RWBY Through Worlds (End)

BC47: New (Flower Power, Arkos, and Cinder--2)

Cinder was astonished to realize that even Shine had never given her this kind of perspective on it...and more astonished that it made perfect sense to her.

"But it was revenge," she said.

"Then," Royal said. "But it still pisses you off, right? Is it still revenge? Or is it that it was unfair?"

"Of course it was unfair," Cinder said.

"Well, I don't see the problem with being angry about that," Royal said. "Just, letting it control you, I'm still working on that. I think Watts got off easy for what he did to Atlas. I understand that punishing him is probably useless now...but there's a part of me that still wants it."

He leaned on his hand for a moment. "And there are always going to be people who want to punish you for Vale and Mistral.... You have to admit, their anger is valid. But it's not doing them any good now. You can't punish someone who's already realized the problem. That's just doing the same thing all over again. I think we have to be fair...but anger isn't as simple as that. That's just from my own experience."

Cinder had to chew on that.

"I can understand the anger," she said. "Actually...it's the lack of it that puzzles me."

"There are some people who just don't want to keep the hatred going," Royal said. "And, I think it's in that book that you all read (fascinating stuff, by the way), that returning evil for evil is a bad thing...but there is an awful lot of punishment in that book also. There's a time and place for that, but I think if it's just out of hatred, it doesn't really help you any more than anyone else."

Cinder, who was far more at ease now than she'd ever have believed starting this conversation, forgot some of her hesitancy.

"My mentor told me that after I did that, running was all I would ever do," she said. "I thought if I killed him I could hide...but I did only run. Until we faced the gods. That was when I finally stopped running--there was nowhere to run then. They did piss me off. But for once, there was no way to take it too far."

"Or with the Grimm," Royal remarked. "I guess it comes down to who you really blame for all this. People are messed up, but we sure get a lot of help from evil gods and Grimm."

"I did blame the gods," Cinder said. "But now we're left to remake the world without them. I never prepared for that...so I left. The others were ready for it."

"That I can understand perfectly," Royal said, shaking his head.

A pause ensued that wasn't actually uncomfortable, but they were both lost in thought.

Cinder wasn't sure how this had gone this way. For some reason she wasn't really embarrassed anymore.

And she thought she understood what Royal was really saying: That injustice was infuriating. For some reason that was a huge relief to hear.

Like...maybe the one thing the others would never say or admit to, and that was why she was just so uncomfortable around them. She felt like it bothering her still made her just inherently most messed up.

Granted, she'd done horrible things, and she knew it--now. But somehow she'd never been able to change her mind about what had happened to her being enough to drive her crazy...but... maybe she didn't need to change that.

Maybe it had, but, coming back out of it, she could see it more clearly now.

She wondered if that was what that old mentor had really meant by another way to handle it. That the unfairness didn't go away if she became part of it (what Shine had tried to teach her), but that if she'd learned to fight it within the law, she'd have found more peace.