Shadows [BUMBLEBY]

2 - Early Morning Torture

Blake stiffened awake almost an entire hour before her original alarm was meant to ring about the dorm room. Rubbing her tired sun coloured eyes, she checked her phone to see that it was only 5:30 in the morning. The moon was still out but the sun edged at the bottom of the horizon, slowly seeping more into view. The cat faunus knew she was not going to get back to sleep after her restless sleep and weird dreams, so instead she hopped out of her covers, careful not to wake her friends that snored quietly next to her, slipped on her school uniform and tiptoed into the kitchen to boil a pot of tea.

Blake yawned quietly as she buckled up the last part of her thin black belt into her skirt and tucked in the back of her shirt. She had only a half day of schooling that day, and decided she would spend the rest of her afternoon stalking the library shelves and settling down under a tree outside. Flicking the jug to life, the black haired girl remembered having a double history class, then morning break and then english class.

'Double History? Great.' Blake mumbled to herself, throwing on her red black blazer. The current topic they were studying was a fresh one, set mostly upon the history of the faunus and how people's views have shifted on them and how their DNA both differed from humans and connected to humans. Blake knew they had an upcoming assignment on the faunus, but she didn't know what it was about. She just hoped it was an individual project.

Her sensitive ears picked up the quiet pop of the jug switch flicking back off. Blake grabbed a black takeaway cup from the top shelves and shuffled over to the fridge, grabbing a litre sized carton of milk. After making her English breakfast tea, the blacked haired girl slipped on her school shoes and crept outside and into the hallways of the school, hoping to get some morning freshair before all the chaos of the students. 

She turned the corner and found that everyone was still in bed, the other dorm rooms dwead silent as expected. Most of the students did not even leave their dorms until there was five minutes until the start of class-time. But who could really blame them, the school had an undenying amount of pressure and high standard set upon the students for everywhere they walked, apart from the own safety of their dorms. 

The large courtyard came into view as Blake's sensitive cat ears twitched under her tight bow, due to the sound of the trickling water from the large water fountain set in the middle of the area. There was a single wooden bench in front of the fountain that could fit between three to four people depending on their size. There was a small framed girl with snow white hair accompanying one edge of the seat, but Blake paid no mind to it and beelined for the other end.

As she sat down quietly, it seemed the other girl did not notice Blake's presence. That could've been due to the tendency that the faunus girl had for being dead silent, or due to the fact that the pale girl next to her had her face shoved aggressively in one of the many Beacon textbooks, occasionally lifting her head to sip away at her large coffee.

Blake stole a final glance at her when the girl looked up again, only to find that the small and timid girl she was looking at was the one and only Weiss Schnee. The heiress to the Schnee dust company. The dark-haired girl had not realised how small, dainty but cold Weiss looked in person until that very moment. She was- she looked ethereal, like a true princess.

The Schnees. Blake did not have hatred for all the Schnee family, but she certainly held no trust for anyone that accompanied that last name. Jacques Schnee had married into their family and turned the mining company into some sort of sick and twisted slave and black market scheme. The mere public only saw his ways as overpriced and shady, a way to have more control over the mining business. But anyone who had been apart of the more confidential and covered up stories knew that he overworked and underpayed his faunus staff, made business with criminals for a cheap buck and even on the odd occasion sold his own faunus workers off to... thieves.