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Princess and The Dragons	By : RWBYRemnants Category: +M through R > RWBY Views: 1054 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: RWBY is not mine and I make no money from this fic

Chapter List
- 24
- 25
- 26
WARNING: graphic injury, in the form of burns

=Chapter 25
Monday morning, Yang was back in school. Her arm was out of the sling, but she had a note from her doctor that stated she couldn’t play any basketball for a few more weeks. Weiss was more surprised that Yang had a doctor, but was reasonably sure the note had actually come from Salem or Watts rather than a “normal” physician.
It was nice seeing her in the hallways again. Though they still had to act as nonchalant as they could, they couldn’t seem to resist a wink here, a kiss blown there. The Dragons were all bemused and fully aware of the situation, but all others hadn’t a clue. It was the most delightful secret.
Pyrrha and Ruby sat with the Dragons at lunch. Penny didn't seem comfortable joining them yet, and Ruby and Pyrrha were still a bit nervous themselves, but it went far better than expected; they only got teased a half-dozen times, and Yang only had to glare at Cinder once for hitting on her sister. As the lecherous girl said, “I don’t care if she’s your sister or Lucille Ball’s; she’s a doll.” Still, she refrained from then on, especially given how horrified Ruby looked with that smouldering gaze fixated upon her.
Once classes let out, they met up by the row of motorcycles. Blake nodded for Yang to hop on hers, but Yang hesitated.
“What about Weiss?”
“She can get her own bike.” One of her trim, black eyebrows hiked higher. “I’ve been wondering when she would, actually. It’s part of the deal.”
Coco snorted as she revved. “C’mon, Ilia doesn’t even have one yet.” As predicted, the mention of Ilia shut Blake up. “I’ll give her a ride. Velvet’s out with her parents, driving in the countryside or something.”
“And Fox is busy,” Cinder purred with a smirk. Coco stuck her tongue out at her. “Maybe the little Schnee should ride with me. I’m quite warm.”
“Ride with Coco,” Yang said with her eyes narrowed at Cinder, who pretended not to notice. “Come on, time’s a-wastin’.”
As they rode through Vale, Weiss tried not to think too hard about the body she was wrapped around this time. It was Coco Adel. They barely knew each other! Before she and Yang started “making whoopee”, she wouldn’t have thought twice about being so close to someone of the same gender. Now, just knowing how close their hips were to each other, feeling her wrist bump the underside of a soft breast when trying to readjust her grip…
“Hey,” Coco laughed as they came to a stop sign. “Cool it, Schnee. I don’t bite.”
“Oh, I know! I know that.”
“Well… not unless you ask.”
That didn’t help. Unfortunately, an uncomfortable ride with Coco turned out to be the least of her problems.
They could see the smoke even before they made it close enough to know where it was coming from for certain. She saw the others speed up in front of her, and then felt Coco do the same. A sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach told her that any hope she had that it wouldn’t be what she thought was in vain, but she held onto it all the way there. Desperately hoping she wasn’t about to have her heart broken.
No such luck. The blazing flames going up from every window in Shopkeeper’s made for a horrifying sight, indeed. At least a dozen Dragons were ranged around the building, some of them already having hooked up a fire hose to one of the nearby plugs and trying to put it out as best they could. The heat was unbearable, and Weiss held a hand in front of her face on instinct as they approached.
“Hey!” Yang shouted, coughing and wiping at her face. “What the hell’s goin’ on?!”
It took a moment for one of them to approach - it was Vernal, Weiss realised. She had been pacing around the building, watching the windows for any signs of a way out. Or, perhaps a way in.
“We don’t know!” Wiping at her face and leaving a smear of soot, she shouted, “One of the cooks said-” A cough interrupted her words. “Said she saw a woman who didn’t belong, but she was already leaving! And the fire was… holy smokes, it was a nightmare!”
Licking her lips, Yang demanded, “Is anybody left in there?!”
“Yeah! Salem! We couldn’t get to the back room before the… the roof…”
The younger Dragons went quiet for a moment, horror filling them as they thought about losing their leader in a moment like this. Then Cinder took off running.
“WAIT!” Yang tried to run after her, but she was too fast; she dove through one of the windows with her arms crossed in front of her face, shattering what little glass was left. The fire and smoke swallowed her up instantly. “Crazy bitch…”
Weiss tugged at Yang’s arm. “Don’t you go, too!”
“Oh, I won’t,” she promised her with her teeth gritted. “Salem would beat me black and blue if I risked my life when I’m the second in command.”
“Vernal,” Blake asked in a hollow voice as she stepped forward. “My mom…”
“Not here!” Instantly, the three of them all breathed a sigh of relief. “Hadn’t showed up yet! Too bad, really-” Blake was already gripping her throat when she squeaked, “Because! B-because if she was, we... she m-might have been able to stop… this from…”
Blake let her go, shaking all over. It took her a few seconds to master herself enough to whisper “Sorry” before she paced away to sit on the curb, hugging her knees.
Nothing happened for a minute or so, other than the girls watching the older Dragons doing their best to put out the fire. It was working, little by little, but not fast enough to salvage much of the building itself; everything of value would be incinerated by then. Then Emerald began to shrug out of her jacket.
“No, Sustrai,” Yang warned her through bared teeth. “You’re not going in th-”
“I have to see!” she gasped out, cheeks already glistening with grief. “Please, if I could save them, if I… please, don’t try to stop me!”
“We should wait until the fire department comes!” Weiss cried. When no one reacted, she turned to gape at them. “What? They are trained for this kind of situation!”
“No one’s coming, Weiss,” Coco said in a hollow voice, watching the flames all the while through her sunglasses. As if daring them to come any closer. “They don’t care about us on this side of the tracks. Probably just let us burn and then sweep up the ashes.”
When no one else made a move to do anything, or to dissuade Emerald, she ran up to her and grasped her arm. “Wait!”
“Get off me, rich girl! You don’t understand anything!”
“Just… one moment! One!”
Completely unable to believe what she was doing, Weiss threw her jacket to one side and whipped off her top over her head. More than one Dragon gaped at her - possibly wondering how expensive her brassiere was, or else eyeing what lay within said brassiere - but she ignored them as she flapped her shirt carefully in the stream from the firehose, startling the ones holding its nozzle. Then she returned to Emerald’s side.
“Put this over your head! It might… well, I think it will keep the smoke from getting to you too bad, or the fire! For a little while!”
The girl just blinked at her, confounded as she took the sodden garment. “Why… I mean, how do you know a thing like that?”
“School! You should pay attention sometimes! Now… g-good luck!”
Emerald nodded, draping it over her head and holding part of it up with one hand so she could see before she leapt more cleanly over the now-shattered window. Weiss slid her jacket back on and zipped it up this time, backing up to stand next to Yang.
“You’re really somethin’ else,” she whispered, and Weiss smiled weakly up at her. They were both terrified, but if nothing else, they could find consolation in the fact that they were together. That sure beat one of them being trapped in the inferno.
Minutes later, they spotted vague movement in the clouds of smoke. It was Emerald, wet blouse still draped over her green hair, but she didn’t have Cinder with her; she had Salem. The cloak seemed to have saved her from the worst of it all, though it would be a complete loss. Their leader was completely unconscious and needed to be passed off to Coco and Blake, who ferried her across the street.
“What about Cinder?” Yang called over to her.
“Couldn’t find her! I’m… I’m going back in!”
“You should re-wet the shirt!” Weiss shouted, but Emerald was already wading back into the fray. “Ohhh…”
Yang wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “I can’t believe this is happening. What… I mean, I thought we’d always have Shopkeeper’s. How could it be gone?”
“I don’t know,” Weiss whispered, voice full of tears even though she hadn’t been there nearly as often. But she had been there with Yang. This was just as bad as if the drive-in went up in flames, or the abandoned depot. It was one of their places. Besides, it was just starting to feel like a home-away-from-home for her the same as it was to the others; now, she would never get the chance to let that feeling deepen and take root. All stolen away from them too soon.
By someone. By someone who set the fire. Maybe it was a coincidence that there was a strange person there on the same day as the fire, but she wasn’t that naive. Not anymore.
“Where are the cooks?” she asked one of the older ladies, taking a break from fighting the fire and wiping a sheet of sweat from her forehead. She pointed her toward the far corner, where they were congregating. “Excuse me, did you- I mean, which one of you saw the stranger?”
One of the girls raised her hand. She had dirty-blonde hair and seemed closer to Vernal’s age than her own. “Why?”
“What did she look like? If she set this fire, we should probably find out who we’re up against!”
“Well…” She licked her lips, then shrugged. “I only saw the back of her. Long blonde hair, and… well, this might sound rude, but she didn’t have much of a figure. Really tall, too.”
“Not much of a figure… really tall…” Weiss tried to commit that to memory as best she could. “What was she wearing, Miss…?”
The woman finally looked a little weary of the questioning. “Saphron. And what does it matter? There are more important things going on right now.”
“Sorry, Saphron, but it might be really important later, and you might forget.”
Saphron screwed up her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know… something blue? A dress? I really don’t remember any details, I’m sorry; I barely caught a glimpse of her. It was like seeing a ghost, so I was turning to tell my Terra- I wish I had-”
“That’s alright,” Weiss told her, feeling bad for pushing so hard. “Thank you. It might not mean anything, but then again… well, you never know.”
Weiss was just jogging back over to share what she had learned with Yang when she saw the Dragons were all crowding around the window. She managed to push in close enough to see what was going on, and the sight made her wish she had stayed put.
Emerald seemed to have survived with nothing but a lot of soot all over and a few deep gouges on both of her forearms. But the form she was bent over had sustained burns all over the left side of her body, including her head. She could only see glimpses, because everyone was attempting to pat her with damp cloths, but it was the single worst injury she had ever seen in her life.
And that was without the smell.
“Cinder…”
“Weiss,” Yang croaked as she looked up at her, cheeks glistening and eyes wide. “I… what do… I… what…”
But Weiss didn’t have any words for her. She turned away and was sick in the gutter. She couldn’t ever seem to handle things like this. Was she really cut out to be a Dragon? Maybe not. Maybe entering the seedy underbelly of Vale had been the biggest mistake of her life - not because she didn’t want to, but because she would never belong to a world like that. A delicate pampered princess with a silver spoon in her mouth had no business cavorting with criminals.
Someone else must have called an ambulance, because the wailing of sirens eventually got louder. Weiss noticed that a lot of the gang paraphernalia seemed to have vanished in the interim; one of the Dragons thinking ahead, given that no less than six police cars showed up into the bargain. Though they immediately started questioning while Cinder, Emerald, and Salem were bundled into the ambulance, getting no answers - other than Saphron describing the perpetrator - meant they had nothing to hold them on, so they were allowed to go their separate ways.
“Where do we go?” Coco croaked as the sirens finally receded just as another approached: the fire department, a day late and a dollar short.
“Junior’s?” Blake suggested. “I mean…”
But Yang was already shaking her head. “They’ll be watching it. We gotta head somewhere else, I guess. I, uh…”
Weiss could see the hesitance in her eyes. The regret mingling with fear. But she was going to go through with it, anyway: Yang knew how important it was for them to have a safe space to discuss everything that had just happened and was going to offer up the depot. So Weiss beat her to the punch.
“We could go to my house!”
Coco let out a snort. “All of us rolling up on Atlas Heights? I doubt that would go very well.”
“We could go to mine,” Blake offered softly, still clearly shaken by everything. Weiss reached out and touched her arm gently, and Blake turned her hand to grip the forearm of her fellow Dragon. “I… I kind of need to see my mom right now, anyway.”
“Yeah,” Yang breathed. “I, uh… I know I’m not supposed to ride, but I’ll take Cinder’s bike. We leave it lyin’ around here, it’s just gonna end up in the impound. Or stripped bare.”
“What about Emerald’s?”
The violet eyes of the Dragon glanced over at Weiss. “How do you feel about a riding lesson?”

The lesson did not go spectacularly. Yang had shown the anxious princess how to turn the handle just so far that it would go no faster than twenty miles per hour, so that even if she did crash, she wouldn’t do much damage to either herself or the bike. Which ended up meaning that every two or three blocks, Weiss would teeter and gently guide the motorcycle into someone's hedgerow. It would have been hilarious if they weren’t still feeling so morose over the situation.
Shopkeeper’s was no more. Even if they tried to rebuild, it would never be the same; there was probably a decent amount of structural damage. And she knew there were only two likely suspects: the Huntsmen, and her father. Much though she didn’t want to think about that, she knew it was a possibility. And none of them would like that very much if it turned out to be true - or like her very much.
By the time they arrived at the house, Kali already seemed to know what was up. She unhooked the fence gate for them to park in her backyard, arousing less suspicion than if they were in the front. Then they all followed her into the house.
“Where are the other Dragons?” she asked softly. Weiss noticed she was still wearing her waitress uniform. It actually didn’t look half bad on her.
“No idea,” Yang sighed. “Three of ‘em are at the hospital.”
“Who?!” she burst out in shock.
Several minutes later, they all had squat brown bottles of beer in hand and Kali had been filled in on the entire situation. Weiss knew she would have offered lemonade if their predicament were any less dire; she didn’t seem like the kind to encourage children to drink. Coco looked the most uncomfortable, since she had been to the house even less often than Weiss, so Kali sat beside her and held her hand between both of her own to help calm her nerves. That was completely bizarre; she had never seen Coco look so nervous before.
“Alright,” Kali finally sighed in the end. “Well, as much as I hate to say this… it could have been worse. We’re all alive. Even if Cinder is… well, we won’t know until we hear something.”
While they were nodding and muttering under their breaths, Weiss cleared her throat. She couldn’t put it off any longer. “Kali?”
“Yes, dear?”
“I… I think…” Swallowing became almost impossible. “I think this is my fault. I think my father is still trying to get back at me for- f-for what my mother and I did.”
Her arms folded over her ample chest, and Yang also looked a little less than pleased. “You didn’t do anything. He tried to hurt you, and he paid the price.”
“But what if that was a price he didn’t want to pay? What… what if he…”
“Weiss…” Apparently, the prospect of trying to reassure the communications heiress was too daunting in the moment, so she simply sighed and patted Coco’s hand again. “Listen. We’re all going to be… well, I suppose the word is ‘hurting’ from this, even if we weren’t physically hurt. We lost our place. That kind of thing stays with you for a while. But we will survive. We will rebuild in a new location, and... and it might not be the same, but it will be ours again. You’ll see.”
Blake let out a scoff of pure disbelief. “Don't you think that's a lot to ask of the others? To just forget all about the pain they've suffered and act like it's nothing?”
“Yes. But don't forget that Dragons are strong. We survive, and look after our own.” Blake opened her mouth, but Kali hurried ahead, “Complaining will do no good. We should be focusing on what we can do for Salem and Cinder - and figuring out the fastest route to catching the culprit.”
That brought them all up short. Weiss and Yang exchanged a look of pure helplessness. Their problems were too big, too dangerous and too difficult for them to fix.
“Salem and Cinder will need someone there to help them fill out forms and stuff,” Coco began very slowly. “Uhh… I should probably find Sienna, put her on that.”
“That’s good,” Kali sighed, satisfied that they were getting somewhere. “Salem would have no one else.”
Blake sat up straighter. “And I could try to get the word out. The other Dragons will want to know our house is a fallback spot. Or is it? Should we find another place?”
“Well… I’d rather not try to cram a couple dozen women in this little shack. And if we go crawling to the Huntsmen, we’ll never hear the end of it.” Tapping her chin, she eventually sighed and said, “We’ll leave that up to the fearless leader when she’s up and around.”
“What did you say the birdie that did this looked like?” Yang asked Weiss.
“Huh? Oh… blonde, tall, wearing something blue? She also said she looked a little masculine, if I was interpreting her description correctly.”
“Let’s get the word around about that, too. Fallback spot is here, and the description.”
“Got it,” Blake said, running into the next room for a pen and paper.
“As for why this happened,” Kali sighed, turning to eye Weiss, “I think I know how we have to determine that factor. But it isn’t going to be pleasant.”
“How?”

All the way back to Atlas Heights, Weiss felt like she was in a daze. To give Yang’s shoulder more of a chance to heal, Kali drove the both of them home - first Yang and then Weiss. Though she tried to reassure her continually that everything would work out fine, and the setback was minor, she couldn’t seem to hold a conversation anymore.
Her mother seemed to be in very slightly better spirits when she walked in. Though she was still a bit unkempt and had the red, puffy eyes that were quickly becoming a standard part of her features, she was at least straightening up the living room and smiled when her daughter entered.
“There you are.” Her hands reached out for her, expression a little worried, and Weiss walked forward until she was in her arms. “I’m glad you’re home; supper’s not quite cold yet. Whitley already snubbed it, but… well, if you don’t want any, don’t worry. We can throw it out.”
The anxiety in her voice made Weiss answer, “It’s fine. Let’s see what you made.”
Pork chops with peas and carrots adorned the dinner table. Very simple fare, but the moment Weiss began eating, she couldn’t seem to stop. She had been truly looking forward to Kali’s pizza a lot more than she realised, and all the excitement had only increased her appetite now that the danger had passed. Even though her worries ensured that she didn’t truly enjoy a single bite.
“What’s wrong?” Willow asked with a furrow in her brow. “Weiss… did I do something wrong? And why haven’t you taken off your jacket?”
“Oh…” Her hand fell to the collar and she remembered the lack of shirt underneath. “I, um, ruined my shirt today on accident. Just very unsightly. I’ll change after dinner.”
Though the furrow remained, she whispered, “Alright.”
“Mommy?”
“Yes?”
Swallowing hard, she laid her silverware down before attempting to continue. “I may be late again after school tomorrow. It’s Dragons business.”
“Ah. Well, that’s alright, honey; I know sometimes social activities come first.”
“Is it really alright? You aren’t upset with me for… for falling in with a gang? Becoming a bad person?” Her voice broke toward the end, so she fell silent.
“Honey…” Her hand reached out for her daughter’s, just barely able to catch it due to the large table. “No, no. Don’t think that way! Well… I can’t pretend I was thrilled when I first found out. But in a world where your father is hurting us, and Kali is trying her best to protect us from him, I can’t afford to be choosy.” Her eyes flicked aside for a moment before adding, “I trust your judgment. If they ask you to do anything you wouldn’t ordinarily do, then you speak up. Otherwise…”
When she never finished the last sentence, Weiss nodded and squeezed her mother’s hand. “Thank you. I know it’s hard, but they really have been the best friends I’ve ever had. Well, except for Pyrrha.”
“Good Pyrrha,” she agreed with a wider smile. “But I would like to see you around the house sometimes. I… I’ve missed you so much…”
This time, when the tears started, Weiss didn’t quite feel up to trying to reassure her with her words. Too much was on her mind. Therefore, she only got up from her seat and stood by her mother, letting her lean her face into Weiss’s stomach as she sobbed herself hoarse. Maybe this was difficult for both of them, but it was still better than having a mother who stumbled around in a haze all the time.
Her father had a lot to answer for. And she aimed to make him do just that.
- 24
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Princess and The Dragons