home.’ The Glass Unicorn, a hotel that The Madame ran and simply refused to hire an extensive workforce. The Madame preferred instead to have her own daughters, Cinder’s new stepsisters, work the hotel. But The Madame didn’t want her daughters being degraded by doing tasks such as cleaning dishes, doing laundry, or Brother’s forbid, taking the trash out! No, those jobs would now be relegated to Cinder.

Cinder didn’t have that much life experience admittedly, but she just knew that this wasn’t fair. She did everything Mr. Oran said, she worked hard, bettered herself, and even ‘accepted her lot in life’, whatever that meant. Why was she now being forced to keep cleaning messes!? Why couldn’t she just get a normal family that loved her!? It was not fair! It was so unfair, and Cinder made her anger known as she sat in The Madame’s office.

Back at the orphanage, Cinder knew throwing a temper tantrum like this was grounds for punishment. The young girl didn’t care though, she needed to express how unfair this whole situation was. The Madame, as expected didn’t take kindly to Cinder’s outburst of tears and yelling. What Cinder was not prepared for was the level of punishment that The Madame would give her. Whereas the orphanage would put her in a ‘silence room’ to think about what she did, The Madame had a different approach.

A collar. One that at first glance appeared to be nothing more than an accessory, a piece of jewelry that could pass as a necklace to any passerby who was none the wiser to the trinket’s true purpose. A chunk of electric Dust acted as the collar’s centerpiece that The Madame had connected to a remote to trigger a painful electric shock to the disobedient girl.

This formed much of Cinder’s new and ‘improved’ life. She worked day in and day out, mopping floors, cleaning windows, and running laundry with The Madame keeping her locked in the basement of the hotel at night and executing said painful shocks whenever Cinder did not perform her tasks sufficiently. Her stepsisters managed the more complicated tasks such as manning the front desk or cooking, but Cinder wasn’t exempt from some of those jobs either as her sisters would occasionally drag Cinder to the kitchen and force her to cook while they ridiculed her and laughed whenever she spilled what she was making.

From Cinder’s admittedly poor count, she believed she was ten when she left the orphanage, and by using some broken handles off of old brooms, Cinder did her best to keep up with how many days she had been here. Cinder struggled severely with her counting process, it took a painfully long amount of time and demanded Cinder’s entire focus when she did it. In her basement room that also acted as a storage closet for old furniture and broken tools or appliances that The Madame was too lazy or cheap to outright repair, Cinder clutched her family’s quilt in one hand as she used the other to move the broken broom handles around to count her days spent at the hotel.

Cinder finished her counting, and it left her wide-eyed and horrified. ‘Four years?’ the girl thought to herself. Maybe her count was off or maybe she just somehow never noticed, but almost four years had passed since she set foot in The Glass Unicorn. The days all blurred together in a haze of pain and focus to do her many labors for the day.

She was so shocked and engrossed by her recent reveal, that Cinder didn’t notice her basement door open nor did she hear her stepsisters approach her from behind. “Mother just scolded me about a burnt chicken meal a guest received!” Kristall screamed as she stomped over to the younger girl. “I had you make that meal and now I paid for your incompetence!”

Cinder jumped at her older sister’s voice booming off the walls of the storage room and causing her to get to her feet while attempting to hide her small quilt behind her. “I-I’m sorry i—it won’t happen again, please don’t tell T-The Madame,” Cinder choked out her apology. The sisters had a habit of telling their mother every little thing that Cinder did wrong just so they could watch her squirm, either in fear of what may happen to her, or in actual pain from The Madame’s punishment.

“Oh, we won’t tell Mother dear sister,” Juwel, Cinder’s other stepsister drawled out with a malicious smile as she walked around the terrified Cinder.

Kristall matched her blood sister’s smile and spied the ragged quilt held in a tight fist behind Cinder. Kristall stepped forward and yanked the quilt away from the smaller girl. “Hey!” Cinder tried to lunge forward and pull her quilt back but was stopped by a pair of arms tangling up with her own from behind.

“Up bup bup, little Cinder,” Juwel sang out in a mockingly joyful tone from right behind Cinder as she held the wiggling girl back.

Kristall held the quilt up and out from her as she looked at the ratty thing disgusted. “Augh! This thing is atrocious! I almost feel as if I should burn my hand of its filth.” Kristall’s disgusted face morphed into that of a vengeful smile as she looked at the restrained Cinder. “I suppose I will have to settle for burning it instead.”

“No-” Cinder tried to scream but was cut off by Juwel throwing her to the ground. Cinder tried to recover from the throw, but she was always weak and her new ‘mother’ hardly fed her any worthwhile scraps of food, preventing her from building up any strength. The sister pair laughed and sprinted back up the stairs of the basement.

It took Cinder longer than she wanted, but eventually, she got up and made to follow her stepsisters. She climbed the stairs, pushed open the thankfully unlocked basement door and looked around the currently empty first floor of the hotel. All the guests had retired for the night, allowing Cinder to listen for the cackling of her stepsisters. She didn’t have to wait long as the horrid laughter of her ‘family’ bellowed out from the kitchen.

Cinder broke into a wobbly sprint toward the noise. Cinder couldn’t lose that quilt, it was the only thing that left her with any sense of hope in this nightmare she called her life. She didn’t know what she would do without it; she was scared of what she would do without it.

Cinder ran through the empty bar and eating room on the first floor to burst through the connected kitchen door. Stumbling into the room filled with cooking appliances and shelves of ingredients, Cinder turned and saw her sisters looking back at her, arms crossed and giggling like a pair of school girls. Cinder ran toward them and looked at what they standing in front of.

An oven with its internal light turned on so the outside world could see into it. A small tiny flame dwindled on the center rack of the oven. Just barely, Cinder could make out the smoldering remains of the quilt, the last thing she had from her birth family, burned away like everything else.

Cinder collapsed on her knees as tears began to blur her vision. Her stepsisters said something. Cinder didn’t hear them and she didn’t notice when they left either. She sat there, staring at the orange glow of the oven that disconnected Cinder from any sense of her past. She didn’t know how long she sat there, mourning the loss of a simple quilt. It was long enough for the bell of the massive clock in the hotel to be what shook Cinder free of her thoughts.

Midnight. A time of change. The shifting of one day to the next. Cinder heard that tone many times as her work tended to keep her up into the late hours of the night and her counting would then take her to this midnight hour.

Cinder stopped counting from that day forward. She shifted her free time to planning and plotting instead. If the world wasn’t going to give her the life she wanted, then she would take it. Enduring endless amounts of abuse and ridicule at the hands of her stepsisters and The Madame, Cinder did her jobs quietly without any fuss. Waiting for the right moment to bring this nightmare to an end.

There it was, her moment. A man, a Huntsman walked into the hotel while Cinder picked up little bits of garbage around the lobby. He was a tall man with tanned olive skin and long dark violet hair. The man’s name and look aren’t what Cinder cared about though. He had his Huntsman weapons strapped tightly to his back, a pair of maces. But just below those maces rested a pair of swords. One of which looked to be loosely hanging in their sheath, probably damaged from some fight the Huntsman was in.

Cinder let out a quiet gasp as she looked around the lobby. There were only a few guests milling about and her ‘family’ was nowhere to be seen either. This was her chance, the moment she’s been waiting for had finally arrived. The Huntsman walked purposefully through the lobby toward the bar behind the front desk. The man must have already had a room.

Cinder, as slyly as she could, followed the man. Walking into the bar and eating room, Cinder only saw one other person there and they were passed out at a small table in the corner. The young girl returned her focus to the Huntsman as he plopped himself down on a stool at the bar. He would have to wait till one of the sisters or The Madame herself arrived to take his order, not that he seemed to care. He rested his elbows on the bar top and ran his hands down his face, clearly exhausted from something.

Cinder didn’t know or care what his issue was, she just knew she needed to make her move. Cinder looked at the black garbage bag she had in her hand and decided it would have to do for hiding the blade. Attempting to remain calm and collected, Cinder approached the Huntsman from behind. Being just a few feet away now, Cinder spared one more scouting glance at her surroundings and made her move. She wasn’t strong, but Cinder at least knew how to move her hands quickly and purposefully.

She slid the sword gently out from its loose sheath while lowering the weapon down into the garbage bag, handle first. If the man noticed, he made no indicator as such. With her prize hidden away, Cinder walked as quickly and quietly as she could away from the Huntsman, desperately trying to will her heart to calm down but the anxiety of getting caught was almost too much for the skinny girl.

Her heart wouldn’t get a chance to steady itself however, as once Cinder stood in front of the basement door to go down and hide the weapon, a strong hand wrapped around Cinder’s arm. Freezing in place, she worried that The Madame or one of her sisters had caught her. Slowly turning around, mentally preparing how she was going to get out of this, Cinder locked up even more upon seeing who caught her.

The tired-looking Huntsman glared at her, his hand completely encircling Cinder’s frail arm. If it was The Madame or one of her stepsisters, Cinder was prepared to draw the sword she stole and attack, but a trained Huntsman? Even one as tired as this would surely have no issues stopping Cinder without breaking a sweat.

The two stared at each other in the hall of the hotel, until the Huntsman sighed and relaxed his grip on Cinder’s arm. Cinder still maintained her horrified expression, fearing that her life was about to come to an end before she ever got the chance to truly experience it. The Huntsman kneeled before Cinder to be at her eye level and tried to give a calm and patient look instead of his annoyed glare earlier.

“What’s your name kid?” he asked softly.

Cinder flinched at the man’s tone; it sounded far too much like Mr. Oran when he gave his orphanage-wide speeches. But she knew better than to try and argue with someone so much stronger than herself. “C-Cinder… Sir!” Cinder added the proper title that she was told to use when addressing the guests of the hotel. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, she needed to do it right, otherwise The Madame would punish her.

The Huntsman’s patient look turned into a sad frown. “Okay, Cinder. My name is Rhodes, I’m a Huntsman but…” the man introduced himself as his eyes drifted to the garbage bag that held his sword. “I guess you figured that out, huh?”

Not knowing how to respond, Cinder opted to just nod.

“Can I ask what you were planning to do with that?” He then asked, pointing to the garbage bag, but making no move to try and reclaim the weapon within.

Cinder felt tears starting to leak from her eyes and mix with the bullets of sweat she was starting to produce. She didn’t know what to say. Lying to this man might make him hurt her like so many others had, but since he was a Huntsman, admitting her true goal with the sword might mean the same outcome. Cinder frantically looked up and down the hall of the Hotel, as if expecting to see her sisters walking menacingly up to her or The Madame, remote in hand, ready to punish her.

“Hey,” a soft voice and a gentle hand on her shoulder brought Cinder’s focus back to the Huntsman in front of her. Kind brown eyes looked at Cinder while the man’s hand actually ground her and stopped her wild and often hurtful imagination. “I’m not mad, or upset. I don’t even want the sword back right now. I just need to know how I can help you, Cinder,” the man, Rhodes further explained.

Hearing her name said like it mattered rattled Cinder to her core in a good way. All her life, her name was either some cruel joke for bullies or a reminder of why she was an orphan. Cinder started to calm down after that. Tears still flowed from her face as she turned around to look at her basement door. Cinder thought she had to give up all hope after what her sisters did to her quilt, but right now, Cinder desperately wanted to trust this Huntsman, wanted hope she could escape this nightmare intact both physically and mentally.

In her attempts to embrace that hope, she asked Rhodes a serious question. “Can-Can I trust you?” Cinder asked barely above an audible whisper, but it was enough for Rhodes to hear.

Rhodes met the girl’s tear-filled gaze and nodded while giving his answer. “Yes.”

That promise. The last promise of hope Cinder desperately latched onto is what would eventually break her entirely.

Chapter Text

Winter learned a lot of things from her Mantle friends. Like the importance of teamwork and trusting your friends, taking time to appreciate the world around you, and that fast food can be pretty decent on occasion. But the most important thing she took away from all her years with Robyn and the others? The fact that sneakers are unbelievably comfortable! Working out, hiking, and even combat was more comfortable in her custom sneakers with special Dust-infused inserts. Sure, her friends may have teased her about how expensive they were, but they were relatively cheap compared to even one of Weiss’s heels. Although to be fair, her friends didn’t ‘teach’ her about her new favorite footwear necessarily since the rest of them preferred to wear combat or even work boots during their time at Pedestal. Their loss.

Regardless of all she learned from her friends, Winter still held standards for certain things in her life. Proper bedding being among those things. Her Mantle-born companions may be satisfied with resting in a bedroll laid out on the cold ground, but Winter would gladly prefer her home bed made of Vacuo cotton. This is why she was rather pleased, and unsurprised, to find that The Glass Unicorn shared her love for comfortable bedding.

Winter stirred awake from her first night in the luxurious hotel and pushed herself up with a stretch. She couldn’t help but admire her hotel room as she pushed some of her messy hair back. The room was nearly as large as Weiss’s old room back at the manor before she moved into the smaller room with Ruby. A few feet away from the room’s bed that could comfortably fit four people, a couch and two armchairs sat facing an entertainment center with a very modern and slim television. Winter spied her scroll, plugged in and resting atop one of the end tables next to the couch of the miniature living room.

Winter carefully extracted herself from the heavy and plush sheets of the red bed she slept in and landed her feet on the smooth, dark red carpeting of her massive hotel room. The Madame clearly had a preferred style, the red carpet, gold-painted walls, and dark wood trim all combined to give the whole hotel a warm and comforting atmosphere. Perhaps that was why The Glass Unicorn was so popular. In a kingdom that is so commonly known for being cold, both physically with its weather and metaphorically with its politics and ascetics, this hotel must have been an immense breath of fresh air to Atlas.

Those were thoughts far and above a drowsy, still awakening Winter. For now, she kept her goals for the day simple and in front of her. Starting with reacquiring her scroll. She accomplished her task with only minimal interference from hostile yawns that continued to plague the teenage girl. Scroll in hand, Winter unplugged her device and set about turning it back on while shuffling around the bed over to the one and only window of her room. It may be the only window she had, but it was also the only one she needed. The window stretched across almost the entirety of the far wall to the left of the bed, it was clear why there were only four rooms on this entire floor considering every room must have been this big. She pushed the small button at the end of the window and a small electronic whirring could be heard as the enormous pair of black curtains began to separate and allowed the light from outside to illuminate the interior of the room.

Winter would have liked to bask in the rays of the sun from her window. Unfortunately, that snowstorm she heard about had begun. Clouds filled the sky and instead of a warm comforting orange glow, she got neutral rays of white light barely poking through dark clouds. All of Atlas was already covered in a thick layer of the accursed snow. The Schnee couldn’t help but let out a dejected sigh at the weather. If there was one thing Winter hated in this world, it was snow. No, the irony was not lost on the snow-haired girl, Robyn and Joanna made sure of that every time she expressed her displeasure with the powdery substance.

Always painfully cold, a pale white or some other muted color such as light gray, and caused problems for anything it came into contact with. While these were some of the issues she had with snow, they were also the problems she associated with her father. Winter scowled at the overcast sky, her hatred of the weather undeniably connected with the hatred of her father and all that he had done. Maybe it was the fact that on such a similar snowy day to this, Jacques learned of Winter’s desire to be a Huntress and he began to reveal his true self from that point forward. Those few weeks of constant yelling and berating from her father about how dangerous and ‘utterly ridiculous’ her desires were. Those memories played out in Winter’s head more than she would care to admit. If her mother hadn’t met Roxy sooner, Winter shuddered to think what else might have happened if she kept fighting with her father. Would it have escalated beyond a point of no return? Would she have…

Winter cut her thoughts off with a shake of her head. These were not vacation thoughts. Swallowing her hatred of the frozen precipitation, Winter glanced down at her scroll in search of anything to distract her sudden dip in mood. Not seeing any major notifications, Winter sighed, connected her device to the TV in her room, and brought up the news while walking through a swinging door connected to her room.

Her friends, mostly Marigold, liked to call Winter a grandma since she always put the news on first thing in the morning, even during their sleepovers. Every time they teased her, Winter would make the same argument. Huntresses need to be informed of the goings on throughout the world. Certain political actions or the increase of crime in a certain area will also affect the level of Grimm attacks and being knowledgeable about these things is how you know where to focus your efforts. Of course, the others would simply scoff and just tease Winter about being too serious.

“We’ll see how far their cavalier attitudes take them in Atlas,” Winter grumbled to herself as she walked into the hotel room’s small connected kitchen to make breakfast with the hotel’s complementary food. While she loved her friends without fail, they could sometimes be very exhausting to deal with. Yet, as Winter brewed herself a cup of coffee and buttered the single piece of toast she made, she found herself smiling at the thought of her friends and reminiscing on how they all met.

Subconsciously making her way back into the main portion of her room and sitting on the velvet couch with her breakfast in hand, Winter half paid attention to what was on the news since it wasn’t anything too crazy or was just more info about the storm passing through. She quickly got lost in thinking back to all those years ago when her mother and Jacques were still married, Whitley wasn’t born yet, and Weiss was barely out of diapers.

Young Winter Schnee had seen some sort of advertisement for a stuffed animal shop down in Mantle. Being the good big sister she was, she wanted to get a cute toy for her recent baby sister, (and maybe herself too.) Back then, her mother and Jacques were both focused on the company and were hardly home, leaving Winter and Weiss both to be effectively raised by the many staff that occupied the Schnee manor at the time.

She didn’t remember her name, but the maid that had spent the most time with Winter was a kind young woman originally from Mistral. With straight black hair, tanned skin that was uncommon in Mantle or Atlas, comforting blue eyes that matched the shade of the deep sea, and a subtle accent in her voice.

Winter had many fond memories from her youth and that maid was at the center of so many of them. She helped the young Winter with all her lessons, played games of tag or hide and seek with her, and had the warmest of hugs. In a kingdom and home that was perpetually cold, the Mistral maid’s warm hugs almost seemed magical to the young Winter.

It took an unreasonable amount of begging and flagrant use of puppy eyes, but in the end, the young Winter had managed to convince her favorite maid to take her down into Mantle to get said stuffed animals for her sister, (and potentially herself) and the pair made their way to Mantle via the many shuttles at the airship docks. Down on the snowy streets of Mantle. Winter held her maid’s gloved hand as the older woman guided them through the busy streets of Mantle wearing full snow attire. Her maid had insisted that Winter wear her big coat she normally only wore for skiing and the fuzzy beanie that completely covered her hair, no matter how much Winter complained about it making her head itch.

Oh, but that trip was so worth the discomfort. It was the first time she had seen the lower kingdom with her own eyes, and not just through photos or the windows of an airship. Winter found herself entranced by the city’s grimy and rustic nature, having only been exposed to the clean and picturesque bubble that was Atlas all her life. Despite Mantle’s colder environment and how rusted almost every building was, Winter was in awe of how every person she walked past seemed… Happy.

Regardless of how crowded the city felt, no matter how much the smog from Atlas clouded the rooftops, they remained cheerful. Sharing small yet warm smiles with one another or stopping to give random kind words of encouragement to each other. It was a far cry difference compared to the fast and harsh way many Atlesians acted on the streets of Winter’s home, and it baffled her. She assumed everyone was short and snippy with each other when traveling on the sidewalk.

Winter’s maid was saying something to her as they walked, but could hardly focus on what she was saying due to being so distracted by everything around her. So lost in thought and admiring the surrounding kingdom, the young Winter failed to see a sizable pothole in the sidewalk. Her small boot-covered foot found itself trapped in it as she walked and brought her down to the cracked asphalt with a mighty thud, barely catching herself with her exposed pale hands and sending her hat flying with all her white hair exposed.

Winter always struggled to recall that part of the day. The pain of twisting her ankle and scraping her hands on the sidewalk always ended up blurring the rest of the memory. She remembered her maid helping her, drying her tears or offering comforting words as she brought Winter’s foot out of the pothole and hugged her close, the maid’s ‘magical’ heat easing the pain almost immediately. There was a man, a large Faunus man who noticed Winter’s fall and came over to help as well. He kneeled to check on Winter and her maid then… Then Winter only remembered yelling at that point.

Looking back, it wasn’t hard for Winter to understand what the man might have been upset about. The SDC went through constant layoffs and her mother had always tried her best to minimize the impact of those who lost their jobs. At least… In Atlas she did. Jacques remained in control of the few branches and mining facilities in Mantle and tended to be far more cruel about who he let go and why. Just another aspect of how Jacques continued to ruin not only the Schnee’s lives but also that of countless others.

Soon, that Faunus man who was yelling about something was joined by others on the street. Recognizing the young Schnee and feeling what must have been years of frustration and anger, the happy and optimistic people of Mantle that Winter saw just moments ago, vanished. In their place stood a mad and frustrated horde of people who were lied to and cheated by her father. All the screaming dug into the little Winter’s brain and all she felt she could do was hide behind her only source of familiarity, her maid.

Her maid stood, saying something to the crowd, trying to calm them, but they weren’t listening. Winter didn’t listen. All Winter wanted, was to go home and forget this nightmare she unknowingly dragged herself and her maid into. Getting louder, larger, and closer. The crowd almost seemed endless in Winter’s mind. Even to this day, as a graduate of combat school, with her own weapon, Aura, and even Semblance. Winter still carried nightmares of that horde baring down on her for the sins of her father.

At some point, her maid turned around and kneeled to Winter’s eye level with a fear-stricken expression. “Go,” was all Winter heard. Her maid had given her a slight nudge to let go of her leg, and so Winter ran. First into the road, the only place where the angry crowd wasn’t standing. Then across to the other sidewalk where she ran and ran for what felt like forever.

A subtle “plop” caused Winter to blink away her memories of that day. She was back in her hotel room, staring down into her now cold coffee cup. She brought her free hand up to her cheek to rub away the subtle tear streak from her eyes. Shaking her head with a frustrated sigh, Winter got up to dump her now useless coffee.

This is why Winter always tried to focus so heavily on her schoolwork or some sort of shenanigan with her friends. When left to her own devices, Winter had a habit of letting her mind drudge up the past. Like how she never saw that maid again after that day. She was pretty sure she didn’t… D-die or anything, at least if all of Winter’s research she did when she got older was to be believed. But she never did come back to the manor and her parents had no idea who she was since they barely knew the staff at the time. All the original staff would eventually be let go after Jacques was ousted from the family, meaning by the time Winter would have had the idea to ask the other staff about her, they were already gone.

With her mug set down in the sink of the room’s kitchen, Winter grabbed her still-unpacked bag and brought it over to the bed. Unzipping the bag and flipping open the cover with a smile. The first thing she pulled out was her sword. On the surface, it didn’t look to be anything other than a traditional style dueling sabre. A small recessed part in the side of the hilt of the weapon allowed for Dust to be inserted and used however Winter wanted, but she tended to only use it to alter her Semblance’s glyphs.

Originally, this was all she intended for her weapon to be. Her mother and by extension, her grandfather both held this belief that weapons didn’t need to be complicated or fancy to be powerful. They were merely tools meant to enhance one’s capabilities. Real strength comes from a person’s mastery of Aura and ideally their Semblance, a teaching philosophy that was echoed by Pedestal Academy.

Winter’s newest little sister, Ruby… Disagreed with that logic, and she was not quiet about her disagreement. Winter chuckled to herself as she could almost hear the arguments Ruby had with both her and their mother.

“What do you mean you won’t give it a name!?”

“It’s supposed to be a part of you! Of your soul!”

“It should also be a gun!”

For someone so young, she was very adamant about her position on that particular topic. No one in the family was sure about where Ruby had picked up this obsession with weapons, but it spread to Weiss as Winter remembered overhearing the two giggle back and forth about what they would name their weapons.

Wherever Ruby’s weapon fascination came from, even if it was opposed to Willow’s teachings and the logic behind Pedestal’s weapon class, it at least had the benefit of Ruby being a near mechanical prodigy. It was only because of Ruby’s insistence and technical expertise that Winter added the blade’s other function. With the release of a certain spring catch on the bottom of her blade’s hilt, the thin guard that curved over the wielder’s knuckles around the handle of her sword would disconnect and unfurl itself into a few-inch long dirk. It may have been simple compared to some of the more outlandish ideas that Ruby had, but Winter legitimately liked this part of her weapon. She was skilled in dual-blade fighting but could save those skills by keeping the dirk hidden in plain sight on the rest of her blade and catching her opponent off guard with its sudden release.

After checking her blade over, Winter set the sword aside and pulled out the other large object in her bag. Robyn’s lock kit. A simple and unassuming greenish-brown bag that from the outside, looked to be nothing more than a simple handbag. Most people would never guess what lay inside. Winter undid the silver clasp on the front of the bag and observed the myriad of tools. Lock picks made from Dust infused materials to ensure they never broke, modified electronic stethoscopes meant to help crack old-school dial locks, vials and syringes filled with Dust neutralizing liquids, and so many other highly illegal tools that would get any of them sent to jail just for possessing.

Winter smiled fondly at the bag before closing it. No matter how casual or flippant Robyn or the others acted, Winter knew exactly why her friends had these things. Ever since Atlas became the kingdom of Solitas, Mantle has struggled to keep from collapsing. A culture of elitism and discrimination formed inside Atlas, and Winter wasn’t blind to her family’s part in that, even if unintentional. Even with Roxy and her mother trying to walk back the issues many of the Atlas nobility caused, there was still only so much that could be done. Corruption still plagued every corner of both Atlas and Mantle, and after what Robyn had been through, Winter understood why her friend was so insistent about ‘tearing down the establishment’ or some other form of radical rhetoric. She may have been dramatic about it, and as much as Winter might complain about how too relaxed Robyn acted sometimes, she did understand how serious her friend was about fixing her home.

Sparing a brief look over to the TV that was still on, Winter saw it was almost an acceptable time to get something for lunch. But as she looked back at the lock kit in her hands, Winter decided to recall the happier part of that nightmarish day. As much as it was the day she lost her favorite maid, it was also the day she met the ‘Happy Little Huntresses.’

After running from the crowd for what felt like hours, the young Winter Schnee ran into an alley and fell to her knees as they finally gave out from all her sprinting. The little girl didn’t know what to do. She was all alone in a city that hated her and she was in incredible amounts of pain. So the little girl did the only she thought she could do. She wept and whined, hoping for her mother, her father, or her grandfather to swoop in and hold her close. To take her back home where she would never want to leave the safety of her room ever again.

“Are you okay?”

A quiet and concerned high-pitched voice broke through the little Winter’s sobs. The weeping girl looked up from her place on the ground and saw another little girl around her age. She had white hair and two massive sheep ears that looked very out of place on the girl’s small head.

To this day Winter and the others liked to tease Fiona about how they met. The Faunus sees a little girl huffing and puffing while collapsed on the ground of a random alley with tears streaming down her face and the first thing she says to the girl is ‘Are you okay?’

Back in that alley though, the little Winter didn’t find the question as funny as her future self would. Instead, she only sobbed harder and shook her head vehemently. She was scared that this little girl was going to hate her too and Winter was tired, she just couldn’t run anymore. Luck decided to be kind to Winter at that point however. Thankfully, Fionas always been a kind soul.

The little sheep Faunus tip-toed over to the crying girl and kneeled down. “Are you hurt?” Young Winter nodded her head and raised her hands to show the Faunus how red and scraped up they were from her fall earlier. “Where’s your mom and dad?” Fiona asked as she looked at the hurt hands.

Little Winter didn’t know where her parents were and just shook her head some more as her crying slowed down. Fiona looked at the girl’s head as it shook and turned to look down the alley that she was already walking down. She smiled and excitedly told the girl, “I was on my way to my friend’s house! You can come with me and I’m sure her parents will help you!”

Feeling a little taken aback by the girl’s sudden energy, Winter tried to absorb what the girl said. She looked back at the entrance to the alley and shuddered about having to go back out onto the street on her own. With not many other options, Young Winter nodded her head.

The little Faunus gave a small hop in excitement and reached down to help Winter off the ground. “Awesome! My name’s Fiona! My friend Robyn’s house isn’t far, come on!”

Hesitantly taking Fiona’s hand, Winter let herself be pulled up as she introduced herself. “I’m… W-Winter,” she couldn’t help but stutter as the remains of her crying fit were still leaving her system.

Fiona guided Winter down the alley and through a few backyards of other people’s houses till they eventually arrived at a two-story house with a single large tree behind it and some sort of mini house built into the tree. Without even knocking, Fiona burst through the door and shouted to get her friend’s attention. Winter shyly followed her in as excited footsteps ran down the stairs. “Fiona!” another girl who looked maybe a year older than Winter ran up to Fiona to hug her. The two broke from their embrace and Fiona gestured over to the still skittish Winter who awkwardly watched the exchange.

“Robyn, this is Winter. She got separated from her parents and I told her your mom and dad could help her.”

The blonde girl, Robyn, looked at Winter with a sad smile. “Hi Winter! My folks aren’t home yet but they will be in a few hours…” Robyn trailed off as she noticed Winter clenching her hands and trying to keep them hidden behind herself. “Are your hands hurt?”

Winter went to shake her head. She didn’t want to bother these people anymore than she already was and just wanted to go home as soon as she could. Fiona answered for her though. “Yeah, I think she fell and scuffed her hands up pretty badly.”

Robyn’s face shifted into one of worry as she gasped. “Well, come on! Our bathrooms down the hall. My mom taught me all about how to deal with cuts and stuff!” She finished, with her hands on her hips.

The confidence the girl showed did a lot to assuage some of Winter’s worries and she decided to follow the girl to the bathroom. Fiona said she was going to go pour some milk for all of them as Winter sat down on the closed toilet in Robyn’s bathroom. The blonde girl opened up the small closet and hopped a few times to grab a spray bottle and a hand towel off some shelves above. “Okay! Hold out your hands!” Robyn ordered with a smile.

Winter complied and lay her hands out, palms up, and she winced at all the cuts and bruises that marred her pale skin. When Robyn pointed the bottle at her injured hands, Winter wasn’t prepared for how much the contents of the bottle would hurt. Yelping and yanking her hands back away from Robyn and her spray bottle of pain, Winter glared at the girl as Robyn gasped and looked back apologetically. “Sorry! I was supposed to tell you that stings. Here, hold this towel with both hands and you’ll be good as new!”

Looking between the girl’s sorry expression and the towel, Winter eventually relented, took the towel into her hands, and squeezed. It hurt for a second, but soon the pain faded and the cuts seemed to stop bleeding. Winter shyly thanked Robyn for her help as she looked at her hands.

“You’re welcome, after all, it’s what Huntresses do!” Robyn said proudly as she put the bottle back in the closet.

“You’re a Huntress?” Winter couldn’t help but ask, making the prideful little girl lose some of her confidence.

“Well… Not officially… Not yet anyways…” The girl muttered as she nervously straightened out some of her wild blonde hair before putting a smile back on her face. “But we will be! And we’ll be the best Huntresses around, or our name isn’t The Happy Little Huntresses!”

Winter giggled at the name and the guarantee Robyn made. “Happy Little Huntresses?”

“Yup! That’s what my dad calls us since we all wanna be Huntresses when we grow up.” Robyn’s eyes widened as an idea struck her brain. “Do you want to be one?”

“Be one?” Winter tilted her head at the question.

“Yeah! Do you want to be a Happy Little Huntress? Right now it’s just me and Fiona and Joanna. We need a fourth and then we’ll be a proper Huntress team!”

Winter let the question stir in her mind. ‘A Huntress?’ She thought. Some of the stories the maids would read to Winter and Weiss involved them, but she never considered actually being one. Her father had always implied she would take over the big business her mother ran. But, between how nice Fiona’s been and the level of confidence and bravery Robyn seemed to have at their age, a part of Winter admired that. Maybe, if she became a Huntress, the people in Mantle might hate her less. Maybe she could even help Mantle be less dirty and scary-looking one day!

With her mind made up, Winter looked at the blonde girl who helped heal her hands and nodded with a great big smile. “Yeah! I wanna be a Huntress!”

Robyn smiled back and told her to follow her out of the bathroom. “Fiona! Winter said she wants to be a Happy Little Huntress! I’m gonna show her the base!” Robyn yelled as she went to the backdoor of the home and threw on a puffy green jacket.

Fiona came running up shortly after the announcement and looked at Winter excitedly. “Really!?”

Winter just smiled and nodded her head. With that, the two ‘veteran’ Happy Little Huntresses showed their newest member ‘the base.’ It was the treehouse that was built in the backyard and was only accessible by a rope ladder. Winter’s hands were already feeling better and the excitement of being a Huntress allowed her to climb the ladder with no issues.

It was a simple structure, just a large wooden box with windows and a roof built off a particularly sturdy branch of the tree. Inside however, was a real file cabinet that apparently contained all the plans and drawings for all the girl’s various ideas for weapons, team attacks, and other random Huntress-related dreams the girls had. All the papers were signed either by Fiona, Robyn, or the third girl Winter had yet to meet, Joanna.

“She’s awesome!” Robyn exclaimed when Winter asked about her. “She’s super duper strong and stuff, and just look at how good she can draw!” Robyn held out a piece of paper with ‘outfit ideas’ written on it and had very detailed drawings of fancy-looking long jackets, cloaks, and a pretty looking bird symbol with its long wings extending above its head. Winter had to agree, Joanna seemed to be the best artist in the group.

“And she has really pretty hair…” Fiona added quietly while looking at one of Joanna’s drawings of her weapon idea.

Robyn’s excitement dwindled slightly as she continued. “She got in trouble at school and got grounded. That’s why she didn’t show up today.”

That’s how the three girls spent the next few hours. Sitting in a tree house and talking about what it meant to be a Huntress. Robyn and Fiona went on and on about the adventures Huntresses went on and all the good they did in the world. The more Winter listened to her new friends talk about being a Huntress, the more excited she got about becoming one herself.

Sadly, their time had to come to an end eventually and that came in the form of Robyn’s parents calling for her from their house. The shocked looks on their faces when Robyn and Fiona introduced them to Winter would always be something the three laughed about for years to come. After getting over the shock of having the SDC’s heiress in their home, the Hill family and Fiona listened to the young Winter’s tale about how she got separated from her maid in Mantle. More tears sprung from Winter as she explained and Robyn’s Mother wasted no time in rushing over to comfort the girl as she cried.

Robyn’s father managed to call the local SDC branch and explain that Winter Schnee was currently at their home. Naturally, they didn’t believe him until he had Winter talk to them directly, at which point the manager for that branch rushed to call and inform Jacques and his wife. Around fifteen minutes later, an Atlas military bullhead landed on the street outside Hill’s home in Mantle and outpoured around ten of the SDC’s personal armed security forces with Jacques following behind them. The Hills were terrified of course, but when Winter ran out from the home to hug her father excitedly and told him all about what happened and how the Hills helped her, all the private soldiers seemed to relax.

Jacques did not.

He grabbed the girl’s arm and dragged his daughter into the bullhead while scolding her and having the soldiers follow back inside as well. She didn’t get to give the Hills and Fiona a proper goodbye as the bullhead was quick to get off the street and back to Atlas.

As poorly as that day began, and as poorly as it ended, that was still a precious memory to Winter. Not only the day she met her friends but also the day she decided to become a Huntress. She wouldn’t get to Meet Joanna for a while, her father had forbidden her from ever going back down to Mantle without very strict supervision. Fiona’s uncle though, occasionally did work in Atlas for the farms and he would bring the three girls up to Atlas with him to meet up with Winter.

Sadly, the day she first met Robyn’s parents would also be the only time. Just a couple of years later, they were both lost to a Grimm attack that hit their side of Mantle hard. Robyn was spared the fate since she was at Joanna’s at the time of the attack.

Winter sighed in her hotel room’s massive bed as she turned the lock kit over and looked at it. Robyn was, and still is, convinced the attack was deliberate. Not long after the attack was quelled by Huntsman, a random shell company bought up the entire destroyed neighborhood to build a Dust refinery that didn’t meet any of Atlas’s standards for safety and pollution. Something that happened all too often in Mantle.

Robyn wanted nothing more than to dig around and find proof of her gut feeling, but at a certain point, she had to admit she couldn’t do it. She was still young and Fiona was scared she’d get hurt looking into the ordeal. She settled on waiting until she was a proper Huntress and promised to not go it alone and to take ‘The Happy Little Huntresses’ with her when she did. They hadn’t called themselves that in a long time, not since they lost the ‘base’ and all their plans in the very same Grimm attack that took Robyn’s parents.

That didn’t stop her or any of them for that matter, from starting to poke their heads around Mantle and Atlesian businesses when they hit their teens. Searching around for illegal or unsafe practices. It was hard, they got in trouble almost every summer for breaking into some private property they shouldn’t have and had only successfully exposed one corrupt company that was illegally minting lien with an anonymous tip to the Atlas specialists directly. The level of corruption in Mantle was so deep, you had to have undeniable physical evidence to get the local police involved and companies were very careful to avoid paper trails of any kind. Winter and her friends kept at it though, and every year of combat school taught them to be better and soon, they’d learn even more from Atlas Academy.

But that was all in their future, back to the here and now. Lying down in the bed of one of Atlas’s most high-profile hotels, Winter couldn’t get her mind off of poking around this hotel’s back rooms.

Sure, Winter may have wanted a simple vacation and take a break away from everything, but what was she supposed to do? With that storm outside, getting anywhere would be a nightmare and that’s assuming any place is even open. She couldn’t really train with her sword or Semblance without risk of getting in trouble or damaging something in the hotel. Plus, there were just some shady things about the hotel that didn’t line up. Like, how does a hotel as popular as this, run with nothing but one woman, her teenage daughters, and the occasional hired help that always gets let go after a week? Or, why does ‘The Madame’ insist on only being called ‘The Madame?’

All these questions and more started to swarm in Winter’s mind. Maybe there was nothing to the hotel. Maybe Winter was just going crazy without any homework or familial duties to attend to.

Winter shook her head and hopped up from her bed with a confident smirk. She was going to find the answer to these questions. Not necessarily because she thinks there may actually be something to them, but because she was bored and wanted to challenge herself. Striding with purpose over to the door in and out of her hotel room, Winter opened the door and… Promptly slammed it shut, and ran back to her bed.

It was difficult to sneak around a place you didn’t belong in your pajamas, especially at midday.

Chapter Text

The Glass Unicorn had money put into it, that was plain to see for anyone who spared the hotel a glance. Handcrafted tables and chairs made from imported Mistrali wood, the attached kitchen in Winter’s room had appliances that were barely a year old, and food offerings that should have been almost impossible to get in Atlas. But as Winter sat in the luxury hotel’s first-floor dining room at a table by a window, a bowl of traditional Vacuan spiced rice in front of her, she decided the answer to the improbable ingredients could wait till after she finished her deliciously spicy lunch.

One of the first things Robyn and her friends taught Winter when they met was simplicity. Joanna was the undisputed master of taking the ‘simple’ approach to things, sometimes to her detriment or the annoyance of others. Yet more often than not, Joanna proved time and time again, that the simplest solution was typically the best solution. Which is why Winter’s first step of her boredom-induced investigation was to start by asking the proprietors of the hotel some of the honest questions she had. Enjoying the hotel’s exceptional food was merely an added benefit.

Winter did a quick scan of the room for the sisters who worked at the hotel, while also taking count of who else was in the room. A few wealthy Atlesians at other tables and some rugged Huntsman discussing at the empty bar, and that was it. Earlier, she had seen The Madame appear to tend to any bar patrons briefly, then disappear to some other duty in the hotel. The daughter she recognized from yesterday had made the rounds, taking the orders for the food, leaving to make the meals, and then delivering them. All on her own, one guest at a time, and with a permanent frown on her face. Winter could almost forgive the girl’s poor customer service, considering how tedious and painfully slow her work must have been to do on her own.

After the last guest got their food, Winter watched as the curly, blonde-haired girl hustled out of the dining room and with poorly hidden anger, unlocked and opened a door that was on the way towards the stairs and elevator and nearly slammed it shut after entering.

That was twenty minutes ago now, and the girl still hadn’t returned.

She assumed that door led to the part of the hotel where The Madame and her daughters lived because surely, they must live here if they were the only employees most of the time. Right? Winter went about enjoying her lunch, but kept her eyes in the direction the girl went. Expecting to see either the other sister come out in a sort of ‘shift change’ sort of deal, or for Kristall to drag her sister out and have her help. Except nothing happened. No one else came out and no one else went in.

All the gears inside Winter’s mind began to turn in thought. The dining room consisted of at least twelve tables and however many stools at the bar that ran the length of the wall that separated this room from the lobby. How did only three, maybe four people keep this place running? It was slow right now, only about eight other people in the room. The hotel though, had four floors with the first three mostly being taken up by what Winter guessed were more traditional hotel rooms. She had seen no staff other than The Madame or her daughters milling about. If they struggled to keep up with this number of guests, how did The Madame and her daughters hold up during something like a lunch rush, or if some big event happens in this part of Atlas and their hotel gets swamped?

Halfway through her lunch, Winter felt an odd pit form in her stomach. Any other time, she would have blamed the rice for the feeling. But now, as the dining room devolved into soft and polite discussions while everyone ate their food, Winter was left with the oddest sense of dread. Seeing how Kristall barely kept a vague sense of courtesy during her work and the fact that no one, not a single person, complained about it? Gave Winter nervous goosebumps and had her asking even more questions in her head. Winter had seen Atlesians explode in frustration over much smaller things than sub-par service. Yet, no one here seemed bothered by Kristall’s attitude. Why?

She stewed on these questions and tried to ignore the curious feeling she had while taking in another spoonful of her lunch. The heat from her chosen dish did well to stave off the chilly feeling of both the hotel’s oddities and the blizzard that continued to rage outside. As Winter watched the Blizzard create and kick up snow outside the window, she felt her scroll give a faint buzz.

Setting her spoon aside, Winter withdrew the device, opened it, and laid it down on her table to skim the notification while resuming to eat. The girl widened her blue eyes, all of her strange feelings taking a backseat upon seeing who it was from.

R: ‘Hey. How’s the hotel? U get kicked out yet? Lol’

Winter smiled and rolled her eyes. She typed out a quick response to Robyn, assuring her she was very much still allowed in the hotel. After sending the first text, she immediately typed out another message. Then promptly erased it with a frustrated scowl on her face and tried again. Repeating the process two more times and finally settling on how she wanted to continue the conversation.

W: ‘How’s May?’

Winter hated texting. You had no context in how people said things, no way to read expressions and check for lies or undertones. The wait was easily the worst part, though. Having to sit and wait for a response and there was no way of knowing when the person would pick up the discussion or if they even saw the message at all! Why couldn’t everyone else like video calls as much as her? It was clearly the superior way of communicating via scroll, no matter what her friends say.

Shifting nervously in her chair, Winter dropped her scroll back to the table as she grumbled incoherently and resumed eating while waiting for Robyn to reply… At some point… Annny second now Robyn would reply, surely… After about the longest three minutes of Winter’s life, another faint buzz came from her scroll. Winter snatched up her scroll in a heartbeat and read Robyn’s lengthy reply.

R: ‘Better now than 24 hours ago. A couple weeks back while u guys were still not talking or whatever. Jo had lent May some hand me down clothes and stuff since they’re a bit closer in size you know? May’s parents found out-’

Winter stopped reading to rub her forehead in an attempt to ward off an incoming headache. The Schnee was no stranger to just how close-minded much of Atlas was, especially when referring to the upper-class members of society, like the Marigolds. Robyn and the others had tried to convince May to not go back to her family after making her self-discovery, but insisted she wanted to at least stay in graces with them long enough to make it through Atlas Academy’s initiation.

After all, Tuition for the academy was expensive. Unless, of course, you signed the contract to join the Atlas military after graduation. Then naturally, the Kingdom itself would pay for your studies. In return, all they asked was for ten years of service in one of the most regulated yet also corrupt militaries in the world. It wasn’t hard to see why May wanted to wait till her family covered her costs and then tell them to shove off.

Near endless amounts of frustration built up inside Winter. Their ‘incident’, as Fiona politely called it, left both May and Winter grappling with various feelings that neither knew how to process. Both of them coming from a similar background in the Atlas high society left them both woefully unprepared for how to deal with such a sudden shift in their… ‘friendship’.

But now, Winter felt like such a fool for ignoring her friend’s issues. Despite how rattled Winter was by their incident, it surely couldn’t have compared to what May had started going through that day. Winter at least had her family, specifically her mother and Roxy to help her with some questions she was having after the whole thing happened, even if she was vague about what brought the sudden questions up. May didn’t want anyone outside their little friend group to know about her, not till she had more time to process it herself.

May had almost no one to talk to. Robyn and the others could have only helped her so much by scroll and no other Marigold would have tried to help her with what she was dealing with. Winter knew all that, and still didn’t try to help her friend. Too ‘afraid’ or too ‘scared of doing more harm’ tended to be Winter’s only excuse. It was pathetic, really. In reality, Winter knew she was just scared about not knowing how to help. She still didn’t know how, but now she wished she had at least tried.

Pulling up her scroll with a deep sigh, Winter barely forced her self-loathing down enough to continue reading.

R: ‘-and believe it or not, her folks didn’t take it well. Did all the classic stuff, take her scroll, lock her in her room, yell at her, Yada Yada. When we showed up the whole mansion was locked down HARD. Since a certain someone has my kit currently, we had to get… Creative when finding May. Long story short, (I’ll tell you the rest in person. Lol) we sorta took you up on your offer and called Klein for help. He ‘very helpfully drove us at a reasonable speed away from the totally not alerted Marigold mansion security’. On an unrelated note, you owe that man a raise.’

Winter chuckled at the end of Robyn’s text before typing out her own response.

W: ‘I’ll be sure to inform my mom.’

With her first text sent, Winter’s smile receded as she finished processing the rest of the message. Her brow furrowed with anxiousness and her continued messages showed it.

W: ‘Is May okay now?’
W: ‘Are you guys still in Atlas?’
W: ‘I can get back to the manner, should I?’

R: ‘STOP’

Robyn’s all-caps message succeeded in halting Winter’s mid-typing of another message. The white-haired girl took a deep breath and closed her eyes while slowly rolling her head in a small circle. A trick that Fiona taught her to help manage sudden waves of stress. While performing her little ritual, she waited for Robyn to clarify at least one of her many requests.

R: ‘U good? Calmed down?’

Winter scowled at her scroll when she looked back at it. How dare Robyn patronize her over text! More importantly, how dare she be right in knowing Winter was stressing! She refused to give Robyn the satisfaction of knowing she was right and didn’t respond. Not that it seemed to matter to Robyn.

R: ‘So, in the order you typed your panicked questions.’
R: ‘May is fine, sleeping right now.’
R: ‘And to answer both last questions, no. We caught the last airship to Mantle before the storm hit and are currently at Fiona’s Uncle’s place. He’s out of town for something so it’s just the 4 of us. YOU stay put. Storm is apparently bad and getting worse.’

She didn’t need Robyn to tell her that. The window next to her was a more than effective weather report. Even in the short hour since she woke up, the winds somehow picked up and every window in the hotel seemed to freeze over, making it even harder to see outside.

Winter leaned back in the expensive wooden chair, reading and re-reading Robyn’s responses. If she let them, more anxiety-riddled thoughts could easily cloud her mind. She just needed to accept that there wasn’t much she could do right now to help her friend, no matter how much she wanted to. This storm wasn’t set to let up for some time, and she needed to let her friends be there for May right now. With another deep breath, Winter went about typing back to her friend.

Winter paused in her typing as she searched for the right things to say. Wanting to express her concern for her friends, but she wasn’t sure how May might feel about her wanting to check in with her. She didn’t know if May wanted her to be concerned for her. The longer she sat there, the more the doubts crept in, making her question every word she typed. With a quick shake to clear her head, she typed and sent her message within moments, not giving herself any time to second-guess her own words.  

W: ‘I’m glad that you all are okay and as soon as this storm passes, I want to come down and hang out. Please tell May I’m sorry.’

What was Winter sorry for exactly? Sorry for not helping Robyn and the others bust May out of her home? Sorry for not trying to check on May sooner? Sorry for the argument they had after their incident? All of it? Winter couldn’t even be certain what she was sorry about. She just knew she was.

R: ‘Sounds good Winny. And I will I promise. May just got up. I think it’s time for the lot of us to have a ‘girl talk’ with little blue. Talk more later Win :) ’

Robyn’s assurance helped push aside Winter’s worries. With a new small smile on her face, Winter put her scroll away and went back to finish her lunch. Only to find it had gone cold at this point. How long had her text conversation with Robyn been going?

“Is everything to your liking?”

A sudden voice caused Winter to flinch in her chair and whip her head around to see one of The Madame’s daughters standing near her table. Composing herself from the sudden appearance of the girl, Winter glanced behind the girl to see only one other person left in the room with her, some older Huntress who had too much to drink at the bar. She must have been more absorbed in her text conversation than she thought.

“Yes,” Winter said, looking back at her nearly empty bowl of rice. “I do believe I’m done for now, Kristall,” she finished, making an effort to put on her more refined Atlesian accent when talking with The Madame or either of her daughters. A habit formed from when Jacques was still in the picture and expected her to be the heiress. She maintained the accent whenever she might need it, like convincing high-class bars to let her and her friends in or attending high-class parties she and her friends definitely weren’t invited to.

The blonde girl let out a small fit of amused giggles from behind her hand. “Actually, I’m Juwel, Kristall’s sister,” she said after her laughter died down, keeping a joyful smile on her face.

“Ah, apologies,” Winter responded with an embarrassed nod of understanding. She thought the girl looked different from when she had taken her order and brought her the food earlier. The two were very clearly sisters, but Juwel seemed to have straighter, darker blonde hair and if Winter squinted, she’d almost guess that her teal eyes were brighter than her sisters.

Juwel waved her hand. “It’s quite all right. Are you finished?” the blonde girl asked, politely pointing to Winter’s bowl.

Even from the short couple of sentences she’s shared with the girl so far, Juwel already came off as far kinder than her sister. She seemed more like her mother at the front desk, polite, refined, and at least could pretend to care about the wants of others. Kristall kept her tone sharp and was short with almost everybody while she took orders.

“I am, yes,” Winter said, pushing the bowl toward the girl. Before Juwel could take Winter’s discarded lunch, Winter spoke up again. “Would you mind if I asked you a question?”

Juwel paused, her polite smile never wavering. “Would you like something else?” she asked. Assuming Winter wanted a drink or some other food.

“Actually, I wanted to ask about the hotel. If that’s all right,” Winter clarified. She caught how Juwel’s ever-present smile dimmed for a moment, before raising the corners of her mouth again.

“Of course. I may need to be brief, though. There are still other duties I need to attend to.” Juwel looked to the drunk Huntress at the bar of the dining room as an example.

“That’s… Partially what I wanted to ask. It is rather impressive that only the three of you manage this entire hotel. How do you handle it all so well?” Winter almost made herself barf with how she skillfully softened the impact of her potentially rude question by subtly weaving in bits of praise. The others may have teased Winter for using her Atlas ‘boot-licking’ lessons so frequently, but they never minded when Winter’s forced etiquette classes came in handy.

Juwel’s already bright smile somehow grew wider as she took in the question. “Proper time management and a level of quality and skill that equally satisfies and justifies any sort of delay in us delivering our services to the guests,” the girl proudly stated, raising her head as she spoke.

“To showcase the exceptional luxury and experience that only our family can provide, our mother conceived and built this hotel for Atlas and the rest of the world to behold!” Juwel’s pride in her statement came with a raising of her voice. Her eyes went wide, and she had to clear her throat to bring her composure back under control upon noticing her rising tone. “Do excuse me… I got a bit carried away…” she trailed off with an embarrassed smile.

“I understand. Familial pride is something I’m familiar with,” the Schnee replied with her own smile. A smile that she was faking. Winter didn’t miss how the girl’s proud answer to her question didn’t touch on the occasional fourth employee that the hotel would hire and then let go a week later. Or how Juwel’s answer didn’t explain what ‘proper time management’ meant. Also, no amount of ‘quality and skill’ would satisfy an Atlas noble to the point of not caring how long they had to wait. As much as Winter wanted to press on with her questioning, she knew it’d be pointless.

While Juwel sounded as genuine as her mother, her answer to Winter’s question told her a great deal about the three hotel employees. Not that she doubted the girl’s answer. Far from it. But that tone, that level of pride she had in her words. It all sounded familiar to Winter. When she was still set to be the heiress of the SDC, she used to have the same mentality as her family, or more accurately, the same mentality as Jacques. If it weren’t for her chance meeting with Fiona, she could easily imagine herself fully embracing his aspirations and even his values. She would have ended up as bitter as Weiss had been when their mother divorced Jacques.

Juwel’s mini-speech hadn’t really answered Winter’s spoken question, but it did answer one of her mental ones. This family had the same obsessions as so many other Atlesian nobles, or at least Juwel certainly did. Near blind loyalty to their family and wanting to create a legacy that the world would remember. Granted, Winter could acknowledge that she might be a bit harsh in her judgment of the family, and wanting a legacy isn’t inherently wrong. After all, her own family wanted the same thing, even now. Although, Winter herself didn’t care as much about upholding any sort of legacy at this point, her time with her friends changed her perspective and goals for aspiring to be a Huntress.

Regardless, Juwel’s pride and passion did appear to be genuine, and The Madame’s kind words to Winter yesterday still warmed her heart. They might have been all simply been a family of great actors (minus Kristall) and were lying through their teeth. That wouldn’t be any sort of surprise to Winter given some things she’s seen and even experienced firsthand. But a fresh problem presented itself in Winter’s mind. If they were lying, what about? It wasn’t like they implied anything out of the ordinary with their words. Sure, some things about the hotel seemed off to her, but those were hunches at best.

“If that is all, I should return to work,” Juwel eventually interrupted Winter’s train of thought.

“O-Of course, I’m sorry to have held you up,” Winter replied with a short stutter, embarrassed with how lost in her own head she got.

Juwel dismissed Winter’s apology with another low giggle before nodding her head and taking Winter’s bowl to the kitchen.

Winter rubbed her eyes exhaustedly. She was getting far too in her own head. Hardly a day into her ‘vacation’ and Winter was already in need of an aspirin. Her own fault, really. Winter stood from her place at the table and decided she could stand to do some more research on the hotel with her scroll.

With the intention of heading back to her room, Winter walked off towards the stairs and elevator on the far side of the building. But as she neared the door Kristall stormed through, she slowed her pace and looked the door over. It didn’t seem that different from the other doors in the building. All dark wood with the edges of the door being decorated with an intricate golden floral pattern. The only distinct thing about this door versus the others was the use of a traditional keyhole on the handle instead of an electronic lock. She expected there to be a sign that read ‘Employees only’ or something, but no. It just seemed to be-

“Oof!”

Something large bumped into the back of Winter, just hard enough to send her stumbling forward. She would have caught herself with no issue if it weren’t for the sudden figure in front of her. Unfortunately, the door she was staring at swung open right as she tumbled forward and caused her to collide with another body that came out the door at the same moment.

Various grunts and yelps of surprise left Winter and her fellow falling friend. Winter managed to catch herself and quickly pushed herself up to her knees. First thing she saw was the drunken Huntress from earlier waving behind her to Winter and whoever else she knocked over.

“I’mb zorry,” the huntress muttered as she shambled past them and down the hall toward the elevator, using the wall as support.

Winter scowled at the back of what was supposed to be one of humanity’s great defenders. But found herself instead focusing her attention to the person she bumped into. Looking back at the ground, Winter saw The Madame’s daughter, Kristall, pushing herself up as well and moved to gently take the girl’s arm and ease her up with an apology.

“Get off!” the blonde snapped, waving her arms to shove Winter off and turning to shut the door she came out of.

Winter raised her hands and took a step back. As she did so, she noticed something on Kristall’s hand. A subtle trace of bright crimson ran down the girl’s left palm. Just as quickly as Winter saw it, Kristall tightly gripped a black washcloth she fumbled. The blonde got up from the ground with her hands at her side as if nothing was wrong. Well, almost nothing.

“I would advise you exercise more caution during your stay here, Miss Schnee.” Kristall still had the same venom she poorly hid in her low tone as she firmly glared at Winter and spat her name out of her mouth as if it were trash.

Winter glared back. “My apologies, but perhaps if you stopped lazing about and focused on your work, your sister wouldn’t have to finish your job,” Winter bit back almost on instinct, her annoyance with the girl’s attitude taking precedence over her curiosity about Kristall’s injury. She may not have been as defensive about her family name as say, Weiss or Ruby, but she still had a low tolerance for disrespect.

“That is not… How dare you… You…” Kristall’s mouth flapped open with incomplete sentences as she processed Winter’s statement, clearly not used to getting back talk, like most Atlesians. She settled on giving Winter a seething furious glare and stormed past Winter toward the kitchen.

Winter watched her shove her way into the kitchen at the other end of the dining room, still clutching the black washcloth. If that wasn’t suspicious, then Winter didn’t know what was. Sparing the door Kristall came out of another glance, Winter started back to the stairs of the hotel to head up into her room.

Climbing the carpeted stairs and passing the second floor, Winter spotted The Madame coming out of one of the hotel rooms with linens in her arms, probably for laundry. Winter continued up the stairs as her mind bounced more questions around. The Madame was upstairs, Juwel was in the kitchen, meaning Kristall should have been on her own and somehow cut her hand. If that door led to the ‘living area’ of the hotel as Winter assumed, why’d Kristall leave to deal with the cut on her hand? Was there not a sink in there? What was through that door?

A new plan formed in Winter’s head. A potentially… Dumb plan.

The lobby of The Glass Unicorn doubled as a fairly comfy lounge. Winter sat in a plush red chair with a low table in front of her, holding some cheesy romance novel Joanna recommended to her, knowing full well how much she hates the genre.

But that was the point. A few months ago, Fiona learned just how paranoid some people could be, especially people in Atlas. The poor Faunus wasn’t even doing anything other than waiting to meet up with Winter and the others outside some restaurant. A few patrons of said restaurant came out and saw her ‘spying’ with her scroll. Winter was glad they showed up before the shouting match that ensued could turn ugly.

Ever since then, Robyn had the idea to give every member of their little group a physical book, just for situations like this. When they needed to scout a building or tail an individual without raising any suspicions. The books helped immensely in masking their subterfuge, making sure the books were in a genre each of them hated so they didn’t risk getting distracted by the books. Winter called the idea ‘ridiculous’ and ‘asinine’ at the time. However, after she and her friends were the only ones to pass their clandestine operations class with flying colors, she had to embarrassingly admit that the idea had merit.

Occasionally flipping the pages of the book, the last few hours for Winter focused on watching that door Kristall went through this morning. The Madame had approached Winter a while back and apologized for Kristall’s behavior. Winter assured her it was fine and that she wasn’t troubled by it, though Winter was curious about how The Madame found out about the ordeal. She doubted Kristall would have told her mother about it.

Regardless, the cloud-covered sun finally set while the blizzard outside raged ever onward. Winter flipped another unread page, slyly observing the only other person left in the lobby with her. Throughout the hours a few other guests had come down to the lobby with a similar intention as Winter. Or rather, the same intention that Winter was projecting with her ‘peaceful reading’. Some talked on their scrolls, others sat in pairs and discussed various events in Atlas. As the hours dragged on, Winter kept her mind focused on the door even as the few guests that had come down to the lobby began filtering back up to their respective rooms.

The last guest, some man in a white polo shirt and slacks, closed his scroll with a heavy sigh while letting his head fall back over his chair. After rolling his shoulders a bit, Winter watched from the corner of her eye as the man stood and headed for the stairs of the hotel.

She felt a subtle smirk cross her lips as the man left her eyesight, the timing almost seemed too perfect. The Madame and her daughter, Juwel, had gone to the third floor with both of their arms filled with cleaning supplies. Kristall sat at the front desk, gazing at her scroll with disinterest.

No one else had gone through the door since Winter started her watching of the door and with two of three employees occupied for hopefully a while. This seemed like the best opportunity Winter was going to get to sneak into the room. Also, a slightly petty part of her was happy that it was Kristall at the front desk.

Placing her fake bookmark in her novel, Winter got up from her seat with a stretch and a legitimate yawn. She grabbed up the small green lock kit she kept on the chair next to her and held it against her book in one hand. Casually walking back to the stairs herself, Kristall didn’t even spare her a look which was fine by Winter.

Once she got to the stairwell, she stopped at the first landing and kneeled to the ground. Opening the palm on her free hand, she witnessed a small white glyph form on the red carpet next to her and let her Aura flow freely into the glyph. Soon, the Schnee semblance did its part and Winter brought forth her oldest and most reliable summon, albeit at a reduced size.

An entirely white and blue Grimm soon arose from the glyph, reared back on its legs with its tail going rigid, and prepared to let out a bloodthirsty battle cry! Only for its maw to be pinched shut by two pale fingers. After getting the message, the two fingers removed themselves and allowed the shin-high Creep to waddle out from its summoning perch and quickly spin to face its mistress with an excited tail wag.

Winter smiled at the sight of her summon. Her mother always said that their summons’ behavior and personalities echoed the soul of their summoner. As much as Winter wanted to blame her friends for some of the… More excitable tendencies of her summons, she knew it was all her own fault. On the bright side, her summons very nature meant that Winter only had to give her little minion one instruction.

“Be discreet,” she whispered. The little creature hopped in place a few times as it nodded its head fervently. Not doing much to convey confidence to its mistress, but Winter just shook her head with a small giggle and pointed down the few steps she had climbed. The Creep followed her finger and without any other sort of instruction, hopped down the steps and ran off towards the lobby.

Slowing its dash down to a measly trot, the little summon scanned the room while remembering its only instruction. Be discree- Beowolf! The white and blue Creep looked up at the glass statuette of a Beowolf that sat upon one of the low tables in the lobby. The Creep’s mistress must understand why it must act, this was an enemy of its mistress and must be removed!

With a new resolve, the Creep ran forward and with its little powerful legs jumped up onto the table where it met its opponent head-on. The Creep gave a low growl, that considering its size, sounded more akin to a thimble rolling on the floor. Dragging its foot back and forth across the top of the table, the Creep let out a roar (more of mewl really) and lunged forward and dived into a small ball that rolled aggressively toward its target.

Much to the surprise of the Creep, its foe was actually far lighter than anticipated and the Creep bowled right through the statuette, shattering it into pieces. Sadly, since the Creep overestimated its opponent, it kept rolling, and rolling, until there was no longer a table beneath it.

Back in the stairwell, Winter heard the sound of glass breaking and a startled yelp from Kristall and promptly focused her Aura into her and forcefully closed it into a fist. With the knowledge that her summon was gone, Winter crept down the steps from the landing and leaned against the wall to peer out toward the lobby. She saw Kristall up and standing by one of the tables in the lobby and grumbling something as she looked at the mess her summon must have made. Judging by the fact that Kristall didn’t seem frightened, her summon must have gone unnoticed.

Before she hustled over to the door, Winter reopened her palm and the same summon glyph appeared in her hand and the small Creep reappeared on her palm. Winter smiled and gave the small Grimm a couple light pats on the head with her finger, which elicited no small amount of joy from the tiny terror in her hand. Her mother always said to treat her summons with respect.

Closing her fist again, Winter looked back into the lobby to see Kristall with a dustpan and broom sweeping up shards of glass with her back to Winter. Taking her chance, Winter quietly jogged to the mystery door and tried to turn the handle.

‘Locked, unsurprising,’ Winter thought, deftly opening the lock kit in her hand and extracting the basic lock picks, a thin metal hook, and an L-shaped tension wrench. Doing a quick look over her shoulder to ensure she was still clear and seeing Kristall still searching for random bits of glass, Winter went about opening the door.

Lock picking was an almost terrifyingly easy thing for Winter to pick up. Ever since Robyn told her the basics of the concept, she couldn’t help herself when it came to opening locked things. There was just something supremely satisfying to Winter about being told not to open something and then doing it anyway. Like most of her issues, she could probably trace it back to her father, most likely something about how he didn’t approve of her being a Huntress.

Whatever the reason, Winter didn’t care and, much to her mother’s shame and annoyance, simply enjoyed the art of lock picking. The soft and subtle movements you needed to have, the dexterous skill required, and of course, the thrill of uncovering secrets no matter how small, all coupled together to give Winter a thorough enjoyment of the practice.  

With that enjoyment of the art came exceptional skill as well. A little pressure on a pin here and a pin there, and the door handle quickly gave a click as Winter turned her tools inside the handle’s lock.

Extracting her tools from the lock, Winter turned the handle and wasted no time in pulling the door open just enough to slide through before quietly pulling the door closed behind her. Winter couldn’t help the sense of surprise upon crossing the threshold.

She was greeted, not by a small living space divided into a makeshift home like she was expecting. Instead, she looked down a steep wood stairwell with no lights. Looking around and failing to find a light switch of any sort, Winter pushed her small adrenaline high from the lock picking down and focused on making her way down the steps carefully. Keeping her book and the lock kit in one hand, Winter kept her other hand on the wall due to the lack of a handrail going down.

Her eyes fully adjusted to the dark by the time she reached the bottom of the stairs and she took in the view of the new room she was in. It looked like a tornado had torn through an all-concrete storage room, old furniture and appliances tossed around, broken brooms and mops lining the nearby walls. An industrial-sized washer and dryer sat against the far wall next to what looked like a near-ancient cylindrical Dust-based heating unit that piped up and throughout the hotel.

Winter took hesitant steps further into the room, watching the floor for any dangerous debris that may threaten her precious sneaker’s safety. Walking around an old couch that had a tarp over it, Winter saw something… Disconcerting, to say the least. On the ground behind the couch and near the heating unit was a ratty mattress covered in stained pillows and hole-infused comforters. What normally would pass as more generic junk for this storage room, became rather ominous considering someone had actually made the makeshift ratty bed quite well. Pillows organized at the ‘head’ by the Dust heater, the damaged comforter sat as nice as it could on the grounded mattress, corners folded nicely, and the top of the blanket folded down to allow a person to slip in comfortably. It was made in the same manner almost every hotel bed was for the guests.

A very large lump settled in Winter’s gut. A lot of implications could be made just from this alone. But something told her the proud daughters and their mother didn’t sleep down here.

“HYA!”

A sudden pointed force slammed into the small of Winter’s back. Thankfully, this whole situation left Winter on edge enough to keep her Aura up. Winter, unfazed by the strike, swiftly whipped around, grabbed the wrist of her attacker, and threw them to the concrete floor in a practiced takedown she’d done hundreds of times.

With her opponent down and their pointed broomstick weapon tossed aside, Winter stepped back to observe the form of her attacker, although, the dark made it so she could only see a set of tattered clothes stretched over a body that was far too big for them. A stained shirt with elbow holes and the pants, which only reached the knees, seemed to be child-sized. The oddest part of her attacker’s outfit though? The right pant leg had been cut or maybe torn off at around mid-thigh and sewed into the left sleeve at just below the elbow to hide the person’s entire left arm.

A few seconds of no motion from her target began to give Winter pause. She crept back toward the unmoving body, keeping her hands up for any sign of aggression. As she inched closer though, her fear for her safety traded for abject horror.

On the ground lay a girl around her age maybe older, maybe younger. Winter couldn’t tell due to how sunken the features on her face were. The girl looked pale, paler than even Weiss, which was an astonishing feat, but sadly spoke to an unhealthy lack of exposure to the sun. The parts of the girl’s body Winter could see looked thin, thin to where Winter could see the outlines of the girl’s bones in certain places. Long, unkempt black hair that went down to her upper back with a portion of it swept over the left side of her head in a complete covering.

With the girl sitting there near motionless, Winter kneeled down and checked the girl’s pulse, worried she might’ve really hurt the girl. There was a pulse though, a fairly active one, probably from adrenaline, but slowing down with every passing second.

Winter pulled her hand back and let out a relieved breath. She gave the girl another once over while deciding what to do next. The only parts of the girl’s outfit that seemed to fit her were her shoes, a simple pair of black slip-on flats, and a rather ornate necklace that-

“Oh my gods,” Winter muttered aloud with an especially horrified look.

No matter how much time she spent in Mantle or hung out with her rag-tag group of misfits from there, Winter was still a Schnee at the end of the day. Schnee, of the Schnee Dust Company. Maybe not as much Weiss, but she still knew Dust in every form, even when it was trying to be masked as a harmless yellow topaz gem.

This wasn’t some random necklace, it was a shock collar. Winter leaned forward and made an effort to gently pull the collar closer in order to get a better look at it, only for it to produce a small spark that shocked her and caused the body it was hung around to twitch lightly.

Winter ripped her hand away as the spark stopped as quickly as it began, and the girl lay still once more, seemingly undisturbed by the shock.

Questions bounced around endlessly in Winter’s mind, but they could all wait. Right now, there was a sickly girl with a dangerous tool of control and manipulation around her neck. She needed to help this girl first, then question the why she was here in this situation.

The first step though, getting the girl back to her room.

Chapter Text

Sore again.

Waking up in pain had become common for Cinder over the years. How could it not? When your alarm clock tended to be your own ‘sisters’ kicking or throwing objects at you to wake up. No, for Cinder, being in pain was almost comforting. It meant she was still alive, still had a chance. After what she tried to pull yesterday, she really didn’t think she’d wake up this time.

Opting to hide the real world for just a little longer, Cinder kept her eyes closed while pushing herself up and through the familiar pain that racked her body. A pile of linens and sheets should already be waiting for her to start today’s work. Laundry was about the only thing that The Madame trusted her to do anymore.

With a raspy and annoyed groan, Cinder went to shove her bed sheets off, only to notice that the sheets she usually used were far heavier than she remembered. It took far too many seconds for Cinder to register what her now opened eyes were showing her. She wasn’t in her basement storage room; this was one of the hotel’s four VIP suites. Cinder was never allowed to attend to these rooms alone. She always had to have The Madame or one of the sisters with her when she came up here. That was years ago though, and now the room almost seemed larger than she remembered.

Cinder squinted her exposed right eye in search of evidence of how she got here, but the room was far too dark and Cinder’s still adjusting eyesight didn’t help. After a few more moments, Cinder’s one good eye finally let her view the darkened hotel suite. The room looked fairly empty except for a single opened suitcase on the ground next to the bed.

Why was she in some random guest’s room? As much as Cinder would have loved to consider the many horrifying reasons for this, a better idea was to just accept the opportunity given to her. Pushing the heavy comforter and blankets off her, Cinder swung her legs off the bed and prepared to make for the room door. The sudden feeling of cold air and the fuzziness on her feet gave her a brief pause. Someone had taken her shoes, maybe trying to keep her from running from the hotel? If this was some plan of The Madame’s, then she must be losing her step.

Her legs buckled the moment she got off the bed from a sudden flareup of pain in her back. She caught herself from falling with a low grunt from the sudden pain and eased herself upright slowly. That’s right. A few hours after her tussle with Kristall, Juwel had come down and Cinder recalled trying to attack her. It wasn’t her most elegant plan, but something big was going on with The Madame lately and was keeping her occupied. Cinder hadn’t even seen The Madame in the last few weeks. Cinder’s plan, if you could even call it that, was to try and take the few good lessons she learned from him, and apply them to ambushing the sisters and getting them to take off the damn necklace!

Unfortunately for Cinder, half-learned techniques from a washed-up Huntsman can only do so much when you have no Aura or any physical strength to speak of. The sisters still managed to overpower her and any sort of physical exertion like that tended to leave her more vulnerable than she’d like.

Hopefully, those will all be problems of the past now. Straightening herself up, Cinder padded her way across the room toward the bathroom. These rooms were meant to be stocked well for the guests in many ways, including a complimentary medicine cabinet. As she walked to the bathroom, Cinder noted the round clock on the wall. It was one of those weird ones with the numbers made up of I’s, V’s, and X’s but she had spent enough time around clocks like that to recognize it was sometime around five in the morning. The Madame and the sisters tended to wake up around six, so if she wanted to be out of here without an issue, she had to hurry.

Picking up her pace as much as her sore legs would allow, Cinder got to the massive bathroom and shielded her eyes as she flicked the light on. She didn’t know exactly how pain meds were supposed to work, but she had seen The Madame and plenty of Huntsman coming through the hotel taking handfuls of the stuff. All she had to do was find where they were kept in this room. With her eyes adjusting to the sudden brightness of the bathroom that was nearly the size of a normal bedroom, Cinder looked around for wherever you were supposed to store medicine, but something else caught her eye. The mirror above the sink.

She shouldn’t care. She was getting distracted. All she needed to do was find those small tablets to relieve the pain, get her shoes, and leave. Yet here she was, standing in front of the hotel mirror, running the fingers of her right hand over her sunken features. Not having to rely on the dim lights of the basement or shattered shards of glass as a mirror, Cinder could see everything she loathed about her life.

Sickly pale skin, deep bags under her right eye, her unruly long black hair that she desperately tried to style into something presentable. Presentation was among the many things The Madame drilled into Cinder’s head over the years. It was expected of her to not look unsightly in front of the guests during her work. But when The Madame refused to give her proper fitting clothes, hardly ever fed her, no education on maintaining her hair meaning she had to wrangle it herself, it became a nightmare trying to stay presentable as she got older. Then, of course, there was the day the sisters and The Madame discovered her training sword and left her as she is now.

Cinder flinched at the memory and raised her left arm, sparing an appreciative look at the gold stitching she did where the pale beige sleeve of her old shirt met the dark brown pant leg she tore off, creating the long left sleeve to hide the evidence of that unfortunate day. She had almost found a nice escape and reprieve from her nightmare in sewing and stitchwork. A shame that The Madame and sisters seldom gave her time to explore it.

Hesitantly pulling the long sleeve down had Cinder seething with anger at every inch of her left hand that got revealed. She clenched her skinny and frail pointer and middle fingers with a great amount of effort, her thumb equally struggling to close as well. Her dulled amber eyes narrowed at the ratty, dark red strip of an old hotel bed sheet currently acting as a bandage covering her whole hand and the space of her two missing fingers. Two vacant spots where her ring and pinky fingers should have been.

Should have been.

There was a lot about her life that should have been better. She should have had a loving family. She should have been rewarded for her hard work. She should have all her fingers! Both of her eyes! She… She… she…

Cinder lurched forward and slammed her hands on the counter next to the sink. She could feel her heart pounding against her chest. She struggled to control her breathing, gasping for air in short bursts.

“Are you okay?”

Cinder bolted upright with a spin to face the unfamiliar voice. Her heart picked up pace again as she stumbled back from the figure standing in the bathroom doorway. She cursed herself as she felt her eyes slowly start to blur, she was so close. So close to having a major out of this situation and here she was, throwing it away because she got lost in her own self-loathing. The last thing she saw as she felt herself fall backward was the image of her new captor rushing towards her.

Not a great start admittedly. Of the two times Winter has interacted with this poor girl, the girl passed out both times. Although Winter refused to take the blame for the second one, she was just happy her half-awake brain still had enough reflexes to catch the girl before she slammed into the tiled floor of the bathroom.

Silver lining? The girl was light. Lighter than even her younger brother, Whitley. Easing the limp girl back out into the dark hotel suite wasn’t too hard. Winter, as gently as she could, tried to rest the girl back onto the massive bed of the room. With the girl put back as comfortably as she could be, Winter reached over to flick the switch of the desk lamp on the end table with a small yawn. She had to see how the girl’s wounds were healing.

The small yellow light barely illuminated the head of the bed it was next to, but it was enough for Winter to see the pale light gauze she wrapped around the girl’s neck a few hours ago. First thing Winter did after carefully sneaking the unconscious black-haired girl back to her suite was look into that disguised shock collar. It wasn’t technically difficult to take off. Between Robyn’s tools and Winter’s knowledge of Dust, the defusing of the collar wasn’t hard, just time-consuming considering how carefully she worked on the collar. The last thing Winter wanted was to trigger the collar’s effect on the poor girl.

After an exhausting amount of time, the collar fell off the throat of the girl. Winter didn’t exactly celebrate her success afterward. Blistering scars and poorly healed burned skin encircled the girl’s neck as evidence of just how long this collar was in use on the girl. The first-aid classes from Pedestal were helpful at least. Some light ointment and gentle gauze application later and all that was left to do was get some rest and hopefully ask some questions come morning. At least, that was Winter’s plan before a sudden slam from the hotel’s bathroom woke her up from her sleep on the hotel couch.

Bringing her back to the present. Winter finished inspecting the girl’s wounded neck, stepped away with an exhausted sigh, and switched off the desk lamp before trudging back to the couch in the suite. Back on the plush sofa with no intention of falling back asleep and missing when the girl woke up again, Winter looked down at the coffee table in search of her scroll. She had to brush aside the miscellaneous components from the shock collar to find her device.

‘Now what to do?’ Winter wondered as she leaned back on the couch with her scroll. Effectively trapped in a hotel with a traumatized and scarred girl and no actual plan other than to help her. What would does help even look like right now other than taking off that horrifying contraption? She couldn’t exactly call her mother for help, she was already in Mistral and would take way too long to get here with the storm in place. Obviously, the authorities came to mind, but that offered up its own problems. Atlas had some pretty archaic labor laws, mostly targeting Faunus, but the more affluent members of society, like The Madame, could easily manipulate the legal system in their favor regardless.

Ironwood maybe? He was a friend of the family and helped with the Jacques situation years ago. His position on the council would help avoid most of the legal hurdles, but there was still the issue of what The Madame and her daughters had done. That all came down to what the girl could tell Winter about what happened to her.

Only being six in the morning, researching the history of the Glass Unicorn now seemed as good a time as any. A few pointed taps on her scroll’s screen should have brought Winter to the CCT universal browser. Instead, she was met with an error that raised her eyebrow in confusion. An error that shouldn’t be possible. It was claiming her scroll couldn’t find ANY CCT connection, at all. That didn’t make any sense. Scrolls should always be able to find a connection to the CCT, even in snowstorms like the one hitting Atlas right now. The only reason they wouldn’t be able to is if something was inherently wrong with either the scroll’s components or the tower itself.

Seeing as the likelihood of one of mankind’s greatest innovations being taken out by a simple blizzard was probably slim to none, something had to be wrong with her scroll. But what? Winter had only been here for about a day and a half, with most of that time having her scroll charging or put away.

“Argh…”

Low grumbles began to emanate from behind Winter, distracting her from her scroll and prompting her to rise from her place on the couch. She had a third impression to try and not mess up. A bit of pale white light started to peak through the edges of the massive window’s blinds. Not quite illuminating the entire room, but just enough for Winter to see the girl stirring back into consciousness on the large hotel bed.

Winter brought in a breath through her nose, held it, and let it flow out her mouth before getting up and taking careful steps toward the bed. Stopping a few paces away from the end table by the bed, Winter set her scroll down on it and turned the desk lamp back on. That seemed to cause the girl to properly awaken.

The girl let out a gasp as she snapped upright in the bed. Her long, messy black hair bobbed as she looked around. Her single visible amber eye widened and locked onto Winter’s form, causing her to stumble back across the bed away from Winter.

She quickly raised her hands passively and even stepped back from the bed as she spoke. “It’s all right. I-I’m not going to hurt you.” Winter tried to keep her voice level and calm to comfort the girl, like how she used to talk to Ruby when she was younger.

The girl’s single amber eye squinted back at Winter, dragging her gaze up and down Winter’s form suspiciously. The girl kept her left long-sleeve-covered arm hidden behind her as she shifted her defensive position on the bed to face Winter.

“My name is Winter. I’m a guest here at the hotel, just got in the other day,” Winter explained cooly, hands still raised. “How do you feel?” She then asked, trying to lean forward slightly to see the bandages around the girl’s neck.

“Ghrgh!-” The girl responded with a wheezy exclamation of pain and coughs that were followed by short ragged breaths as the girl dragged herself to the opposite edge of the bed, bringing her right hand to her throat.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you, I just wanted to check on your neck,” Winter rushed to assure the girl, taking another step away from the bed to calm the girl.

Slowing her labored breathing, the girl gently pulled her righthand across her neck. Her eye widened. Not at the feeling of the gauze around her throat, but at the lack of a certain collar that’s been positioned around her neck for most of her life.

Seeing the subtle realization on the girl’s face, Winter let a small, proud smile cross her face. “The first thing I did when I got you back here was take that… thing off. There was a ton of scarring around where it was. I… Tried my best to treat it but… I’m not a doctor.”

In an instant, the girl yanked her hand away from her wound and returned to eyeballing Winter hesitantly. Just like that, Winter’s proud smile was wiped away. No matter, Winter just had to focus on one thing at a time, starting with getting the girl to relax. “So… Um… How do you feel?” Winter tried asking again.

“why…” The girl whispered hoarsely.

It was Winter’s turn to widen her eyes, she lowered her hands slowly and took a tiny step forward in hopes of better hearing the girl. “Huh?”

“WHY-” The girl tried to shout before interrupting herself with a visceral coughing fit.

Winter turned back toward the kitchen and took off toward it, calling over her shoulder, “Just hang on.” One small kitchen trip later and Winter came back to the side of the bed with a bottle of water. She uncapped it before handing it to the girl as the cough started to subside.

The black-haired girl snatched the bottle and started to chug the water as if it were the only oasis in all of Vacuo.

“Okay, you may not want to down the whole thing- AHH!” Winter tried to ease the girl off potentially drowning herself in a bottle of water when the girl suddenly whipped the half-empty bottle at Winter, causing her to shield her eyes.

It didn’t hurt or anything, although Winter was annoyed her shirt and vest were now wet, the more distressing thing was the sound of rapid movement to her right. She lowered her forearm from her face to see the girl sprinting, (or rather trying to) down through the hotel suite. Winter let out a deep exhale as she raised her hand toward the door of the suite and focused her Aura. A giant white snowflake glyph formed in front of the door a moment before the girl could reach the handle.

Winter approached the glyph and the girl slowly, making sure to stop a few feet back when the girl angrily whipped around to glare at Winter with a scowl. Winter found herself at an impasse. It wasn’t hard to figure out the girl was kept here and controlled against her will, most likely by The Madame and her daughters for who knows how long. It’s no wonder she would take a chance at any sort of perceived freedom and avoid trusting anyone she met. Winter wanted to let the girl go, literally trapping her here in this room with her glyph can’t feel too different from however The Madame had been treating her. There was a real issue with that idea though.

“You won’t make it,” Winter stated bluntly, letting her arms go lax, and the glyph behind the girl went away. Thankfully the girl either didn’t notice or Winter had succeeded in capturing her attention.

Winter turned around and walked back to the massive bedroom window and opened the blinds. The blizzard outside had calmed down since yesterday, but there were still snow and sleet hitting the window with noticeable force. “This has been going on since the other day and is projected to run through the next couple of days,” Winter explained, turning back to see the girl had taken a few steps away from the door of the room and back toward the center while looking out the window.

“Fact of the matter is,” Winter sighed. “You’re not going to get more than a hundred feet out there in this weather.” She gestured to the girl’s ragged clothes and skinny frame.

Without ever averting her eyes from the window, the girl’s expression softened. Winter could tell, from anger to disappointment, or maybe confusion.

“How about a deal?” Winter then asked.

The girl made no indicator that she heard Winter. Just stared at the window for another minute or two before turning her head toward the other girl in the room and raising an eyebrow as a silent question. Winter understood and walked over to the foot of the bed where her suitcase was. She kneeled down to grab her dark blue wool coat and held it up. “I ask a question. You answer it. And then you can have some of my clothes. They might be a little big on you, but they should help with the weather. Deal?”

It was far from a perfect plan. Ideally, Winter would rather the girl stay until she could get in contact with Ironwood. But kind of like Ruby back in the day, Winter needed to focus on getting and maintaining this girl’s trust first. Starting with one simple question.

“What’s your name?”

The girl stared at Winter. Her eye went back and forth between the coat and the pale hands holding it, thinking. “Cinder…” she eventually whispered in a crackly voice.

Winter heard her, nodded, and stepped forward to hand the coat over to her, only for the girl, Cinder, to stumble away with a subtle gasp. Hearing her panic, Winter immediately stopped and opted instead to toss the coat a few feet across the floor towards Cinder and stepped back again. Cinder capitalized and grabbed the coat up off the floor and held it close as she continued to stare at Winter.

“Your shoes are just behind the couch there. I won’t try to stop you if you want to leave,” Winter said as calmly as she could, actively trying not to wince when she saw Cinder’s damaged left hand appear briefly when she took the coat. Winter took a small step back toward her suitcase and kneeled again to sift through it. Standing back up with a pair of warm, dark gray leggings. “Or… We can do another?”

Cinder held the wool coat out and looked it over, considering her options. She looked at the window where the blizzard continued to rage, then over to the door of the suite. Without Winter getting another word in, Cinder threw the thick wool coat on, grabbed her shoes, and ran for the door. Leaving Winter unsure of what to do. On one hand, Winter didn’t want to betray the girl’s trust and stop her when she just explicitly said she wouldn’t. On the other hand though, just a woolen coat wasn’t going to help much in this sort of storm, not long term anyway.

Winter dropped the leggings and was about to shout something to grab the girl’s attention back when Cinder opened the door and an unfamiliar, refined voice caught both girls in the room off guard.

“Oh! Well that was rather convenient,” a woman a few years older than both Cinder and Winter said with an amused smile.

Two fair-skinned women stood in the doorway of the suite, both dressed in ornate dark blue long-sleeved dresses with hoods raised to cover their heads. They partially covered black woolen leggings with matching black knee-length high-heeled boots. The most striking bit of their outfits however, went to the silk-like golden scarves that matched the golden color of a curious looking pin on their dresses. It was a sort of circle with what looked like three blades connecting the inside of the circle.

Cinder picked up pace again as she backed away from the women before looking over her shoulder and shooting a violent glare at Winter, much to her confusion. Without getting any chance to understand what was happening, the unwanted guests confidently stepped inside while the woman who had yet to speak slowly closed the door and parked herself in front of it.

“Winter Schnee,” the woman who didn’t opt for door guard duty spoke while walking into the room toward Winter. Maintaining her amused smile, she looked straight past Cinder and over to the white-haired girl. “Dreadful weather you’re having here in your kingdom, wouldn’t you say?” she finished with a polite giggle.

With each cautious step, Cinder retreated further from the women, eventually deviating towards the seating area of the room. Leaving nothing between Winter and the strangers as they both remained focused on the Schnee. Winter attempted to smooth out her messy hair that was still in a loose bun from last night. In fact, she never actually changed out of her outfit from last night after helping Cinder, shoes and all.

“Atlas storms can be… Burdensome, on occasion. I take it you are not familiar?” Winter responded cooly. Doing her best to remain calm in the face of the strangers suddenly in her room. Winter glanced over at the wardrobe past the foot of the bed that held her sword in the top drawer.

Her reply elicited more low giggles from the pair before the same girl spoke up again. “No, no, no. We are from Vale. Snow isn’t quite uncommon, but frankly, this is preposterous even for us!” the woman exclaimed humorously. Gesturing to the frozen-over window that no one could see out of.

Winter simply nodded her head and started to inch her way towards the wardrobe as continued. “That is Atlas for you after all. Perfectly climate-controlled one moment and unstoppable blizzard the next,” Winter said as she blindly sidestepped over to the wardrobe.

“Indeed. Truly a curious kingdom. I’ll never understand the value in such a… Dismal place.” The woman rolled her eyes as she looked around the room which was now bathed entirely in white sunlight from the window. The woman took a quick and quiet deep breath before looking back at Winter with near-emotionless eyes. “But that is not for me to question. Our associate has requested your presence back in Vale and we intend to deliver.”

If that wasn’t a threat, then Winter didn’t know what one was. “I’m not sure you’re aware, but no airships are flying in this weather, ma’am. I also don’t appreciate you and your companion barging your way into my room. So perhaps we could reschedule this conversation for another time?” Winter tried to reply as cooly as she could, doing her best to not let her nerves show.

“I do believe that is enough conversing,” the woman declared matter-of-factly. Straightening her right arm at her side as a thin metal rod seemed to telescope down her sleeve and into her hand, creating a hidden rapier. “We really must be on our way now.”

Sensing the finality in the woman’s words, Winter reached for the top drawer of the wardrobe with one hand and instinctually raised her other hand to create another large glyph wall between her and the woman.

As predicted, the woman had lunged forward to grab Winter and instead slammed into the glyph, buying enough time for Winter to draw her sabre from the drawer.

Barely in time too. Winter leapt back away from the sudden hilt strike the woman tried to land after getting around the glyph.

Winter had no time to catch her breath though, the rapier wielder sped at her with a combination of lighting-quick stabs and slashes.

With a lack of Dust in her sword and no time to focus on her summons, Winter was catching and deflecting the woman’s blade by nothing more than the skin of her teeth. But the woman was relentless with her precise and calculated attacks. Not even her spars against her mother compared to this woman’s skill with her blade.

Winter’s light blue Aura flashed more and more as an increasing number of the woman’s strikes found their way through her defense. A swift-heeled kick to Winter’s sternum sent her crashing through the coffee table in the sitting area of the room.

Her Aura was on the brink of falling apart. Winter could feel the strain that would hit her if she tried to use her semblance now. She still had her right hand on the handle of her blade, but the realization that she was completely unprepared for this fight and had no escape plan washed over her as she lay in the remains of the coffee table.

Groaning in pain as shards of broken glass fell off her back, Winter tried to push herself up to see her attacker looking down at her, as if disappointed. On her way up though, she felt an odd shape in her other hand. An odd shape she recognized.

The electric Dust from Cinder’s collar! It wasn’t much, but if she could get it in her blade’s hilt quick enough, she should be able to at least eliminate her opponent with one well-placed surprise strike. She had no plan for the other woman who was still sitting in front of the door watching this whole thing play out.

As luck would ordain, a golden opportunity would present itself in the form of Cinder.

“Hey!” Winter heard the woman guarding the door yell but didn’t get the chance to look around as another shattering sound rang out through the room, but was quickly drowned out by the sudden rushing of ice-cold air into the room accompanied by a hail of snow and ice.

Winter’s attacker shielded her eyes for a moment, giving Winter her chance. Without letting the snow or cold air phase her, Winter gripped the electric Dust in her left hand and brought it over to the handle of her weapon.

Getting the Dust slotted, Winter wasted no time in surging forward from the ground while pulsing just enough of her Aura down into her blade to activate the Dust and swung overhead to collide with her target’s head. The woman lowered her arm in time to see Winter’s attempted strike coming and stepped out of the way.

Just as Winter had hoped.

Her electrified sabre sliced through the air, crackling with energy, as she smoothly triggered the release on her dirk, causing a small spark to jump from her main blade into the newly freed knife. She caught the blade in her left hand and quickly got away with a light slash against the woman’s right sleeve before she could react again.

Not a particularly damaging strike, but it didn’t need to be. Whatever armature the woman used to hide her telescoping rapier wasn’t protected by her Aura and quickly got filled with thousands of volts from the refined electric Dust. Sending a massive jolt of pain up the woman’s arm and shattering her Aura instantly. leaving her to collapse to the floor.

Slotting her dirk back into its place as her sabre’s guard, Winter had to squint to see through the amount of snow and ice that filled the room from the shattered window. Speaking of the shattered window, Winter saw Cinder in the wool jacket she gave her, looking out the broken window.

Winter took a glance back at the door of the suite to see the other blue-dressed woman drawing a pair of daggers from her boots and looking back at Winter. With next to no Aura, Winter looked around for anything in the room that might help even her next fight. Only to instead see Cinder do the unthinkable.

She jumped out the window.

A lot of thoughts ran through Winter’s head in that split second of cinder leaping out the broken window. For some reason, following Cinder was among those ideas. Honestly? Between potentially jumping to her doom and fighting another one of these assassins or whatever, her odds out the window seemed better. She might be able to get away with a single quick glyph to slow her and Cinder’s descent.

So… That’s what she did. Steeling herself with what little determination she had left, she tightly gripped the blade in her right hand and dashed for the shattered window. She stepped up onto the edge, shattered forms of glass crunching under her shoes as she looked out into the hazy abyss of snow. With one final deep breath of chilled and icy air filling her lungs, the sounds of the assassin yelling behind her, Winter jumped.

Chapter Text

“How can someone so smart also be so incredibly dumb at the same time?”

Just a passing insult. One of many that Joanna would dispense daily. Nothing more than a teasing joke really. Yet, it was also an incredibly accurate way of defining many of Winter’s… Less than stellar moments. Ideas that were thought out just enough to ensure the success of a plan and then not much else.

Like the time she and her friends wanted to break into the Dust lockup at Pedestal, or when Robyn got herself tossed into the back of a Mantle police cruiser. Both times, Winter had carefully crafted plans that ultimately worked, just with some minor hiccups due to a handful of things she may or may not have overlooked. So what if Fiona lost a little fuzz on her lamb ears or if Robyn had a cast on her arm for a couple weeks? Bottom line was that Winter’s ideas did work! Although this most recent exploit of hers might make even her question her own twisted thought process.

Leaping from a perfectly good fourth-floor window of the nicest hotel in Atlas. Into one of the harshest blizzards the kingdom has seen in the last fifteen years, wasn’t exactly intelligent. But, true to form, she had thought ahead enough to discern how to not immediately parish upon impact with the ground.

Throwing her left hand out in front of her and desperately ignoring the rushing of cold air slamming into her face. Winter focused what remained of her damaged Aura into an angled glyph beneath not just herself, but also the fellow falling body a few feet below her. The bright white snowflake shape barely stood out amidst the hail of snow that surrounded Winter, but her positioning of the glyph must have been on point as the falling form ahead of her suddenly shifted directions and fell into a clumsy roll that slowed their descent.

Winter wasn’t confident on where the ground was due to the heavy snowfall all around her. She hoped she guessed correctly. Judging by the way her falling companion seemed to stop falling away from her, she must have nailed it! Oh, she couldn’t wait to brag about this to Robyn and the others-

Winter’s confidence shattered in an instant. Both metaphorically and literally as she slammed into her glyph and began her own tumble down the holographic rigid body of her Semblance. Although, the sudden impact cracked whatever remained of Winter’s Aura and halfway through her tumble, the glyph itself crumbled down with Winter following suit. If there was one positive thing about snow that Winter only now appreciated. It was the fact that snow was soft.

Her roll-off landed her in a pile of snow with a big poof kicking up from her landing. The stinging cold of the frozen precipitation actually did wonders for easing the pain her Aura-less body was now feeling. The dangers of freezing to death have never been more apparent to her as she honestly felt like she could just fall asleep like this. Thankfully the death grip she held on her sword brought her back to reality as she felt it start to drift out of her hand.

With great effort, Winter re-tightened the grip on her weapon and pushed herself up. She rolled over to get out of the Winter-shaped imprint she left in the snow and went to call out for her fellow daredevil. “C-Cinder!” she hollered through her chattering mouth. Her voice barely carrying out over the howling blizzard winds. She got to her feet and slid her sword away at her side. “Cinder!” she tried again, having to bring her hands up to her mouth to warm them. As she did so, she saw movement in the snow ahead of her.

She ran over as best she could, her feet sinking into the snow up past her shins as she hustled over. She reached the hunched over figure who was struggling to push themselves up out of the snow. Without a second thought, she looped an arm around the familiar woolen sleeve of her own coat and helped a dizzy and slightly confused Cinder to her feet. Cinder shivered almost uncontrollably as snow fell off her form. The coat was certainly big on her, going past even her waist and the sleeves almost completely covered her arms helping keep her warm. But the short pants with only a single pant leg weren’t doing Cinder any good for this cold, not with how deep the snow was.

Despite her vigorous shivering, Cinder yanked herself out of Winter’s grasp. Rather she tried to. When she pulled her arm away, she stumbled back and nearly fell off into the snow again only for Winter to catch her and hold her steady.

“H-hey! Stop! Relax will you!?” Winter tried her best to remain calm as she tried to keep her hold on a defiant Cinder that wouldn’t stop trying to free herself. After all, Cinder was prone to passing out from something, it was probably only sheer adrenaline that was keeping the girl up right now. But between mystery assassins, jumping out the window of a building, and her general disdain for snow, Winter hoped she’d be forgiven for being a tad bit irritable right now.

Slowly, Cinder did calm down. She was still shivering from the overbearing cold but she had stopped trying to actively resist Winter and opted instead for another single-eyed glare. It was good enough for Winter and she hoped she could convince Cinder to follow her.

“T-There’s an airship dock not f-far from here!” Winter yelled over the shivering winds and pointed down the row of snow-covered buildings. Cinder hesitantly followed Winter’s point before quickly snapping her head back to Winter.

Winter was saying something else but Cinder began to tune her out as she noticed something odd out of the corner of her eye. Movement from behind the frosted glass of the front door of the hotel. Cinder’s eye went wide and she reached out to grab Winter’s wrist, taking off in the direction the white-haired girl indicated and dragging a surprised Winter with her.

“What’s the big idea!” Winter shouted, looking over her shoulder for just a second and barely being able to make out the sight of the dagger-wielding woman. She shoved the front door of the hotel open and scanned up and down the blindingly white streets, eventually catching sight of the fleeing girls. Luckily the woman seemed to have an even harder time moving in this unforgiving weather than Winter and Cinder did. Winter got the idea and continued to run alongside Cinder.

And so they ran, trudging their way through shin-high snow, oppressively cold winds, and shards of ice and sleet that clung to their faces. Winter looked back frequently as they pushed through the harsh weather. The winds of the storm created a hazy wall that made it near impossible to see if the assassin was trailing them. It was safe to assume she was if she was navigating this weather the same way Cinder and Winter were, by keeping the run of buildings on their left.

Winter eventually pulled back on her arm and got Cinder to stop alongside her. “Whoa, W-Whoa! Stop here!”

With Winter now grabbing Cinder’s wrist, she pulled her up the covered stairway that led up and into the airship station. It wasn’t much, since these stations were modeled off of train stations they had openings for the small commuter airships to come and go freely. Still, it had walls and a roof which got their feet out of the snow and their bodies out of the wind.

While making their way up to the main platform, Winter released her hold on Cinder and immediately brought her frozen hands back to her mouth, hoping to warm them up. She scanned the platform, her eyes darting from one corner to another, hoping to find something that would spark an idea. There was a chance they lost their pursuer and they might be able to try and start a fire. The vending machines around the place should have Dust, all they had to was break into one. Or maybe-

Rhythmic banging echoed through the station and startled Winter, causing her to search for its source. She found it in Cinder, slamming a shaky fist into the door of one of the bus-sized docked airships. Winter had seen the airships, but dismissed them as options. She knew from experience that airship doors had advanced locks, even small passenger ones like these. Besides, without Robyn’s lock kit there was almost no chance she’d get in. It probably didn’t have any Dust in it anyway, they’re supposed to empty them when they’re going to be grounded for any amount of time.

No, their best bet right this moment was to bust… Into…

‘Oh, that might work,’ Winter thought to herself as an idea took hold. She ran up to the airship Cinder was slamming into right as the ashen-haired girl began coughing. Winter rested a hand on the girl’s shoulder and eased her away from the airship and over to a nearby bench.

Winter turned back toward the airship door that connected to the pilot and co-pilot seats. With all the freezing winds and snow that must have been pelting this thing over the last couple of days, there was a solid chance that the locks on the doors might be frozen. Frozen locks mean brittle locks.

Drawing her sword and deploying the small dagger from her blade, Winter went about finding where the lock of the sliding pilot door was. She ran her shivering fingers up and down the seam of the door, light pushing on the fiberglass of the door occasionally in search of where the fiberglass didn’t give in. A painfully cold minute of searching revealed her target near the bottom of the door. Keeping her fingers in place, Winter wedged the thin blade of her dagger into the seam and slid it around till it met the locking clasps of the door. She moved her fingers and dagger away and slotted the longer blade of her sword in their place. Putting her dagger on the ground, she adjusted her stance with both hands on the handle of the blade.

She pushed her hands forward slowly before suddenly yanking her hands back, sending the tip of her sword’s blade forward to smash against the frozen lock in the door. She felt her blade slam against the lock, but otherwise made no other notion it had broken. So she tried again, and again, constantly pushing her arms forward and pulling them back to slam the blade against the lock. Every move exhausted the already sore and tired Huntress in training even further. Winter stopped her assault on the lock to watch her breath drift out from her as she huffed and puffed. With another deep breath, she lurched her arms forward and back with another forceful pull of her blade inside the seam of the door. This time, her blade went past the point of the lock, the momentum causing her to fall backward onto her rear.

With surprise writing on both Winter and Cinder’s faces, Winter got up and grabbed her dagger to slot it back into place on her blade. She pulled on the sliding door of the pilot’s seat but could barely get the thing to move. Made sense that if the lock was frozen, the sliding track for the door to open would be frozen too. But that didn’t stop Winter from trying. She yanked and pulled on the door but the cold and exhaustion were starting to get to her.

Just as she was about to try and wedge her blade into door to pull it open, two more pale hands grabbed the handle of the door and a familiar, annoyed, amber eye greeted Winter. Cinder’s brow was still heavily furrowed with skepticism, but even she had to recognize that being inside the fully enclosed airship had to be better than sitting out here on the airship platform. So with the added aid of Cinder, Winter grabbed another part of the door and counted the pair down.

“Three, two, one. Pull!”

The girls threw whatever energy they both had left into forcing the door of the airship open. A small click and the sound of ice and even some metal breaking signified the beginning of the end of the pair’s struggles. The door pulled out slightly and they were able to slide the door back along its track. Cinder had fallen to her knees the moment the door hit its stopper and she wheezed through another retching amount of coughs and labored breaths.

Winter reached down to help the girl, but an irate hand shoved her away. No matter, they should have all the time in the world to talk and rest inside the airship. As Cinder kneeled and tried to compose herself, Winter stepped up into the airship’s pilot seat and scanned the controls. She may not have known how exactly to fly an airship, but she and her friends had… Politely observed how pilots used the console in these kinds of airships. Just in case. A little bit of searching finally revealed what she was looking for.

The passenger doors of the airship slowly creaked open. Alongside finding the passenger door button, Winter noticed the fuel gauge of the airship. It was half full. Someone was getting fired. On the bright side, she could actually run the heating elements in the airship for them. Exiting the pilot’s seat, Winter couldn’t help but wear a satisfied smile. She made her way back to the platform, where she discovered Cinder on the ground, leaning against one of the station’s pillars. Eyes closed and head lowered.

Winter ran over and kneeled beside the girl and quickly grabbed hold of her shoulders and shook. Much to her relief, Cinder jolted awake and spun her head around in terror, her eye seemingly searching for something.

“Hey, it’s okay. I-It’s just me,” Winter said, fighting her chattering teeth the best she could. “Airships open. we gotta get inside alright?”

A sudden gust of cold wind came through the opening of the station and caused both girls to shiver. Cinder looked past Winter to see the opened doors on the airship. Winter helped the bone-thin girl up off the floor of the platform, Cinder didn’t have the energy to push her away this time.

“Alright now, easy does it.” Winter carefully eased both of them into the airship and eased Cinder down into one of the front rows of seats in the long airship. Cinder fell into the seat and immediately felt her head drift over and rest against the window next to her while her singular eye shut as all the recent events finally took their toll on the girl. Winter could still see the vapor of Cinder’s breath leaving her. Only thing now was to turn on the airship’s heater, close the doors, and hope for the best.

Winter stood up, shivering, and rubbed her hands up and down her arms, trying to ward off the biting chill. She turned to head back up to the cockpit of the airship when she was dead stopped by a dreadful sight. Coming up the covered stairway of the station, the hood of her long-sleeved dress blown down and the golden scarf around her neck trailed out behind her. The other assassin found them and leveled an irate glare at Winter before beginning to run at them.

“Miss Schnee!? This is all rather uncouth and a waste of time!” the woman called out as she bolted toward the pair in the airship.

Moving as if her life depended on it, because it probably did, Winter yanked and threw the emergency seatbelt of the airship’s seat over the unconscious Cinder and jumped back into the pilot’s seat. Closing the passenger doors and sliding her broken pilot’s door closed, Winter began toggling every switch, lever, and button she thought was related to taking off with the airship.

The long airship hummed to life and Winter pulled back on the vessel’s flight stick moments before the assassin could reach out for the airship. With that, the airship hovered out the opening in the station and the winds of the blizzard rocked the vessel back and forth despite Winter’s fighting with the controls. Winter looked all around the bright dash of the cockpit before finally finding her lever for altitude. Pulling the airship with one hand while desperately trying to steer the flying bus away from the station. All the snow and high winds made it hard to tell, but she was pretty sure she had made it above the neighboring rooftops. Pushing the controls forward in whatever direction was away from the hotel and their mystery followers, Winter leaned back in her seat and let out a deep, visible exhale of stressed air.

Turning the heaters for the airship on, Winter tried to relax. Only for another gust of strong wind to rock the airship and force her to keep a strong hold on the controls. The airship slowly leveled out again and Winter could finally relax. Although, maybe that wasn’t such a good thing. Cinder wasn’t the only one who was exhausted. Winter didn’t even notice her eyes drooping… Down, down, down. Until finally, the white haze outside the cockpit’s windshield was entirely blacked out.

A flashing of lights, the blaring of warning alarms, and violent shaking brought Winter back to consciousness. Winter reached out for the airship’s controls to try and stop the rocking of the airship but something was wrong. The tail end of the airship kept swinging side to side no matter how hard Winter fought the flight stick. She looked around the cockpit for a solution.

Sadly, she’d only find an explanation. All the warnings throughout the airship were telling her about wind speeds that exceeded what the airship could handle and looking out the windshield, Winter agreed. The storm must have picked up dramatically again during her blackout, and now their altitude was dropping fast because of the airship’s instability.

How fast exactly? Fast enough that Winter couldn’t tell the difference between the snowy haze made by the winds and the snow-covered ground. At least, not till their airship slammed into said ground. Allowing Winter a second nap, courtesy of their high-altitude crash.

Chapter Text

Luck.

What a stupid concept. Some invisible force in the world decides whether good or bad things happen to you. Just because of superstitions and foolhardy beliefs from bygone eras?

No.

In Cinder’s experience, power and strength decide the fate of the world around you. With those at your side, you could do anything to anyone without consequence. Not even the almighty Huntsmen were immune to those with powerful influence. She knew that all too well.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter if you were a Huntsman or a little girl. There was always someone with money or powerful friends who could do whatever they wanted, usually at someone else’s expense. Luck is just another lie the weak tell themselves so they can sleep at night, like Gods and Maidens.

And yet, even Cinder struggled to reason away the reality she was now faced with. Opening her eye and squinting through the haze of a throbbing pain in her head, no better explanation than sheer ‘luck’ could justify her last twenty-four hours of life, or however long it’s been. Miraculously surviving her little… ‘Scuffle’ with the weird white-haired girl, escaping the hotel, pushing through the nightmarish blizzard outside, and last but most certainly not least, waking up from what must have been an airship crash. If Cinder gave it any more thought, she might start believing in the idea of a lucky break.

Thankfully her priorities righted themselves real quick. Cinder glanced down to see the belt of her airship seat securing her tightly. She released the safety belt off her and planted her hands on the window next to her as she tried to drag herself out of the seat. She surprised herself with how easily she got up. Sure, the headache persisted, but otherwise she felt… Okay? Better than she’s felt in a long time for that matter.

Odd…

Whatever the cause of this newfound energy was, Cinder wasn’t about to complain. Especially as she noticed the lack of heavy snowfall outside. The blizzard seemed to ease off in whatever timeframe she spent unconscious, the daggers of high-speed ice replaced with slow snowfall. They apparently crashed in some sort of forest and even with the dark clouds still blotting out the sun’s rays, there was plenty of early morning light to bedazzle the surrounding snow-covered trees and ground.

Cinder stared out the window… She had never seen snow like this before. It didn’t snow often in her part of Mistral growing up and she seldom ever got to see the occasional cold weather from her place under The Madame. Even when she did, it looked nothing like this. The gross and gray ‘slush’, as The Madame and her daughters called it, surrounding Atlas during the occasional snowstorm looked foul compared to this. When dusted in the white powder of snow, the neighboring buildings with their cold and chilling design didn’t sparkle; they simply blended in with the wall of white.

The picturesque scene before Cinder now, though? She couldn’t deny that something about it captured her mind and… Some other part of herself?

The way snowflakes gently, almost gracefully, drift down from the matching white hue of the sky. Sparkling all the way till it either joined its brilliant brethren in the pile of pure white diamonds on the ground or land nearby on a tree branch so its shining nature could stand out amidst the evergreens of this forest. It was as if the sky was an art piece, shedding pieces of its precious painted canvas to grace this wretched remnant of a world with some of its resplendent beauty.

“Ah!” Cinder wrenched her hands off the window, unsure if her very own thoughts or the odd feeling in her hands startled her. Cinder looked down, while pulling back the long sleeves of the blue coat around her. Her hands were hot, vapors of warm air trailing up off them. Strangest of all were the crackling lines of orange energy flowing up and down her hands. A light cracking sound caught her wide-eyed attention. Looking back up to the window, she saw small spider-webbed cracks form on the glass where she had her hands.

Countless thoughts ran through her mind, the first being, ‘Aura,’ she thought to herself. She remembered his lessons about the stuff.

“Physical manifestation of one’s soul.”

“Can grant magical abilities called a Semblance.”

“Allows near immeasurable strength, protection, and speed.”

That last lesson always stuck with Cinder. She remembered begging him to help her unlock her Aura or her Semblance, being denied every time for one reason or another. Either too dangerous for her physically weak body, the risk of The Madame finding out being too high, or any other number of excuses.

‘Well!’ Cinder thought bitterly, clenching her Aura-infused hands into fists. ‘I guess I wasn’t too weak, huh!?’

Cinder stared back out the window, no longer with wonder or admiration and whatever other such nonsense was going through her head earlier. Now she glared outside, hateful, angry, and filled with more confidence than she’d ever had before in her life. Growing a wicked smile, Cinder let all her new powerful feelings flow through her. It felt right, pooling years of pain and sorrow, anger and loathing, all into her hands that glowed a raging golden orange, and threw her entire self straight through the airship window with the heaviest punch she’d ever thrown.

The glass shattered instantly as her whole body lurched out into the snow-covered forest. She flopped out onto her back as fragments of glass scattered around the rapidly melting snow that outlined Cinder’s place outside. Her mess of hair spread out over the ground as she stared up into the sky, feeling a light chuckle rise in her throat. The girl sat up as the wool coat around her body began to soak up the suddenly melted snow surrounding her. Her slight laughter at her situation came out wheezy and strangled because of her injured throat, but she couldn’t help herself. Finally, something in this world FINALLY went her way for once. Endless plans about where to go and who to see first rang in her mind. She had so very many people she wanted to speak with now that she had this power.

All the extra warmth and strength that came with this Aura made getting up off the ground easy, a strange thing to note for the average person, but it meant the world to Cinder. However, she had to resign her excitement. For now, the first step was to get out of this forest. Scanning the near-endless and random rows of evergreens didn’t offer much in the way of directions. A small glimpse of color did catch her eye in her investigation. Some sort of fluttering yellow object occasionally poked out from behind a distant tree. It served as an excuse to get moving.

Only a few steps forward around the front of the crashed airship and Cinder found herself locked in place at the sight of something else, rather, someone else. The large gray pilot’s door of the airship was missing entirely and dangling outside the opening left by the missing appliance was the girl in white. She was alive. The shallow and unconscious breathing proved as such. With most of her still strapped into the pilot’s chair, only her head, torso, and left arm hung limply in the cold air.

The girl. Winter, she said. A fitting name. The occasional flake of snow that landed in her matching hair blended so perfectly. This girl that didn’t offer to help, she gave it automatically. Not in hopeful promises that were only empty, not in twisted lessons of morality, but in tangible actions that only improved with no expectation of recompense. No assorted-

“Argh!” Cinder howled again as her Aura flared violently around her and she clutched her head, her fingers digging into her hair. These thoughts played havoc in her mind. They didn’t feel like her own, yet also couldn’t be someone else’s. She hated it.

Hated, hated, hated it!

As her brain seemingly wrestled with itself, her focus on escape regained its importance as her hands pulled loose from the grip on her head. With her hands came tufts of singed black hair. Whatever the deal with her Aura or Semblance or what else it might be, she needed to control it somehow. Maybe the strange thoughts were related? None of that would matter if she froze to death out here. Tossing away the hair, Cinder strode forward to pass by the unconscious girl and only stopped as her eye spied another out-of-place color in this pale landscape.

Red.

A small patch of red snow formed underneath the white-haired girl’s dangling left arm. If she looked closely, Cinder could spot small dark stains on the girl’s sleeve and the trickle of blood drops rolling down the girl’s pale arm, painting the snow beneath it.

Why?

It was the first thing Cinder could think to ask when greeted by this girl back at the hotel. She had asked it because she assumed the girl wanted something from her. Most people did after all. Even now, Cinder still wanted to know why. Why help some pathetic rat on nothing but a whim? For all Winter knew, Cinder could have deserved what was happening to her. Winter could have gotten herself killed going against The Madame, she had to know that. Was it something to do with those women that attacked her? So many questions and Cinder couldn’t decide if she cared about any one of them or not. Much of her simply wants to take what she has right now and return what’s been done to her back onto the world tenfold. So why was she hesitating here? Standing in this cold as her inexperienced Aura fought the chill off valiantly.

Before Cinder could settle on a solid enough answer, a foreign, low rumbling sound hit her and traveled down her spine. She turned away from the source of her confused thoughts and faced the sound. There, lumbering between the distant trees was a silhouette she was intimately familiar with, albeit she was more used to dusting the small glass imitations.

A hulk of black fur with a cracked lupine bone mask dotted with intricate red lines that barely concealed the red eyes of a soulless monster. A Beowolf. Grimm.

It took labored steps with its two large front appendages while its back left leg seemed to drag behind it. The creature’s head remained trained on the Cinder as it stalked through the trees, growling as it appeared to size up its newest prey. Soon, the creature stopped prowling across the forest and turned to face Cinder directly.

Cinder was frozen. Years and years of the cruelest treatment from every person in her life somehow couldn’t compare to this paralyzing feeling. Every ounce of abuse and neglect from The Madame and others almost made sense to her. They were pushing her down to raise themselves up, it was what many people did. This… This, this monster, however, was beyond her understanding. Of course, she expected to meet a Grimm at some point in her life, old promises of becoming a Huntress briefly came to mind. But that felt like a lifetime ago at this point.

She had never seen a Grimm in person before, and its presence rattled her. They were never a threat back in Mistral. Mankind was too interested in killing each other to let any monster have its fair shot and Atlas was truly the safest kingdom. At least in the way of Grimm attacks. The Madame used to say that the sculptures back at the hotel were meant to invoke the strength and sense of elegant brutality these beasts held and more importantly, to showcase her power in not being afraid to display the beasts’ monstrous visage to her guests. But as the monster took step by terrifying step closer, Cinder failed to see the elegance The Madame spoke of. All she saw was the labored breathing of a monster looking to extinguish her meek flame before it could ever grow. Black fur matted down by clumps of snow, claws that uprooted the dirt as it approached. Eyes blinded entirely by contempt and hate, for no reason other than it was its very purpose.

Willing herself to move, Cinder met the monster’s advance with her horrified retreat. With every step forward, Cinder would back up. Too scared to even think beyond lamenting her approaching reaper. Eventually, her back hit the cold steel of the crashed airship, the fear of her impending doom bypassing her newfound warmth. Cinder couldn’t even will herself to tears over this, she barely remembered any of the lessons he taught her all those years ago. She couldn’t fight this thing even if she wasn’t nearly paralyzed with fear. Instead, she slowly slid down the side of the airship till she met the ground, forcing herself to accept reality.

This was always her fate, wasn’t it? Either agonizingly slow at the hands of The Madame or face down in an unmarked grave, her struggle never being known and easily forgotten by the world. No revenge, no hope, nothing. The wolf inched ever closer, close enough for it to loom over Cinder as its low growls turned into predatory howls. In a flash, the beast lunged to tear into her and all Cinder could do was sit there and close her eye.

“Urgh, ah!”

An exhausted yell and the sudden rush of air followed by a pained howl rang out through the entire forest, jolting Cinder’s entire body. Her eyes shot open as she saw the wolf land and slide through the snow just to the left of her. As she followed the path of the Grimm, she saw Winter’s previously motionless body briefly bob still strapped into her seat; her left hand holding that sword of hers. Blue bleary eyes that could barely stay open quickly began to droop back down. The grip on her sword faltered as her entire head dipped into its previously passed-out state, while her sword clattered down into the snow, small traces of blood sticking to the handle.

Cinder wasn’t sure what shocked her more, that Winter had protected her again, or that she even had enough strength to deflect a Grimm’s blow like that in her state. Sadly, it was just that. Deflected, not defeated. The Grimm pulled itself up with pained grunts and furious growls. Whirling itself back around to survey what was supposed to be easy prey, the Beowolf prepared to charge again.

The sight of the monster’s eyes on Cinder sent a shiver down her spine, and the all too familiar crippling fear started to consume her. And yet, a subtle change took root in her senses… As her mind wandered in a new direction, the fear faded away.

‘I did not escape hell itself just to wind up a nameless corpse in the snow!’ Cinder’s thoughts began to burn, not noticing how the steel of the airship she was leaning against began to glow from her heat. ‘If Winter, half-unconscious and trapped in a chair, still tried to fight this monster-’ her raging thoughts interrupted as the Beowolf lunged again, forcing Cinder to roll away, the Grimm slammed into the now super-heated hull of the airship creating a subtle sizzling sound as it yelped and recoiled.

Cinder ended her roll right above the silver blade of the trapped Huntress next to her. She gripped the blade’s handle in her one good hand and rose to face the monster as it finished collecting itself. Cinder glared at the monstrosity, burning away every instinct in her body telling her to just run away. The Grimm responded to her glare with a blood-curdling howl, followed by another desperate charge.

She met the beast’s leap with a sidestep she had learned ages ago made clumsy due to age and the snow. A hefty clawed paw landed next to her as she stumbled, managing to steady herself enough to bring the sword down across the Grimm’s now exposed shoulder.

It howled in pain and lashed its accompanying paw at the girl.

Cinder couldn’t bring the blade up in time and felt the force of the beast knock her down. The snow kicked up around her landing, blinding her to the monster’s following attack. Fortunately, its howl acted as warning enough to bring the sword up in time to catch both paws of the Grimm. Cinder braced the blade with both hands as she tried to hold the monster’s claws away from her.

The Grimm outclassed the girl in pure strength by miles, only her newly unlocked Aura was serving to slow her demise. Even that began to wane, the Beowolf’s head inching closer and closer to Cinder’s as her arms shirked back toward her body.

Cinder couldn’t hope to match the Grimm’s strength, she whipped her head around hoping to see anything that might save her, she’d even take Rho- Wait. Her eye caught the glowing metal of the airship. An idea hatched. Facing back toward the Grimm, Cinder shimmied her body to the left as much as possible while releasing her right hand’s grip on the sword.

The Beowolf’s paw slammed down into the ground, narrowly missing Cinder and only scratching her Aura. But with the free hand she now possessed, she reached up and gripped the bony face plate of the Grimm, working her fingers into the already damaged cracks that existed on it. She repeated her actions from earlier, forcing her loathing for this creature into her hand. Alongside every other emotion that racked her brain recently. Anger, fear, hate. All of it manifested in her hand and thus, into the body of this monster.

She locked her gaze on the creature, feeling an intense heat radiating from its head, scorching its fur and flesh in an instant. Those hateful eyes of mankind’s greatest enemy slowly dulled, dimming into nothing as the Beowolf slumped down, partially pinning Cinder.

Cinder removed her hand and stared as the smoke steadily poured out from the deep hole she burned into the creature’s head. ‘I did it?’ she thought. ‘I did it! I killed a Grimm!’ The Grimm being young and previously injured did little to extinguish her excitement. But the realization that she couldn’t move her legs because of the sudden weight on them did kill her mood somewhat. A combination of vocal shoves, wiggling, and the Grimm’s natural fading away eventually freed the girl.

Cinder stood, exhausted but still warm. She didn’t even lose her Aura. There was no stopping the proud smile that crossed her face. It’s been a long time since she could be proud of anything. Riding her mighty high, Cinder scooped up the sword beneath her and trudged back toward the front of the airship.

She looked out at the curious yellow sight that caught her attention earlier. From this distance, it looked like some sort of strip of cloth? Maybe a ripped flag? Whatever it was, it was pinned to the trunk of an evergreen tree, flapping in the slight wind that blew through. If Cinder squinted, she could have sworn there was another strip of yellow pinned to another distant tree. It wasn’t much, but it might be a trail, or it could be random garbage. Before she could decide to follow the strewn bits of cloth, a weight that sat gripped in her right hand gave her pause.

Her eye drifted down to the sword that helped save her life and she shifted to look back at its owner. Still hanging out from the pilot’s seat of the airship, the pool of blood beneath her left arm had grown considerably larger.

She threw herself into dangerous circumstances over and over again for you, even at her weakest she still went out of her way to do whatever she could for you. The world shouldn’t be deprived of someone like that, especially not when you could do something-

“SHUT UP!” Cinder screamed through the painful scratchiness in her throat to silence the alien thoughts, frightening away a solitary black bird. If having an Aura meant having these absurd unfamiliar thoughts, Cinder never would have wished for one so much.

The worst part was how much she agreed with the curious-sounding thought. Or at least a part of it. Cinder could do something for this girl, Winter. Clearly, the girl knew a thing or two about Aura. Maybe if Cinder helped her, Winter would feel indebted to her? Cinder needed all the help she could get and right now Winter seemed like her best option.

Re-approaching the open airship, Cinder leaned into the doorway of the cockpit and reached for the release of Winter’s seatbelt. Undoing the belt saw Winter fall and slam into the floor, her face burying into the snow while the lower half of her body clattered against the metal floor of the airship.

‘Maybe this was a mistake,’ Cinder wondered with an annoyed sigh before reaching down to pull Winter up. Even with her Aura as damaged as it was from the battle with the Grimm, it still gave her enough strength to heft the fellow teenage girl up so she could drag her out into the world and towards the strange flags.

And ideally, to some sort of element of civilization before the blizzard picked up again.

Chapter Text

Truth be told, Winter didn’t care much about sleep. She didn’t have dreams, or if she did, they were never remarkable enough to remember. Her friends would mock her for it at almost every sleepover, but she saw sleep as a means of refreshing her mind and nothing more. Transporting her body past the dark land of night to the realm of a fresh morning.

This was why it shocked Winter so much when she woke up recalling the most action-packed dream of her life, and it played out so vividly in her mind. Creeping down into a strange basement of her hotel, finding a poor emaciated girl imprisoned there, being attacked by strange assassins, stealing and crashing an airship! It sounded like the plot of one of Robyn’s or Joanna’s video games.

Winter wobbled her head as her consciousness slowly came back to her. Far slower than it should have. She struggled to open her eyes; they felt heavier than normal. Something was wrong. Something weighed her right arm down, while her left arm just felt numb and floaty. The sound of a low, familiar grumble shook Winter’s core while simultaneously spiking her adrenaline. It was a sound she heard many times and could easily place it.

A Beowolf.

The jump in heart rate was enough to force her eyes open and lift her head. There it was, the monstrous mutation of a wolf, dragging itself towards… Not her. Its eye line was locked just to her right. Crooking her neck slightly revealed a mortified Cinder. She couldn’t tell if it was the cold or fear, but the poor girl was shaking as she stared at the beast with her back to the hull of their airship.

Panic quickly set in for Winter. She couldn’t let the girl get hurt. She was the one who dragged her into this airship and then crashed it. Winter could have already gotten the poor thing killed. Cinder was about to be killed. She couldn’t let this monster take the girl, but no matter how much she pulled and yanked on her right arm, she couldn’t get it free from its tangle of a seat belt. The Grimm was inching ever closer, preparing a lethal pounce that would surely be the end of them both if she did nothing. Using every sore muscle in her core, Winter was able to force her left arm back in from its place outside the vessel and grip her sword’s hilt. With what felt like a near-impossible amount of force, Winter managed to torque her entire body into a hefty slash the moment the creature went for its kill.

She heard the pained howl; she stopped it. But all that energy she found just started drifting away. Her eyes got heavy again. She could feel her hand go limp and the sword tumbled down. She couldn’t even drag her head back up to see if Cinder was okay. All she could do was let her brain drift away again. And hope she had done enough.

The girl was heavier than she looked. Perhaps that issue lay at Cinder’s feet more than the girl’s. Before today, the heaviest thing she had lifted was a dirty mop bucket. Dragging this ‘Winter’ girl through the deep snow quickly drained Cinder’s already limited stamina. Coming off her scuffle with the Grimm was doing her body no favors either.

As the third tree with a yellow cloth wrapped around it went by, she began to doubt if her aimless wandering was amounting to anything. By this point, her arms were screaming at her to stop, she could barely feel her legs from the shin down, and her new magical Aura was doing less and less to protect her by the second.

Cinder repositioned her hold on the girl’s midsection and hoisted her up a bit more as she took a few more quickened steps past yet another tree. As they traveled, the amount of blood trickling down the girl’s wounded arm diminished. Cinder wasn’t sure what to make of that, her know-how of the body was minimal, but the girl’s labored breathing meant she was still alive, at least.

The snow from the storm was picking up again. The only protection for the wounded duo came in the form of a wall of trees that encased them all around. Even all that could only do so much. More and more miscellaneous flakes of snow fell in from the cracks of the tree line to assault Cinder’s already dire warmth. After failing to set alight a small pile of branches earlier, Cinder gave up on using her new Semblance. Every time before, when she focused on how upset something made her, the scorching heat would just come naturally. Now, no matter how angry or how much loathing she dwelled on, not even a spark or anything would ignite. Her lack of knowledge when it came to these things frustrated her, and getting angry at the snow itself seemed to do nothing, forcing her to focus on dragging the girl around in search of shelter.

“Gah!” Cinder’s foot caught on something in the snow, sending her careening into the nearby banks of white as Winter flopped down as well. Grumbling through her chattering teeth, Cinder got to her knees and tried to wipe away as much of the snow on her face as possible. Dislodging her foot from whatever branch she caught on, Cinder got up and looked around for her limp charge.

However, in her search, something else stuck out. Another yellow cloth fluttered about, but this one looked bigger as if all the all the other strips were torn from this one. Taking hesitant steps towards the cloth revealed something that made Cinder question all she knew about reality.

A cabin. Or rather, the modest-looking log-based structure fits every definition of a cabin that Cinder knew. A single floor, just a couple of windows, and a chimney. The rusted frame of the windows and the aging wood went right over Cinder’s head. At this moment, the simple structure looked more enticing than the Glass Unicorn ever did. With little other choice, Cinder began to hunt for wherever she dropped her passenger. Winter’s paler color palette made the search a bit difficult, but Cinder found her target in the snow and dragged her with a renewed purpose.

She got them both to the green door of the cabin and leaned Winter against the side wall as she bashed her balled fists into the door. Getting no response after the second try, Cinder tried the handle. The resounding click from the door shocked her. Giving it a slight push, the door to the cabin swung open. Enough light came from the evening sky and through the windows to light up the interior, but Cinder wasn’t interested in investigating the building just yet. First step was getting inside. She reached down and got her arms underneath Winter’s and dragged her through the threshold. Barely making four or five steps into the building, Cinder fell once again, this time from exhaustion. She had never felt so happy about falling into the hard surface of a wooden floorboard.

Letting the still-unconscious Winter roll onto her back from Cinder’s fall, the dark-haired girl pushed the door shut with her foot from the ground and let her head thump back into the floor with a sigh. Immediately, the cabin was warm. Not quite warm enough to stave off the cold when that blizzard finally hits back in full force, but still warm.

Cinder turned her head to face the still body of her companion. Winter’s chest was barely rising and falling. It didn’t take a doctor to guess that was bad. Was it really Cinder’s problem, though? She just wanted the girl’s advice on how these new Semblances and Aura worked. She wasn’t looking for a persistent ally or, gods forbid, a ‘friend.’

Cinder shuddered at the mental image. She only knew one type of friend, those who associated themselves with the strong. All the kids that would hound her every waking moment back at the orphanage always had ‘friends’ who would take part in the harassment. ‘Friends’ who would support their ring leader. It seemed that everyone in power had to have people beneath them, people who would keep them strong, keep them in power. Cinder was always weak. She was never allowed friends. Now she was determined to prove she could be strong without them.

Cinder did her part, dragging the girl through the forest to this place where they’d be warm. Now she’d leave it up to the girl’s constitution to determine her fate. If the girl wanted to survive, she’d have to pull herself through whatever was wrong with her. With a deep scowl, Cinder got up from the floor and began looking around the cabin.

It appeared that the front door led straight to something of a living room with a couch, two plush chairs, and a coffee table all set in front of a fireplace. The fireplace looked like it had plenty of wood and a set of matches next to it. There’d be plenty of time later to light it. For now, Cinder walked through the first door on her left into a small kitchen. It was all more of the wood flooring, with nothing but an incredibly old stove, a bucket sink with its pipes exposed, and two rows of cabinets running along one wall. Cinder opened one of the cabinets above her to see rows upon rows of cans. Grabbing one down revealed it to read, ‘Green Beans’ in plain letters over a bland sticker that wrapped around the whole can. She placed the can back and wandered out from the tiny kitchen and back across the living room to the other door.

As suspected, the last door led to a bedroom. A bed that was smaller than anything they had back at the hotel sat neatly made in the center of the back wall. Not too far from it was a small wooden wardrobe that even Cinder stood above. A mirror leaning against the wall atop the wardrobe caught her attention. She stepped over to the wardrobe and instinctually pulled open the top drawer. It wasn’t filled with clothes like she thought, instead; it held various sewing supplies. Needles of different sizes, strings in loads of colors, pin cushions, all things sewing really.

Her face gained a bit of softness to it as she picked up and looked over a tiny silver needle. She hadn’t sewn in a long time, not since she had to make her custom long sleeve. It was always fun and relaxing. One of the few joys she had during her time at the hotel.

The slow and peaceful practice of stitching together various ripped bits of old blankets and sheets. Digging through the piles of discarded fabric, finding various colors and patterns that had been torn and thrown aside for any number of reasons. Cinder cherished the feeling that came with letting her needle glide in and out of the textures of the forgotten fabrics. Sewing them together into something new, something special, something hers.

Stepping back with a gasp, Cinder dropped the needle back into the drawer as the intrusive thought faded. This one didn’t seem as… Foreign as the ones in the forest, but it still left her uncomfortable. Maybe it was because she truly lamented how little time she spent sewing. Though that was hardly her fault! The Madame and her daughters were the ones who ripped her work away from her, took the meager supplies she had, and left her with nothing down there!

Cinder shoved the drawer shut with a frustrated grunt, knocking the mirror over from her force. Taking a few seething breaths, Cinder slowly calmed down and went to put the mirror back in its place atop the wardrobe. As the reflected surface reappeared, Cinder couldn’t help but look herself over. Rather than lingering on her scars as she did previously, her eyes wandered down to her neck. There were the gauze wrappings around the rough burn scars, wrappings applied to her by a girl who didn’t even know her name at the time. A girl who was currently lying out in the living room of this very cabin, bleeding.

Cinder traced her fingers over the bandages… Thinking. No matter how much she tried to reason the girl’s intentions as selfish, her lingering distrust of the girl waned. Cinder walked over to the door and peered out into the living room. There the girl, Winter, sat unmoving. Uncertain if she’d ever find the strength to rise. Cinder couldn’t ignore it any longer. Even if she was out to get something from her, it wasn’t like Cinder had much to offer… The least she could do was repay Winter for saving her.

Thoughts poked the back of Cinder’s brain, thoughts of doubt, suspicion, and hate. Cinder ignored them all. She could justify this as furthering her own agenda anyway. There was so much knowledge she was missing out on, knowledge this girl clearly had. Taking a small needle and two rolls of the thinnest string she could find, Cinder marched back out into the living room and set them down on the low table. Winds from the blizzard outside began howling and shaking the windows of the cabin. They would need that fireplace soon. Not wanting to even bother with whether her Semblance would work or not, Cinder grabbed the matchbox next to the piles of wood and struck one up. She’d seen the daughters light enough of the fireplaces they had in the hotel to understand the process. A few handfuls of kindling and a log later, the fireplace was stoked and quickly gaining in heat and light.

Satisfied with her efforts, Cinder stood and went to pull Winter off the ground and over to the couch of the cabin. With her patient placed on the couch upright, Cinder rolled up the left sleeve of the girl’s shirt. At around the bicep of her arm was a long cut. Long, but not very deep by the looks of it. Cinder trailed the blood drip from the bottom of the cut and let out a big breath. Grabbing the supplies she had, Cinder threaded her needle, tilted Winter’s arm toward the fire’s light, and got to work.

Warm. The first thought that hit Winter’s slowly waking brain, was that she felt warm. Her second thought was, ‘Oh dear gods! My arm hurts!’ But, Winter was more than capable enough to suffer whatever ache was plaguing her arm with a refined and subtle grunt as she focused her Aura over the source of the pain. Winter kept her eyes shut as she placed her sore arms down against what she assumed was her chair in the airship and pushed herself forward. She expected her seatbelt to catch her at some point, but as she nearly fell forward, it dawned on her that something was wrong.

Flailing her arms a little as her eyes shot open and took in her surroundings. The airship she half-remembered waking up in earlier was now replaced with a rather quaint little cabin. An orange glow coming from a raging fireplace in front of her was the only source of light. She spun her head to try and get a good look around, but with the windows outside only offering darkness; she had to settle for the fireplace’s glow. Her seated investigation didn’t offer much, just that the room was sparse.

“Y-You’re awake.”

Winter whipped her head around to the scratchy voice that startled her. The blue coat resting over her body went unnoticed as it fell from her movement. She steadied herself upon seeing it was Cinder, uncurling herself from her fetal position in the seat right beside Winter. Wanting to give Cinder some more room, Winter went to scoot herself one couch cushion down. Only to wince with a sharp inhale of air as she put pressure on her left arm.

“Careful!” Cinder yelled before erupting into a series of coughs. Winter obeyed regardless and watched Cinder reach out to tap her left bicep.

“Ow!” Winter flinched and pulled her arm back. Cinder kept pointing to her arm. Seeing as that was what kept hurting, it made sense she might have hurt herself in that crash. When Winter pulled the sleeve of her shirt up, she was shocked to discover a long, jagged cut on her arm. Even more shocking was the clean and… Well, frankly, pretty stitching that sealed it. It started as a white string and ran into blue before turning back into white at the end of the cut. Getting over her shock at the sight, Winter asked, “D-Did you do this?”

Winter was too focused on the stitching to notice Cinder’s embarrassed flush. “M’not a doctor,” Cinder whispered, her voice still suffering from the previous coughing.

“Well thank you, Cinder,” Winter eventually said as she smiled at the girl next to her. Some petty part of Winter was wondering if the needle and string were sterilized beforehand. But realistically, her Aura could handle whatever infection might come. Though she may want to still take the string out at some point and let her Aura deal with the cut in its entirety, that could wait till her Aura’s a bit stronger. She remembered using a lot of it to swing at that- “Grimm!” Winter exclaimed, startling Cinder into looking at her wide-eyed. “What happened with the Grimm!?”

“I killed it?” Cinder hoarsely whispered, almost sounding afraid.

Winter let a world of tension fall away as she relaxed. Until another thought presented itself. “How?”

Cinder just pointed to the coffee table next to them. Winter followed her finger to see a familiar and comforting sight. Her sword, resting gently on the low wooden table. “I had help,” Cinder added, causing Winter to look back at her as she held out her right hand. Closing her one eye, Cinder had a deep frown on her face as small orange flickers of light danced across her skin.

“Aura?” Winter gasped. “You have an Aura?”

Cinder closed her hand and retracted it back. Pulling her legs onto the couch and wrapping her arms around them, she shook her head. “I didn’t… Not till we craugh-” Another small cough interrupted her. “Not till we crashed,” she hurriedly said before another cough hit her.

‘She unlocked her Aura from our crash!’ Winter thought. She’d heard some crazy stories about people unlocking their Aura, but those tended to range between falling out of a chair or stubbing a toe. Cinder just might have the most exciting one she’s ever heard of.

“I need help,” Cinder interrupted whatever other thoughts might have been going through Winter’s mind with her suddenly forceful tone, still made scratchy.

Winter tilted her head in silent question.

“I don’t know how to use this…” Cinder gestured aimlessly in the air with a frown. “T-This… Stuff!”

“You’re Aura?” Winter assumed.

“Yes! Aura and the… Semblance thing.”

The blue eyes of the Schnee went wider. “You discovered your Semblance too!?” To unlock your Aura accidentally was one thing. To just stumble upon your Semblance at the same time? Nearly unheard of for the average person. Especially for someone who’s never even trained in the stuff.

“But I don’t understand it!” Cinder whispered harshly, trying to avoid another attack from her traitorous throat muscles. “At first it was easy! I would just think about how angry and u-upset I was and my hands would heat up! But after that Grimm attack, I can’t do it anymore!” Cinder squinted her eye and shook her hands for emphasis as if trying to prove herself wrong.

“Are you thinking those thoughts now?”

“Yes!”

“Stop.” Winter grabbed Cinder’s wrist as gently as she could while still being firm. Cinder scowled back at Winter’s seemingly knowing expression. “Do you know what attracts Grimm?” she thought to ask. It was common knowledge for any person, but it wouldn’t surprise Winter in the least that Cinder didn’t know. As far as she knew, the poor girl might have been raised in that hotel.

“People,” Cinder replied confidently, clearly biting back an annoyed growl.

“Negative emotions,” Winter corrected. “Grimm are attracted to the negative emotions that people emit. It’s especially sensitive to them when those emotions are focused out through someone with an active Aura.”

Winter let go of her wrists and leaned back. Cinder’s expression shifted from anger to… Sadness? “He always just said it was people.”

“Who’s he?”

Cinder curled her arms and legs a bit closer to herself and looked away from Winter to the fire instead. Its crackling embers were far more interesting than answering Winter’s question, apparently.

Winter wanted to continue their conversation, but something about it just felt wrong now. Cinder had locked up, lost in her own little world. No more anger or determined questions, she was just quiet. She didn’t want to push Cinder any more than she already had. Shuffling her feet on the floor beneath them, Winter felt a familiar wool coat. Looking down and pulling the coat up off the floor, a new idea struck her.

“Hey,” Winter called out to the dark-haired girl beside her. When Cinder hesitantly turned to look at her, she was greeted by the wool coat being handed to her. “This is technically your coat now.”

With her eye going back and forth between Winter’s small smile and the coat in her hand, Cinder looked like she was searching for something in Winter’s gesture. After not finding it, she took the coat and wrapped it around herself.

“How about another deal?” Winter then asked, reaching out with her arm, drawing the now bundled-up Cinder’s attention again. “I’ll teach you everything I know about Aura and Semblances. You tell me about what happened at the hotel. Deal?”

Cinder eyed her extended hand suspiciously. However, her suspicion didn’t seem to last as long as back in the hotel. After just under a minute of internal deliberation, Cinder took Winter’s right hand with her own.

“Deal.”