Fear could be a funny thing. It could paralyze one in a single moment, the shock of a sudden burst of terror overriding all other bodily functions. It could leave the victim trapped in a state of observance, stuck in a single moment and unable to process that time was still moving forward. They saw nothing but the instant of the fear, the moment it appeared in the mind and spread to the body. It could also do the opposite; fear could make people do things they'd never imagined. It could spur them to fight against impossible odds, confront that which they thought they never could in a fit of anger. Fear and rage were intertwined, and one was never far from the other. For Roman, it did both. He wanted to move, yet couldn't. He felt rage and terror, a desire to act and the inability to do so. He felt torn; he felt his body being pulled painfully in opposite directions. It made him feel sick to his stomach. The sensation was too fast and too intense for him. As the metal door flew off its hinges in a storm of flame, he fell to his knees and vomited. It was a bubbly, white substance; there was no food to regurgitate, as he hadn't eaten for almost the entire day. He stared at his vomit as he knelt in it, refusing to look up. He knew who was standing at the door. Blake had found him.

"Roman." The voice rang in Roman's ears, calm and devoid of any kind of typical fury, but it was horrible all the same. He could hear the same quiet rage she had the last time they met. It was a meticulous anger, the kind he feared more than any other. She was waiting, he knew. It shocked him almost as much as it scared him. She was prolonging the moment as she stood passively before him, torturing him emotionally before she began to harm his body. He wanted to stand, to begin the fight as soon as possible, but he couldn't. For a good minute, he knelt on the floor. Blake looked at him; he could feel her gaze, and yet he never looked to meet it.

"Well?! You gonna get this over with?!" Blake gave Roman no response, no satisfaction.

"Come the fuck on! Gut me, rip out my eyes, shove your goddamn gun up my ass and pull the trigger! Just do something, because I know you're fucking gonna!" Silence.

"Just...just do it...stop staring at me like that!" Roman closed his eyes, not bothering to hide the tears that started to form. He was a mess; he'd been a mess for days. There was no use in pretending he was in control of anything anymore.

Twenty minutes were stretched to an eternity. Blake moved in small, calculating steps, coming closer and then drifting back away. Every time he heard her move he flinched, unwilling to open his eyes and see what she was doing. She stepped towards him, once even leaving the room, watching him from beyond the doorway as he sobbed, lying on the ground. Her gaze was not unlike that of a scientist examining a test subject, a gaze of natural and incredibly subtle dominance. It was a look she'd picked up from Adam, and if Roman had bothered to open his eyes he would have seen movements that seemed to mirror the former head of the White Fang. He would see the pacing, the staring, the small but noticeable gestures that beckoned fear in their beholders. Yet, what he couldn't see, he could feel. He felt Blake's Aura, a terrifying and unrestrained presence. Every passing second saw an increase in its intensity, and his horror. It was an Aura he'd felt very few times before. He felt it from Cinder, he felt it from Adam, and now Blake had the same soul-devouring presence about her, the same dominant power. But she was methodical, so unlike her wild Aura. He tranquil fury would seem at odds with it, and yet Roman knew otherwise. Uncontrolled actions were the releases of anger. Calm showed a desire to hold onto fury, a desire to dole it out sparingly so that it would last as long as possible.

"You haven't looked at me for the past twenty minutes."

"No! No," Roman cried out, so happy to have the silence broken that his voice cracked and came from his mouth in an almost jubilant shout.

"I don't see why you should have eyes if you don't plan to use them." Roman, at those welcome words, found himself almost smiling, his tears now representing his joy. He knew what Blake was going to do, how she would start her physical torture and his inevitable demise. He could predict his suffering. He could see it coming. And, after thirty agonizing seconds, his eyes opened with shock and pain as Blake thrust her sword straight down between his legs.

"Morning, sleepyhead." Blake stumbled out of the hallway, emerging from between dark brown walls into a more spacious kitchen area with a cream-colored floor, ceiling, and sides. A small round table sat in the middle of the room, adorned with two plates stacked about six centimeters high with waffles, each batch lightly covered with maple syrup and a dab of yogurt on the top. Small bowls filled with various fruits were placed in a circle in the middle of the table, and each plate was side-by-side with a glass of orange juice.

"Since when did you learn to cook?" Blake asked teasingly, although she was genuinely surprised that Adam could make such a visually appealing dish.

"Since I started having to. I'm not gonna be here forever, you know," was the reply. The kitchen counter looked cleaner than it ever had, and Blake admired Adam's precision in his tasks.

"And what did I do to deserve this meal?"

"You helped me get back on my feet. I was...in a bad place for a long time. I would have stayed in that place and died in it if it weren't for you. So...thank you. This can't possibly represent how glad I am that you let me keep being a part of your life, or how grateful I am for you never giving up on me...but it's all I've got to work with." True to his words, Adam had been in a bad place. He'd never been a kind man, or a man given to mercy, but he'd been so angry for so long that he transformed the White Fang the same way he'd transformed himself. He corrupted it, corroded away its core foundations and replaced them with the instability of destruction and subjugation. His Aura ate away at his mind the same way he ate away at a once peaceful organization, representing peace and equality for all faunus. Blake had hated him and feared him, but upon seeing what a wreck he became when she left the White Fang, she couldn't let him keep destroying himself.

"Sappiness doesn't suit you, but I appreciate the attempt. Though, if you really want to thank me, all you need to do is make good on your second chance." Blake gave Adam a short but tight hug, and greedily sat down to enjoy her breakfast. Adam looked at her for a bit before sitting down himself.

"Mm! These are really good!" Blake was once again surprised by Adam's apparent culinary prowess.

"If half of Vale didn't want me dead, and the other half didn't want me behind bars, maybe I'd be a chef. I can cut things up well enough," he replied nonchalantly. His black humor, sometimes too dark for Blake, was something she supposed she'd have to deal with. He never was the most sensitive of people.

"I kind of want you behind bars when you say disturbing things like that," she retorted, smiling.

"You think I could pull off the jumpsuit?"

"...No, your hair's too ridiculous to work with it."

"Ouch." Blake and Adam continued to eat their food, the meal punctuated by casual jokes and small talk. Eventually, however, they had to leave. Blake had her duties as a Huntress to attend to, and Adam was going to work on a construction site, helping to repair areas that took serious damage from The Fall. He didn't like the job, but he couldn't be picky, what with his track record. He jokingly thought to himself that perhaps he'd come across a building he destroyed.

Adam and Blake left around roughly the same time, with Adam heading out earlier to make the longer commute to his new workplace. Blake planned to spend her few minutes of down time checking her weapon, an small habit picked up from Ruby. She sat on a white couch in a brown room, her feet resting on a glass coffee table and her ammo cartridges lying on a pillow beside her. The door was nearby, and as Adam left it, he turned around and waved.

"Goodbye, my love." He left before Blake could register what he'd said and scold him for it, so she was left on her own, with feelings of unease and regret. Again, his dark sense of humor unnerved her. He used to mock her with such romantic japes back when he was in the White Fang, even before she had ceased being a part of it. At first, it had been amusing. She even played along. But soon, such jokes came to be much more sinister, both to her and Adam. They felt possessive, dominant, and during his White Fang days, he had developed a possessiveness over Blake. Hearing him say such things again made him wonder how much he'd really changed, and what she really meant to him, but she pushed such thoughts aside quickly. Adam had taught her how to live in a world that didn't want her, even if those teachings were aimed towards a despicable end. He was her mentor, once, and her closest friend long before she had met her teammates. Just as they had accepted her for who she was, she would accept Adam. He had once been the most important person in her life; she couldn't have made such a bond based on lies.

Blake woke up in her own springy bed, in her own shoddy apartment, next to her own wooden night table, to the annoyingly sharp ringing of her own phone. It was eleven in the morning, as today was a rare and welcome respite for the soldiers of the Trenches. She had planned her visit to Roman so that she would be free the next day, free to stew in her thoughts if she found her nerves too frayed by her deception. Yet she had no such concerns. She felt lighter and more energetic than she had in a while, as if a burden had suddenly been lifted from her back. No one would find Roman, nor Melanie and Miltiades. She had seen to that. No one would be able to say that she'd been out and about around the time of Roman's disappearance, if in fact the authorities ever suspected that he hadn't simply gone off to some other continent. Only Ren, Nora, and Sun would know the truth, and she trusted them. In fact, it was Ren who was calling.

"Hello?" Blake picked up the phone, sounding unnaturally chipper. Even on a good day, her tone of voice tended to be calm and relatively light on emotions. Ren seemed surprised to hear her sound so happy.

"Um...hello. I was just calling to ask how you were, but you sound perfectly fine. I'm...I'm glad everything went well." Blake knew that Ren was just glad she wasn't being arrested. He had been more fixated on the consequences of her actions as opposed to the benefits they would bring, and that was understandable. Ren wasn't a particularly emotionally-driven person, and he certainly wouldn't know how vengeance could be so cathartic.

"I am, and I owe it all to you. You, Sun, and Nora."

"I'm glad we could help. Anyway...that's really it. I was just worried. If there's anything you'd care to share in more detail, I'd be happy to come over at some point, perhaps tonight. Nora and Sun, of course, would love to come along."

"...No, I'm fine. I would like the idea of getting together, though. Perhaps we could invite everyone else as well, plan a dinner or brunch or something like that."

"Alright, that sounds great. I do have to get off, though, so perhaps we could plan later."

"It's fine; I'll take care of it. Tell Nora I said hi."

"I will. Goodbye."

"Goodbye." Blake hung up the phone, smiled, and hopped out of bed and went to the nearby closet where she kept Gambol Shroud. Before she started her day, she felt a strange desire to look at it for a while.

"Hurry up. The transfer vehicle leaves in five minutes." Cinder calmly and leisurely strolled through empty, bleak hallways on her way to leave the prison. In front of her, five other prisoners walked with hunched backs and faces titled towards the ground. She, unlike them, had her back straight and her head held high, with a small but dangerous smile visible for all to see. Her excitement was tightly restrained; she had always prided herself on being difficult to read. The guards escorting them saw nothing, facing either away from her or towards her back. No one saw her face, a face alight with a smile that no one, herself included, had seen since The Fall. She was among the group of six prisoners who were to be reassigned to different facilities as part of a government initiative to get more inmates into new prisons and avoid overcrowding. Primrose had made sure her name was on the list of transfers.

"My apologies. I'm a little drowsy," Cinder replied, a hint of a smile in her voice. She often toyed with prison staff and inmates alike, saying one thing and acting in a contradictory way, and speaking and looking like she always did was just a part of her act. It was an act that disguised the plan she had set in motion. No longer did she possess the skill afforded to her by the likes of Emerald, Mercury, and Adam. She had no contacts who would help her; those ties were severed with the death of Roman. And these days, no one could say where Neo had gone. She vanished like one of her illusions, and Roman was the only person who could be expected to know where she'd went. If Cinder was right, Roman was either dead or going to die at Blake's hands, so she supposed the mute woman would stay hidden for good. Yet Cinder had love on her side, a weapon as powerful as any kind of fear, hatred, or ambition. Primrose was so pathetically, hopelessly smitten with Cinder that it almost seemed cruel to use her so frequently and dangerously, but Cinder regretted only a few things in her life. Having a new pawn wasn't one of them.

"Everybody in the transfer vehicle, single file." Four guards stood around the prisoners, forming a rectangular shape, as they were ushered into the truck like lambs. Cinder and the other inmates piled into the back, and the gray metal doors swung shut behind them. After a few minutes, the vehicles began to drive. Two police cars trailed the truck, driven by the four guards, while two more sat in the front of the truck. Cinder waited for about five minutes before, with a chilling grin, she blasted a fiery hole through the truck, rolled out, and set the police cars and transfer vehicle ablaze. The device which regulated her Aura was no longer active, another intervention on the part of Primrose. Cinder and her lovestruck ally were scheduled to meet in one of the many abandoned warehouses that she, Emerald and Mercury had once called a base of operations.

"Such sweet memories," Cinder said with a hint of cheerful nostalgia before hurrying off, her handcuffs melted on the ground behind her.

Well, it's been a freaking long time since I last wrote for this story (or on this site), and I apologize again for the long wait. Anyway, I don't have much to note about this chapter except that I like writing Blake as taking on some of Adam's mercilessness and dominance, and with the newest episode of RWBY, (SPOILERS!) I can officially say that Adam is beyond redemption and deserves to get skewered by Gambol Shroud. NO ONE SLAPS BLAKE. NO ONE! Also, he cut Yang's arm off and that's horrific as well! Anyway, because I intended him to be sympathetic in this story I wrote him as such, but I wanted to put a little bit of the canon Adam into my writing.

Still, Adam's honestly the best villain the show's got so far, and a very interesting character to boot (and although I'm reluctant to admit it, he's hella badass). With his first appearance as a full-blown villain, he's done more physical and emotional damage to team RWBY than anyone else in the show. I mean sure, Cinder has her evil plan and killed the Fall Maiden, but Amber isn't a particularly important character. Blake and Yang, on the other hand, are. Adam defeated Yang with a single attack, cutting off her arm, and his interactions with Blake were all kinds of creepy and messed up. I mean, he actually backhanded her.!That whole scene was so cruel and abusive that it made me wonder why the hell Adam let her leave when he clearly doesn't respect her as a person. To conclude, Adam is taking the show to some dark places and I like it. But eventually, he better get what's coming to him!

Also, speaking of villains, if Roman's actually dead I'm going to cry. I refuse to believe that he's gone!

Also also, how about Weiss' character development?