Chapter 23: Talking Allegiances.

To call somebody a friend, one needs not know everything about them. Just enough. For some, that is their only hope and solace.

"...And checkmate."

Darius looked at the board.

His king was trapped.

And he was displeased.

Greatly so, in fact, for, alas, this was far from the first time he found his king surrounded by legions of enemy pieces (black ones, no less!), all escape ways cut off completely, leaving him no other options but to tip it over in recognition of defeat, more often than not crushing in its decisiveness. Although, to his credit, this particular session had been one of the outliers; indeed, there were several times where he had managed to put Lin's king under heavy pressure with egregious use of bait-and-switch maneuvers and some clever pincer setups. Unfortunately, looking back at the match, if he were to wager a guess as to where exactly he had lost the initiative and the upper hand with it, it would have to be the moment where he oh so smugly refused to accept the sacrifice-slash-bait offering of his Master's bishop, which had then proceeded to, bafflingly to Darius personally, ravage his backline, causing him to hastily drop the gambit he had been setting up for a good five turns and reorient his tactics before the bloody bishop cut all the way through to the king.

Alas, by the time he managed to restore his rear guard to a semi-passable state, he had lost no less than three pawns, a rook and his last knight, at which point his offense swiftly crumbled and forced him into an inevitable zugzwang, spite being the only thing that kept him going until the bitter end. And yet, contrary to how the matches usually went about, Greystone himself had naught but a pair of pawns, a knight and a bishop by the end of the session, an insignificant detail in the grander picture, but nevertheless a consolation to the boy, who, after a solid three months of playing no less than half a dozen matches every day, was utterly and completely numb to being defeated at this point. Admittedly, he may also have lost his ability to feel a solid quarter of emotions in the normal human spectrum, mostly pertaining to various expressions of joy and amusement, but it was, in retrospect, a small price to pay for being able to endure being devastated repeatedly without so much as a disappointed mug.

"I mean… I'd say 'good game', but it's kinda average, isn't it?" he sighed, pushing all the black pieces on the board over to Lin's side and grabbing the ones he had managed to fell during the game, handing them over. The set, in itself, was highly indicative of the fascination the former Chapter Master of the Atlesian wing of the Order felt towards the ancient pastime and could be described as nothing less than a work of art. The black pieces, along with the black half of the board, were masterfully chiseled by Lin himself out of obsidian hauled all the way from Mistral so long ago Darius suspected he wasn't even alive back then, while their white counterparts once comprised the skulls of a particularly ferocious breed of Atlesian bear that have made their habitat at the northernmost end of Solitus, pretty much as close to the North Pole as it gets. Unable to stand the idea of an innocent animal suffering to get himself the material for crafting his pieces, Lin forsook ivory for something more… deserved, so to speak, setting out to procure the materials himself in glorious combat. This fact, combined with at least half a shelf's worth of books dedicated solely to the fine arts of playing chess scattered around their humble domicile square in the middle of an Atlesian tundra, would cause Darius, if anyone were to ask his comment on the topic, deem this obsession of his master's with the game downright unhealthy. But he didn't. One reason for that was because aside from Lin himself, he'd have at least sixty or so kilometers to walk before he ever stood a chance of meeting another person, and the hike would not be an easy one. The other was that Darius himself, justifiably fearing being called a fucking hypocrite, was the last person to talk smack about someone else's personality quirks.

"I'm inclined to agree," Lin chuckled, taking his fallen queen and slightly spinning it in his fingers, looking at it absentmindedly. "Maybe you'll have better luck in a rematch?"

"Oh, we're calling it luck now?" Darius pinched his left eyebrow and raised it up, indicating how he couldn't even be bothered to spare the energy to lift it by itself. "...Nah. Think I had enough for today. One more isn't going to make a difference."

"Any game takes a lot of time and effort to achieve true mastery, Darius," putting down the queen, his mentor raised his finger to the skies, hammering down the obvious truths upon his disciple, who stared at him with hollow eyes. "I'm sure you are aware."

"Sure am."

"And I'm sure you are also aware that chess isn't just some game! If games were people, chess would be king! God, even, archaic as the terminology may be."

"Archaic is putting it mildly. You're off by, like, a millennium and a half," Darius sighed again, propping his head on his hand propped, in turn, on the table the two were sharing.

"Missing the point, Darius!" bringing his finger down from the heavenly heights, Master Lin imposingly waved it in front of Darius' face. What was he gonna do to stop him? "There's a reason it is revered so much."

"And I'm missing it entirely. You're right in that regard," he hummed, grabbing a queen of his own and slightly tossing it to at least somehow alleviate the boredom. "I mean, I get it that it's a complex game, but nowhere near what people compare it to."

"Really now? That's an ambitious claim to make" Lin's features became distorted by an ear-to-ear smile as he leaned closer to Darius, mocking him with great might. "Does the great Silva have some hidden insight for the lowly plebeian?"

"And what if I do?" the great Silva shrugged, flipping the queen upside down in his fingers. "Do you… actually want me to talk?"

"Oh, please," Lin kicked back in the chair, giving Darius an encouraging wave. "A good debate is always a delight, especially since you don't want to play and we just stopped training."

"Alright..." he nodded and blinked, gathering his thoughts. "Well… if we're debating, we should probably first find common ground on what we do agree on. In our case, the basis of comparison is, in my opinion, the ridiculously simplified comparison of chess to various bouts of power-wrangling in politics, business and the like, which is typically done through middlemen and without direct confrontation of conflicted sides because a) apparently ain't nobody got time for fisticuffs and b) blood's hard to wash off. We good on that?"

"We are."

"Then my first point makes the comparison fly out the window already: since we're playing using inanimate pieces and not people, there's no human factor to account for. The game is devoid of chance and human fu..." In an abrupt pause, Darius almost bit his tongue, hastily correcting himself. "...Human…. error. Ahem. Only the player can make mistakes in the match, definitely not the ones actually enacting the plan. So… there's that."

Lin chuckled.

"Even for your first argument, this is rather paltry. Sure, this line of reasoning is valid... if your scope of actions is no greater than some backstreet gang going about their business. Then yes, definitely do keep in mind that your mooks probably aren't the finest operators. But Darius, my boy," letting his hand hover over the table, Greystone grabbed a white knight and put it in front of Darius to see. "I understand your perception is rather skewed, but with your new rank you have to think grander! The beauty of chess is that it's wholly ambiguous in scope. Sure, one could think of it as just a battle between thirty two individual pieces. But let's not forget, the game was made to imitate a battlefield! This knight, you see, may very well not be a singular knight, but an entire cavalry platoon! And the greater the scale of operations, the more insignificant the consequences of an individual's failure become."

"Yeah, a platoon that only moves in an L-shape," Darius snickered. "See, even if we go along with your line of thinking - nice job shifting goalposts, by the way - we only segue into my next point. Without even mentioning the fact that both players start with an equal number and strength of pieces, which is just ridiculous if we try to apply that in real life, those pieces are all subject to the same rules and regulations, making the outcome of their actions wholly predictable. Rooks only move in straight lines, pawns only go one square a turn and even that's forward and so on and so on. This isn't how real life works!"

He quizzically threw his hands in the air in silent inquiry, almost letting the queen slip from out his fingers, something he immediately remedied by carefully putting it down on the table. He wouldn't even want to wager a guess as to what would happen to him if he damaged one of Lin's precious pieces.

"Even if we go with your battlefield analogy, there are just so many examples of extraordinary feats of commanding prowess that utterly break what few rules warfare has! General Dorran forcing his army through the Sanus expanse in 629, flanking the main forces of the opposing kingdom and seizing what we now know as the city of Mirrah, for instance. How do you put that on a chessboard?! Or that one time the denizens of Mantle set their capital ablaze to halt a particularly brutal wave of Grimm storming through the northern valleys that would definitely overrun the more southern settlements otherwise? The ones, mind you, that fed the entire kingdom up to that point! Humans aren't predictable, and if we dial back the scope to more... u-u-uh..."

Stopping his tirade dead in its tracks and grabbing his forehead in a bout of intense thought, Darius paused for a moment as the right word straight up vanished from his mind. "Intrapersonal… scale, this only gets more obvious! Our very Order is a direct testament to that, is it not? Several thousand people with extensive combat training and a Semblance any infiltrator would give their limb for! What's to stop any one of our brothers with more than a year of training to jury-rig a bomb, sneak their way past security during any council meeting and set it off right under their noses? Not that they would ever even think of doing that, of course… unless it was necessary, but just the fact that we can do this is akin to a pawn rushing all the way across the battlefield and taking out the queen all in a single turn! There needs be no buildup, no insidious schemes, no shady powerplays. All we need is a C4 brick and someone who's willing."

"Well..." Lin scratched his bearded chin, nodding in approval and giving himself a couple seconds to contemplate his answer. "In this particular, hypothetical situation, you are indeed correct. But let us, for a moment, expand on this situation, since you brought it up and since nothing ever happens in a vacuum. As it stands, the councils of all four kingdoms, Mistral especially, find it to be far more worthwhile to be our allies and to cooperate with us. Imagine, for a minute, what would happen if this scenario of yours were suddenly to come to life. Trust from the rest of the councils, current and future, gone. Our wealth of resources, both material and immaterial, a liability both to them and to us, since a great deal of our information does, indeed, come from the kingdoms' internal security services, and vice versa. Trying to sabotage the council of any four kingdoms would be a great setback to our cause, and whatever purpose this may serve, the consequences are all too heavy for it to be worthwhile. Sure, this may not be entirely reminiscent of moving pieces on a board, but Darius, you have to see that this is the same mindset employed while playing chess. It's not about moving pieces and taking others with it, it's about striking a balance between the consequences of one's actions, and setting up for moments that would benefit us most. The councils, if you wish, are a piece in our game, and we are a piece in theirs."

Darius paused.

"...You know what, fuck the chess debate. Here's something that's been bugging me for as long as I've had the mental capacity to think about this. Does this kind of thing not directly contradict the purpose of our Orders?" Darius shook his head, looking at his mentor with a frown. "Have the Orders not been established to combat the enemies of mankind regardless of circumstances, regardless of whatever rank they had infiltrated and regardless of whosoever they had managed to sway to their side, instead of engaging in this petty politicking like we have been? And… Am I not the culmination of this mentality? Is my purpose as Avatar, as a direct conduit of Her will, not to operate so far outside of any boundaries established by this world: social, legal, or otherwise, that whoever attempts to cast this world into chaos fails because no matter what conventions they may break in order to gain an advantage over others, no matter whom or what they try to exploit for that little bit of edge, I would be stronger still?"

"Is your plan to slaughter every petty thief?" Lin raised his eyebrow, staring at Darius with a hint of condescension. "Every small-time politician who decided to help himself to the quarterly budget? No matter how strong you may get, you are but one man and evil is rarely one man you could murder, or even an army thereof. You'd think that you, of all people, would know that evil is commonplace, and doesn't even have to be expressed in a desire to do bad things to people. Pettiness, greed, cowardice, pride. None of those traits are making the world a better place, but they're nevertheless present in all people… just more in some than in the others."

WIthout saying a word, Darius lowered his gaze firmly into the table, his lips pressed together and he himself utterly stumped. He had no rebuttal to that argument.

"See, Darius, for the most part, keeping the world together takes a little more than force," the man chuckled, reaching out across the table and lightly patting him on the shoulder. "Of course, trying to eradicate these qualities would mean to rewrite the nature of man itself, which is, frankly, not something we can, nor want to do. Far too bothersome. So, instead, we make sure that those qualities are kept in check amongst those who are supposed to lead humanity into the great new tomorrow. Either through… direct involvement, or at least by serving as a reminder that there is always someone watching who does not depend on them. As you can see, for the most part, it worked out rather well. More often than not, us cooperating with the governments of Remnant throughout history has led to both us and their countries prospering. However," making sure to catch his disciple's eyes, Lin continued in a much more somber tone. "In your particular case, you do make a very valid point. One that has been causing a lot of… commotion and contention within our Orders. Would you like to wager a guess as to why?"

Darius ran his hand through his hair, scratching his head as he reached the back of it, then spent a couple minutes contemplating before making the first suggestion:

"I'm guessing it revolves around the question: if the Orders have been doing such a bang-up job so far, why'd She have to choose me?"

"You reallyhave changed for the better after the pact," a wide smile spread across Lin's features as he quietly chortled to himself. "Good thinking, Darius. Yes, this is indeed the question that is on everyone's minds nowadays, both on our side and on the Church's. Along with the… more trivial ones like: how'd we miss the coming of something that needs an Avatar to be dealt with, and what do we do now?"

"So… are we doing anything right now?"

"Well… good thing you're showing initiative and asking. Yes, we definitely are. The Orders are buzzing with activity, for lack of a better word. Our brothers not currently involved in any of our affairs across the world are undergoing intensified training routines, and those that are are busting their everything to dig us deeper in and dig up as much information as possible. Our goal optimum is some of our brothers taking a council seat in both Atlas and Vale to reduce the risk of hostile infiltration as much as possible, but it'll take some more effort and time. I'll get you some reports later if you want to start immersing yourself into that early on. Still, even if we don't manage that, our current connections should give us warnings aplenty at the very first step it makes."

Darius didn't reply, sitting silently and lazily stroking his chin as he mulled over a thought plaguing him for some time now that had now resurfaced in lieu of their little argument, yet one he couldn't quite put into words.

"You seem distraught all of a sudden," perceptive as he ever was, Lin had no issue picking up on this sudden shift of mood of Darius'. "Politics not sounding as enticing as you thought?"

"No, not that..." he hummed. "It's kind of a loose tangent to what we were just talking about… but it ties into our argument about chess rather nicely. See… so, for instance, we've got this here situation where we're scrambling to pick up loose strings so that they don't get picked up by our mysterious adversary, to the point where we ourselves are trying to infiltrate the councils of Atlas and Vale before they get a chance. The councils are a liability. Their members can be… taken out and replaced with ones unsympathetic towards our cause, or even the current members can be manipulated, overtly or otherwise, to turn against us. After all, they've got families to feed, ambitions to satisfy and so on and so on."

"Well..." Lin chuckled. "That's true for every game of politics. It's all fishing in troubled waters there; your alliances only tend to last as long as your interests are intertwined. But I'm sure you understand that already."

"Sure do," Darius sighed. "But that's the thing: in chess, your pieces don't turn against you. Your rook can't take your own knight because it got dissatisfied with the pay! And… it's not like it's like this in politics alone. Like, there's a reason people say that every human is at the center of their own little world. Every human has their ambitions, desires or responsibilities that more often than not don't involve one another. Something that can be used to turn them against one another."

"And your point is?.." Lin inquired, his eyes carefully studying every centimeter of Darius' troubled features.

"My point is… well, I guess I'm only just now realizing what I signed up for… and I'm a bit troubled by it, is all. If the sole purpose of someone like me is to expediently eliminate whatever is lurking out there before it takes too many lives… why bother trusting people? Why bother trusting anyone at all aside from my brothers in the Order, who'd all been indoctrinated in the same vein as I was and thus cannot possibly be swayed by outside influence?"

Lin stayed silent.

"Master Lin?.."

"How did you come across this thought, Darius?" he asked, looking him deep in the eyes. "I understand, of course, that now is about the right age for children to get cynical, but..."

"She taught me that."

"She?!"

"Well, the Lady..." he timidly replied, slightly shrugging in uncertainty. "It wasn't directly, of course… but, you know, since I'm now able to consistently meditate through the night, we've been talking a whole lot. And also studying. A lot of studying. She's currently dragging me through the standard school program to catch up on what I've missed. But… yeah. We once decided to take a stroll through a Vacuoan bazaar and just… talked. We looked at people trading, talking to each other, having a whale of a time in general… then, some time later, we saw those same people going at each others' throats because their water source had started to run dry, causing them to start strictly rationing it. Everyone was desperate to make sure their family and friends would get their ration, even if it meant someone else wouldn't get it. We eventually arrived at the conclusion that no matter how much I think I know someone, I have to be mindful that there is a part of their life that does not involve me, but one that they may value much more than my acquaintance. She told me to think it over… so there. In essence, it's not like she's wrong, right? I can't truly trust somebody unless I can control their very livelihood… so why bother?"

A moment of silence was shared between the two as both have taken their time to carefully consider what to say next. Or, at the very least one of them, for Darius, if he were to be frank, had no idea where to go further with this conversation, taking this unpleasant thought of his for another ride across his cranial cavity. Lin, on the other hand, spoke up after a solid minute of intense thought:

"Tell you what, Darius. I understand that this is a… rather grim lesson to take out of this, but I want you to heed everything She tells you, including this. I don't know what Her plan for you is, but if there's one thing I can tell you with certainty, it's that She doesn't moralize for nothing. I'm not saying this type of situation will happen to you… but it might. And you'll have to deal with it. So… if anything, this line of thinking should make it easier for you to… rationalize it, if anything."

Darius nodded, looking straight into the table.

"But, to answer your question… Have you considered what you're going to do after your role in this is done?"

"Didn't… really have the time to consider this. You know, what with me only being a whopping two months into it."

"Understandable," Lin chuckled, kicking back in his chair. "But what I want you to understand is that the Orders aren't some cult that isolates you from the world… contrary to what it may have felt to you so far."

"Hey, I understand my circumstances were a little… out of the ordinary."

"I knew you would. It's true that many of us choose to spend their lives within the family, partly because they felt the same as you do right now. But for some, although, admittedly, not many, we were their chance to get back into the normal world. For orphans like you, for instance. Don't you want to rebuild your family's legacy?"

"I… yeah, I do," Darius stuttered, his eyes peering into nowhere for a fraction of a second, evaluating the monumental task that it would be. "That's a pretty tall order, though."

"Downright impossible to do alone, true," the old man burst out laughing. "And don't get me wrong, your family will be glad to help you, but unless you want to go down the same road as your ancestry, you're going to have to do so in the hearts of the people first before you stake out a plot of land for your new residence. And for that, you'll have to earn their trust first. Who knows; maybe for some, you'll be that part of life they value above all else?"

"That would be an incredibly novel feeling for me," the boy smirked, squinting at Lin.

"You wound me," he shook his head, struggling to recover from the devastating blow. "To accomplish that, however, you'll have to go about solving conflicts through something other than intimidation and egregious violence. Defeat your opponents without necessarily maiming them. Now, if only there was some way you could practice that. Maybe, I don't know… some kind of game that forces you to outwit your opponent by exploiting established rules to your advantage..."

Darius' gaze fell once again upon the queen that had been standing beside him this entire time.

He sighed.

"Set them."

Darius blinked, gathering his thoughts back from the steaming heap they were in caused by a mild case of scatterbrain, this four-year-old memory being one of the major contributors thereto. He sighed, reaching out to his side and grabbing a thermos of colossal proportions, bringing it to his lips… and feeling a tiny bit of his soul split off and die horribly as disappointment overcame him from the realization that said thermos, filled with scalding hot tea what seemed like just a minute ago, was now just as hollow as his gaze. Blinking once again and peering into the shiny surface of his thermos, Darius tentatively shook it in hopes of hearing the sloshing of the precious liquid within. Alas, he was met only with further disappointment.

Welp.

He put the thermos aside and, confronted by the cruel reality of the waking world, was forced to regain his focus through more traditional means, namely via an exertion of will of titanic scale. And sure enough, not half a minute later his grey eyes had once again gazed into the waking world with crystal clarity, the concentration within them gleaming with the sharpness of the finest make.

Admittedly, as it was, there wasn't actually much for him to gaze upon barring a sizeable collection of various notes, photographs and data files all arranged in an orderly fashion before him. Sitting in his humble tent, accompanied only by the quiet humming of the generator and a formerly full thermos of tea, Darius had spent the last several hours of the day in laborious study. On the surface, a most fitting time-sink for a first-year student indeed, even of such unorthodox establishment as a Hunter academy. However, upon closer examination of his subject of study, a multitude of questions would inevitably arise, as nothing displayed and otherwise scattered across the tent's surface came even close to the standard curriculum. Photographs and clips captured by Vale's CCTV network, reports straight out of Vale's Police Department, intricate and diverse documentations pertaining to the circulations amidst the underground markets; the colossal swaths of data that the Silva had been dauntlessly parsing through for the last week have all been gathered or otherwise procured by him in a determined effort to discover the motifs and predict the possible actions of the nefarious lawbreakers behind the ongoing spree of Dust shop robberies plaguing Vale for the last half a year, give or take.

And indeed, through tireless practice of the arcane arts of logic and reason, one by one patterns and tendencies slowly started to emerge, lifting the ephemeral veil separating the mundane and the hidden, granting their devout practitioner insight into what goes unseen. Yet as it often tends to be, such knowledge leaves a terrible mark upon its bearers, and as he slowly put together the pieces of the puzzle, Darius grew more and more concerned.

His brief reunion with the Order has been fruitful in more ways than one. Aside from the opportunity to have a heart-to-heart with Endymion, Darius spent much of that evening conversing with the leader of the Valean Chapter on topics as varied as they were plentiful, eventually explaining his predicament to Wilhelm in how he was rather stuck as far as his investigation went. Following up on the leads begrudgingly provided to him by Hei Xiong had only led him to disappointment when it came to establishing the escape route the leader of the raiders undertook during the one heist that got him flashed on cameras. And although the contact information provided by the Elysium's unfortunate owner that was supposed to let him get in touch with other informants that may have been of help was promising at first, attempting to actually develop this line of investigation had left him at a dead end as he was confronted by a wave of sudden… disappearances of men and women that made money selling information one couldn't get in the public domain. With many found either dead or vanished without a trace, the Silva was soon left starved for information and with no other option than to wait for the next robbery and attempt to leverage evidence from there.

Although puzzled at first as to why the academy's intelligence would saddle a first year student with this kind of assignment, Wilhelm conceded to Darius' rebuttal that he was far from an ordinary student, and eventually warmed up to his pitched suggestion that, mayhaps, this offer of Ozpin's was, in a way, an outreach to the Order itself, with Darius serving as an influence agent of sorts, providing access to some of the Order's considerable resources in exchange for some of the more clandestine knowledge that the headmaster undoubtedly possessed. Darius was certain there was some kind of outsourcing joke buried beneath all this, but, frankly, he would rather have someone else dig for it. Letting Darius know that he hoped he knew what he was doing with a short remark, the Chapter Master expressed his consent to this unexpected, but nevertheless welcome offer of cooperation, stating that the Order was, indeed, also looking into this peculiar case, generously offering to share the relevant information they had gathered so far. And boy was this information relevant indeed.

Although an indecipherable mess of CCTV feeds, police reports, various documentations on almost completely unrelated topics and field reports made by the Order's agents deployed on the case at first glance, the overwhelming bulk of the data provided by the Chapter's analysts delved rather deeply into the machinations of Vale's underbelly, closely monitoring the circulation of currency and wares, as well as keeping a wrist on the general pulse of the markets; most notable, among many things, was the fact that despite the fact that the amount of stolen Dust was slowly but steadily growing to industrial proportions, there was no noticeable surge in the internal illicit Dust trade. On the contrary, the underground markets found themselves in rather dire straits as the demand skyrocketed, spurring a growth in smuggling operations from abroad, as legal tender was nowadays nearly impossible to come by due to the ridiculous risk of investing into Dust shipping. Indeed, it has come to the point that several field reports coming from southeast of Sanus mentioned a suspicious rise in new arrivals, oftentimes accompanied by mining equipment with no plates. Several swift glances at the map let the young Silva determine that the origin of those reports just so happened to coincide with a number of Dust mines closed a varying amount of time ago due to either unsustainability or the risk of mining in that particular area. A rather telling sign that the perpetrators behind the raids weren't aiming to just make a quick buck by flooding the numerous markets of monochrome variety with weapons-grade Dust. And a concerning one.

With such an amount of illicitly procured Dust that was clearly intended for, quote-unquote, 'domestic use', as none of it seemed to have been smuggled outside of the kingdom, a question subsequently arose: where would one even store this? With the Dust stolen being either crystalline in form or stored in tubes created for this specific purpose, harboring so much would require no less than a warehouse, and quite a large one, at that. And sure enough, the package presented to Darius contained several reports on… acquisitions of several pieces of real estate of considerable proportions, most of them being in rather conspicuous parts of town, but, alas, almost always acquired by an unknown source and brokered by dealers one shadier than the other. Several names among the lists of those who assisted in procurement of such property were known to Darius from the information provided by the disgruntled owner of Elysium. All of them were marked as either dead or gone without a trace, a further point of concern. With no reason to assume that any other brokers mentioned in the reports would still be there to enlighten him as to who conducted the acquisition, Darius simply marked the largest sites for further investigation.

Lastly, there was one more tendency that failed to escape his inquisitive eye, which just so happened to also be the one to cause him the most discomfort. Having vigilantly kept an eye on the news for the last semester, the Silva couldn't help but notice reports of multiple companies ceasing operations throughout the months. Unsurprisingly, said companies were, for the most part, occupying a niche in the spheres of banking, logistics and insurance. One doesn't have to be a genius to see how a recurring theme of Dust shops taking one hit after another would put some of them out of a job. The issue he had with it now was that while immersing himself in the data, certain names kept popping up here and there, more often than not unrelated to the case itself. Yet what truly had Darius shivering in a paranoiac fit was not the sole fact that an unnerving number of those names was, in one way or another, related to the companies who oh so unfortunately failed to keep up with the competition, but that they were also overtly tied to some… very unruly entities. Valean branches of the Mistrali triads, drug rings from Mantle, homebrewed Valean syndicates, even. Filth, all of them, doing their shady business for as long as the city stood, if Darius' research was anything to go by. But now… there was commotion. A lot more than one would usually observe. Massive swaths of cargo shipments going out of Vale and literally anywhere else: Atlas, Vacuo, rarely to Mistral, even. Key assets being put to the knife and stowed out of the city. High-ranking figures suddenly taking lengthy vacations abroad or undergoing 'management reshuffle', putting some no-name in their place and taking off to Grimm-knows-where.

Rats fleeing a sinking ship.

Still, as nerve-rattling as the circumstances surrounding this otherwise unremarkable, if persistent, case may have been, progress was being made. And although the motivations behind the raids remained unknown and thus highly disconcerting, shuffling through several police reports detailing the crime scenes and witness testimonies left little to no delusions when it came to their identities. Multiple interviews taken from the unfortunate owners of the Dust shops had fairly explicit mentions of the assailants having undeniably… bestial features, like hands covered in crude green scales, disproportionately large fangs and even a flanged tongue that one of the robbers flailed smugly at the terrified owner. Combined with the fact that all testimonies but one described the thugs as wearing white-red face masks covering the upper half of their faces, the allusions to the White Fang could not be any more obvious. As much as Darius felt his blood already beginning to boil from the mere mention of this wretched cabal, he would deny himself the pleasure of taking out his anger in the armory via an unscheduled workout session, if solely due to the fact that this would severely impede his investigation due to how often he'd have to blow off stress. Admittedly, however, the appalling lack of tea in his possession had every chance to prove an even greater hindrance if not remedied posthaste.

Still, even if there wasn't much he could do to stop the perps right this second, plans could nonetheless be set in motion, which they were. With the remaining unravaged Dust stores rapidly investing in armed security, something that a certain security company could definitely benefit from, the number of easy targets for the White Fang and their unlikely assistant was shrinking rapidly, increasing the chances of successfully intercepting the robbers in the act in equal measure. Darius also estimated that, with a bit of help from the family, he would be able to single out the properties acquired by the robbers within two, three weeks maximum, at which point conducting a brief reconnaissance run before tipping off the police would be as trivial as brewing a cup of tea.

Alright, you know what, just go and make yourself another thermos already, you're going crazy.

For once in complete agreement with himself, Darius grabbed his empty thermos and effortlessly hoisted himself up from the tent's floor and left it, inhaling a chestful of chilly winter air. Although paling shamefully in comparison to its Atlesian counterpart, this year's unusually cold weather gave it a damn good run for its money. Taking no more than five steps towards the rooftop's edge, Darius expunged all the air stored up in his chest cavity with a single forceful exhale… before completely losing his shape, now but a puff of black smoke slithering its way down the nearby tree and through the narrow slit of the window left oh so graciously by the girls just for him. Having fully entered RWBY's dorm room and restoring his fleshy visage, Darius threw a passing glance around the room, scanning both for any subtle changes and for any members of the aforementioned team that might be there. Yet as his head eventually turned to face left of the window, his errant gaze was met by a pair of glowing amber eyes, looking at him in silent inquiry, with a hint of mockery glinting deeper inside, amplified further by the left eyebrow lifted just a little above the right one.

Now, normally one would expect said pair of eyes and eyebrows to be attached to a face, which, in turn, would typically be attached to a body. Luckily, both were the case this time around and, coincidentally, both were on the list of things that Darius would rather look at just a little longer than was entirely necessary to acknowledge the individual in possession of said face and body. And while the latter was in plain view for him to see, currently laying in her bunk, the lower half of the former was obscured behind the book Blake was holding. Upon slightly closer examination, it became clear that the book happened to be the one with which Darius attempted – successfully so, at that – to bribe his teammate into hating him slightly less. At the same time, however, Blake hastily put the book away upon realizing that was what Darius was staring at.

"Hi Blake." As the seconds ticked away, it dawned upon Darius that, once again, he'd have to be the one breaking the silence. With that, he accompanied the greeting with a curt nod, feeling the edge of his lips distend ever so slightly. "Am I interrupting something?"

"One day you actually will, Darius", she groaned, propping herself up on her elbows and assuming a vertical position, now sitting cross-legged. "You're going to rue that day for the rest of your life, I promise you that much. Seriously, is it really that hard to knock before coming in?"

"Kinda," he shrugged, enveloping his free palm in smoke and then attempting to slap himself in the face with it, fruitlessly so as his shadowy limb just swished right past his face, slightly distorting in its shape. "Especially when you don't have a solid fist. Besides, the windows are still see-through. You could've at least closed the curtains, I would have noticed that much."

"Changing the subject," Blake cut him off. Heeding the change in her tone, Darius made the executive decision to just go along. "Weren't you studying? Thought you weren't coming out of your hole for at least another two hours."

"That was, indeed, the plan," Darius reaffirmed his teammate before confessing his plight. "Unfortunately, I'm fresh out of… refreshments." He shook the hollow thermos in his hand, before pointing towards the kitchen door. "So I decided to remedy that and brew some more. Should I make some for you?"

Blake narrowed her eyes, squinting heavily at Darius, trying to pick up any semblance of a hint that this was his intention all along. Darius, in turn, eagerly accepted this challenge to a stare-off, donning the most innocent expression he could muster, his face a perfect mask of purity and childlike naivete. It didn't fit him.

With a heavy sigh and a longing glance towards her book, Blake untangled her legs and stood up from the bed, the entire situation eerily familiar to her.

"Well, you've killed the mood already. Might as well reimburse me with some tea."

"I humbly accept your conditions."

"Sleazeball."

"You wound me."

As the two proceeded into the small, tightly packed kitchen present in every dorm room of the academy, Blake took a seat at the table surrounded by five sturdy-looking chairs, while Darius stepped up to the assortment of racks and shelves taking up one of the walls in the room and got to work, pulling out various jars and cans packed chock-full of dried herbs for which he may or may not have been raiding Beacon's greenhouse for the entire semester. Most of them needed plucking anyway, with many strains having grown into proper bushes without supervision and crumbling beneath their own weight when Darius first took a stroll through the greenhouse. He simply rationally judged that they were better off dried and tossed into his tea than withering and wasting away. Nobody seemed to mind.

With movements and measurements repeated and rehearsed hundreds of times throughout his studies, it took him no more than three minutes before a teapot full of steaming dark brown liquid stood before him, an overwhelming herbal aroma spreading through the room with the kettle as its centerpiece. About half of the kettle went into two obscenely large cups, followed by a generous slice of lemon and three teaspoons of sugar in each: a preference in tea the two, surprisingly enough, shared. The remaining half was emptied into his thermos and sealed. He'd have more than enough time to add the remaining ingredients after this unexpected, but nonetheless welcome intermission.

"Tell me the truth, Silva," Blake smirked, eyeing up the cup Darius put in front of her, before taking a hearty chug from it. "You just creeped on me and waited until I pull out the book so you could ruin everything, didn't you?"

"You have to understand," the Silva pleaded, imbibing of his own beverage. It was great, as usual. "Tea is great, no doubt about that, but drinking it alone is just soul-crushing, and no one else on this team drinks it! Do you even know how crushed I was when I found out that even Weiss, a fellow Atlesian, prefers coffee to tea?!"

"To be fair, Atlesian tea might just be more tasteless than paper," the Faunus remarked, eliciting a tormented sigh out of her companion. "And those moneybag Schnees probably wouldn't drink any other sorts."

"I… cannot refute you," Darius' shoulders drooped as he grabbed the mug once more, attempting to drown his sorrow in copious amounts of tea. "You're joking, but this might not even be that far from the truth."

"At least you guys know your way around herbs," she placated. "Suppose that makes up for your lack of decent tea."

"Ehhhhhh, this kind of savvy is less common than you think. Though, admittedly, this would be a lot better with some stuff from the Solitas taiga. Thornberries don't really grow in local forests."

"True, I suppose. But then… How would a Silva come across this kind of knowledge?"

I guess I did walk into this one.

"Consider this an offshoot of my fancy with all things living," he shrugged, immediately grasping the opportunity to steer the conversation away from the sensitive subject. "And while we're talking about things that are living… Yang isn't still doing laundry, is she?"

"Of course not," Blake shook her head, slightly furrowing her eyebrow as if such heinous proposition somehow offended her as well. "She dropped it off about an hour and a half ago. She then said that we're no fun and that she'll go hang out with Juniper since we're so busy studying."

"We?.."

"Weiss said she refuses to study anywhere but in the library," Blake expanded upon the topic, answering Darius' yet unasked question. "Ruby… kinda just tagged along."

"And you…"

"And I treasure my alone time. Not everyone gets a tent all for themselves. Uch…" Blake winced. "That came out wrong, didn't it?"

"Ehhhhhh… Just about right, I'd say," Darius shrugged, not bothered by this little blurt in the slightest. "I get what you mean." He then smirked. "However, I could offer you to swap places if this bothers you so. The tent's certainly large enough to accommodate you."

"You won't survive the night," Blake grinned. "Yang will rip you to shreds the second she thinks you're looking at Ruby. Or at least she'll try to."

"Yes… that may be problematic," Darius conceded, once again powerless to refute Blake's reasoning.

"I mean… It's not that it actually bothers me. Sure, I've got to get away from people from time to time to recharge, but overall… Having company, for once, is actually rather nice," after a couple seconds of silence, Blake suddenly spoke up, her voice entirely devoid of the mischievous spark that had been accompanying it for the entire conversation. From both the numerous lessons in human behavior he'd had with the Lady over the last years and from his comparatively short acquaintance with Blake, his very gut sensed she was completely sincere in this moment. "You know… having people who enjoy their time with you because it's you. Not because there's something tying you together that you've got no control over. You understand what I mean?"

Darius paused.

"Well…. I could argue that technically, we are stranded together because of circumstances we had no say in and that we just came to know each other due to prolonged exposure to one another…"

"You can tell that to Cardinal."

"That is true," he nodded. "Which is why I won't. I… I definitely relate to what you're saying, though. Having friends is rather novel to me, too. It is… pleasant."

The two spent the next five or so minutes just sitting in a surprisingly comfortable silence, slowly chugging their tea and splitting what remained of a chocolate bar that just so happened to have been stranded all alone on the table. Darius could not possibly know what Blake was thinking of, yet he himself couldn't help but to mull over a faint hint of an idea that, although vague and incoherent, firmly lodged itself in his mind and refused to let go. As his mug eventually showed its bottom, he had no choice but to carefully put it down, combating a sudden shaking feeling in his arms, and took a breath noticeably deeper than was required to maintain a normal breathing pace.

"Say… Blake?"

"Hm?" He saw her slightly tilt her head, looking at him quizzically, and for a fraction of a second, he could've sworn he saw the bow on her head twitch ever so slightly.

"I realize this question is somewhat out of a left field. But… since we started talking about friends all of a sudden, I feel like I have to ask: do you consider me one?"

He had no reason to suspect otherwise. Nor was there even the slightest chance that Blake would notice there was something wrong with him based on his body language. Years of exercising in restraint and his own passion for acting made sure his body remained in the same relaxed position and his voice would not waver for a millisecond. Yet nevertheless he had to exert considerable effort to keep his breathing at a standard pace and to force the churning in his chest to subside, standing up to a turmoil inside him that had no logical reason to exist. Unfortunately, considering who it was he was talking to, he doubted even that would be enough.

"You… sure can keep a straight face when talking about that sort of things," she quietly stated as her nostrils flared just a little wider than normally, reaffirming Darius in his suspicion. She held out a pause before continuing, yet as she did, he saw the far corners of her lips edge towards what could, if observed under an electronic microscope, be interpreted as a semblance of a smile, a far cry from her usual smirk when conversing with people. "Certainly better than I can. Yes… I do," she nervously chuckled, as if struggling to believe her own words. "Dad would have a heart attack if he heard this."

A nigh irresistible urge to shoot his eyebrows straight into his hairline overwhelmed Darius, and only gathering all of his willpower into one infinitely tight knot allowed him to keep his expression unchanged despite the sheer shock. Of the four members of RWBY, he was yet to hear a word about Blake's family in any way, shape or form. This confession, however involuntary it might have been, was a clear indication to him that whatever got Blake into this charitable state (he did, however, suspect it was the copious amounts of mint in the tea), this would be his best, if not only, chance to enlighten himself further on the girl's obviously troublesome past. Or, at the very least, put some of his stirring suspicions to rest.

On the outside, his only reaction was to slightly tilt his head and narrow his eyes, closely studying Blake's now vaguely aloof features as he cautiously pushed further.

"You miss your family."

"More than I hoped I would, ye…" cutting herself off mid-sentence, Blake's gaze regained focus as she peered straight into Darius' eyes, her own widening in terror. Rapidly blinking a couple of times to get her bearings, she slightly shifted in her chair, her pose now much stiffer than mere seconds ago. Throwing a hasty glance at the table, or, to be precise, at the cup standing at her side, she gulped down what little remained in it in a single, ragged chug, putting the mug down with unsteady hands and a deep exhale. She nervously swallowed, attempting to stare down Darius as he maintained eye contact with her, yet proved unable to withstand his piercing gaze, lowering hers into the empty cup and utterly failing to muster a cogent rebuke.

"You still don't trust me," Darius sighed, lightly shaking his head as he leaned onto the table, head propped up by his hands, looking at Blake with sorrow in his eyes. He couldn't blame her; if anything, he would be the last person to blame someone else for keeping their secrets to themselves. Yet still this stung. More than it had any right to. And Darius struggled to find the reason for this.

"It's not that…" she muttered. "Anything you want to ask, you can. Just… not this."

Darius didn't answer. This information was not vital to him. In fact, it was downright useless for any purpose except to confirm what he already suspected to be the case, and, frankly, with how obviously talking about this distressed his friend, this was all but confirmed. He didn't need to push her. He shouldn't have pried. The both of them seemed more than comfortable with a friendship built on mutual ignorance.

You know you'll have to open up after this. You're more than likely to lose even this little.

He knew.

Through no measure known to man could he claim he had a reason to push this further.

"Asking… usually doesn't get much out of people," he began, purging all errant and disruptive thoughts from his head, now streamlining all of his brainpower towards a singular purpose. "And I can see this is a… very sensitive topic for you. I won't pry."

He saw a weak grin timidly spread its way across Blake's features.

"I… appreciate that, Darius."

"Instead, I propose a little game," Darius continued, wiping the already faint smile off her face completely, now replaced by a grimace of concern. "A guessing game of sorts. I'm going to ramble for a little, and when I'm done, you get to tell me whether or not I'm completely full of shit. Sound fun to you?"

"I don't like where this is going… but the offer is enticing."

"Wonderful," he rubbed his palms together, a tenacious smile occupying half of his face. "Let's begin then. We shall henceforth establish the known before we begin with the speculation: you're a feline Faunus attending Beacon academy and undergoing Hunter training. You admitted to the former and anyone around here can attest to the latter. Sound good?"

Blake didn't answer, drilling Darius with her narrowed eyes.

"I shall take this as a 'yes'. Now is where the guesswork begins. Now, don't take this the wrong way, but you're clearly not from Menagerie. Never minding the accent, the denizens of that land carry a particular sense of pride towards their heritage – to hide the fact that they're Faunus is crazy talk there. However, your desire to hide this identity of yours and – no offense – your ineptitude at doing so is a major telling factor. Namely it means that you yourself are rather new to this concept and didn't have to do it before enrolling in Beacon. This, inevitably, raises a question: where'd you get the training to be able to endure the grinder we're put through here? Don't take this as empty flattery: your skills are quite exceptional, something I'm sure you're aware of. Following me?"

Blake didn't answer.

"Well, I hope you do. So, the question is: how? Last I heard, there are no Faunus-majority combat schools in Vale, and if you were to attend a normal one, you'd have infinitely more expertise in disguising yourself as an actual human than this amateurish bow. There is, of course, the possibility that you decided to hide your ears in the stretch between leaving combat school and enrolling in Beacon, but this just makes no sense. The only logical answer to this question is that you have spent most of your life among your fellow Faunus, which is where you got your training. Your weapon further attests to that: as sturdy and efficient as it is, no argument there, it consists of at least four separate parts scrounged up from several different sources and hammered together on someone's knee. It's obviously not factory-issue, nor is it a gun-nut's custom-made wet dream like Ruby's Crescent Rose. You try your best to avoid talking about your past, clearly either too ashamed of it yourself or afraid to tell us for fear of alienating us. Or Weiss at the very least."

Blake didn't answer. Nor was she looking at Darius anymore. In fact, her attention seemed to be focused entirely on the cup she was twirling in her hands, yet the odd position of the bow on her head signaled clearly that that was a mere façade.

"So, to sum up: you spent most of your youth amongst Faunus who drilled you well enough to square up to a Hunter's routine of training, after which you left them and refuse to bring them up in any way, to the point where you are afraid of even appearing as a Faunus because you're certain you will immediately be linked to them. Yet considering that your stance on certain talking points almost perfectly echoes that of the White Fang, it seems to me that it's not the cause you've been disappointed by, but rather the lengths they would go to further it. You grew disillusioned with the prospect of murdering your way past your problems, perceived or otherwise, and decided to begin anew, putting your skills to a cause that did not involve killing people. Am I right?"

Blake did not answer.

Darius did not continue.

A minute passed.

Five of them.

As the sixth minute began to tick, Darius had no choice but to once again break the thick silence hanging between them, lest this conversation end without the closure it so desperately needed.

"Blake… I don't know what you're thinking right now. But I want you to realize that at this point, everyone but, perhaps, Ruby suspects the same thing because this bow is not fooling anyone. The thought process is likely a little vague, the logic chain is missing a few links here and there, but the sneaking suspicion is still there. If this is what it's like when there's just the two of us, what's going to happen when the rest of the girls inevitably starts asking questions to your face instead of behind your back?"

Although maintaining her silence at first, Darius saw Blake shift in her chair a couple seconds later, taking an uneven, ragged breath. As she began to talk, he couldn't help but notice that her hands were shaking.

"When the news first broke… when we first got the news that the Silvas have been massacred… I was celebrating. All my brothers and sisters in the den were so happy those damn Silvas finally got what was coming to them… I'm pretty sure we stayed up all night just making merry and whatnot. I thought that this was how things should be done. That we'd see real change if we showed them we were actually serious about it. But my father was… he was of different opinion on this. Mind you, he still couldn't stand your father, he opposed him with every fiber of his being… But when he learned about this, he just said we proved him right. I disagreed, of course… that argument didn't go well, let's just put it that way. We mulled it over within a week, of course…but it's not like the Fang went away or anything. Time went on, we got into more fights about this sort of things. After about a year I just packed up and snuck out. Left Menagerie, went to Vale, got in touch with the guys there," another breath. Yet this one was more reminiscent of a whimper than of a sigh. Blake grabbed a nearby tissue, swiping it across her eyes. As she put it down, Darius noticed it was quite wet. "I wanted to be the change, you see. I wanted to make our equality happen. But time went on, change wasn't happening, and the bar for justifying murder was lowering and lowering. At some point, I distinctly remember decking some guys who just happened to be unfortunate enough to be guarding the supplies we needed. But… the worst part was that it didn't seem to bother anyone but me. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who were fine with shedding blood for the sole reason that doing otherwise would be inconvenient, nevermind something so trite as collateral damage. So I ran... Should've run sooner…"

Admittedly, Darius couldn't vouch for the correct interpretation of the last several phrases uttered by Blake, for at that point, the girl devolved into an incoherent mess of shuddering and sobbing, incredibly uncharacteristic of the usually stoic Faunus and thus utterly dumbfounding to Darius, at the very least on the surface level. He fully realized that one doesn't turn to a life of a Hunter for shits and giggles, and considering this particular part of her upbringing, it would be foolish to expect somebody trained this well not to have her hands stained in blood up to her elbows.

But he'd be damned if he were hypocritical enough to judge her for that.

Still, simply seeing somebody of such mental fortitude in everyday life break down so completely felt disheartening. Painful, even. His studious side knew that attempting to calm her down through simple words would be a futile effort, and, quite frankly, he wasn't even sure there were words in any of Remnant's languages, alive or dead, that could stop her right now. Certainly none that could come out of his mouth without reeking of double-think of the highest caliber. So instead he simply raised himself from the table and swiftly grabbed another tissue from the shelf. With that done, without uttering a sound, he took a seat next to Blake at the table, put the tissue in front of her, and gently laid a hand on her left shoulder.

Although not acknowledging the contact at first, likely due to simply not noticing, at some point the slightly added pressure on her left shoulder eventually prompted Blake to shift her focus from wallowing in self-pity to whatever was weighing her down. And as her eyes traced up the familiar-looking palm all the way into his grey eyes, he saw the entire spectrum of emotion flash through her eyes several times over, going from shock to confusion to indecision to embarrassment to this empty, hollow look of pure exhaustion, upon which he saw her kick back in her chair, taking in one more deep, ragged breath, and putting that tissue he brought to good use. For now, he let go.

"For what it's worth, I understand how you feel, Blake. I do not judge you. And no matter how poorly this may go over with the rest of the team, there'll still be one person in this academy you can call a friend."

Blake looked at him, her eyes completely raw. She sighed, blinking away the remaining moisture in her eyes, and quietly said:

"Th… Th-thank you. This means a lot to me. Truly. But… how? How can you just… sit here and take this?"

Darius sighed.

"Do you really want to know?"

Five seconds later, a quiet answer followed.

"…No. Not now, at least. Forgive me. I know this is inconsiderate, but… I don't think I can take this nearly as well as you."

And I pray I never have to find out.