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“Oof,” said Clover.
Robyn didn’t disagree. Still, it was anyone’s game.
They were set up for the afternoon in a common area on the third floor of the Academy student center, out of the way of the worst foot traffic but not so far out of the way that they didn’t have line of sight on the cafe. Everyone fell a little behind on classwork during the Festival, but since RGEE had been one of the first quartets to progress to the doubles, the profs weren’t letting them slide at all these days.
The first leg of the competition was almost over; there was only one group of Atlas second-years who hadn’t had their team round yet, so they’d tuned the projector to the live broadcast.
It could have been going better, but it wasn’t a travesty. It was shaping up to be the kind of fight that fell into a holding pattern, and the commentators were using that to their advantage to review the current standings picture-in-picture.
“...with eight teams of this year’s field still to go. That’s four more team rounds remaining in the 36th Vytal Festival Tournament, hosted by the Kingdom of Atlas…”
A paper football hit Robyn between the eyes.
“Oops,” said Joanna.
“Ladies,” said Robyn, flicking it back with vicious accuracy. Joanna swore and ducked too late. “Glad to see you taking your studies so seriously.”
“Hey,” protested Elm, whose fingers were still blatantly forming the goalposts for Joanna’s misaimed shot. “Some of us are working!”
“Want to take my hand and try that again?”
Joanna grinned. “Nope. Hey, Robyn, want to quiz us on those Tactics & Strategy notes you’re supposed to be taking?”
Robyn, who had absolutely been watching the Vytal Festival and eating popcorn for the last three hours, cheerfully flipped her off. Clover just grinned. “What does it look like we’re doing?” he asked, gesturing toward the screen. “We’re analyzing tactics and strategy in a real-time environment!”
“This is why you get to go to the doubles round,” said Robyn, patting him on the shoulder. “You understand the burdens and subtle intricacies of leadership.”
It was an unconventional choice; but in their second year, Robyn had sent Elm and Joanna forward with the intent of steamrollering their most versatile fighter to the finals. They’d put in a very good showing, but ultimately been taken out by a narrow margin by a speedster and some guy with a weighted net. For their fourth year they were coming in at a diagonal and hoping to trip up their opponents.
Literally, as well as figuratively. Kingfisher was a bitch and a half in a normal fight. Robyn would hate that thing if she and Clover weren’t on the same side.
“Oh really.” Elm, for some reason, seemed unconvinced by their blatant lies. “Go on! We’re listening. Analyze away.”
Robyn glanced at the screen. “Splitting up was a mistake,” she said instantly.
Clover raised an eyebrow. “How do you figure? They’ve got a sniper.”
“Yeah,” said Robyn. “But they’ve got a bad layout for her. Grassland, no cover, no high ground? Splitting them like that was suicide. Look at her poor spotter.”
Robyn had been just a few seconds faster than the commentators.
“...may have been a mistake on the part of Team APCT leader Ashe Angara,” said Professor Dogwood mildly. “A very classic deployment pattern, but taking the terrain into account gives Team CTRN the advantage…”
Citron and Apricot. Vale and Atlas. And the depth of the blunder was quickly becoming obvious to even the spectators. APCT’s sniper couldn’t shoot and defend herself at close range at the same time; so CTRN had placed their support fighters on APCT’s melee, serving as a distraction, creating distance—while their year-3 heavy hitters had gone straight for the second-year sheep faunus serving as her bodyguard.
“Pull in the sniper,” Clover agreed after a moment. Chloe Brooke—Robyn, always terrible at remembering names, had checked her name on the side of the screen again—wasn’t bad at her job; she’d nailed the Vale speedster a few times, but it should be obvious by now that she wasn’t doing enough good to justify the inevitable.
“A remarkable showing by Miss Thyme,” Professor Brandy pointed out. “It’s possible APCT knows something we don’t; she’s certainly holding her ground.”
“Barely,” argued Robyn. “She’s obviously getting overwhelmed, come on, open your eyes—”
“That she is,” agreed Dogwood. “But there’s a difference between holding your ground and—oh!”
“Ouch,” agreed RGEE in unison.
“What the hell was that?” demanded Clover.
Robyn could barely believe what they’d just seen herself. The spotter—Fiona Thyme, according to the readout—had been one wrong move away from a brutal takedown for the past five minutes; she just hadn’t made any wrong moves. Apparently, APCT’s leader wasn’t as ignorant of her sniper team’s dire straits as they’d assumed, because the moment she and her partner had gotten an opening she’d turned her attention to the second pair—
But what had she been thinking?
The profs couldn’t believe it either.
“...intentional, do you think?”
“It seemed to be—and if Miss Thyme were human it might very well have worked. That was a very good look at Pearl Lagoon and her Sonic Blast Semblance, which works by…”
It was pretty obvious how it worked; a concentrated blast of sound had funneled itself safely over Chloe Brooke’s head and slammed into the pair of Vale brawlers trying to take her out. But Thyme had been caught squarely in the crossfire, and she had a sheep’s excellent hearing.
Sure, it might have bought their sniper a few extra seconds, and knocked out the Vale tank’s Aura; but they had a teammate who’d been doing that just fine on her own, and the sonic blast took her to her knees. She rallied, visibly in pain, lifting a hooked staff to block a blow to her face; but it was already over, and the Aura-out alarm blasted again a second later.
At that point they’d gained nothing. Chloe Brooke barely had time to reach for her sidearm—why the hell hadn’t she switched to that pistol five minutes ago to help her spotter, anyway?—before she’d been taken out as well. Then it was three on two, then three on one, then—
“That was a mess,” Joanna decided before Pearl Lagoon had even been taken out of the fight. The buzzer rang a moment later. “Robyn?”
“Don’t look at me,” she muttered. “I’m not that stupid.” Then, because she couldn’t resist: “They value the sniper support so much they just weren’t thinking about the spotter, I guess. In the moment it didn’t occur to them that she’s the only reason they get that sniper support at all? She’s good, they probably don’t have to worry about her in the field very often…”
None of which explained how they were that sloppy at directing sonic blasts near each other. Not in second year. That was unforgivable carelessness with a teammate’s safety.
“You think?” said Clover. “That tracks to me.”
“No,” said Robyn softly. “I think they think she’s expendable.”
“They’re not even checking on her,” Joanna said with a disgusted snort. Sure enough, the other three members of APCT had picked themselves up and congregated together, while Thyme was still leaning heavily on her staff and massaging her temples.
Robyn could feel her teeth grinding; but anger wouldn’t help, so she shook her head and sighed.
“She busted her ass defending that sniper, too,” said Elm. “Ugh. That’s disgraceful.”
“Well, it’s bad tactics, at least,” said Clover carefully. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just don’t want to assume too much from one fight. I don’t know the second-year teams very well.”
Robyn, reflexively, glanced toward Joanna. To her relief, her partner was returning the look.
“I get where you’re coming from,” Robyn told him. “But devaluing someone in the field like that is symptomatic of something, and you know it. And I don’t like how easily they wrote off the faunus girl from Mantle.”
Clover arched an eyebrow. “And you know she’s from Mantle because…?”
“Because unlike you, I was paying attention to the pregame introductions and Dogwood outright said she’s the only one on that team from Mantle,” she responded through her teeth. The others had gotten fun-fact flavor commentary about their families or career aspirations; Fiona Thyme was from Mantle. It stood out.
Clover held up his hands. “All right, all right. Easy. That’s different; you can’t blame me for how I reacted, Robyn. Out of context it sounded bad.”
Elm snorted. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that? You’re from Mantle, Clover.”
“Yeah, but that’s different from assuming faunus can’t be from Atlas—which isn’t what you were doing, I know . Look.” He sat forward, palms open, an olive branch. “All I’m saying is that’s kind of a serious accusation. I mean, APCT’s leader is a faunus too, so I doubt it's that. They might have just panicked. It’s their first tournament, Robyn; they’re under a lot of pressure out there.”
The look exchanged with Joanna was longer, flatter, and more tired this time.
“Well, I’ve never been under enough pressure to forget Elm existed,” Robyn said, deliberately dry, before flashing a smirk. “And Clover, I promise—if I ever shoot you in the face, it’ll be on purpose.”
Elm laughed and pulled out a deck of cards; Clover, the tension broken, rolled his eyes with a grin and shoved Robyn playfully off the couch.
Joanna reached down to offer her a hand back up, and Robyn let the Vytal Festival play out on the projector as she gave up on studying in favor of letting Elm deal her into a game that Clover would almost certainly win.
Robyn flung herself flat against the wall of a ‘ruined building’, just in time to brace against the explosion on her heels.
“Cutting it a bit close, don’t you think?” asked Clover smoothly.
Robyn shot him a look. He grinned at her, and after a moment she was forced to grin back.
“We may be in trouble,” she admitted.
Clover shrugged, unconcerned. “It was always a gamble. Thankfully—”
“Yeah, yeah, can it, Poster Boy,” said Robyn, who’d once made the mistake of playing poker with him before he revealed his Semblance. “Duck.”
Clover hit the deck without missing a beat, and Robyn’s Gravity bolt hit the Shade student straight between the eyes. It didn’t do more than stagger her—she was a rhino faunus, and it showed in more than just the lovely grey pebbling over her arms and bare shoulders—but staggering was all they needed when she’d been climbing over a pile of rubble at the time.
“You seemed pretty sure they’d send in their speedster,” said Clover, light and conversational.
The speedster, they could have taken. Taking out a lightly-armored moving target was what Robyn did for fun. In their first Vytal Festival, the Mistrali commentators had compared RGEE’s rapid-fire victory over their qualifier-round opponents to skeet shooting.
Team JSMN sending in both of their tank-built melee brawlers was a whole different story.
Excellent tactics, of course. Robyn just hated them for it.
“What are you thinking?” asked Clover.
“I’m thinking I should have brought Elm.”
“That’s very hurtful, Robyn.”
“And what are you thinking?”
“That I should have brought Joanna!”
Robyn smirked. “Well, that’s because you’re ungrateful.” She gripped Kingfisher above the hook. “We can make the pirate ship if we hurry. Slingshot on three, I’ll cover you.”
“Happy landings.” Clover braced himself—and Jade Mulberry, who Robyn had apparently not been successfully tracking sneaking around them in a completely different direction, lunged around a pillar.
“Three!” Robyn yelped.
Clover whipped her through the air, hooking her over a low arch; the angle brought her in along the surface of the next biome’s water table, letting her brake over a longer, softer surface before releasing her anchor. Kingfisher’s line hissed as it was retracted—by sheer good luck, the Fire bolt Robyn had impaled on the hook didn’t ignite until it was safely back in Clover’s control.
A glance at the monitors— yes. Clover had trusted her to leave him a parting gift, and slammed the Fire bolt directly into the face of Jade’s partner.
No time to sit around and admire the show. Running leaps were hard in knee-deep water, but Robyn clambered onto the wrecked pirate ship with the skill of an old Mantle freerunner, and shimmied up the jagged mast only a little slower. Clover was in full retreat, keeping his opponents back by using Kingfisher as a brute-force whiplash. That wouldn’t last much longer; Robyn loaded her crossbow with Ice bolts and opened fire.
Clover, after all, had lured their opponents into the open.
“Still wish you’d brought Joanna?” Robyn called down, perched casually on a yardarm as the Ice bolts created much-needed distance.
“Lucky shot!” he objected.
“Was it?” Robyn’s next attempt glanced off Mulberry’s shield; JSMN was adjusting fast to the sniper fire. “You know I can’t have you taking credit for my hard work, Clover.”
Clover looked up, grinned, and thumbed his stupid good-luck badge. Robyn slotted in a Fire bolt and shot without looking, to cheers and groans from the crowd.
“...rallying well, but pure defense is a losing strategy,” commented Dogwood over the arena comms. “Team Jasmine has very healthy Aura meters and have landed more solid hits, despite the very skillful delaying tactics being shown off by Rouge at the moment…”
“Whose side are you on?” Clover yelled good-naturedly at the ceiling.
Grey Novak laughed at that, between her attempts to take Clover’s head off with an ax.
“What I want to know,” said Robyn, firing ineffectually at Mulberry’s shield to try to create an opening for Clover, “is who the hell Team Rouge is. Haven’t heard that name in years.”
“I still say—nice try—that they should have swapped Elm and Joanna. Then we could be REGE.”
“Rage isn’t a color,” called Robyn, panting slightly with the exertion of trying to find firing solutions on heavily-armored opponents, with a rapidly dwindling stock of trick bolts.
“Neither is Argee,” Clover pointed out, infuriatingly unruffled. “‘Rage’ is a good team name! And you have anger issues!”
Robyn rolled her eyes and took aim at Novak’s unprotected face, only for Jade to pop up in her way, shield raised, swapping with her teammate to face Clover. That was good, actually; Kingfisher could tangle with the shield, and then—
The entire pirate ship shook.
“Oh, no,” said Robyn to absolutely no one, looking down.
Apparently, JSMN had two speedsters.
“...wondered when we’d be seeing that! Grey Novak’s powerful Charge Semblance, not usually very well suited for distance fighters like Ebi and Miss Hill, but a very creative usage! Disrupting the sniper…”
There was only so much all the teamwork, determination, and good luck in the world could do.
“Oh, no,” said Robyn again.
A desperate flurry of bolts scattered harmlessly off her armored skin. Grey gave a good-natured wave, backed up along the deck, and charged forward in a blur of scarlet Aura toward the mast.
Robyn ducked.
It would have been a lot more effective if Joanna’s punch hadn’t been a feint.
“You’re a lot better than you used to be,” offered Elm, once Robyn’s ears had stopped ringing enough to accept Joanna hauling her back to her feet.
“Damning with faint praise,” said Robyn, giving Joanna a wry grin and an affectionate slap on the back.
“This is why…”
Robyn groaned. “Don’t start, Short Stuff.”
“This is why you bring people into fights who can—”
“I know! I know.”
“Who can actually fight,” said Elm, helpfully.
Joanna silently held out a hand. Elm slapped it.
“We deserved that,” Clover admitted.
“You deserve a lot more than that, we’re being nice," Joanna corrected him. Then, with a smirk in Robyn’s direction, “Go again? You might get lucky this time.”
“Eh,” said Clover. “I’m not that good.”
Rolling her eyes amid the laughter of her team, Robyn snagged a towel off the back wall and flopped down on the padded floor of the training room.
Another towel flew lightly into her face. “Just remember your friends when your wrestling career takes off,” Clover teased.
“I’m making you all run laps,” complained Robyn. “I can still do that.”
A grinning Joanna crossed her arms, leaning back against a training barrier. Not one of the five separate times she’d just kicked Robyn’s ass had even worked her into a sweat. Bitch.
“Burning bridges a month before graduation?” She shook her head. “And here you’re supposed to be the strategic powerhouse or something.”
Clover snorted. “We should probably lay off,” he said with a suspicious level of sincerity. “Let’s be realistic. She’s gonna have General Ironwood’s job in twenty years.”
Elm laughed. “As if. I’ve got money on ten.”
Robyn’s smile fell.
“I don’t know,” she said, forcing a laugh into her voice. “According to all of my performance reviews, I have ‘problems with authority’.”
Joanna placed a shocked hand over her heart. “What? You?”
“It’s like we don’t even know you!” exclaimed Elm.
Clover’s lips twitched, and the fondness in his expression made Robyn’s gut clench unpleasantly.
“You call the shots,” he promised. “Me and the girls can handle the admins. Well, mostly me. Don’t let Elm and Joanna liaise with Command.”
Elm muttered under her breath about pencil-pushers.
“You still have to do your own paperwork, though,” Clover concluded. “I don’t like you that much, Robyn.”
Robyn sighed. “Guys, that’s not gonna happen.”
“Fine,” said Clover without missing a beat. “Maybe sometimes if you ask nicely—”
“Clover, I’m not joining the damn military!”
Her outburst was, unfortunately, loud enough that a few nearby teams shot them a look before returning to their own sparring.
Elm and Clover exchanged a loaded look. After a moment Elm glanced toward Joanna, looking for backup—but Joanna pretended not to see it.
Finally, Clover heaved a sigh and rested his elbows on his knees.
“Yeah,” he said. “You’ve said.”
“Are we finally talking about it…?” Elm glanced between them, uncharacteristically hesitant.
Robyn’s shoulders were high and tight; she tried to keep her voice calm, but the short, “Looks like” came out more curt than she’d intended.
Clover rubbed his face.
“Robyn,” he started. “You have to realize you’re a shoo-in for the Special Operative commission, right? Come on. You can barely land a punch and you’re still the top of the class.”
“I can—”
Joanna threw another spare towel into her face.
Robyn ripped it off and shot her a poisonous look.
“I just can’t take one,” she muttered. “That’s not the point. I told you on day one, Clover. I’m here to become a Huntress and get back to Mantle; as soon as I’m licensed, I’m gone. They need good Huntsmen down there.”
“Yes,” Elm interjected shortly. “They do. The entire Kingdom does.”
“I can read recruitment flyers too, thank you,” said Robyn, as mild as she could manage. Elm huffed but didn’t press further.
No such luck with Clover, who pinched the bridge of his nose. “Do you have any idea how much good you could do for Mantle with that kind of position? Why am I asking, I know you do.”
Robyn clenched her hands.
“I’m well aware,” she said quietly, “of how much good the Atlesian military does in Mantle.”
“And you could change that,” Clover said, gesturing with his hands. “Robyn, please, think about this.”
She fought the urge to clench her teeth. “I’ve thought about it for four years. Atlas has had plenty of time to impress me, and they’ve always come up short. If I—if we —join the military, we become one more number on a spreadsheet.”
Clover shook his head. “Don’t sell yourself short, Robyn,” he urged. “There’s more to being a Specialist than just combat, and you’re an incredible leader and an amazing tactician. You wouldn’t just become a military Huntress, you would have real institutional power in just a few years. You could use that.”
“You don’t get it, Clover.” Robyn fought down her frustration. “Atlas has hundreds of SpecOps Huntsmen and Huntresses. It might want us, but it doesn’t need us. Not like Mantle does.”
“You can help Mantle a lot better if you have backup,” Clover insisted. “And a little bit of luck. I know it’s not...the same. I get that you want to help in person, and it’s frustrating not being there. But I want to help Mantle too, Robyn. I know what—”
“No,” Robyn interrupted. “No you don’t, Clover. You were born halfway to the clouds already, and I’m a little tired of you acting like you know anything about Mantle’s plight.”
The silence of something that couldn’t be unsaid fell hard between them.
Robyn couldn’t...bring herself to regret it. Clover Ebi may have been born in Mantle, technically—but there was a huge difference between the beloved only son of wealthy uptown-Mantle professionals, born with a good-luck Semblance, and the strained subsistence of the mining districts. The hollow-eyed raw desperation in the Crater.
He’d never seemed to grasp that, not really. He’d never gotten why “helping Mantle” at the distant remove of an Atlas desk job would never be enough. Why she would never try to take the boot off Mantle’s face by lacing it on herself.
Clover’s jaw hardened. For a sick, dizzying moment, part of Robyn welcomed it.
Then, slowly, carefully, Clover stood and crossed the mat to her side, dropping to one knee.
“I know what Mantle means to you,” he said, only putting a little pointed emphasis on the end of the sentence. He didn’t, not even a little, but Robyn wasn’t enough of an ass to snap at him again for it. “Please listen to me. Robyn, you have every right to feel hurt. Atlas failed you. But we won’t. We’re your team. And I don’t want to watch you give up your career and sabotage a chance to really create peace and security in Mantle out of...misguided resentment.”
Misguided—?
Robyn stared at him for just a moment too long, for the first time in four years feeling as if she was looking at a stranger. The gulf between them stretched wider and colder than she’d been prepared for.
“Just think about it,” Clover said, softly. “We don’t want to do this without you.”
Elm hesitated as he got to his feet, and sighed before falling in with her partner. Robyn closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the wall rather than watch them go.
She’d known, they’d both known on some level, that a day would come when they would have to stop pretending the ground beneath their feet was solid. Stop pretending there was no chasm running down the center of RGEE. But knowing wasn’t the same as being ready for it. All of a sudden the veneer of pristine snow had shifted and fallen away underfoot, and Robyn was left reeling back from the lip of the gaping crevasse that was cutting Solitas in half.
There was no straddling that gap. No half measures. You had to choose a side, or it would swallow you whole. And Robyn had chosen hers a long time ago.
She’d just hoped Clover and Elm might still have been willing to jump.
“They’re never going to come with us,” she whispered. “Are they?”
She felt Joanna sit down next to her. “You know, I never actually said I was going with you.”
Robyn opened her eyes and looked over at her, her heartrate spiking for a terrifying instant. “Aren’t you?”
Joanna’s smile was small but warm. “Obviously. But I’d like to be asked.”
Robyn looked at her, really looked at her, and finally said, “I’m sorry.” When Joanna accepted the apology with a casually inclined head, she added, “Freelancing as a Huntress in Mantle isn’t going to be easy, you know. Will you come with me anyway?”
Easy, unhurried, Joanna responded, “Try and stop me.”
This late in the semester, the library was functionally abandoned.
Most of the academic finals took place earlier than the practicals—a mixture of not wanting students trying to take two-hour exams with a concussion, and not wanting students to go into combat assessments after pulling an all-nighter to cram for their electrical engineering final. The fourth-year students had their exams offset by a week to boot, so that the last week of the semester could be dedicated to reviewing their results and getting them set up with licensure, recommendations, first postings...that kind of thing.
By now even the Vytal Festival was over. One of the library’s viewscreens, muted in observance of the time of night, was playing footage of the final bout yet again: third-year Vacuo student Jade Mulberry’s defeat by this year’s champion, second-year Atlas student Harriet Bree.
Secure in the victory of their Kingdom and school, everyone at Atlas Academy was simply waiting for the year to be over.
So Robyn, holed up in a computer cubby in an empty corner, hard at work with nine days left at the Academy, was an anomaly in more ways than one.
Well.
In theory she was working.
She had the Academy database open and had pulled about a dozen resources up; spreadsheets, a few academic articles about inter-Kingdom trends, economic breakdowns of the Mantle housing market, the main sites for several professional Huntsman organizations. A watchdog site that evaluated the ethics and internal enforcement history of all major professional Huntsman organizations—with the exception of the only notable Huntsman organization in Solitas, of course. She’d tried out a few free-to-use budgeting apps on her scroll and was pretty sure she’d found one she liked.
Robyn dropped her head into her hands and tried to hold back the oncoming headache through sheer force of will.
Maybe she was overthinking it. Maybe every rookie Huntress felt like this at the end of their Academy days.
Or maybe Atlas was a broken system and the overwhelmed despair at the idea of trying to do anything outside the military was a feature rather than a bug.
The problem she was facing was that Atlas Academy wasn’t...designed for this. Students becoming military Huntsmen received their first month’s salary in advance specifically to make this transition easier; Robyn would be taking wing with nothing. And that meant she had to have a plan now, which meant…
There were too many unknown unknowns. In order to plan for anything she first had to know what the hell she would be up against. Grimm were easy compared to finances.
She lifted her head and glanced at the corner of the screen. 0120 hours. And it had been at least an hour since she actually parsed anything she was reading. The smart thing to do would be to save her open tabs to her student account, put on her big girl pants and go back to the dorm to get some sleep.
Eyes burning with the strain of staring blankly at all of her open tabs for hours on end, Robyn opened another article and subtly rearranged her notebook so that it covered the time readout.
She wasn’t…
The RGEE dorm wasn’t exactly home these days. It was easier if she just waited until she knew the others were asleep. Even Joanna, some days. If anyone was still up they all felt obligated to make small talk as if something hadn’t broken forever. If she was there and awake when one of the others came in, she felt the same obligation.
So. Here she was.
Physically, at least. Gods, she was so tired…
Robyn wasn’t sure how long she spent like that, head in her hands, brain full of unhappy static. She was only jolted out of it by someone rapping gently on the desk.
Her eyes, bleary from being pressed against the palms of her hands, took several seconds to adjust and longer to comprehend the paper cup being set down safely out of the way of her notes.
Clover didn’t say anything. He just gave a hesitant smile as Robyn stared at the coffee he’d brought her. She didn’t need to ask; she’d never actually told him her coffee order, not like Joanna, but she knew without a doubt that he’d miraculously managed to guess right.
He placed a warm, soft hand on her shoulder, gave a single reassuring squeeze, and left her in peace.
It was an apology, an olive branch. He’d gone so far out of his way to find her, to put himself through the trouble of figuring out exactly what she needed right now. To support her. To make sure she knew he cared, that he wasn’t angry, that he wanted things to be all right between them. To do it all without pushing her before she was ready.
Robyn, fingers shaking, placed a hand around the hot coffee and found she lacked the strength to lift it.
Clover really thought this was personal.
He thought this could be...fixed, that this was a fight between friends and teammates over the best course of action. The kind of thing that could be talked out until they agreed to disagree.
This late in the semester, the library was functionally abandoned.
Robyn was grateful for that. It meant there was no one around to interfere as she buried her head in her arms and cried.
She’d been hoping for a few minutes to take some deep breaths and mentally review her arguments for what she knew was going to be an uphill battle; but no such luck.
“Miss Hill!” Ironwood’s smile was warm and friendly. He must have heard the elevator chime, assuming he didn’t have a live feed of the damn thing, because he was waiting at the door to his office by the time Robyn was halfway across the atrium. He stepped back, one arm extended to hold the doors for her, and waved her through. “Please, come in.”
“Headmaster Ironwood,” she returned with a polite nod of her head. “I’ve been looking forward to this.”
She had not. That was a lie.
But Ironwood took to it readily enough. “I’m sure you have, Miss Hill. These last few weeks before graduation are frustrating; I remember. Don’t worry—you’ll be in the field before you know it.” He sat down behind the desk; Robyn, deciding not to comment just yet, tucked one leg under herself and slid onto the significantly less comfortable chair across from him.
Ironwood smiled. He also pulled out a crisp white cardstock folder containing two or three sheets of paper at best. All of those things combined were concerning.
“Normally,” he told her, “these career consultations are fairly uneventful. We discuss the various specialties available to military huntsmen or Special Operatives—as if everyone in the Academy hasn’t been familiar with them for years by now, from your own research as well as your classes. You tell me what branch of the military appeals to you, I pull up your grades, and we decide your first deployment together based on where your interests and abilities intersect. All very standard. You, however, are a special case.”
Robyn lifted an eyebrow. “Am I, now?”
He leaned forward, steepling his hands together, his expression still very warm and open. “Miss Hill. You came here with no formal training, no history, no advantages, with practically nothing but the clothes on your back. And from that you have become, without a doubt, one of the finest graduates this Academy has ever seen.”
Oh boy. He was going somewhere with this. “Well,” Robyn said, deliberately light, “I still think my close-combat skills could use some work. Hope you weren’t watching my doubles round.”
That got a good-natured chuckle out of him. “Miss Hill, I think everyone was watching your doubles round. And I don’t think it was quite as bad a showing as you must feel, but I shouldn’t need to tell you that there’s more to being a Huntress than your performance in an arena brawl. You certainly have a reputation of being...outspoken about such things. I think most of the complaints I got from your professors just boiled down to ‘she’s smarter than me’.”
“And I think that’s giving a few of them too much credit for self-awareness,” Robyn tossed back, voice light. “I appreciate your willingness to work with me, Headmaster. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. I wrote down a few questions I was hoping you could help me with, about how to get established as an independent Huntress—”
He held his hands up good-naturedly. “Hold on, hold on. I haven’t gotten to the good part yet. I can see how you would find the structure of the traditional military a bit...restrictive, given some of the disciplinary incidents that have brought you to my office before.” He chuckled again, like that was a private joke between the two of them. “It’s certainly a change from what you must have been used to—”
Robyn dug her nails into the armrests.
“—but I’ll be blunt, Miss Hill: you’re in no danger of becoming just another grunt. You have an aptitude for command that deserves to be nurtured. With that and your...particular skillset, you could rise very high in a shorter time than you’d think.”
Robyn stared at him for a moment, as something unpleasant began to percolate in her gut.
“What exactly do you mean by my particular skillset, sir?”
“You’re a natural leader,” Ironwood responded frankly, as if he was surprised she needed to ask. As if just under twenty-five percent of Academy graduates hadn’t also been identified as natural leaders. “You have a keen sense for tactics and diplomacy alike. I certainly have no intention of stifling that by placing you under the authority of anyone less intelligent and perceptive than you already are; and I think we both know you can function at your best with as much red tape removed as possible.”
He opened the cardstock folder and slid her a single piece of extremely high-quality paper. Robyn didn’t touch it.
“On paper, the title is Special Operative,” he said evenly. He was still smiling. “But the terms of the commission itself provide...greater leeway than is typical. Higher intelligence clearance, of course, among other...perks, to streamline your work. No more artificial barriers in your way. I know how deeply you care about the safety and security of the citizens of Atlas. I’m asking for your help in safeguarding that—on a much higher level than street patrols.”
Robyn sat very still, and forced herself to keep breathing, and did not let the furiously shaking fingers inside her gauntlet so much as twitch toward the trigger.
Her particular skillset. Eliminating artificial barriers, as if she was stupid, as if she didn’t know that translated to ‘no accountability’. All of this glowing praise of her record, the jocular manner, the blatant buttering-up about how she could be anything —there was only one thing that he really wanted from her. Of course there was.
“You want me to be an interrogator.”
His complete lack of reaction was answer enough. “The potential to—”
“Thank you for your consideration,” she said curtly, flicking the edge of the paper so that it slid back across the desk but she didn’t have to touch it. “But I fully intend to go where I’m actually needed.”
Ironwood sighed, and Robyn nearly shot him after all.
He sounded, at best, mildly disappointed. As if this were...as if she were his favorite TA and she’d just requested a transfer to another department, and not as if he’d just put in a casual requisition order for her soul. As if what he’d just dangled in front of her was a tempting, comfortable offer and not an abomination.
What happened to people who breathed the air up here for too long? How could anyone, any Huntsman, get to the point where they felt anything but revulsion at the suggestion that they forget the Grimm and the suffering and become a glorified—
“Well, Robyn,” said Ironwood, as if this was still a friendly conversation. “I hate to lose you. But I suppose I can understand the urge. You spent your whole life in Mantle, and aside from the last Vytal Festival in Mistral you’ve been in the Academy your whole career. It’s entirely understandable that you want to see the world a bit before you commit to any kind of permanent posting. If you’re determined to freelance for a while, I took the liberty of writing up a contract with our Argus base.”
“Did you really,” said Robyn, voice like ice. Ironwood either didn’t hear her, or pretended not to.
“Or I can put in a good word with Ozpin, if Vale is more to your tastes. I imagine he’d like you.”
“How very thoughtful of you. But I’m actually intending to go freelance here. In Mantle.”
Finally, finally she got a reaction. It was barely there, a slight frown, but it was something. At the very least Ironwood seemed to finally be picking up on the fact that this conversation wasn’t going the way he’d planned.
“If you intend to stay in Mantle,” he said, irritated and confused, “then you may as well accept the officer’s commission. One soldier alone down there can’t accomplish more than getting in the way.”
“I’m well aware.” Robyn sat back in her chair, arms crossed. “But I came here to become a Huntress, not a soldier.”
“And the highest calling of a Huntress is to defend the helpless against threats they cannot fight themselves. You’re being offered an incredible opportunity to do good.”
“It’s strange.” Robyn’s eyes flashed. “You can’t actually interrogate Grimm.”
“This Kingdom faces threats far worse than just the Grimm.” The friendliness in Ironwood’s voice was freezing faster than rain in the crater. “It’s clear that you came into this meeting with a few preconceived notions—”
“It’s a career consultation, Headmaster,” Robyn snapped. “Not a military recruitment drive. All I want is answers to a few questions about freelance work in Solitas. Commission rates outside of straight bounties; inter-Kingdom connections, coordinating temporary teams, establishing a presence—what kind of on-hand supplies I should stockpile—”
“Miss Hill,” he said, voice hard. “If what you really want is to protect the citizens of Mantle, the best thing you can do for them is to stop letting your pride interfere with your judgement. Stubbornness is not always a virtue.”
Ah, there, now it was pride and not predisposition for command, of course it was. Amazing how fast being above artificial barriers turned into mere stubbornness. “With all due respect, General, you keep bringing up that I grew up in the Crater. I’ve seen with my own eyes just what the Atlesian military does to protect people down there. I don’t think it’s arrogant to not want to become part of the problem.”
“I don’t know what you think you’ve seen,” said Ironwood, low and furious. “But I would expect you, of all people, to appreciate the need for reliable, humane methods of information gathering. I expected you to want to oversee those operations personally. Of course, quiet behind-the-scenes work doesn’t have much glory in it.”
“But it has quite a lot more torture that you’d like to put a friendlier face on, right?”
Ironwood’s eyes flashed. “We do not—”
“Oh, I’m sorry, what should I call it? Does enhanced interrogation sound pretty enough?”
Ironwood’s jaw tightened. For a long moment, they glared at one another across the desk.
“Do you,” he bit out finally, “have any idea how—”
“Let me guess,” Robyn spat. “How lucky I am, how stupid it is to pass up this incredible opportunity? Are you going to tell me I’m ungrateful, Headmaster? Because I’ve never heard that one before. Try something else original, like how I’m untrustworthy. Naïve? Foolishly idealistic, I got that in the margins of an essay once—”
Ironwood interrupted her, voice hard. “I would go with something more like selfish.”
Robyn— damn him, he’d actually gotten her on the back foot. She blinked rapidly, flinching back from the desk, incredulous. “Self— what?!”
“You decided at the mature and intelligent age of sixteen that you wanted to be an independent Huntress, just like in all the fantasies and storybooks,” said Ironwood, voice dripping with condescension. “And yes, Robyn, it is that obvious that you fudged your age on your Academy applications. You’ve built an identity around this idea of the noble rogue, the loose cannon, going solo to ‘fight the system’ as some kind of heroine; and now—”
Robyn half-stood. “I’ve never said anything like that! The only way real change happens in Mantle is through a community—”
“And now that you’re faced with the choice you would rather throw away an incredibly valuable opportunity than accept reality! Yes, Miss Hill, I do think it’s selfish to be so obsessed with making your own rules and commanding your own team without oversight that you refuse to even consider a high-ranking military position.”
“You’re offering me a position that doesn’t have oversight from anyone but you!”
He actually heaved a sigh. “You would still be accountable to a system, Miss Hill, as I myself am subject to checks and balances from the Council.” He sat forward again, anger still clearly present but making an effort to sound reasonable. “Freelance work...oh, the notion is romantic, certainly. But in reality it’s an inefficient system; it breeds desperation, burnout, too much compromise, little ability to do any real prioritization. I don’t want to see you end up with that kind of bad reputation just because you got your hackles up at the idea of working for the government.”
Robyn’s hackles really did go up at that. “I’m not the one emotionally invested in whether or not I work for the government.”
“All I’m saying is that you are too good to waste—”
“—on Mantle?”
Of course Ironwood sighed again and tried to protest; but Robyn was done. She’d expected pushback; this was too far. She shoved away from the desk and got to her feet.
“I know what I want to do with my life,” she snarled. “And I know where I want to do it. This was supposed to be an advisory session with my headmaster, to help me get started. Are you going to answer my questions or not?”
Ironwood’s eyes blazed with an intensity that might have been frightening if Robyn had actually cared what he thought of her. “This is an advisory session,” he said, a parody of calm, “to discuss potential opportunities and career paths within the Atlesian military. Anything else lies outside the scope of this meeting. Which is over, Miss Hill.”
Robyn pressed her mouth into something far too bitter to be termed a smile. “That’s what I thought. Good day, General Ironwood.”
Ever hopeful, Joanna elbow-dropped her suitcase again.
No luck.
Joanna, forced to reluctantly give up on the hope that creative folding would allow her to violate the laws of physics, sighed and began pulling clothes out of the suitcase. She hated having to travel with more than one bag, but at least the Atlas Academy duffel was pretty easy to lug around.
Well, if she was going to have to pack more than one bag she might as well take as many of the clothes as possible out, actually. They’d fit better in the duffel, and then anything heavy would be in the hard-sided suitcase with wheels.
Not that the wheels worked since that Nevermore incident, but—never mind.
Technically, none of the fourth-years actually needed to stick around. Their final marks were in, finals were over, graduation was in two days; most students stayed in the dorms until the ceremony, but you didn’t actually have to.
Hell, you didn’t have to go to the ceremony at all; the two of them had already signed a lease on a decent studio in Mantle, and the only reason Robyn was even considering going to the Academy commencement was that it would force the entire faculty to be nice to her in public one last time. Joanna was still a big fan of skipping the whole thing and just having Atlas upload the damn credentials remotely.
Depending on how hard Robyn was setting Ironwood’s office on fire right now, that decision might get made for them.
Joanna, admitting defeat and acknowledging her limits, did not attempt to stuff ‘just one more’ shirt into her mildly creaking duffel bag, and managed to force the zipper closed without incident before turning to the rest of her belongings.
“How do we have so much stuff?” wondered Elm out loud, making Clover give a wry laugh of agreement from among his personal effects.
“Things, uh...pile up over four years,” he agreed. “Does anyone know who this Beowulf bobblehead even belongs to?”
“It’s not mine,” said Joanna, hands on her hips, performing intricate spacial calculations in her head.
Weapons maintenance and first-aid kids went first. Textbooks...well, most of those she’d be happy never to see again. She should probably keep the Illustrated Guide To Rare And Exotic Grimm just in case...a field medicine pamphlet...would she really miss the encyclopedias, or was that just nostalgia?
All of Robyn’s secondhand history, economics, and psychology books were her problem, Joanna had no idea how they were gonna transport that miniature library—
The door opened with a whir of servo motors.
One look at Robyn’s face told Joanna everything she needed to know. First and foremost, that Robyn had never hated the automatic doors more in her life than right now, when she clearly needed something to slam off its hinges.
“...So,” said Elm into the sudden silence. “I guess it didn’t go…”
“It went exactly how I expected it to,” Robyn said through clenched teeth. “Just not how the General wanted.”
Clover shifted, nearly reaching out—and Robyn’s gaze shifted just slightly to meet his.
Whatever he saw there, the words Clover Ebi had been about to say died on his tongue. For a long time neither of them moved; Robyn with one fist clenched inside her gauntlet, Clover holding a silk Academy tie between his hands. They didn’t speak. The tension around Robyn’s eyes changed minutely; Clover’s jaw almost, but not quite, twitched; his shoulders lowered, while she ever so slightly lifted her chin.
By the time Clover finally sighed, an invisible portcullis had long since lowered, ice and steel, down the center of the room.
No one wanted to be the first to speak into that kind of freezing silence. So, finally, it was Joanna who cleared her throat.
“Robyn,” she said, to no obvious effect—except that Robyn was listening to her, and if someone put a gun to her head Joanna couldn’t have said for certain how she knew. “Give me a hand. I need to get this stupid thing closed. Have any duct tape?”
Robyn looked at her, smiled, and crossed over the line.