A Rabbit Among Wolves

Chapter 68

It didn't take all too long for things to come to a head with the puritan party. Fundamentalists that they were, they couldn't afford to sit back and let him change the status quo too much so they'd always been on a time limit. Jaune had expected many things, mostly with Adam's advice, but all the things he'd thought of were subtle, clever ruses: poison in his drink, a car accident, a knife in the back while he was talking to someone, or a sniper when he spoke in public like it had been with Cinder.

That was giving them too much credit. Jaune and Sienna's home, a simple wooden building down by the seaside, hadn't actually served as their home since their arrival. They made a show of moving shopping in there and pretending to sleep there, but the reality was that they stayed under the guard of Yuma, Trifa and Ilia in a separate location. That was what saved them from the bombs planted in their home, which detonated at midnight in a fantastical show of fire and heat, sending the roof flying up and into the ocean, and a plume of smoke so high their home looked like a volcano.

"A bomb," said Jaune, not sure if he was upset, confused or just disappointed. "That was their plan. Bomb us."

"You can accuse the White Fang of many things," said Adam, "but creativity was never one of our strengths. Bombs always worked before with Atlas, and before in the Great War as well. The faunus were famed for traps planted at night that humans would stumble into. These people idolise those past glories so..."

"So, they assumed I, as a human, would be just as dumb." He sighed, pinching the brow of his nose and rubbing his fingers up and down. There were a lot of people gathering nearby, alarmed and drawn by the sounds and the flames to see what was going on. Jaune turned to them and began to talk loudly. "It's alright. No one was hurt. We just have a little case of traitors within the White Fang trying to murder Sienna and I."

There were plenty of White Fang members in the gathering crowd, and whether they agreed with him or not didn't mean they accepted the idea of killing their own. The White Fang was supposed to be unified. Several of them began to mutter angrily; scrolls flashed as pictures were taken; sirens played in the distance as Menagerie's own fire response teams mobilised. Sienna was talking to Ilia but sent him a meaningful nod to say he should continue baiting the puritans.

"This is how some people handle their differences in opinion," said Jaune to the crowd. "They destroy. It's easier, I suppose. They don't want to have to try and convince people to change their minds, and it doesn't matter that we're on the same side. They only see their side, and they're not afraid to turn violent in pursuit of what they want. Not you, not the faunus, not anyone else. Just them." He shook his head theatrically. "It's sad really; it's selfish; they would see innocent faunus burn just because they want to fight. How pathetic. How weak of them."

It was, as insults went, the tamest and least aggressive he could have ever imagined. Oh no, weak. What a sharp cut to one's self-esteem. It would have had Jaune rolling his eyes, and he couldn't help but think the reactions would be the same among most people he knew. Not the puritans, however. They prided themselves on strength – and not the kind of strength you could measure, or the kind that involved defending your friends or changing the world. No. They valued strength in so far as strength was defined by shouting louder, shouting angrier and being called out for it.

Strength to them was in being alpha – in leaning into the whole predator-prey dynamic that worked in nature and trying to apply it to faunus-human relations even when that didn't make any sense. They saw themselves as wolves in a pack and lorded it over the lesser species as if actual wolves took pride in hunting rabbits and weren't just doing it because they were starving and needed to eat to survive.

They were the kinds of people who ate whey protein dry with a spoon.

Even now, among the crowd, Jaune saw several faunus bristling and angrily whispering to one another about his words, and two turned and stormed away, clearly insulted. He didn't recognise them but he knew the Albain brothers would, and that they would be watching this just as keenly.