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From the moment she was born, Weiss knew what she had to do. As soon as she could walk, she’d had it instilled in her. She was told at almost every twist and turn that she could fight, that she had to do this, that she had to be the huntress to protect the family, to protect the company. Her father had four children, a plan for each of them. And she was the one that got placed with the duty to be a huntress.
Her father worked closely with some military corporations to create the best equipment to help protect his company. The idea of them was to be able to completely halt, or at least slow down, invasions of Grimm or people. Few of the models were tested against Grimm, however. On her twelfth birthday, her father told her he had a surprise. He locked her in a room with the latest model of robots he’d been trying out.
Fear was her greatest enemy in that fight. She knew it was an early design. She knew that with the early design of the robots, the most common flaw was them being unable to stop. The basic AI installed in them would fail, and they would go on a frenzy of slicing and shooting. Which sounds ideal in a fight against an enemy, but not against yourself. The model did well in the fight, but as she started to overtake it the AI failed. She ended up with her first real injury, a large gash in her leg. Even though she would have won the fight if it wasn’t for his failings, her father was disappointed. There was no celebrations that day.
The method of testing didn’t halt, though. It was a matter of preparing Weiss for being a huntress and making sure the new models were worth using. She fought against the robots, be them early in design or nearly something that would make her father happy, at least for the time being. She was put against a few other humans, occasionally, but she always came out of those fights well. Even if she had to ignore her father’s blatant disappointment when she showed them mercy. She never fought Grimm, though, her father saying that the creatures were too mindless to bother training with. It made her more afraid of them than she should have been, but she didn’t know if this was intentional or not.
When she was fifteen, her older sister, Winter, decided that she was done. Winter was the one brought up to be the future leader of the company. But she quit when she turned eighteen. It left that duty to Weiss, who had only prepared for being a huntress. It put many more things on her plate, having to fight her father’s creations and learn how to run the company as well. She learned of the future her father had planned for the company, with minimal details. She probably would have planned to dump it when she turned eighteen as well, legally leaving the family and the company behind. But at this point, she’d put too much work in it to just leave it, and she hoped to better the company when her father was finally gone. Besides, she couldn’t do that to her younger sisters.
She was unhappy after the initiation at Beacon. Not only did she miss her chance to be on a team with Pyrrha Nikos, but she ended up with a faunus and a brute on her team. The team leader was just a kid, even. She couldn’t shake the thoughts about how upset her father would be if he heard wind of who she was on a team with. She figured he probably already knew. She overexerted herself the first week or so, avoiding the rest of her team at all costs and going to the training arena every day, fighting the hologram Grimm. She knew embarrassingly little about how to fight them, and she wanted to fix that.
She didn’t have anything, personally, against her teammates. But she knew that this was not the team that it was good for her to be on. She knew that if she wasn’t the absolute best, she would be the worst in her father’s eyes. And she wasn’t sure if she could maintain the status as the best on Team RWBY. (She pushed to the back of her mind the personal, verbal attacks her father would’ve had for the three girls, if given the chance)
Being confronted by Ruby was what changed her mind. The kid gave a speech about how they would be the very best, and how they would help people, and how it would be easier to be the best if they were friends. Or at least on good terms. So Weiss, begrudgingly, tried. She spent time with Ruby, who was far too excited for her own good, and Yang, who was far too relaxed, and Blake, who still looked at her with hostile eyes.
Blake was the one who yelled at her about how she treated the faunus, even in the most minor ways. Blake spat out words about how the Schnee Dust Company treated the faunus, about how Weiss was just like her father when it came down to it and no wonder Winter Schnee had broken all ties with them. About how it didn’t matter how terrible your childhood was, it didn’t excuse racism and that was awfully selfish reasoning. About how there was never any personal attacks on the Schnees, just attacks on their practices and activities as a business, which was a right of the public to criticize.
And as soon as the words “you’re just like your father” came out of Blake’s mouth, Weiss froze. She didn’t have it in her to run anymore, but that accusation was something she couldn’t take. What scared her is that she had no real dispute she could offer, not without revealing information that the public wasn’t supposed to know, that she didn’t want the public to know. Was she truly any better than her father? Her father, who would never call a faunus something on the street, but then happily turn around and use his connections and company to make life much more worse for them than it needs to be, just so he could have some cheap labor? How could she say she was better than him when she never had intentions of bettering the way the company treated faunus in her plans for the future? When she avoided them on the street and when she did run across them, said things about them loudly that no one could ignore.
So, Weiss tried. She’d been trying her best for a long time, trying to impress her father, trying to figure out how to manage a company, trying to fight more and more brutal robots, trying to maintain a decent relationship with her sisters. Trying to keep the other two Schnees from dropping out, trying to organize how she could change things and be even better at running the company than her father is. And then she was trying to better the relationship with her team, trying to improve herself at fighting Grimm, trying to maintain good grades. And now she was trying to not exhibit racist behaviors, trying to keep the company in her hands, trying to make sure that her father wouldn’t see her team and be so absolutely disgusted that he took her position away from her.
And she would keep trying, she supposed. Maybe one day she wouldn’t have such a long list of things she was trying to do, and she could add a few to her list of accomplishments. But that was really just hopeful thinking in the end.