If it Fits 2

Another day, another set of problems and frustrations. Irritations of a particular sort that Weiss found herself loving and hating in equal turns. Loving, because she hadn’t been confronted with this sort of thing before, and she was glad for it. Hating, because she hadn’t been confronted with this sort of thing before, and wasn’t quite sure what the correct sort of response to this sort of mess was.

It was understandable, she supposed. She had been partnered with a child after all. She wasn’t used to dealing with children.

Her mouth set itself into a tight, thin line as her partner and...leader...snickered over a doodle, inviting the rest of the team to laugh along. To laugh at a badly drawn caricature of their teacher that the young heiress, at the age of five, would have considered an appalling waste of time and pencil lead. Her tutors, many as they were as some of the greatest artists in Atlas, would have been even worse... How the Headmaster thought that Miss Rose, prodigy or not, was anything near as qualified to be a leader as Weiss was, was beyond her.

Dealing with children was more Klein's thing, obviously. Also, if she had been even half as bad at half of Ruby’s age, she owed the poor man an apology and a raise...and by the gods.

All Weiss could do was vibrate in place and stare in disbelief. Disbelief and a heavy helping of rage as she watched Ruby pick her nose. Her nose. In public. With her fingers.

When she’d said that the younger girl was a menace, she’d been more right than she had suspected. Right in the worst sort of way...which led to Weiss giving the most powerful reprimand she could resort to while in a public venue.

She stared at the girl. Hard. Hard enough that, if Weiss had possessed some kind of offensive eye based Semblance, the (Redhead? Brunette? Whatever she was) would have most likely been wiped off of the surface of Remnant. Turned into little more than a greasy, gross smear that the help would have been forced to place a tasteful rug over, lest they are forced to replace the floor altogether.

Weiss, in her time, hadn’t exactly met all that many Faunus that weren’t trying to kill her in some way...but, really. If Ruby was in any way a representative of their kind—

Ruby stuck out her tongue. Started turning her head from side to side. Started blowing in the longest, wettest raspberry that Weiss could think of at the moment while Professor Port continued rambling, seemingly completely unaware.

—then Weiss had no idea how they ever got anything done, let alone plot and successfully carry out assassination attempts.

Or...maybe that was just what Ruby wanted her to think.

Maybe she was just acting like an idiot. Acting like the very sort of person that Weiss would have normally dismissed without thinking...a person like Arc. It all made sense, once she thought about it. They’d walked into the auditorium together. They’d known each other...and just before, Ruby had caused some of Weiss’s dust cache to explode through what seemed to be mere incompetence.

Seemed to be. The distinction was important...important enough that their time yesterday, the time where Ruby had had Weiss at her mercy and hadn’t taken the chance to go out in a blaze of glory (an occurrence that wasn’t all that uncommon among the White Fang, sadly) by taking  her head, left her with doubts. Worries that Ruby really was that childish.

Worries that she was going to have to spend the next four years...babysitting.

Weiss quietly shivered, only tangentially realizing that that one girl from JNPR, Nora, had been called up to the front of the class. Which she happily did. While skipping…she was a strange girl...and honestly. What kind of question was ‘do you do squats’? Of course, she did squats. Any Huntress/Singer/Ballerina/Lady (Weiss was a girl of many talents) worth the name did squats. Of course, her rear was firm and taut and worthy of comment and...no. None of that.

Weiss closed her eyes and resisted the urge she had to...adjust herself when her underwear got the slightest bit uncomfortable at the thought of someone, anyone, even Ruby, touching her rear. Not only was it crude. Not only was it rude and inappropriate...those thoughts were unbecoming of her, especially in class where anyone could see the results of such thoughts.

Whether that time with Ruby had felt good or not didn’t matter. It had been undignified and shameful and something that she should have been over already, considering the fact that she’d already spent a good half hour (vigorously) exorcising that particular demon in the bathroom that very morning while bent over the toilet bowl and panting up a storm. A demon that she couldn’t exorcise without it being commented on by their leader once again.

Weiss slowly pinched the bridge of her nose, uncaring of the sudden noise that had started to fill the classroom as the very memory of what had happened after she got out of the restroom caused her mask to crack.

Why does the bathroom smell funny indeed… Even then, in what Weiss had assumed to be sheer and utter privacy did Ruby continue to be a thorn in her side and… Was that a draft?

The white-haired girl looked up after what had to have been far, far too long to see Nora spinning in circles on the classroom floor.

“Around and around and around we go!” Nora loudly sang as the tips of her shoes started to leave burn marks on the floor. “Where I’ll stop, not even I know!”

Her ‘dance partner’, a full-grown and very putout looking Boarbatusk, squealed...and Weiss’s jaw dropped a little in shock.

She...had been much more distracted than she’d thought if she’d missed...however this had come to be.

Faster and faster, louder and louder. Panicked, angry roars. Mad, ecstatic giggles. The movement of hair and paper against the breeze caused by a very unhappy Boarbatusk, unable to get its front legs free of the (completely mad) excitable girl’s grip on its own initiative...a point of contention between it and Nora that quickly became moot when she just—

Everyone looked on in horror and unsettled awe as the poor beast (wasn’t that a strange thought) flew out of the nearest window as a black and white blur, screaming the whole way down. He then stopped just a hair shy of thirty seconds, assumingly because he’d messily hit bottom.

—let him go and fell on her rear, so dizzy that her eyes rolled about in her head while Professor Port clapped and commended her for her enthusiasm… All before he dove into a story of him doing much the same against a Goliath in his youth, seemingly just for the sake of sucking all the energy out of the room. It was enough to make Weiss, gently, lay her head against the desk as she tried not to scream.

She couldn’t work in these conditions… Maybe she should have joined the army like Winter had? Gone through boot, worked her way up through the ranks and, hopefully, reached General and Headmaster of Atlas one day? … No. Bad idea.

Weiss rose her head with a sigh, gathered her materials, and stood along with everyone else as they made to file out of the classroom. Unlike them though, she waited for the doorway to clear instead of squeezing her way through like some sort of lemming. The fact that it caused her to fall behind the rest of her team so that she could think in peace was just a happy little accident.

Anyway, back on topic. Becoming an Atlesian officer sounded good (at the moment), like something worthy of her station, but it just wouldn’t work. Winter had a headstart, was already the current General’s aide, and would have the position locked down by the time Weiss ever hit Lieutenant.

Second best was nice and all, but it just wasn’t Weiss. It looked like, if she wanted to be who she wanted to be, one of the best in her field...she was just going to have to suck it up.

“Make sure to get a good night’s rest, children!” Port called out to the backs of his quickly retreating students. “We have a field trip tomorrow and it just wouldn’t do for one of you to nod off during the hunt!”

Weiss cringed, then sighed again as the gratingly high and excited tone of Ruby’s voice scratched against the deepest parts of her inner ear. Like nails on a chalkboard, or the talk you’d hear at a high society dinner.

Painful to experience, but something that must be borne until it could be borne no longer. That was all.

==========

“Damn, Weiss. I know that they’re the greatest enemy man has ever known, but maybe—”

Weiss, with a deeply expressive frown on her face, plunged Myrtenaster into the eighth Grimm crotch that afternoon. A Beowulf crotch, to be exact. A Beowulf crotch attached to a live Beowulf that had, after standing stock still from shock, fallen to its knees. Then, and only after it had fallen on its face and started crying, did Blake give it mercy.

“—you should chill out a little?” Yang suggested. “Like, I’m not the type to say no to taking my frustrations out on deserving targets...but that last thing? That thing you did to that Beowulf? It hurt me.” Spreading her arms out wide, Yang dramatically pointed at herself. “Me... That says something.”

Weiss gave her blonde teammate an unimpressed look while Yang continued to hold that pose. Probably because she was hoping that Weiss would comment on it...and she would go on hoping if Weiss had her way… Which she did, when an Ursa came up behind the now pouting Yang and forced her to pay attention to the fact that their Professor had brought them into a warzone. A warzone of his own making even!

He’d just...he’d just walked into the nearest forest, with his students waddling behind, oh so trusting and naive...and he’d started calling the Grimm out! With a megaphone! Just before he’d run off into the woods himself, ready to go ahunting! Who did that!? Who!? Why!?

Of course, she was on edge! She was surrounded by incompetents! Incompetents and madmen!

To think that she’d actually considered talking to the man about her misgivings when it came to Ruby. Ha! It was to laugh...as was the sudden dearth of Grimm for her to emasculate. It made sense though, she supposed… There was a reason why the name of her profession’s main duty was hunting and not turkey shoot.

When Grimm died you had to find more. Simple. Anything to get her mind off of her teammates, flouncing about in their too tight outfits and… Never mind that. No privacy, not the time.

Onwards.

==========

There are points in someone’s life when you come to a realization. A slow dawning, most often during times of teenage angst and ill-considered decisions. A slow dawning that had been described, in-depth, by Winter during one of her few visits home.

Weiss ducked, her features grim as a few strands of her hair blew away on the wind of an Alpha Beowulf’s clawing swipe.

It was the feeling that you, yes you, had just fucked up. Probably beyond any sort of recovery...and Weiss had to admit. Losing sight of your team, or any other team, while in the middle of Grimm-infested territory due to a fit of entitled pique wasn’t one of her brightest moments.

Duck, weave, dodge, flip. Lay a glyph, jump. Jump again, impale Ursa through the top of their skull. Do yet another flip and bite back the scream as your side is raked by a claw. Burn whatever had hurt you to a crisp, then keep on moving. That had been her experience so far and she wasn’t enjoying it in the slightest.

Who knew that tracking down murderous beasts could be so dangerous? Well, her obviously...but it had never hit her quite as hard as it did at that moment. At that moment when, with a lucky blow, something struck her across the back, leading to her rolling in the dirt before she found her feet once more.

She was getting worn down. Pecked to pieces by a bunch of mindless beasts. A disgusting way to go...but that was how things worked sometimes. People made mistakes. People paid for them. The world was not kind.

With a weary swipe of her blade, she was alone. Or, at least, nearly so. She was alone with that Alpha. The one that she’d sliced across the eye earlier in the fight, half-blinding him before he’d retreated and allowed his compatriots to soften her up for him. Smart of him...even smarter when, instead of falling for her feint to the side that was, in fact, a straight...he spun right around with a backhand. A blow that sent her flying through the air until she came up against what felt like a stone...in a sensitive spot.

She was no doctor but, considering the pain she was going through as she writhed on the forest floor, she was pretty sure she’d just took a hit in the kidney...and it only got worse when she realized just how dire her new circumstances were.

“Weiss!” Ruby screamed into what might as well have been the heiresses’ ear, proving that the rock that Weiss had run into hadn’t been a rock at all, but something infinitely more aggravating… Well… Maybe not that bad, seeing how there was a good chance that Weiss wasn’t go to die that day, thanks to the cavalry coming to her rescue...but still. “Are you okay!? Where were you!?”

Weiss, in a show of just how okay she was, continued to hold her middle while writhing like a worm and trying not to cry. She’d heard from Winter how bad this sort of thing could hurt...but words did not describe it. The closest approximation that she could think of was, on a scale of one-to-ten, this was (pardon her Mistralian) a bloody thirteen.

Ruby, taking it in exactly the wrong way from what Weiss wanted (mostly to leave her alone and kill the Grimm while she silently broke down) continued to look her over. Badly. If Weiss wasn’t a doctor, then Ruby wasn’t even a lifeguard at the kiddy pool. Lots of fingers. Lots of touching. Above the belt and below while, in the background, Yang and Blake made the Grimm that had left her like this regret ever coming into existence.

Not even getting the scar on her face had hurt this bad...it was like battery acid in her veins. Fire in her eyes. Electricity in every part of her being...and she was not looking forward to her next bathroom break. Neither was she looking forward to having her team fuss over her like she was some sort of inva—HELLO.

“Guys! Stop playing with that Grimm and help me get Weiss to the Bullhead! I think she’s poisoned!” Ruby cried out as she gave that particular spot against Weiss’s thigh another squeeze, a squeeze that actually got Weiss to stop moving for a bit, horrified, before her wriggling redoubled in strength. “Her inner thigh is swollen and it’s getting bigger!”

By the gods, old and new...may they strike her from this earth...