Regrets
Bon Bon scuffed her foot against the courtyard surface as she and Cardin left the tower, wandering slowly and forlornly back in the direction of school. She folded her arms. “Well… this sucks,” she said.
“You have no idea,” Cardin muttered. He’d been trying to get hold of Skystar since last night when this broke – since his mother, of all people, had told him that it was breaking – and she wasn’t returning his calls, his texts, or his emails. It was… well, it wasn’t looking good. Not least because he didn’t even know what he was going to say if she did pick up the scroll. Please take me back? I didn’t really mean it? That hadn’t gone over too well with Professor Ozpin; he could only imagine how it was going to come over with Skystar.
“Yeah, I think I do, actually,” Bon Bon replied. “Seeing as how, you know, I’m in this mess as well.”
Cardin snorted. “Right, sorry. I mean that. I’m sorry that I got you into this mess.”
“It’s okay,” Bon Bon replied. “I mean, it’s not okay, but what I mean is that I got myself into this mess when I vandalised the Sapphire door. You know that this was Sunset again, right?”
“Does it matter who it was?” Cardin asked. “This isn’t like what she did to Lyra, where if it came out that she’d done it, everyone would think she was a jackass for it; if it came out that she’d done this, the dining hall would probably give her a round of applause.”
Bon Bon sighed. “Unfortunately, yes. Even more unfortunately, we’d deserve it.”
“Is that what you think?” Cardin asked. “Because you’re not a racist?”
“I’m not!” Bon Bon squawked. “You don’t believe me?”
“I’m not sure you can call for wiping out a whole people like that if you really think that saying so makes you a monster,” Cardin mused. “Even I was shocked when you said that.”
“I didn’t mean it!”
“You sounded like you meant it to me, and to Blake too.”
“From what I hear, you managed to convince your girlfriend that you didn’t hate her faunus in-laws for a while, even though you did.”
“I never hated Silverstream and Terramar,” Cardin insisted. Terramar… it had been nice to have somebody who looked up to him, who thought that he was cool. Maybe that was selfish, and it was certainly sad as hell, but at the same time… Terramar was a good kid, and Silverstream was just so darn nice that you couldn’t dislike her just because she had wings. It was the other faunus, the ones who were all surly and moody all the time like Blake, or who were always staring like Velvet, they were the ones who rubbed him up the wrong way. “Of course, I’m not so sure that they’ll believe that.”
“Especially not since, Mister ‘I was shocked at how awful you are,’ you agreed with everything I said.”
Cardin frowned. “No, I didn’t!”
“Those were your exact words.”
Thinking back, Cardin realised with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that he might well have uttered the words ‘every word she said is true.’ Every word. Oh, God help me, Skystar must think… Silverstream and Terramar. “Well, I didn’t mean it like that!” he cried. “I was pissed off and speaking… you know, generally. When I said every word, I didn’t mean every actual word out of your mouth.”
“Unfortunately, that’s not how words work,” Bon Bon informed him.
Cardin whimpered. “No matter everyone’s making such a fuss, they think I’m a… how am I supposed to… oh, God. Everyone’s taking it literally, aren’t they?”
“Probably, yes,” Bon Bon said, not without sympathy. “So,” she continued, “what’s our next move?”
Cardin’s eyes bulged incredulously. “I’m sorry, our next move?”
“Yeah,” Bon Bon said. “You know, how do we-?”
“There is no next move!” Cardin snapped. “Were you not in the same office that I was in just then? Did you not listen to the same headmaster that I did? We just got our asses kicked! We are this close to getting tossed out of Beacon on our asses! Now, maybe that doesn’t bother you, because you can just transfer to Atlas or something and try again next year, but I actually want to graduate from this school at some point!”
Bon Bon was silent. “You could have thought about that-”
“I never said I was perfect!” Cardin shouted. “The point is… the point is that I’m done. Yes, I don’t like a White Fang terrorist being here, yes, I’d like to see her gone, but I don’t see that me getting myself expelled is actually going to do her any harm, and it’s starting to look as though she’s bulletproof, so why don’t we just let it go, make the best of it, and hope that everybody forgets what we did sooner rather than later?”
Bon Bon was quiet. She didn’t look at him; she just walked along with her arms folded. “I can’t let it go,” she muttered. “I just… I can’t.”
Cardin’s jaw tightened. He didn’t know whether to envy her resolve or pity her stupidity. Both, maybe? Either way, it didn’t change his mind; he wasn’t going to put what remained of his future on the line just out of some sense of loyalty to her. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but… good luck,” he said. “I think you’ll need it if this is the road you want to go down.”
Bon Bon’s smile was wan, although Cardin wasn’t sure why, because it wasn’t like anybody was forcing her to do this, right? She could just give up, like he planned to do for his own good. Instead, she was choosing to keep on putting everything on the line to get at Blake – and for what? – but at the same time, she was acting like she was going to her execution. “Yeah,” she said. “Don’t I know it.”
Cardin didn’t know what to say to that – seriously, what was going on with her? – and to be honest, he wasn’t interested in finding anything to say, or in saying anything else to Bon Bon either. He started to turn away from her, walking not straight back to the greenhouses, where Plant Science was in session, but towards the lawns in the direction of the docking pads.
“You’re not coming back to class?” Bon Bon asked him, gesturing in the right direction.
“Not just yet,” Cardin grunted.
“You just got told off, and you’re already going to play truant?”
“I’m not ready to go back to class quite yet,” Cardin told her irritably. “Just… you go; I’ll catch up soon. There’s something that I have to do first.”
Bon Bon frowned. “How many times have you tried calling her?”
“What are you talking about?”
Bon Bon’s eyebrows rose. “Come on, Cardin. Who your girlfriend is and why she’d be mad at you were both part of the article. That was the whole point of the article: First Councillor’s daughter dates racist grandson of Lord Chief Justice, remember?”
“Yes, I remember, I’ve done nothing else but remember,” Cardin snapped.
“So,” Bon Bon insisted. “How many times have you tried calling her?”
Cardin sighed. “I’ve lost count.”
Bon Bon winced. “Dude, I’m sorry to say this, but… it’s over.”
Cardin was silent for a moment. “I know,” he replied. “But I need to… I have to try. At least… I need to hear her say it.”
Bon Bon nodded. “I guess I can get that,” she murmured. “For what it’s worth… I’m sorry.”
“It’s not worth much,” Cardin replied. “But… thanks anyway.”
“Good luck,” Bon Bon added, very quietly, as if she didn’t expect that he would have any luck, or else maybe she thought that no amount of luck would save him, or maybe she just thought that if she sounded too enthusiastic, he’d think that she was inappropriately happy about all of this. Whatever the truth, she didn’t say anything else but finally left him alone and headed off to Plant Science.
Cardin headed in the other way, crossing the empty courtyard as he pulled out his scroll and started flicking through the alerts on his social media feed. It was… not great. Besides the initial story itself… well, it was like Professor Ozpin said, but even worse. Councillor Aspen Emerald had felt the need to publicly insist that Cardin’s grandfather was not a racist, but was ‘a gentleman of immense courtesy whom I am proud to work alongside for the betterment of Vale’; that endorsement hadn’t stopped Sir Orange Peel from calling for Lord Winchester’s resignation – which was a bit bloody rich of him, in Cardin’s opinion, considering that Peel had been saying things at least as bad as anything Cardin had said since the White Fang had started all their robberies. Councillor Leo Aquas had been a little less supportive of Cardin’s father and had ordered an internal inquiry into racism and bullying at the Treasury. There were think pieces about endemic racism in the huntsman academies, former faunus students coming out of the woodwork to talk about how they, too, had been victims of racism… and there was the article that had started it all, about how Skystar was dating a racist and what did her faunus uncle and cousins think about that?
He didn’t know, but he suspected that it was nothing good.
He couldn’t get Skystar to reply to his messages, but he did have unopened messages from both his parents. He hadn’t had the guts to look at what was in them yet.
How had he managed to mess this up so badly? His grandfather facing calls for him to quit – okay, they weren’t serious calls, and it probably wasn’t going to happen, but that wasn’t really the point – maybe his father’s job at risk too, all because of him. And Skystar…
He didn’t realise how good he had had it until it was starting to look until he didn’t have it any more. How had he become so consumed with petty jealousy, with envy of Jaune Arc and Sunset Shimmer, with anger at Blake Belladonna, how had he let all of that stuff get so big that he hadn’t realised just how good he had it? Yes, he wasn’t the best student at the school, sure, nobody was giving him special favours or opening up doors for him, and he knew that he didn’t have one of the best partners in the school and certainly not the partner that he would have chosen, but so what? So what? Did Jaune Arc stay up at night worrying about how much he sucked? No! Because he was dating Pyrrha Nikos, the hottest student in school, and he was grateful for it! The guy was so grateful – and well he might be; she was way out of his league – that he was practically floating three feet off the ground most of the time. Cardin had found it insufferable, but why? It wasn’t as though he didn’t have anything of his own to be grateful for: an enviable social position as the heir to the Winchester family, an income that was almost sufficient to his needs – a gentleman’s income was never quite sufficient – and a girlfriend who adored him.
Why couldn’t he have been satisfied with that?
Of course, it had been partly for Skystar that he had tried to do this, but at the same time… she hadn’t asked him to, and she certainly hadn’t asked him to go about it like this.
When he and Skystar started dating, he had known that his attitudes might cause him problems down the line. That should have been a sign for him to do something about them, but instead, he had acted as though he could live a double life, the asshole at school and the model of tolerance with her.
How had he let it all come to this? How could he possibly have been so stupid?
Was there any way that he could make this right?
He tried to call Skystar again.
The ‘ringing’ icon rumbled on with no response. The scroll shook a little in Cardin’s meaty hands.
Come on, come on. Pick up.
I don’t know what I’m going to say but still, pick up, please.
Just talk to me.
“Stop calling me!” Skystar’s voice squawked out of the scroll as her image appeared on the screen. Her usually immaculate face was blotchy with tearstains, her nose was running, and her big blue eyes were wet with tears that were still welling up with them. She was dressed, as far as Cardin could tell, in the turquoise dressing gown that he’d gotten her for her last birthday.
He couldn’t tell if it was a good sign that she hadn’t thrown it out yet or if it was a bad thing that she was so upset that she was still in her dressing gown at ten-thirty in the morning.
“Skystar,” Cardin begged. “Please, just listen for a minute-”
“'Listen'?” Skystar cried. “Listen to you? Why, so you can lie to me some more?”
“Is that Cardin?” Silverstream’s voice echoed out of the scroll from somewhere off screen.
Silverstream was there. Of course Silverstream was there, with Skystar in that state. He really should have seen this coming.
And yet, he was not prepared at all.
Skystar sniffed. “Yes,” she said.
“Tell him for me that he’s a big stupid jerk!” Silverstream screamed. “Actually, I’ll tell him myself!” She elbowed her way into the frame, her violet eyes blazing with anger. “You’re a big stupid jerk, Cardin Winchester!”
“If you’ll just both let me explain-” Cardin began.
“What is there to explain?” Silverstream demanded. “Are you going to tell me that I should be grateful that you haven’t murdered me already like you want to?”
“I don’t want to kill you, or Terramar, or any other faunus; I was angry, and I didn’t think about what I was saying,” Cardin insisted.
“Should I be grateful that you don’t want to kill me?”
“No!” Cardin yelled. “Please, whatever I said in there… I’ve never thought about you or your brother that way. You and Terramar, you’re not like other faunus-”
“Cardin!” Skystar exclaimed. “That’s a terrible thing to say!”
If he’d been speaking to someone else, Cardin would have asked why, exactly, it was such a terrible thing to say. He might have asked why it became a crime to say that water was wet. Some faunus – a lot of faunus – were not good people; they were cunning and conniving, callous and cruel; look at Sunset Shimmer for example, look at the White Fang. It wasn’t wrong to say any of that just because it hurt some people’s feelings, and it wasn’t wrong to have negative feelings towards them because of the way that they behaved. Was it wrong to have negative feelings towards criminals?
None of that, however, was likely to get him back into Skystar’s good books, and so Cardin showed a little wisdom – if only he could have started showing it sooner – and did not say it. Instead, he said, “I did this for you, Skystar.”
“What?” Skystar and Silverstream both cried out at once, and both in the same tone of disbelief.
“Blake Belladonna is a dangerous criminal, you know that as well as I do,” Cardin explained. “Your mom was worried that you’d be in danger if you came up to school with her around, so I tried to take care of it.”
“Mom didn’t mean for you to say things like that,” Skystar insisted. “She would never mean that.” She wiped at her eyes in a futile gesture since more tears simply welled up there immediately after she was done. “Cardin, I… I thought that I knew who you were.”
“You do know who I am,” Cardin insisted. “You know exactly who I am.”
“No, I don’t!” Skystar said. “It turns out that there’s this whole other side to you that I never knew existed. You must think that I’m such an idiot.”
“I’ve never thought that.”
“Really?” Skystar demanded. “All that time that you were lying to me, hiding what you really thought, pretending to be someone else.”
“I never pretended,” Cardin said, softly, desperately. “I never… it’s true that I act in a different way when I’m at school than I do when I’m with you, but that… that’s the act, the me at Beacon. When I’m with you… that’s the real Cardin Winchester.”
Skystar sniffed. “I wish I could believe that,” she whispered.
“You can believe it,” Cardin declared. “What can I do to show you that you can believe it?”
“I don’t know,” Skystar said. “I don’t know if there’s anything that you can do, or anything that you can say. I thought I knew you. And I thought that you knew me too. I thought you knew that my family means everything to me. I thought you knew how much I love them.”
“I do know that.”
“And that’s why you lied and pretended not to hate us?” Silverstream demanded accusingly.
“That… that’s not what happened; that’s not what I was doing.”
“Cardin,” Skystar said. “Do you believe that the faunus are the equals of humans?”
Cardin was silent for a moment. He couldn’t lie, not to her, not any more, not like this. “Not all of them.”
Silverstream growled wordlessly.
Skystar shut her eyes, cringing visibly on the other side of the scroll. “Cardin,” she moaned. “I can’t believe that you would-”
“Please, Skystar, don’t say any more,” Cardin begged. “Please, I… I’ll do anything. I know that I’m not perfect, but if this means so much to you, then I’ll fix it. I can change. Give me a chance to prove to you that I can change, that I can be better, that I can… that I can move past this. Don’t… don’t let this be the end of it. I know that I shouldn’t have lied to you, but the reason I did it was because… because you mean so much to me. Because I knew that you would never look at someone who thought the way that I did, no matter what our families wanted. Because… because you mean so much to me, Skystar. Because… because I love you.”
“I believed you did,” Skystar whispered. “Just like I believe that… that you were one person who would never hurt me, ever. But that wasn’t true either. I don’t know what was true and what was a lie, but I do know that I can’t trust you. Goodbye, Cardin, don’t call me again.”
“Skystar, wait-” Cardin cried, but it was too late. She had already hung up on him.
He called again. The scroll rang for a moment, and then a red exclamation mark flashed up on the screen informing him that he had been blocked by that number.
Cardin closed his eyes. He couldn’t muster any anger or upset towards Skystar, or Silverstream. He deserved that. He didn’t like it, not one bit, but he deserved it.
That didn’t make him feel any less hollow inside. It was like he had been gutted, and everything ripped out of him. Everything good, anyway.
And it was all his fault. It was all, absolutely, his fault.
There were no tears. He didn’t shout or scream. He just stared down at the now-blank scroll in his hands that did not even shake. What was he supposed to do now?
What was he supposed to do?
He was supposed to go to class now, but he didn’t feel like it. He didn’t know how he was supposed to attend lessons, pay attention to his teachers, take notes on things that didn’t matter in the slightest any more. What was Plant Science when the light had gone out of the world?
With heavy, slow, ponderous, and solemn tread, Cardin made his way back towards the dorm rooms. He didn’t actually return to his room, although he thought about it; he wanted nothing more than to lie on his bed with his head on the pillow, doing nothing, thinking nothing, becoming nothing. He wanted to sleep until this was all past, like the memory of a dream. He wanted to wake up in bed and find that it was all a dream and had been from the first, that he hadn’t endangered his future and his family, that he hadn’t lost Skystar. He wanted to wake up and find that this had all been some sort of cautionary tale, to teach him to appreciate what he had and make the best of it.
But, since he knew perfectly well that this was nothing of the sort, he did not go back to the dorm room; that would be the first place he would be looked for, after all. Instead, he went to the second place he would be looked for, the roof above the dorm, and lay spread out on the roof next to the pipes.
He was still lying there, some time later – he didn’t know exactly how long – when he heard Weiss’ voice calling in the dorm room down below.
“Cardin?”
She didn’t sound as irritated as he’d expected her to be – irritated, sure, but not apoplectic, which was a surprise all things considered.
“Cardin,” Weiss repeated, a moment before a squeak of alarm. There was a moment of silence, and then Weiss appeared, leaping nimbly from one glowing white glyph to another before jumping onto the roof itself. From the way that she flicked at her slightly frizzled bangs with one hand, he guessed that she’d tried to climb up onto the roof and lost her footing.
Lucky she had such a useful semblance.
“There you are,” Weiss said, looking down on him. Somehow, she always managed to look down on him, even though she was half his size.
Cardin rolled onto his side. “What do you want?”
“I want you to come to class,” Weiss told him. “If I don’t bring you back, we’ll both be in trouble.”
Of course that was why she was here. “I don’t feel like classes right now.”
“That’s unfortunate, considering this is a school,” Weiss remarked dryly.
“Yeah, it’s really unlucky,” Cardin muttered. “Listen, I don’t feel like being yelled at right now-”
“That’s better, because I’m not here to yell at you,” Weiss informed him. There was a moment of silence before he heard her sigh. “Ugh. Listen, we’re probably both going to get into even more trouble at this point anyway, so let’s just… I’m sorry, Cardin.”
Cardin blinked. He rolled back over so that he could see Weiss sitting on a pipe beside him; weirdly, it didn’t look as though she was mocking him. “You’re sorry?”
Weiss sighed, and looked away. “Please don’t ask me to repeat myself.”
“I just… of all the things that I expected to hear today, that wasn’t one of them.”
Weiss rolled her eyes. “Have you managed to get Skystar to answer you yet?”
Now it was Cardin’s turn to sigh. “Once,” he confessed. “Before she blocked my number.”
Weiss winced. “I’m sorry for that,” she pointed out. “And for… everything else besides. It’s over, then?”
“It looks like it,” Cardin muttered. “Unless you know a way that I can get her to take me back. Show her that I’ve changed.”
“Have you changed?” Weiss asked.
“You don’t think I can?” Cardin demanded, starting to sit up.
“I think that we can all change, thank goodness,” Weiss replied. “But I’m not sure that we can all change that fast.” She paused, her brow momentarily furrowing. “I’m also sorry that I allowed things to reach this point.”
“You don’t tell me what to do.”
“No, I don’t; that’s the problem,” Weiss said. “I’ve never been a good leader. For the most part, I’ve barely even tried to lead. I resented the fact that you were on my team, and I never sought to make us more than very reluctant teammates. It’s little wonder that we haven’t been assigned a training mission yet.”
“It’s still early.”
“Iron and Sapphire both got a mission in the first week of semester,” Weiss pointed out. “The divide between the teams that are considered likely to succeed and those that are not trusted by the faculty is quite clear. Made even worse by the fact that I can’t really blame them. In Professor Ozpin or Professor Goodwitch’s place, I’m not sure that I would trust us either. And, while this probably hasn’t helped in that regard, as your leader, I shouldn’t have let things get that far.”
“Do you really think that you could have stopped me?”
“I think that I ought to have tried,” Weiss replied. “Why did you do it?”
“Not because I’m an advocate of faunus genocide,” Cardin declared. “And I don’t think Bon Bon is, either.”
“I don’t care about Bon Bon,” Weiss said quickly. “As far as I’m concerned, this is partly her fault.”
“I went to her,” Cardin informed Weiss. “I saw that she was… well, you know what Sunset did to Lyra-”
“Someone did that to Lyra,” Weiss corrected him.
“Oh, come on, who else would have done something like that?”
“I’m not interested in throwing blame around without proof,” Weiss told him, “and I don’t think that you’re in any position to be holding grudges.”
Cardin snorted. “Believe me, I’m done with revenge.”
“Good,” Weiss said. “And you’re done with Bon Bon too. You may have had the idea, but she didn’t tell you what a bad idea it was, which means that she isn’t good for you to be around. You still haven’t told me why you did it.”
Cardin did sit up now, and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s like the headmaster said, the plan was to goad Blake into crossing the line.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s White Fang!” Cardin snapped. “I know, I know, you believe in second chances.”
“Luckily for you, yes,” Weiss said, as a touch of frost entered her voice.
“Is it really so hard to believe that a reasonable person could think that a former terrorist isn’t the best person to have around?” Cardin demanded. “Is it really so hard to think that I might not be overreacting just because of Blake’s race?”
Weiss was silent for a moment. She clasped her hands together and looked down at them for a moment. “Who raised you, Cardin?”
Cardin frowned. “What the hell kind of question is that?”
“Just answer it,” Weiss said. “Please.”
“I was raised by my mother; who do you think?”
“She had time?”
“What else was she going to do?”
Weiss sighed. “That explains so much.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, that was… not particularly called for. The point is that you had a stay-at-home mother to care for and look after you. That… was she a good mother?”
“She was the best,” Cardin said. “If I didn’t turn out perfect, that’s my fault, not hers.”
“Then you are very fortunate,” Weiss said, “to have been raised by someone who loved you without-” She cut herself off, abruptly and with a look upon her pale face that approached shame. When she continued, it was from somewhere else. “I was raised by my family’s retainers,” she informed him. “My father was preoccupied with the affairs of the company, as you can imagine, and my mother… had her own distractions. My care, as well as that of my sister and brother, fell to the staff. In particular, my father’s butler, Klein Sieben, and my mother’s nanny, Laberna Seacole. Laberna, Miss Seacole as I suppose I ought to say, had looked after my mother when she was a girl, had stayed on in her employ, and then looked after my mother’s children when we came along. Until my father dismissed her as the White Fang began to turn violent.”
Cardin’s eyes narrowed. “So, she was a faunus?”
“Yes,” Weiss said softly. “She was. More importantly, she spent more time with us than she did with her own family; she was there for us more than our own family… and yet, once the White Fang started to turn violent, father showed her the door. And no reasonable person would say that he was overreacting.”
Cardin frowned. “What happened to her?”
“I have no idea,” Weiss murmured. “I’ve sometimes thought about tracking her down, seeing how she’s doing now, but… what would I say? How would I even begin to make up for what my father did? Would she even want to have anything to do with me? After all, she was paid to care about me before; she’d be under no such obligation now.”
Cardin was silent for a moment. “Look, that’s… your old man should have had more loyalty to someone who’d been with the family for so long, sure.” His own family did not have many servants – it was just too expensive to keep them in the modern day and age, not to mention the fact that not a lot of people actually wanted to work in service these days, and with so many modern conveniences and technological advances, there wasn’t a lot of need for them anyway – but they did have a housekeeper, and when old Mrs. Byrd had gotten too old to carry out her duties, Father had found her a sinecure in the Treasury. She was nominally employed as Chief Messenger, with the tacit understanding that she would never be required to carry any messages. “But throwing her out just because she’s a faunus isn’t the same thing as an actual White Fang terrorist!”
“Former terrorist.”
“You say that, but it’s not as if you’re eager to become buddies with her.”
Weiss exhaled through her nose. “That… is true. Blake and I are not friends, and I’m not sure if we will ever become friends. But you don’t have to befriend her either; you just need to curb your hostility towards her.”
“Consider it curbed.”
“Not just because you’ve suffered from your attempts at… whatever it is you were attempting,” Weiss informed him.
“So you are asking me to like her.”
“I’m asking you… I’m asking you why you want to become a huntsman.”
“Huh?”
“Humour me,” Weiss said. “You could have chosen to enter politics, law, or the Civil Service like your family.”
“I still might go into politics when I get older.”
“So being a huntsman is about what?” Weiss asked. “Raising your profile so that you can say that you’ve fought for Vale to make yourself more electable?”
“No,” Cardin said quickly. “If that was all it was, I’d join the Royal Navy and serve out the minimum term in a position that guaranteed I’d never see combat. I want to become a huntsman because I want to see some action. I want to get stuck in, you know, against the grimm; I want to get stuck in for Vale. I want to have cool stories that I can bore my grandchildren with.” Though who I’m going to have children with now is something I don’t know. “I guess that I want… that I want people to hear those stories and think how brave I was, to go out and fight like that. I wanted people to think that I was cool.” And they did: Terramar and Skystar. And I just had to blow it because I’m a dumbass.
He was a little surprised that Weiss didn’t laugh, or call him pathetic, or give any sign that she found his paltry ambitions to be laughable. Instead, she stood up and turned her back to him, raising one foot and placing it on the pipe which she had previously been sitting on. “I want to restore my family’s reputation,” she declared.
Cardin, likewise, rose to his feet. “Your family’s reputation,” he repeated. “The Schnee family’s reputation is-”
“One of rampant profiteering and a dubious regard for labour safety,” Weiss said, cutting him off. “But it wasn’t always thus. You know that my grandfather was known as much for his courage as he was for his business acumen. When he died, Councillor Bradley called him a model of Atlesian valour and an exemplar of the spirit that had made our kingdom great once more. It’s hard to imagine anyone saying anything like that about my father… and I don’t know if anyone will care enough to say anything like that about me when my time comes, but… but if I can make it so that it’s at least possible that someone could say that with a straight face? Well, then that will be enough for me. I don’t have to renew the glory of the Schnee name, but I should very much like to renew its honour.” She turned around to face Cardin once again. “I don’t know if I have it in me to become a great leader like my grandfather, but I think – I hope – that I can become a better leader than I have been so far.” She smiled. “So, do you think that we can start over? I think… I think it might be the only way that either of our dreams can come true.” She held out one hand to him. “I’m Weiss Schnee.”
Cardin looked down at her small, pale hand. Start over? Wasn’t it a little late for that?
Maybe, but at the same time, she was right: if they kept on as they were – if he kept on as he was – then there was no way that he was going to make it to graduation.
He had asked Skystar to let him prove that he could change. She wasn’t willing to give him the chance… but maybe if he changed first, then she might be willing to take another look.
And if she didn’t? Maybe just changing would be worthwhile. It wasn’t as if being himself had done him many favours.
"I am not holding you back. Pyrrha isn't holding me back, Ruby isn't holding me back, Cadance- no one holds us back but us. If we have been deceived, it's by our blindness to our natures. If we have been restrained, it is by our unworthy hearts. But we can change, Cardin. Our hearts can mend, our souls can grow. I have to believe that we need not be these small and ugly things forever, or else... destiny is not beyond us, if only we can... there are lights that we can follow."
That had been what Sunset had said to him, in the forest. At the time, he hadn’t understood what she was talking about; it seemed like nothing more than a bunch of nonsense, words spewed out without any meaning. But afterwards… afterwards, it was like she’d turned her life around, and look at her now: successful and loved by everyone.
If she could do it, then maybe he could do the same?
It couldn’t hurt to try, right?
He took her hand. “Cardin Winchester,” he said. “Good to meet you.”