Chapter Text
“What made you decide to come public now?”
Weiss looked past the cup of hot chocolate in front of her and across to Ozpin sipping his own cup. “I guess that means that you knew too.”
“I did.” The headmaster confirmed. “I’ve been around for quite a while, Miss Schnee. A little bit of nail polish wasn’t going to fool me.”
“It worked on me.” Her voice was quiet.
Ozpin blinked, leaned forward inquisitively and then straightened. When he next spoke it was with a softer tone. “I see. This wasn’t a confessional. It was a revelation. My commiserations then, Miss Schnee. How do you want to proceed from here?”
Weiss shrugged. “I… I really don’t know.”
“Understandable. Perhaps we should start with practical concerns.” Ozpin spread one hand out, the other keeping close by his side. “Official registration.”
“I’m faunus. That’s what it should say.” She straightened her back. “I don’t want to keep lying.”
“You certainly weren’t raised by your father.” Ozpin half chuckled.
Weiss thought about it for a moment and then nodded. “No. I really wasn’t.”
“Let’s be perfectly clear on this, Miss Schnee.” Ozpin folded his hands together. “You have not been lying. Nor do I particularly consider keeping something like this private to yourself as a lie in the first place.”
Weiss briefly tilted her head in that half-nod of acknowledgement that would not break her poise. “It feels like a lie.”
Ozpin nodded. "It feels like a lie because the only person who is owed the truth was not told it."
"And that is..."
"You, Miss Schnee." Ozpin stood up and walked to the window. "All the rest of us are owed such knowledge at your discretion. So, I ask again are you sure?"
Weiss huffed. "Yes. I'm sure. I need to do it."
“Then you should know the ramifications of changing this status.” Ozpin cleared his throat and turned to face her. “The registry is public information. The change will be noticed by several people. Medical documentation will be requested to justify the change.” He noted the way she flinched. “That will not be publicly available, but it will be available to your family.”
Weiss shook her head slightly. “Good. Let them see it. What kind of medical tests are we talking about?”
“Pretty much anything that will counter whatever has been falsified or omitted by your family doctors.”
Weiss nodded and reached a hand up to hold back her hair to reveal the scars on the side of her head. “I guess we should start with this.”
The notification sound was far too sterile and understated for the information it brought to her attention.
Those watching her noticed as her normally pristine posture sharpened to the point of slicing the air. She lifted the scroll up and picked out a name to contact.
“General Ironwood. I’ll be on site earlier than expected. Family business, sir. I’ll report as usual.”
Weiss slid into the space between Blake and Ruby. On the other side of Blake, Yang leaned over to watch her.
“How’d it go?” Ruby asked.
“You do not want to know how many things on my medical record were wrong.” Weiss shook her head with exhaustion.
“Why? Isn’t there only a couple of things?” Yang asked.
“They needed a condition to explain the surgery.” Weiss began to tick fingers off “They needed something to explain…” she paused “...the parts that are still there. Later doctors that took those at face value made other diagnoses, which are also wrong. It just… kept going.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Ruby asked.
“Yes. It is.” Blake confirmed.
Weiss dismissively waved the concern away. “It was a plethora of little things. There’s a couple of vitamin supplements I take daily that I guess are now optional. That’s about it.”
“That doesn’t make it not dangerous.” The cat faunus responded.
“Let’s just move on to what classes I missed and forget about it.”
“Right.” Yang turned to the side and pulled out a pack of papers. “I’ve got work on contract basics, for you.”
Blake accepted those and added her own small pile before handing it over to Weiss. “Just a reading assignment for Grimm Studies. But here’s my lecture notes. And Ruby’s lecture notes.”
Yang’s notes were sparse, rarely more than five words, and leaving a lot of blank spaces. It didn’t convey a lot of information and depended on knowing the context for each of the phrases, images, and words meant to the person who wrote them. Most of the papers she had handed over were copies of sample hunter contracts to analyze.
Blake’s notes and hand-writing were crisp, orderly, using a minimum of words, lots of abbreviations. The sort of writing developed by someone who wanted to get the most information onto the smallest practical surface with the most efficiency. Weiss almost asked if Blake were a spy or something but stopped herself.
By comparison, Ruby’s hand-writing was inconsistent, shifting in size, spread, and angle. They rambled in literal circles in places when she started to run out of room at the edge of the page and she’d looked for some other place to continue writing. And there were several tiny scribbles that once she squinted and focused on turned out to be personal observations.
“Right. Grimm Studies is one of your subjects.” Weiss twisted the sheet in her hands. “Maybe we should talk about how to take notes.”
“Oh? If you had to grade our notes, what would you give them?” Yang asked.
Weiss held up Blake’s. “Easy A.”
“Naturally.”
She held up Yang’s. “C”.
“Hey! Improvement.”
And then turned to Ruby’s with her eyes scrunched up as if she were fighting a headache. “B? Maybe? On sheer density of information.”
“Thank you, Weiss!” Ruby smiled.
“D on readability and coherence though.”
“Aww…”
“Really. Thank you for going to the trouble.” Weiss reached up and gripped her head, unconsciously rubbing over the scars. “This has been such a headache.”
That was such an unserviceable expression for the situation.
She looked across the library to the vending machines in one of the nooks. “I’m going to get a drink before we start studying.”
“I can get it, Weiss. Don’t…” Ruby stopped as Weiss stood and held out her hand.
“It’s fine.” She looked around. “Does anybody want anything?”
“Sure. Thanks, Weiss.” Yang smiled.
The white-haired girl smiled as she listened to their requests and walked across the room and into the nook, examining the options available. She slipped into her pocket to get her card and slipped it into the slot. There was a quiet beep followed by a harsh buzz and the word “declined” passed over the digital marquee above the car reader.
Frowning, Weiss retrieved the card and inspected it for dirt or grease before taking a handkerchief to wipe it clean. Finally she placed the card in the machine again.
The same result.
She stepped to a different machine and received the same result.
Weiss looked back at the table to see her team leaning over their books. Ruby glanced in her direction and tilted her head. The white-haired girl waved her hand back and smiled. Ruby nodded slowly and then bent back to her own books and notes.
Weiss’s smile faded into a practiced porcelain expression and she stepped behind the short wall framing the entrance to the nook. Once there, she retrieved her scroll and made a call.
“Hello. I’m having troubles with my card.” She nodded. “Weiss Schnee. That’s right. Closed? What do you mean it’s closed?” Her porcelain expression cracked into a frown. “No, I understand what ‘closed’ means. I want to know why it’s been closed?”
She grimaced and fell back against the wall. “I see. And there’s no way to reverse it? Thank you.”
Weiss checked the time on her scroll before slipping it into her pocket.
“It’s not even half an hour.”
The white haired girl lifted her hands up to either side of her face, fingers curling in. She clenched her jaw tight and shook violently for several seconds, her eyes closed. Then she let that tension flow out of her muscles and she wiped her hands over her face, checking for any tears to wipe away. Then took a steadying breath, firmed up her shoulders and stepped back out of the nook into the library, porcelain expression in place. She walked back to her team and slipped back in between Ruby and Blake as they watched her.
“Did something happen?” Blake asked, looking at her in concern.
“My card’s not working.” Her voice was dry and irritated as she rolled her eyes.
“You can’t get to your money?” Blake asked.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” Weiss assured her. “But in the meantime, do you know where I need to go to set up a student account?”
“Yeah, you should already have one.” Ruby nodded as Yang stood up. “Ms. Goodwitch walked me through it. Take out your scroll, I’ll show you.”
Yang stood up. “In the meantime, the drinks are my treat.”
“Thank you.” Weiss nodded. “Our first field trip is in… three weeks? Correct. That’s our first paid job?”
Blake leaned in and spoke quietly. “We have a stipend. Your student account definitely already has money in it. Ruby, double check for her, all right?”
“Yep! Okay, so you’re going to need to set up your password…”
In the course of fiddling with Weiss’s accounts, the notification of a received message was quietly lost and overlooked.
“You going to be okay Weiss?” Ruby asked.
“The shower room is just down the hall. I’ll be fine.” She rolled her eyes and turned to look at Ruby with a smile. “Just because people call me the “Ice Queen” doesn’t mean I’m going to shatter easily. Nothing is physically wrong with me. And I feel fine.”
Ruby nodded and then stepped over to her, looking around to make sure nobody else was hanging around the entrance to the showers. Then she leaned in and whispered, “You know. Sometimes I say I’m fine when I’m not. And sometimes I can’t say I’m not.”
“Yeah, but I’m actually fine. Please don’t treat me like I need to be rescued.”
“Everybody needs to be rescued sometimes.” Ruby shrugged. “You rescued me when we first met, remember? You stopped me from falling.”
“And then I blew us both up, so that seems a net negative.” Weiss chuckled then bit her lip and shook her head. “Go on. I promise I’m not going to do anything terrible between now and going to sleep.”
“You promise?” Ruby pointed at her.
“Promise.” Weiss assured her. “So unless you…” she stopped. “I’ll be fine.”
Ironically, the hot shower helped her to cool down, but it didn’t really help to make sense of everything. She made sure to do an extra thorough job on cleaning herself and took her time. Beyond that she simply stood in the hot water stream for several minutes, she didn’t count how many.
Eventually, she reluctantly dropped her hand down to the spigot and shut off the stream before walking out of the showers and grabbing a towel and her bathrobe. Weiss stood in front of the sink and mirror, vigorously drying her hair and skin. She didn’t know when her eyes had started scanning the contours of her face, but at one point the thought came.
“They’d be there.”
Slowly, she reached out to her reflection and traced a half circle in steamed up glass, right along where her face sat in the mirror. Frowning, she tried again with a sharper triangle shape that also failed to satisfy. She pulled her hand back and stared at her face, trying to visualize the missing pieces.
“Who’s this performance for?”
Weiss turned around and saw the alligator faunus that had given her trouble before. Her eyes traced to the girl’s tail and immediately wanted to ask what a tail was like, but she shoved it down.
“What, jealous?” The girl asked.
Weiss turned to look up at her with her porcelain face applied. “When you were talking about ‘costumes’ before. You meant pretending to be human didn’t you?”
The girl scoffed and crossed her arms. “Okay, you’re still acting like you didn’t know that already.”
Weiss nodded, moved to where her clothes were folded, and started to get dressed.
“Yeah, I’ve heard what Scarletina has been saying, but please. Who doesn’t…” there was a hitch and Wiesse looked back to see the other girl’s eyes angled down to where the scar at the base of her spine was. Then the alligator girl looked back up away from it. “Who doesn’t know they’re a faunus growing up?”
Weiss started pulling on her clothes as she spoke. “I suppose if this were a movie. This would be where I’m supposed to unburden myself to a tormentor and have a heart to heart. That’s not happening. I am also not going to stand here and listen to you try to find an insult that sticks.” She threw back her hair once and again to dislodge any stray drops of water. She started walking for the door. “I’d likewise advise you not to waste your energy on me.”
As Weiss passed her the girl reached out to grab her by the elbow.
“Do you think you’re just suddenly one of us? And not one of them?” The girl asked.
The girl was half-right. But it was quite clear that she wasn’t one of “them” either. She was just sort of nowhere. But she wasn’t going back on her promise that this girl wasn’t going to be the one she unburdened herself to.
Weiss maintained her porcelain looks and glanced down at the arm on her elbow before looking back up at the girl. “Well?”
The other girl scoffed but let go of her elbow. “You’re not worth it.”
“Now we understand each other.” Weiss responded as she stepped out of the shower room and started walking back to her team-dorm as the alligator faunus turned back to the showers.
Alone in the hallway, Weiss took one perfectly poised step after another as a quiver grew in her lips. She crossed her arms, hands shoving up the sleeves of her night shirt and fingers pressing into her forearms. She stopped outside Team RWBY’s door and took a long deep breath. She started to reach up to smooth out her face but stopped as she saw the trickle of red blood on the claws of one hand.
Looking down she saw the four small rivulets and slowly became aware of the slight sting. She quickly rolled down the sleeves to cover the cuts. Then she blinked her eyes open and closed a few times. Finally she wiped a hand over her face and put on a smile before opening the door.
“See, Ruby, I told you everything would be fine.”
Blake looked up from her book while Ruby glanced down at a trace of red leaking through the elbow of Weiss's shirt. Yang sat on the upper edge of her bed looking down at their fourth teammate.
“Cool. So… Think tomorrow will be better?” Ruby asked.
Weiss shrugged and moved to sit down on her bed. She was silent for a moment before bending over and turning to meet Ruby’s silver eyes as the younger girl looked down over the edge of her bed.
“I can’t say.”
“Well, have a good night’s sleep.” Ruby smiled cheerfully and waved before sitting up out of Weisse’s line of sight. She bit her lip, the smile fading as she looked across to Yang and Blake, shaking her head.
Yang nodded and stretched out with a loud yawn. “We’ve still got classes to do and a criminal empire to smash.”
“Yeah. We’re going to be so busy it’ll be hard to think about anything else.” Blake confirmed.
Weiss laid down and pulled her covers up over her. “Hey, Blake?”
“Yes?” The cat faunus looked over.
“Can you tell me about being…” Weiss’s voice trailed off.
“Yeah.” Blake said. “I can definitely help you with that.”
“Thanks.”