Any resemblance to film or book titles living or deceased is entirely unintentional, I just made shit up.

Also, this went to a somewhat darker place than I initially expected, so I'm going to stick a list of oops-that's-heavy topics at the bottom, if anyone wants to scroll down and check before reading. There's nothing at all graphic, though.

Man's Best Friend

It starts at breakfast. Jaune references a show, and all three of his teammates turn and give him blank stares. A few days later, Ruby finds out that Weiss has seen exactly three movies in her life, two of them documentaries.

When Blake admits that she never had access to a holoscreen until about two months ago, it's the last straw. Ruby and Yang and Jaune spend a few hours plotting, the pop-culture illiterates get herded into one of the first-year common rooms, and Nora winds up holding a bucket of popcorn almost as big as she is. It's half empty by the time anyone else dares to reach for it.

"We're starting with the best," Yang declares. "Silver Arrow!"

And it's good. It is. Good enough that not even Weiss complains when they binge an entire season in two days.

A human in his twenties stands at the crest of a hill, staring blankly out at the sunrise. His eyes flutter closed. A hand falls on his shoulder, and he turns his head.

"Hey, Aurum," he sighs.

Aurum smiles at him, but then the camera pans away, revealing her drooping dog tail. "Silver..."

He's worried about tomorrow, when the two of them will lead an exhausted army through a valley notorious for its Nevermore infestation. Only he and Aurum have active auras. It's based on a true story from the great war—a character based on Jaune's famous grandmother even makes a cameo appearance.

Blake wants to like Aurum. She does like Aurum—it would be difficult not to. She's kind, supportive, fiercely loyal... Silver's best friend who follows him everywhere. There to listen to him whenever he dumps his insecurities on her, but obviously never a love interest. Not when there's a snarky human in the ranks for him to fall for instead.

In an otherwise beautiful story, it leaves a bit of a bad taste in Blake's mouth. But it's not a big deal, and she did like the show, so she doesn't say anything. She enjoys the season that Yang lets them watch—apparently there's a second one, but given the way the sisters and Jaune all shudder when Nora asks, it's not very good.

Overall? Blake doesn't try to hide her smile when the others start planning do this again next weekend.

Bull in a China Shop

It's only Wednesday when the great pop-culture education initiative rears its head again. Ruby and Jaune have been trying to get Blake to read a comic book for almost a month, and they finally found one that tempts her—it's based on a book called Greetings from Underwater that she loved as a child.

Having it in comic form is... different. She spends almost ten minutes staring at the cover page, getting used to the art style and the explosion of color. It's hard to see much of the main character, Esmond, since he's using a diving helmet. Odd, considering he's a shark faunus who doesn't need one.

All is well for about the first six pages. Blake reads slower than she normally would, pausing every panel to appreciate the art. Then Esmond takes his shirt off to wade into the lake behind his house, revealing... scars. Rows of them, running in parallel to his ribs.

Did the artist not research what faunus gills look like?

No. No they did not. Because six pages later, the comic explains that he got the scars from a close run-in with a shark years ago, and that's why he's not sure the love interest will want him. The self-acceptance message had already been a little hamfisted in the book—replacing him with a human makes it feel downright ridiculous. Were they worried their human audience wouldn't know that aquatic faunus exist?

She gives the next page a last, cursory glance, and groans out loud. Somehow, it gets worse. There is a faunus in the comic after all—a six foot tall bull faunus with, thankfully, curly brown hair that isn't at all familiar. But the character is. He's the love interest's body guard or something, Blake's skipped quite a bit of dialogue by now so she isn't sure, but she can tell that his lines are all in roughly the same vein.

"Dunno. I just do what he tells me."

"I'm the muscle."

"Would you drop the math crap? I had enough of that in school."

Near the end, there's a panel of the bodyguard hunched over, his face twisted with rage, his shirt shredding right off his shoulders. The many shades of red in the background do not escape her notice. Neither does the focus on his horns.

Blake doesn't even get the satisfaction of slamming a book shut. She tosses the comic onto a table in the middle of the library and walks out empty handed.

People always expected that from Adam. A big, dumb faunus. Just the muscle to someone else's brains, ready to fly off the handle at any second. And every time he got angry, he knew he was proving them right, and that made it worse. So it fed on itself like that, and festered in his shame until it ate him from the inside.

Or maybe that's just her making excuses again. Maybe he always liked hurting people, and she was too swept up to notice.

Blake escapes from her thoughts into a book. By dinner she's stopped obsessing about the comic, and by the time she gets ready for bed she's put it out of her mind completely.

The next morning, she finds Jaune reading it in the common room.

It's not his fault. She's pretty sure he's never read the book, so he doesn't know.

His eyes light up, and he starts to laugh. She goes back to the room and locks the door behind her.

Hush, Chatty Monkey!

Yang probably only suggests playing Destiny of Remnant because she wants to watch Weiss struggle. Blake surprises herself by agreeing to join the rest of her team, even though she was in the middle of a chapter. She sits next to her partner while Ruby explains the rules.

They're supposed to be a team of Hunters, apparently, on an epic quest to fight hordes of mutated Grimm. The story is mostly just there to prop up the fighting mechanics, but the game is apparently famous for having lots of extra dialogue that changes depending on which characters are in play.

When they get to the character selection screen, she spends a few minutes dithering. There's only one faunus—out of about thirty options, which, okay—and he actually looks quite a bit like Sun. Blond, monkey tail. Abs. So she picks him, thinking it might be fun to hear his dialogue.

It is not.

"Oof! Man, who put that door there?"

"Hey! Look at all this cool science junk! I'm gonna go look at my fur under a Mikey-scope!"

"Twenty billion lien? That's, like, a hundred bananas!"

Blake tries to ignore it and focus on mashing the Grimm into pixelated paste, and doesn't say anything. It's not like the dialogue for the other characters is much better—every other word out of Yang's boxer's mouth is "Booyah!" and Weiss' fencer has a horrific fake Atlesian accent. The gameplay is fun. She can just pick a different character next time. A human character.

Or maybe next time she'll stick with a book.

Sacrificial Lamb

It's Ruby's recommendation first, but Yang lights up when she mentions it. It's called The Foot of the Maple, and when Blake reads the book jacket she almost fumbles it in her excitement. One of the leads, Ewan, is a sheep faunus, and she doesn't see any red flags skimming through the summary.

Maybe it's a bit sad that she's so excited, but she's used to conspicuous absence, bad stereotypes, and the occasional decently written side character. So she curls up on her bunk that afternoon and ignores the rest of the world for six hours straight.

The maple was gone, by then. So Finnegan knelt by the stump and stroked Ewan's hair. It was as soft as he'd always imagined, like touching a cloud, and a tear fell onto his forehead. He opened his eyes and smiled.

"Hey, Finn?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm glad I came here."

The day's last sunlight turns his skin the color of honey wherever it touches him. The bruises disappear in that light—but nothing can hide the scarlet flower at his chest, spreading even as he whispers...

She hardly even registers the sound of her teammates returning from dinner. Then Yang jolts her out of her reverie. "Hey, you finished! What did you think?"

Blake tries. She really does try to pretend that it's fine.

"Blake? Are you okay?" Yang sits down next to her and puts a hand on her arm. "I'm sorry, I should've warned you it hits pretty hard. When I read it to Ruby I used to stop on page one-sixty-eight."

"It's fine." She wipes her eyes and looks away, not wanting to see the others' reactions. It's just a book. Just a book her partner loves.

"Hey." Yang nudges her side. "Talk to me?"

"I don't want—I'm just frustrated, and I don't want to get into it."

"You didn't like it?" Ruby asks.

And gods, now Blake feels like she's kicked a puppy. "I did." It's not a lie, exactly.

"But?" Yang prompts her.

"I don't want to complain about it." Blake pulls her knees up to her chest. "It's not that big of a deal, I don't want to ruin a book you like."

Not that you would, a treacherous part of her thinks. She probably wouldn't care, anyway.

Yang pulls her into a hug and says, "I like you more."

With her team looking at her like that, what can Blake do except try?

"Okay... to start with, it's not really about the book. It's about this same story that gets repeated over and over. Whenever you have a human-faunus couple in a book, or a movie, or anything, it always has to go wrong somehow. Usually if the faunus has traits from a carnivore, they turn out to be abusive or untrustworthy, or they kill the human. If they have traits from an herbivore, someone has to die. And nine times out of ten it's the faunus."

"Oh," Ruby says, her voice small.

Blake can't seem to stop. "And it's always this—this pity party, for this poor innocent person who did no wrong and wasn't like those other ones, and isn't it such a tragedy that they were doomed to live this short and pointless life!"

Yang squeezes her shoulder, and Blake hates the guilt and shame that bubble up. She wanted to like the book, it isn't her fault that human authors only have about six faunus characters...

"I'm sorry," Yang says. "It's something we read as kids, I guess I never really thought about it like that. Now I know, so—"

"Yang. Don't."

"Blake—"

"Really." Blake forces herself to make eye contact with Yang, then Ruby. "I meant it when I said I didn't want to ruin it. And it's not this book's fault. I just... had a lot of bitterness stored up. This was better than most books out there. It's just that it was so close to something I would have really liked, but then it turned into this same thing that I'm so tired of—"

She stops herself before she can start ranting again.

Ruby considers that for a minute. Then she grins and says, "So... lets find something you really like!"

On the Prowl

The first thing they try is actually Weiss' idea. Blake doesn't hold that against her, even though it goes spectacularly wrong.

Crepuscule has a lot to recommend it. It's an award-winning play, and Blake sees a blurb on the poster about how the faunus lead won something for her performance, too. Weiss knows absolutely nothing about the plot, but somebody brought it up at one of her father's parties and everyone tore the poor guy apart, which seems promising.

It also means Weiss can't pay for a ticket—not without him noticing the charge on her card and going ballistic. Which is an issue of its own, and Ruby is definitely going to bring it up later, but they manage well enough. Blake, Ruby, and Yang each pay an extra third towards her ticket, and Weiss insists on treating them all to dinner afterwards.

(She also leaves more than a hundred lien in tip, to compensate the waitress for Blake's somewhat disruptive rant.)

Things start off well. The lights dim, there's a musical number, Yang pulls about twenty pounds of smuggled candy out of her jacket for them to share. Then, with a flourish, Ariella emerges onstage.

Yang laughs nervously. "Uh... what the fuck? Where's the real—oh, shit..."

Someone behind them shushes her, as the actress introduces herself to the male lead with a deep bow that shows off her lion's tail.

Her limp, cloth tail. With a tuft. Apparently no one bothered to tell the costume department it's male lion faunus that have tufted tails. Unless they're trying to imply the character is a transgender man—dimorphic traits almost always correlate to gender rather than physical sex, and tend not to appear at all in nonbinary faunus. Somehow Blake doesn't think that level of nuance went into the script.

Weiss sighs. "Well, at least this definitely deserves to be torn apart."

"Shh!"

They linger at first in case it's better than it looks—but before long, they're just watching to see how bad it will get. Weiss and Yang take turns heckling. Ruby tries to help, even though she isn't very good at it. Blake stops them. It's sweet, and cathartic, but people are starting to stare.

It soon becomes obvious that Sebastian, the male lead, wants nothing to do with Ariella. She refuses to take no for an answer, stalks him across two continents, and finally ambushes him in a forest. Under the full moon. Pins him to a tree—

"Blake?" Ruby takes her hand. "Do you want to go?"

She's seriously considering it when the other love interest—human, naturally—swoops in to save Sebastian. As gross as it is to listen to her impassioned speech about right and wrong as she murders Ariella—and there's the other faunus death scene, the one where we brought it on ourselves—she's still relieved by the interruption.

And, of course, on the way out she's reminded that play and actress both won awards for this.

Yang offers to draw mustaches on the poster. Blake shakes her head no, but she does smile for the first time since walking into the theater.

Catcalling

Their next attempt is a movie, this time in their room. A nice, quiet, intimate space, instead of a crowded theater. It seems like a good idea at the time, especially when Yang steals popcorn from JNPR and they all crowd together on Blake's bed.

For the first hour or so, it's a typical mindless action film. The main character Dune is handsome in a generic kind of way, and there's an explosion every fifteen minutes or so to make sure everyone is still awake. After months of associating the genre with curling up with her team like this, it has an oddly relaxing effect on Blake that has nothing to do with what's on the screen.

Dune is a spy, or maybe an Atlesian Special Operative? It's not exactly clear. He needs to break into a top-security research lab in Mistral to stop a doomsday device. Blake was in the bathroom when they explained what's in there that's so important, but she can fill in the blanks.

Enter Callie—a confident, sarcastic infiltration expert with ears just like Blake's. And yes, they probably named her after the calico pattern of her hair and fur, and she winds up playing second fiddle to the human even though she's one who actually knows what she's doing. But Blake's not in the mood to care. The actress is good and there's something deeply satisfying about the swagger in her step, and for once she manages to set context aside and just enjoy the movie.

At least, she does for the half an hour they spend sneaking into NeeCorp, stealing the—okay, is that a waffle iron? Maybe she should actually ask Yang what the hell she missed—and fleeing from a dramatic hail of gunfire. The two leads head back to the hotel, and the constant lowkey flirting abruptly graduates into tackling one another onto Dune's bed.

Suddenly the nice, quiet, intimate space isn't such an upside. Blake has to work very hard to ignore the fact that she's not-quite-but-almost in Yang's lap. Weiss stares pointedly out the window. Ruby gets bored and starts bouncing one knee up and down.

Then Dune reaches up to touch Callie's left ear, and she gasps.

"You like that, kitty-cat?"

The dorm fills with the sound of purring, punctuated by breathy sighs. Dune starts scratching and rubbing at both ears, and the sighs turn into—

Yang lunges for the remote, and the noises stop.

The silence is deafening.

"Does anyone mind if I turn it off?"

Red-faced head-shakes all round.

The projection stops, and Yang drops Ruby's scroll into her lap with a soft thump. "So... is it okay if we talk about it or would you rather pretend it never happened?"

Blake scowls. What she actually wants to do is crawl into a dark corner and die, but she knows if she puts off talking about it now, she'll never get the courage to bring it up again. She doesn't want her teammates coming out of this with any ugly misconceptions. "We should talk."

The room is quiet for a while. Finally, Weiss starts. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would guess that touching someone's faunus trait like that without permission is... highly frowned upon."

Her laugh comes out a bit more bitter than she intended. "It should be, but that doesn't mean people don't do it all the time." Blake knows this mostly second-hand. She grew up first in Menagerie, where it's hardly ever a problem, then on the road with the White Fang. Her parents made sure she stayed near them or other trusted adults, and then—

—Well. It's okay for another faunus to touch them, isn't it? Isn't it, Blake?

"So he didn't ask, which is definitely not cool," Yang says, giving Blake an opening to continue.

"Honestly? They only met each other, what, two days ago? It depends a lot on the person, but most faunus wouldn't react well to a human they barely know asking to touch them like that. Some don't like humans bringing it up at all."

Ruby fidgets with the hem of her cloak. "Um... is it different if they're having sex?"

Blake bites her lip. "I'd say if anything it makes it worse. A lot of humans have a bad habit of fetishizing faunus. Especially, um... feline faunus. It's really bad for fox and rabbit faunus, too, but I notice it more when it's directed at me. Sometimes humans will just yell things, like..." She flounders, because she doesn't think she can say the words pussy cat out loud.

Weiss rescues her. "That came up in the play, too."

"Ugh. Yes. The predatory faunus chasing down a helpless human thing happens a lot in... fiction."

Porn. It happens a lot in porn, and Blake's gotten very good at spotting red flags on book jacket summaries and running the other way.

"I can't really know what's going through these people's heads, but I'm guessing there's something in there about wanting to have sex with a faunus they're attracted to, while also being against interspecies relationships on some level. If it's the villain doing it to the protagonist, then they can indulge in the fantasy without condoning the attraction."

"It seemed like calling her, um... that wasn't good either," Yang says.

"Again... it depends a lot on the person, but definitely not something you should do without asking first, and probably not a good idea to bring up with someone you've just met." There are faunus who like both of those things, even a few who enjoy wearing collars, but Blake might actually rather die than get into that right now.

"What about the, um, purring?" asks Ruby.

She's been dreading that question. "It's something I can do," Blake admits. "And stuff like this is why I don't anymore. It's just... it's really not sexual. At all. It's... kind of like laughing. It comes from feeling happy and secure, which can happen during sex." Or so she's been told. "Sometimes it happens because of anxiety or stress, too. Like how you might laugh in a tense situation to calm yourself down."

Ruby lets out a nervous chuckle.

Blake grins at her. "Yeah, like that. I think that's why it annoys me so much when it's used like that." She gestures at the place where the screen used to be. "It's the same thing with him touching her ears. It wouldn't be weird, exactly, to do that during sex, but it's just—it's not like touching breasts or thighs or anything. More like stroking someone's hair. It's affectionate, not..."

She cuts herself off with a frustrated huff. It shouldn't bother her so much, but there's a wound where there used to be memories of her parents petting her ears when she was small. Infected and tainted.

Yang must see something on her face, because she claps her hands together and says, "Well, I vote we take a break from movies for a little while."

All of them jump on the suggestion like it's the last lifeboat, and soon they're getting ready for bed. But Yang lingers, even after Ruby and Weiss are already asleep.

Blake catches her arm. "Hey, are you okay?"

Yang looks down. "Yeah! Yeah. I guess I'm just... sad you can't feel comfortable doing something that's like laughing."

Her stomach clenches. She's not angry at Yang—she doesn't know what she's feeling about Yang right now, actually, only that she doesn't have the energy to try processing it—but she's furious at the world for stealing these precious things from her. A loving touch. A contented sound. Every movie, every play, every book she's ever dropped halfway through because she just can't do it one more time.

Angry at Adam for promising to give it all back, when all he did was take even more.

Angry at herself for believing him, and letting the shame creep in, and falling for the bait every time she hears about a faunus character and thinks, maybe this time...

She's on her back with her eyes squeezed shut, and she can hear Ruby's soft breathing. Weiss' quiet murmurs. Yang's snores. There in the dark, with her teammates asleep and her head spinning with dark thoughts, Blake takes a deep breath. A familiar rumble starts deep in her chest. Her heartbeat slows.

"Mine," she whispers, and pulls her blankets over her head.

1. Obviously lots and lots of anti-faunus racism and stereotyping

2. You know that thing where a book or show will almost depict a sexual assault but the protagonist and/or love interest is saved at the last second? They watch a play that does that, but it's not at all explicit or graphic.

3. Some past references to catcalling, unwanted touching of faunus ears, and Adam being himself