Juniper Bough Chapter 5

A fist to the skull was not how Yang saw this fight going, but the big Mistralian didn’t really care what she expected as he socked her square in the eye and left her reeling. Stars flashed, colors bloomed, and that bastard was trying to push his advantage, get her while her ears were still ringing from the blow, but Yang knew—or, at least, her body knew—to pull back and, even on shaky legs, keep him from taking her out. It’d been the coup de grace of a series of hits, but she wasn’t out just yet.

Not that the crowd, roaring and jeering and saying things her ears couldn’t make sense of, cared for her ability to stay standing. Sure, the ones who bet on her were pissed, the ones who bet against her were thrilled, that was how these fights went—but Yang very much had the sense that the crowd, no matter how they bet, was more eager to see Yang Xiao Long get paid the reckoning she’d delivered to just about every fighter who’d entered the Pit. Someone always had your number, and seeing Yang get hers reassured her audience that nobody won all the time.

Of course the pricks watching her would make it a moral thing.

He was a big guy, and unlike the other Mistralians who’d become an increasing presence in the fighting pits, he fought like a proper boxer rather than using the Mistralian style, throwing out haymakers that Yang knew she’d be feeling in the morning. Spitting some of the blood from her mouth—and hearing that aggravating click of a tooth hitting the ground—Yang raised her fists back up, ready for the next punch.

Only now, she was pissed.

The big guy took his swing. She juked—her feet were still slow from the hit to the dome, but not as slow as he was expecting, so she was able to dodge. But he wasn’t thrown off by the miss, he knew she was quick and just kept on swinging, but Yang had been learning a few things from the local neighborhood cats…

He swung. She turned, and whipped out a sudden kick square to his side. She heard the crowd react as she dropped down to give another kick square into his kneecap, painfully forcing his leg to go straight… and she swept forward, left knee rising, right into his groin. His eyes went wide. Her fist caught him in the chin, paying him back for the pummeling he’d given her at the start, and her right caught him square in the throat. Being taller than her just made the angle easier, and as he doubled over, she had a perfect angle for another uppercut to get him square in the solar plexus.

Big motherfucker thought he had her on the ropes, but Yang Xiao Long didn’t go down easy!

Nobody won all the time. There was always someone better than you. Those were the platitudes Yang had been raised with, but for today… there was still nobody who could dominate the Pit like she did.

Stumbling out of the Pit, Yang roughly grabbed her winnings as she ignored the cheers and jeers of the gamblers who’d bet on or against her. They didn’t matter. The man she just beat, Yatsun, or whatever his name was, staggering up with the help from two of his mates, he didn’t matter. Ain’t nothing in the world that mattered right now, other than getting home and sleeping off a blow to the head. Nothing better in the world than dragging herself to a good night’s sleep, too punch drunk to care about anything after a night in the- ah for fuck’s sake!

In his white coat, there was no mistaking him amongst the crowd, and the look on his face said he had something to say to her… and that he knew she didn’t want to talk to him. No way but forward, even if she didn’t want to...

“Torchwick,” she grunted.

The constable gave her a smug bow, doffing his hat in a gentlemanly manner while his eyes conveyed that he most certainly didn’t see her as a lady. Which Yang didn’t mind—she sure as shit wasn’t a lady and didn’t expect anyone to treat her like one. ‘Specially when her head was still throbbing from those punches.

“I should congratulate you,” he breezily replied, “made a tidy little sum counting on you being as hard to put down as I’ve always found you to be.”

Yang didn’t have time for this, even for him. “Here for a raid?” she asked.

He grinned. “Only if my bet lost.”

“Well, I’m glad to save you the trouble,” she responded, dryly, “So I take it you’re talking to me for the fun of it?”

He was always such an asshole. Racist, smug, preening Constable Torchwick, who thought the shield of the Constabulary made him any different from any of the shakedown gangs and dock thugs he arrested. Weiss and Blake hated him even more than Yang did, but they found him useful enough, and so now Yang had to talk with him.

She really wished Weiss was cooking up one of her blackmail packages on him. Would be a sweet day when she saw Roman squirm.

“No, I’m here on business,” he sighed, then narrowed his eyes at Yang as he continued, “The ex-wife is now involved.”

Yang cocked her head to the side, feeling how heavy her swollen bruises now made it. “Whazzat mean?” she asked, racking her concussed brain for some memory of who that might be.

Torchwick shook his head. “Forgot, you’re an idiot. Your cat would know. Suffice to say, the Mayor’s on my ass because the Governor General’s on his ass, and we’re hoping to get some good news.”

“Chat with ‘my cat’ about it, then,” Yang shot back, “Cause I handle the ground work, not whatever it is that you do.”

“Did Daichi punch the brains out of your head?” he asked before grabbing Yang by the front of her shirt and jerking her close to him. Her fists clenched, but she knew not to do a damn thing. To keep things in check. Even as her head throbbed as the rage inside her made her brain feel hot. “I’m contracting your crew to tell me what the fuck’s going on with the ‘Quarter situation,’ and it just jumped up as a priority and I want answers today.”

Yang wanted to sleep. Wanted to go home and let the concussion smother the stress and frustration that made up her job. She went to the Pits for the adrenaline of cracking skulls, but nothing in the world took her mind off of her problems like getting her face smashed into a pulp. And now she had to get to work even as her body felt like lead. Lead that had been stamped with half a dozen seals after an hour in the furnace.

“They ain’t like other cults,” she grunted, “Organized, got experienced criminals running the streets for ‘em. Got a lot of flash to keep the converts in line, then they run things like a real gang. They know the streets and know how to get results.”

“That’s what we were worried about,” Torchwick gruffly admitted, “I figured a cult would run up against the regular scum of the streets-” Yang, some of that regular scum, tensed to hear that “-and give us some in as they started meeting some friction. Or if they were just a gang, we could use the usual bribes and threats to get information.”

Yang gave him a crooked smile, feeling the gap from her lost tooth, blood still dribbling down her chin. “So you’ve got us.”

Torchwick’s expression turned cold. “Tell your cat that I need a report, things in a file I can show to my people-”

“With your name stamped all over it.”

“-so I can start putting together what the hell we’re doing on this matter.”

Yang thought about making another crack at the crooked crook-catcher, but thought better of it. She gave him a long, slow nod, then asked, “Think you’re dropping the hammer?”

He didn’t answer, just turned away to leave. Which was how Yang knew the answer was yes. At least, they were considering it. She idly imagined what it would look like when the city went to war against itself. She’d seen it before, but…  but she was tired. Too tired, and her bed was calling. She’d deal with it… tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow was sounding like a much better place for that. Today was for sleep, and if she didn’t start walking home now, she was liable to spend it in the gutter. So: home, sleep, problems tomorrow.

Just like always.

LINE BREAK BLAKE

No matter how many times she reminded herself that they were in a messy and cruel business where letting things get personal, letting a conflict become a vendetta, was the first step to her own bloody destruction, Blake could not stop thinking of it as such. Not from the look on Ilia’s face, the look that screamed that all their differences were just trivial nonsense when they had come so close to never seeing each other ever again. Embracing her, reassuring her that everything would be okay… knowing that the Juniper Bough had come so close, if she hadn’t put Ruby to watch her, almost more out of spite than anything…

And then leaving her, leaving her again, back in her safe house so Blake could get to the Snowflake and start planning a countermove with the rest of the Masque. The look on Ilia’s face as Blake assured her she’d be safe… the way her eyes said, “Don’t go,” but her lips stayed closed, her courage alone keeping her from breaking.

It was very, very hard not to let this become personal.

Half guilt for her own negligence, how close she came to losing her old friend, forever, half the shock of how quickly the Juniper Bough had moved—and how good their information was, from what Ilia had told her—Blake was in a mood that called for action. Swift and decisive and foolish, the kind that was stupidly hard to talk herself out of when she was the one facing the heat. So now that she had Ilia holed up in her apartment—the safest place to keep her for now, she reminded herself for the thousandth time, her little bolthole that not even her comrades knew about—she needed to be here to find the person who was best equipped to tell her no.

“Where’s Weiss?” she asked Yang, before she realized… Yang had been through a different kind of hell.

Her face was bruised, her lip split, and she was pressing a washcloth against an eye that was clearly swollen shut. But Blake knew Yang, knew what she did to blow off steam. It was rare to see her take the worse of a fight, but… well, everyone had someone who could land a punch on them. An attitude Yang seemed to take as well, not letting her battered body even remotely put a damper on her usual attitude.

“She’s doing setup work for another stage in the operation,” Yang replied, nodding towards the corkboard, sketches and maps of various buildings now pinned to it, “Her kind of work, the kind where none of us can exactly get in the door… think it’s making dinner plans with,” she nodded at the board, where some of the more prominent figures they’d been able to discover as members of the cult were pinned. “But until she’s back, we’re working without her.”

Blake… didn’t like that. Not that they were liable to be assaulted by the arrayed forces of the Juniper Bough before Weiss returned from whatever social calls she was making, but because she was rattled now, and that meant mistakes.

“Ah, don’t worry,” Yang said, trying to sound reassuring, “Ruby gave me the rundown.” She nodded to her little sister. Thank every ancient and fixed star that they’d put Ruby on watch. Not just to keep an eye out, but that rifle...

“Weiss has a country home,” Ruby chimed in, clearly trying to be helpful, “I bet Ilia can stay there for a while, and like, I dunno, write? At least, until this is all over.” Her eyes darted between Blake and Yang, seeing the uncertainty on their faces. “I mean, we’re not thinking that this’ll be that long of a job, right?”

“I don’t know about that,” Yang said, uneasily, “This isn’t just some religious movement that’ll flare up one month and be gone the next… It’s not that they’ve got some magical warrior woman, it’s that they’re organized and they’re organized to operate like the gangs do. They get believers and they get turf and they’re scary good at both. Like we just saw...”

Blake felt her ears twitch at that. For all Yang’s skills, they weren’t built for a real fight. They were in intelligence, and proper street fighting… it was just the four of them. But even as reason started to reassert itself, Blake’s fight-or-flight instincts were primed. And if she wasn’t going to fight, her instincts told her to grab Ilia and run.

And the one thing that would keep her from running wasn’t here right now!

“So what are you saying is...” she said, looking to start a fight to burn off some of this adrenaline, “What? Turn tail and run? Get our-”

“I’m not saying we roll over, Blake,” Yang’s eyes narrowed, emphasizing the black bruise framing her left side, “I’m saying things are deeper than I thought when-”

“You’re the one who wanted a fight last-”

“I know.”

Yang didn’t growl. Didn’t shout. Didn’t do anything like she normally did. And that shut Blake up real quick, because it wasn’t often that Yang was serious. But her words, delivered with the stony certainty of an inscription on a monument, were the last word on this.

And it broke through.

All Blake’s adrenaline and guilt and fear had her bouncing off the walls, looking for a fight against something, but when Yang wouldn’t give her one… it all became too much. The tears sprang to her eyes, unstoppable and unbidden, but they were there and they were flowing and her resolve crumbled as the memories of her last day in the Fang came back with a-

“Hey, hey, Blake!” Yang said, her busted face looking more like a gargoyle than anything comforting, but it was something to cling to as she put an arm around her, “It’s okay, it’s okay. Ilia’s safe and we’ve got options to-”

“Alright!”

Oh no.

Blake knew that voice.

“I heard there was-”

Looking up, her eyes stinging with the haze of tears, Blake saw the one person she didn’t ever want to see her in a mess like this. But there she was, eyes wide, drinking in the unexpected scene of her pulverized enforcer comforting the sobbing wreck of her thief. Weiss Schnee was right there, making Blake realize what Ilia saw, what she felt when she looked upon her this morning… and that set off the waterworks again.

LINE BREAK RUBY

Ruby was not good with emotions.

She liked simple things. Mechanisms and plans and relationships that charged by the hour, those were things Ruby enjoyed. Put her towards a goal and she’d untie all the knots that Weiss couldn’t, the ones that were about locking mechanism, automated alarms, or how much powder was needed to blow open a wall and how to time the fuze to make sure it blew up at the exact right moment. Then she’d burn off her stress by handing money to Glynda until she felt better. Easy stuff, no messy business.

This, however, was all messy business.

Blake was crying. Blake didn’t cry! Criminals didn’t cry! It was the only unwritten rule Ruby was 90% sure was actually written down! And the thing between her and Weiss, and crying in front of Weiss when she had that thing with Weiss, and Ilia was somehow important to her too, and-

It was all a lot too much for Ruby to be okay with, but also, she couldn’t leave. Because they were a gang of four, which meant ducking out would be really noticeable. So she just… looked at Weiss and hoped for the best.

“I see things are… can someone explain what’s… what’s happened?”

Yang gave Blake a gentle pat on the back and straightened up. Say what you will about Yang, but for a lunatic thug who liked hurting people and getting hurt way too much, Ruby knew her big sister would always be the rock the rest of them needed. “The Bough sent assassins after Ilia. Ruby,” she nodded towards her, making Ruby really want to shrink away, especially as Weiss’s eyes tracked to her face, “managed to drive them off.”

“Killed? Wounded?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

Ruby hastily shook her head. “No- no, course not. Just drove them off.”

“Shame,” Weiss sighed, making Ruby feel a little heated. “Would have liked first blood.”

“And where were you?” Yang asked, raising an eyebrow… maybe, her face was still really swollen because she wasn’t putting the compress on it like Ruby told her to.

“Arranging dinner plans,” Weiss said without further explanation, “And should I ask-”

“Drunken brawl, nothing to report,” Yang shrugged. “Heard from Torchwick, though.”

“Torchwick’s in on-” Weiss stopped as she glanced to Blake, wiping the tears from her eyes. She softened. Deep down, these were the moments that counted, and Ruby knew that Weiss wasn’t the merciless taskmaster she liked to position herself as. She was the person who’d go get pancakes with Ruby to gather intel, intel that could have been gathered without the pancakes, if she really wanted it.

“We’ll handle this, all of it,” she said, her voice firm and determined, “but we have to take this one step at a time. Yang, what did Torchwick want to know?”

Yang stretched, cracking her back with a loud pop. “Well, he said something about an ex-wife leaning on-”

“Hell,” Weiss said, her voice clipped and her lips pursed tight.

Yang chuckled. “Yeah, figured you’d know the score… but he said it means there’s pressure on him to get results, and I don’t think he’d go to me unless he really needed to get in touch in a real hurry.” That was true—Yang didn’t typically handle business stuff, but she really didn’t keep a low profile, especially not the way Blake could just… disappear. And Weiss wasn’t even officially associated with the Ruby Masque, being their secret mastermind and all. “I shared what we knew so far, but it sounds like all that did was confirm bad news. He wants weaknesses, cracks in the facade, actionable stuff… and he seems game for action, if I was following him right.”

“Okay,” Weiss said, “We can-”

“And Ilia!” Blake suddenly said, her words surprising her as much as anyone else, taking a second before she realized she ought to say more. “What can we do to protect Ilia?”

“I don’t want to dismiss the threat against Ilia, but I trust wherever you put her is as safe as she can be in Beacon,” Weiss said, “But the bigger matter,” Ruby noticed the uneasy twist in Blake’s demeanor as Weiss moved the meeting forward, “is that now we’ve had our first direct conflict with the Bough—no one’s dead, but gunfire’s been exchanged, and they’re going to notice that someone was backing up Ilia.”

Blake nodded. “Ilia told me that… that the thugs sent against her knew I had met with her. By name.”

Weiss sighed. “So our secrecy won’t last. And Roman wants to move up the timetable on getting results. We might have to,” she glanced at Ruby, “start ‘disabling’ some of their Sacristans or other intelligence measures, start going on the offensive to-”

“Uh-uh, no,” Yang cut in, “We start assassinating their lieutenants, then we’ve got a war on our hands.”

Raising an eyebrow, Weiss asked, “Are you the one advising against violence?”

“We already had this discussion,” Yang sighed, “The thing is-”

“Well we didn’t finish it!” Blake snapped, gesturing to Yang, “Weren’t you the one calling for us to go and beat up Nikos? Wouldn’t punching out their precious Vessel set ‘em off harder than anything we could do?”

But Yang didn’t rise to it. “If we fight Pyrrha, bloodying her nose means they’ve lost their image of perfection,” she explained, “and if we get our noses bloodied… it’s all good, we’re on their radar, but they’ve got other people looking to take a crack at her. That’s street stuff, it’s part of the game if you’re in the Low Quarters. A war is different.”

Ruby nodded, feeling that she really ought to speak at some point. “Yang knows what she’s talking about,” she said, “Gangs fight and steal from each other all the time, but when a war’s on, the rules are off.”

“How civilized,” Weiss replied, drolly, “But I think we-”

“You’ve never seen a war,” Yang said, shaking her head, “Either of you.”

Blake gave Yang an affronted look. “I beg your pardon, but the White Fang-”

“A street war,” Yang clarified, “And yeah,” she said, turning to Weiss, “you’ve seen the scuffles between gangs, maybe even got to see some of the brawls between the Malachites and the Bough when they took the Quarter, but that’s… that wasn’t a war.”

“Trust me,” Ruby added, gesturing to her rifle, “I’m really careful about how I use this. I could have killed those thugs, but I didn’t. For a reason.”

Blake looked up from Ruby’s rifle. “Always just… thought you didn’t like killing.”

It was true. Ruby didn’t like killing, but she kept that part quiet because a gunslinger who didn’t like shooting people wasn’t as scary as one who just saw it as only a part of the job. But she had a lot of leeway to hide those little details.

Yang pressed forward, leaning over the table and jabbing her finger into it to punctuate her message. “Fighting over turf, people bring out the whole gang and fight. Maybe some people get killed, a whole bunch get hurt, big street action… but that’s where it happens. Everybody comes out, and either you’ve got enough numbers to scare off the other side or you throw down. But that’s how it happens. Street fighting, shakedowns, some intimidations, but it’s about taking territory. A war,” Yang’s eyes darkened, her bruised face making her seem all the more grave as she delivered her opinion, “doesn’t have fights like that. It’s all-or-nothing, a fight for survival. Anything the other guy’s got is fair game, as is anything you have. Gambling halls get bombed, storefronts get looted, the guy who fences stuff for you ends up a corpse left in the square. It’s total war, and it’s madness. Going to war with the Bough, they’ve got numbers we can’t match, and I’m thinking they’re much more likely, a bunch of Mistralians transplanted into Vale, to not know how bad a street war can get. Which means they won’t realize that they should have held back until well after they’ve squashed everything we have like bugs.”

A dark silence passed over the room. Ruby thought about what Yang knew about street wars. They’d first come into Beacon from the countryside when the Lower Quarters were in a war, the last full-on war to hit Beacon. Ruby was too young back then to really remember, but she’d never forget the smell of gunpowder, ash, plaster dust, and blood, smell being the only sense she still had as her vision swam and her ears rang. Years later, she’d finally ask herself the question why was a boarding house packed full of day laborers considered a valid target for a bomb, but she realized that there really wasn’t an answer to that question. Whatever “strategic” purpose it served, however one gang or another was benefiting from it, the why loomed ever larger. Because it was a war, and that’s what happened in a war.

She shivered, glancing to Weiss and seeing a crack in her usually flawless facade.

“Alright then,” she said, putting up her palms, “So we’ll keep things quiet—how we always do—but we need to move forward in the operation. But...” she gave Blake a careful, but hopeful, smile, “Well, we have Ilia on our side now. We were hoping she’d give us some insight into what we should do next, and I think she’s inclined to help us.”

Blake paused. “I… I asked her to share with me everything she knew, and…” Ruby braced herself, feeling her gut churn with recognition of what was about to happen as Blake continued. “There’s… not much she knew we didn’t know already.”

“Great,” Weiss said, her lips drawn tight, the syllable clipped, “That’s… that’s just great.”

Yang shrugged. “Things happen, but… well, just gotta hope they’re not getting ready to march on us right now.”

Fidgeting where she stood, Ruby looked from face to stony face. Blake’s still puffy from crying; Yang’s still a wreck from the pits. And Weiss…  “What do… what should we do?” she asked, her eyes glancing to her rifle.

But Weiss just nodded, as though none of this even crossed her. Even in the worst, Weiss was a thinker, a planner, and Ruby could see the wheels turning as she spoke. “Plan’s still on. Anonymity wasn’t going to be a shield for long, and we knew that,” she said, running through options. Glancing around the room, she continued in a commanding voice, “I’m going to work my contact: he’s rich, Bough-connected, and apparently unhappy with things, might be able to find a crack in their structure. But Blake? I want you on the offensive. If they’re gonna be looking for us, let’s show them what the Ruby Masque can do.”

“And that means...” Blake asked.

Weiss just grinned. “So we can’t kill them. Fair enough. But we can keep focusing on how organized they are. So let’s hit their organization. Get a sketch of how they work, find the weaknesses, hand it over to Torchwick and let the Constabulary fight it out with ‘em. And if they’re that organized, it means they’ll have a central location, a headquarters… a place where we can give them a little visit and show them what we do best.”

Blake nodded. So did Yang. But Ruby was grinning. Because now, the oppressive pall seemed to lift from the room. Now she had a problem, a question of which windows were accessible, which locks were pickable, what the floor plans looked like. Things she could solve. And rather than deal with intractable personal problems… Ruby could do something.