A Rabbit Among Wolves

Chapter 1

Adam was a man with many regrets.

Blake was one of them. A recent one. Beyond that, he regretted how the faunus had rolled over after the last war; how many of them accepted debasement and poverty. He regretted that violence was necessary to change the status quo; that good men and women had to die to bring change. That his people were seen as monsters, and that history would not remember them fondly whatever the outcome of their revolution.

Adam was a man with many regrets.

He was also a man with a hole in his throat, which really ought to have invalidated a lot of those regrets; or at least pushed them down in importance. He pondered that for a second, but only for a second. There wasn't anything with which to ponder when you were dead. Had he lived a little longer, Adam might have regretted his death being so...

Anticlimactic.

Suddenly, Adam was a man with very few regrets. Unless he counted as a dead body which still did. Perhaps the millions of tiny bacteria that made up his system and lived in symbiosis with the man were regretting not picking someone a little more long-lived. Perhaps his gut regretted the food it had eaten earlier, which would soon be decomposing in a stomach that was in itself decomposing.

Maybe I'm thinking too hard on this, Jaune thought.

He was, after all, a man stood in a shop with a bloody knife in one hand, a dead body on the floor and at least six armed terrorists in masks behind him. It wasn't the best time for philosophy. In fact, it might just have been the worst of times.

Jaune was also a man with many regrets.

He regretted coming to Vale. He regretted trying to become a huntsman. He regretted the sticky toffee pudding he'd had an hour before, which was now flip-flopping around in his stomach and he regretted waving back at that pretty girl earlier who had been waving at someone behind him and had then laughed at his embarrassment. Compared to a man like Adam they were fairly pathetic regrets – but they were his, damn it, and no one would take them away.

Oh, and he regretted everything that led up to this disaster.

Obviously.

"He killed Adam," one of the faunus said. He wore the distinctive mask of the White Fang, which didn't quite cover the gobsmacked look on his face. His grey uniform blended in with his fellows and the gun at his side was pointed down. "He... He killed Adam. Just like that..."

Jaune hid the bloody knife behind his back. "No, I didn't."

"You-" the faunus choked on air. "Knife..."

With a metallic clink, the murder weapon bounced off the wall, not quite disappearing around the corner as Jaune had hoped it would. The bloody instrument came to rest where it fell, visible to all. Nervously, Jaune stepped over and gave it a kick, sending it skittering out of sight. He cleared his throat, coughed and faced the White Fang once more.

"What knife?"

The man pointed weakly.

Another placed a hand on his arm and pushed it down, shaking his head slowly.

By this point the store owner had taken the distraction he'd provided to do the brave thing and run far, far away, abandoning his innocent customer to the White Fang. If he was lucky, the man would call the police and they could tell his parents how he died.

The dust store was silent. The six faunus continued to stare at him, weapons pointed toward the ground and eyes gingerly flicking between Jaune and the dead body of Adam Taurus. He certainly looked dead. A hole in the throat tended to do that to a person, breath being at least somewhat important in the day-to-day running of the brain.