Tear Jerker / Holding the World On Their Shoulders

Never before had a silent, empty courtyard been so painful to behold.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Of course a fic inspired by RWBY has its fair share of tragedy, though Holding the World On Their Shoulders, Lost In The Storm, and Reignfall might actually take it even further than the source material.

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Holding the World on Their Shoulders

Chapter 14: Beacon Academy

• While the event itself is one of the fic's most heartwarming moments, the leadup to May coming out as trans is filled with sad moments.
  • The Happy Huntresses takes team CASM out for shopping. While Cinder, Marrow and Winter all enjoy themselves, Winter and Cinder in particular taking the time to really find their own styles for the first time after being raised in the strictly conformist society of Atlas, May is left wanting. While the HH are happy to offer May the same fashion advice they gave her teammates, the fact that May is not out as a woman to anyone present means that, no matter what she gets, it will still cause her pain and dysphoria. The well-meaning advice from her friends eventually causes May so much stress that she leaves to pick out some clothes alone. She ends up walking around the mall alone, picking out whatever causes her the least dysphoria while at the same time feeling jealous of how happy her teammates looked wearing styles that really fit them.
  • While on the rooftop dealing with a fit of dysphoria, Winter finds her and asks her what's wrong, since she knows her well enough to see through her fascade and even calling her her best friend. May's ensuing ramble about how much pain she is in is heartwrenching.
  Winter: I know you, and I can tell you’re clearly-
  May: But you don’t! You don’t know me, no one does! Everyone’s been going on and on and on about who I am, when they don’t have even the faintest clue! They just see the shallow, surface level shit. ‘Oh, that’s Marigold, he’s emo, he’s moody, he’s antisocial.’ No one at all can actually name a trait about me that isn’t just me being ‘reserved’, and that’s not an actual trait, that’s a coping mechanism! Everyone got to start being themselves and I’m still stuck being the same old *** (May) godsdamned Marigold, and I’m sick of it!

Chapter 24: Glass

• Stella has finally deduced May's real name through various immense breaches of privacy. May's reaction when Stella reveals this is nothing short of horror, as Stella now can not only torment May any time she's asleep, but also has the means to completely ruin May's life by outing her. May is terrified to tears, and it is only made worse when Stella lies about how she learned it, claiming that she took it from Winter's memories. Even knowing that it was likely not on purpose, May still tries desperately to deny that Winter would betray her trust like that.

Chapter 25: Spiral

• Appropriately considering the title of the chapter, it opens on May panicking over Stella's nighttime visit. In particular, she realizes that even if Stella has no evidence of May being trans, she can still out her to her Abusive Parents.
• In her panic, May runs to her rooftop retreat. Winter tries to follow her, but Watts blocks her access to the elevator and blocks all her messages. With no one to talk to, and Winter seemingly ignoring her on purpose, May spirals further into panic and despair. Watts even goes the extra step of blocking all other messages from May's scroll, leaving her completely isolated during her worst panic attack yet.

Chapter 26: Janus

• When Winter tells May about the shady stuff she's heard about the Janus archive, it pretty much destroys any trust between them. May's trust was already frayed from the last two chapters, but the revelation that Winter has been keeping secrets from her causes May to question if Winter lied about not outing her to Stella, which again leads her to question if Winter has kept other secrets from her. And considering the outcome of the Janus mission, it will be many, many years before the two will repair their relationship, if they can at all.

Lost In The Storm

Chapter 21: And All That Could Have Been

• Just to give an idea of what the reader is getting into, the title is inspired by What Could Have Been by Sting, the song used in the famously tragic ending of Arcane.
• The bulk of the chapter is a Lotus-Eater Machine showing May's perfect world; She is living as a woman and in a relationship with Winter. Jacques and Ironwood have been arrested, and Willow is working on redistributing the Schnee fortune. Even May's parents, Ladon and Celeste, are supporting of both her gender and of her relationship. At a dinner with Winter and her parents, Ladon is about to tell May how proud he is of her as his daughter... which is where the dream shatters, and May is ripped back into cold reality. May is left desperately grasping for any remain of the illusion as it falls apart around her, and then begging Salem to give her just a few more seconds, to let her hear her father recognize and be proud of her for who she is. Salem, of course, does not.
  May: I… no… I… put me back, you don’t understand, you need to put me back in! Just for a minute or two, please, he… he was about to… he…
• Salem wastes no time in manipulating May, making her turn all her frustration and despair into anger and directing it at everyone. Not just Ozpin, but also Cinder, her parents, Ironwood, Clover, Harriet, and even Winter and Marrow, the people she once considered her closest friends. And to top it off, Salem tells May how proud she is of her, and even calls her daughter. If May ever had a shred of disloyalty to Salem, it is long gone. May has been on a Protagonist Journey to Villain for a long time, but this is the greatest demonstration of how the girl who wanted to make a difference in an unfair world is becoming a pawn for a monster.
• Normally, a declaration of love would be a joyous occasion. Not this time. May, still crying from everything and raging at the world that tormented her, blames Winter for lying and keeping secrets, finally admitting that she loved her. Winter, perhaps the greatest source of happiness in May's life, becomes another means for Salem to manipulate her.
  “Winter!” May snapped. “She promised me she wouldn’t lie to me, that she’d care, that we’d protect each other, time after time, no matter what happened! But then, she just… left me to rot! I trusted her, I cared about her, I loved-,”
  
  May’s voice choked out, on the last word, as a truth she hadn’t fully admitted to herself threatened to spring free.
  
  “I loved her”

Chapter 24: Old Friends

• While walking the streets of Mantle, May ends up reminiscing about how much she still loves the city, but feels unable to truly enjoy it, both because of the narrative Salem has fed her, and because of the trauma she still has towards Atlas.
• May sees the Happy Huntresses, and completely shuts down. Not only are they friends she hasn't seen in years, but Marrow and Winter are among them. The sight of them laughing and smiling along with Robyn, Fiona and Joanna serves both as a reminder to May about what she has lost, and as a glimpse at what she could have been had it not been for the disastrous mission to Janus. Even worse, the sight of Marrow and Winter causes May to feel that she has been replaced, that all of her old friends are just as happy, perhaps even more so, without her. Once again, May's anxieties and self-doubt come in the way of her happiness.
  • In a spectacular bit of bad luck, May ends up bearing witness to Marrow being invited to the Happy Huntresses, something May always wanted but now can't.
• May does eventually build up the courage to call out to Winter, hoping that they can at least share a common cause with Salem and desperate deep down to reunite with the girl she loves. Only for her call to fall on deaf ears. In her panic, she has activated her semblance, and is in too much emotional distress to deactivate it. By the time she's calmed down enough to lower the cloak, the huntresses have left, and May decides that it's for the best.

Chapter 29: Life

• The deaths of all of May's companions, save Emerald. Having tracked May across continents for no other reason than petty revenge and slight prompting from Salem, Juni Synthrichia blows up the explosives May was using to get into the silent archive. Barry dies instantly. The rest survive thanks to auras, though Cassia and Silver are cut down in short order. These characters, despite being original to the fic, have been built up as familiar and friendly faces, with their own lives and stories. Now they are killed and left to rot in a cave somewhere in the tundra of Solitas, caught in the crossfire of petty vengeance.
• While also heartwarming, May's determination to save Emerald. Emerald has been with her longer than anyone else, and she sees her as close as a sister. May is a panicking mess by the time Emerald is saved.
• Cinder is not in a good mental state this entire chapter. Seeing the rough, aggressive leader of team CASM reduced to a hopeless, powerless, PTSD-ridden mess can tug on some hearstrings, especially with the knowledge that it was caused by one of the few people Cinder could have ever considered a friend.

Chapter 30: The Bad News

• May suffers yet another nightmare, this time seeing the Happy Huntresses at a diner in Mantle. She's cloaked by her semblance and can't turn it off, as the huntresses talk about how much they always hated her and how glad they are to be rid of her. The dream follows up on May's anxieties seen in "Old Friends", how she truly feels that her closest friends actually never liked her.
• While the entire conversation with May and Amarillo is heartwrenching, as she tells him about Silver, Barry and Cassia's deaths, the end stands out in particular. Having come to realize that Salem's treatment of May is not healthy, Amarillo tries to tell May that she should call up her old friends, hoping to guide her into rebuilding her support network. May instead hangs up on him, cementing how deep Salem's manipulation has taken root.

Chapter 31: A Loose End

• Amarillo's death. Having finally realized what a monster Salem is, Amarillo defects, trying to steal an airship for Vale so he can tell Ozpin everything he knows, and maybe even have the chance to help May. He never gets the chance, as Cinder interrupts him mid-escape and kills him. Things were finally about to take a turn for the better, only for a long line of dominoes to finally collapse. What makes it worse is that Amarillo's death makes perfect sense. Cinder doesn't kill him for sadistic fun, she kills him because of all the circumstances that have led her to this point. If Rhodes had taken the time to hear Amarillo out, if Ironwood hadn't taken Cinder under his wing, if Amarillo had defected earlier, this would not have happened. But all of those things did happen, and this is the innevitable outcome.

Chapter 32: The Cold Reality Of War

• Salem uses Amarillo's death as another means to turn May against her old friends, because of course she does.

Reignfall

Chapter 4: The Board Has Been Set

• May, despite having no reason to think so, is terrified when going to report to Salem because she's afraid Salem is going to punish her. It's a reminder of how abusive May's childhood was, and the trauma she still carries even when she doesn't act it. An additional layer of tragedy is added when May is relieved that Salem is not like her former abusers. As the reader knows, Salem is exactly like that, and just better at hiding it.

Chapter 5: Are We Heroes Keeping Peace?

• Much like how May's Anguished Declaration of Love happened during the most tragic circumstances, May finally calls Cinder her friend in this chapter. And she does it as part of calling out Ironwood's crimes, which include ordering Cinder, May's friend, to arrest her.

Chapter 6: Born An Angel, Heaven Sent

• At the Vytal dance, May notices all the spots where she and her friends hung out at the vytal dance eight years ago. Each moment brings her more pain, either from recalling how much dysphoria she was in, or from the broken relationships with all of her friends. She ends up leaving early when it becomes too much to bear.
  • In particular, she reflects on the experience that made her leave; Seeing Marrow, happier than he had ever been, having just come out as gay and dancing with his crush. A happiness that May could not have or even imagine herself having, but desperately wanted.
• Upon seeing Pyrrha and Jaune, May gets a hint of jealousy. At Pyrrha for having the perfect life, everything she could have ever wanted with no sacrifice (that May knows of), whereas May lost everything and suffered immensely just for taking a stand for her principles. At Jaune because he had the courage to come to the Vytal dance in a dress, something May had considered eight years earlier but ultimately did not go through with. She is left filled with both anger and regret at the life she could have had if she had done so.

Chapter 7: Where Our Lives Are, As of This Vytal Festival

• The entire last third of the chapter! Having arrived to the Vytal festival to support Weiss, Winter ends up spotting a girl with blue hair and golden eyes in the crowd, recognizing her as May. Even seven years after her supposed death, the mere chance that May is there is enough to get Winter to hope, chasing after her. Instead, she finds just an empty courtyard. What follows is Winter Talking to the Dead, letting out all the feelings she has been bottling up and not even shared with the other Happy Huntresses. She says that she misses May, that she can't stop thinking about what she could have done differently to prevent her death. How much it hurts her to let May be deadnamed and misgendered posthumously, while also not wanting to out her and betray her trust. Finally, she outright begs May to give just the slightest hint that she's alive. Of course, she's met by nothing but silence.
  “I miss you,” Winter said. “I miss you, and I hate it, because it feels like… it feels like I’m never going to get better from this. Every time you cross my mind, all I can think about is how wrong it all went, about how everything fell apart in the worst way, and I want to apologize, I want to say I’m sorry, I’m sorry for how things ended, that I’m sorry I didn’t tell you more, that I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, but… but I’ll never, ever get that chance.”

Chapter 8: Reminiscence

• The chapter opens on a retelling of the last part of chapter 7, but from May's perspective. As Winter is talking about how much pain she has been in since May "died", May is left completely unbelieving, trying to deny that Winter is telling the truth. Trying to deny that Winter still loves her. After years of Salem's gaslighting and manipulation, it takes a herculean effort from May's side to accept the obvious, that Winter never stopped caring about her.
• While the chapter is mostly sweet, as May and Winter ''finally' reunite after nearly eight years, and, just for once, May's life seems to be going in the right direction. However, it constantly carries the undertone that May does not let herself get too close to Winter due to Salem's manipulation. Not to mention the innevitable Fall of Beacon looming on the horizon...

Chapter 9: The Trolley Problem

• May and Winter confess their feelings to each other and agree to get together as a romantic couple. The Fall of Beacon is 48 hours away.

Chapter 10: A Ray Of Hope

• On top of the train where they once had one of their most significant conversations, May decides that she'll tell Winter everything. The decision causes so much anxiety in her (much of it Salem-induced) that she panics and Winter has to calm her down, and even when she opens her mouth to talk, she finds herself saying that it's nothing.

Chapter 11: Burned

• The Fall of Beacon begins.
  • The way it begins is both this and sheer Nightmare Fuel; May, through Watts, hacks into Penny's visual sensors, causing her to see Cardin as still having his aura when he's actually downed. Penny, a sweet young girl who was looking forward to a friendly tournament fight, is used as a murder weapon by a woman who's fallen so far from grace that she can't see what she's truly doing. One has to wonder what Penny will think when, and if, she's turned on again.

Chapter 12: Fall

• The chapter begins with a compilation of different characters reacting to May's speech and Cardin's death, all of which are various degrees of horrified;
  • Winter, the only one who knows for sure that the speaker is May, feels like the entire world falls apart around her. She has been reunited with May for a few days after nearly a decade of thinking she was dead, and now the girl she loves has done something horrible.
  • Marrow is the first one to recognize May, since she was his partner, and he flashes back to the last time team CASM ever talked, during the mission to the Janus archive when they had a fallout that they never could mend. He doesn't know if it's worse that May is dead, or that she's alive and responsible for Cardin's death.
  • The other happy huntresses are left completely stunned when they realize, wondering how May of all people could do this. Meanwhile, the panicking people of Mantle are attracting grimm, and Atlas is pulling back its soldiers, forcing the huntresses to push their personal issues aside to focus on protecting people.
  • Aside from Winter, Cinder is the very first to recognize May, even before Marrow. She reacts by throwing herself straight into work, going to pour over security footage to identify May as the shooter who took her eye out, before coldly steeling herself for the innevitable fallout of Beacon's fall. It's fairly obviously a coping mechanism.
  • Qrow is overwhelmed by guilt, blaming himself for having failed to stop May the night before.
  • Ladon Marigold hears it and brushes it off as an attempt at slandering his family name, refusing to believe that it's truly his "son".
• May and Winter's confrontation. It starts with Winter, with shaking voice, asking May why she's doing this, how she could possibly think the fall of Beacon will help people. May tries to argue that she's tearing down the corrupt system that perpetuates suffering, but Winter calls it for what it is; Lashing out at the world that hurt her with no constructive goal. May, of course, does not take this well, angrily accusing Winter of not understanding what she's trying to do.
  • May dismisses the volunteering and activism done in Mantle as futile and useless in the long run, which hurts Winter who feels like May is minimizing the years of effort she and the happy huntresses have done in Mantle. When she calls her out on it, May only doubles down, calling Winter naïve for thinking she can ever make any kind of lasting change without doing something like what May is doing with the fall of Beacon. With this, May is both hurting one of the people who actually truly care about her, btu also showing how far she has fallen into Salem's manipulations that she doesn't even see simple acts of charity as worth it anymore.
  • Seeing no hope for convincing her girlfriend otherwise, Winter finally draws her weapon. This finally breaks through May's anger, filling her with regret instead, as she has no desire to fight the woman she loves. Despite her pleas, Winter refuses to budge.
  • During their fight, Winter continues to beg May to turn around, to come back with her. And worst of all is that May truly wants to walk away from it all and go back with Winter, but she's so deeply entrenched in her warped mindset that she only sees Winter's pleas as pity and faux compassion. At which point the doppler starts speaking with her voice, and May doesn't even realize because what it's saying comes naturally to her through her doppler-induced anger.
  • Having no hope of defeating May using her crosstaff, Winter instead switches to a different weapon; Matilda, May's old bastard sword. It speaks volumes to how far May has fallen that the weapon she used to care for like a prized possession, which she always kept perfectly sharp and referred to only by the correct pronouns, she now destroys without a second thought.
  • Their confrontation ends when May severs the traincart Winter is standing on from the rest of the train. The last they see of each other, both their faces are filled with heartbreak and anger.

Chapter 13: Achilles, Come Down

• Starting with the title, it's taken from the Gang of Youths song "Achilles Come Down", about a man being talked down from suicide. The song itself is filled with tearjerker, but equally tearjerking is how it applies to both Pyrrha, who is committing practical suicide by going to fight May, and May, who is committing figurative suicide by making the worst mistake of her life.
• The scene from the show where Pyrrha decides to go back to face Cinder/May is here shown from her perspective, and it is heartwrenching, as she reflects on the happiness she's had with her team and how she wants that happiness to continue, only to ultimately decide that leaving would be selfish and it's her duty to go to her death.

Chapter 14: Haunted

• Qrow Branwen is dead, which means that Ruby reached the top of Beacon Tower just in time to watch her uncle die.
  • Cinder may have never liked Qrow, but she is sadened by his passing as a fellow Huntress.
• The entire chapter is dedicated to showing the aftermath of the Fall of Beacon. The dust may have settled, but now the bodies are counted. By the third day, when Pyrrha wakes up, there are already 1400 confirmed dead, with that number expected to grow into the thousands.
• Cinder, Clover, Santiago and Ironwood are all quietly horrified when Santiago reads the names of the dead students of Atlas academy, including an entire team of huntsman trainees, and three students from various teams. They only have a moment to grieve before Ironwood launches into actions that are understandable given the circumstances, but will only make Atlas and Mantle into a worse place than they already are.
• Pyrrha suffers a trauma-induced nightmare about facing a nightmarish vision of May in the arena. The dream then shifts to her escaping Beacon Tower, stumbling and falling outside and lying on the ground, looking at the star. She did not think she would ever see them again. When she wakes up, Jaune is sitting in a chair next to her bed, having not left since the Fall judging by his unshaved chin.
  • Jaune makes it clear that Pyrrha will likely need a mobility aid because of the injuries she suffered against May.
  • When he tells her that it was a broken piece of Pyrrha's shield that killed Qrow, she gets sick at the idea that May used her tool of protection to kill someone, and even feels guilty for it.
• Winter returns to Mantle to find it having fallen even further into authoritarianism that it had already, with countless security checks, breaks of civil liberties, and hundreds of Mantlers kept confined to the airport while waiting to be processed. Everything the Happy Huntresses had accomplished through the last six years of working to improve Mantle's conditions, undone because of May's actions.
• The entire interrogation scene.
  • Winter notices that Cinder is less rigidly militaristic than usual. Either it's exhaustion from the events of the past few days wearing on her, or she is simply more relaxed when around two of the three only people whom she could ever have considered friends. Both of whom deeply loathe her.
  • When Winter admits that May came out as trans to her back in Atlas, Cinder seems genuinely hurt and distraught that May apparently never trusted her enough to come out.
• May wakes up and immediately panicks over how many people she has killed, trying desperately to convince herself that it was necesarry, and for the greater good. Not only is her reasoning echoing Cinder's reasoning in the Hephaestus mission, but she's not fooling anyone. Least of all herself.
  • Emerald is seen for the first time since her injuries, with burns covering large parts of her body and hearing in her bad ear never coming back, adding to May's guilt.

Chapter 15: Scarred

• May starts noticing the effects of the Doppler's possession, but assures herself that if it was anything serious, Salem would tell her. The idea that Salem is responsible for what's happening to her she doesn't even consider.
• Winter finally tells the Happy Huntresses that May is a trans woman and came out to her all the way back in their first Vytal tournament together, complete with an account of how May and Winter left the ball early because May was too miserable in her suit and wanted to spend at least part of the night in a dress. Marrow feels guilty that his dance with Malen made May more miserable than ever. Everyone else is quiet with regrets. Robyn thinks about everything she could have done different to help May earlier, that she could have told her in no uncertain terms that they wanted her with them when they left Atlas, that her team could've hung out at the landing platform the night May was blackbagged.
• Upon realizing that May is in what's essentially a cult, the Happy Huntresses somberly realizes that, with the Fall of Beacon, May has nowhere else to turn but Salem, as everyone else would try to arrest or kill her. Not only that, but May is now more likely than ever to double down on the path she's headed down, because realizing that she's wrong would mean confronting the fact that she's a mass murderer who killed thousands for no reason.
  Robyn: I’m… I’m so sorry, Winter, but… I don’t know if she can come back from this.
• Marrow realizes that Winter was in love with May, and everyone reassures her that they don't think any less of her for that. When Winter admits that part of her still loves May, they all fall silent until Robyn speaks up and reassures her that it's okay if her feelings don't just disappear overnight.
• Watts returns to Evernight after a trip to Solitas, bringing a newspaper that he thinks May should see, but warns her that she probably won't like it. The article is an interview with Ladon, May's father, and even before reading it May can already tell it will be hell for her already bad depression, but can't stop herself from wanting to know what Ladon said about her, showing that even after all this time she can't help but want the love of her parents.
  • In the interview itself, Ladon completely mischaracterizes May as a loyal Atlesian, claims the Beacon terrorist was just a deranged individual trying to sully the Marigold name, and dismisses the idea that his "son" could be trans, misgendering her throughout. Either Ladon never paid any attention to his daughter whatsoever, or he did but his image is more important to him than respecting his dead child. May is so furious that the scroll breaks in her hand.

Chapter 16: The World Keeps Turning

• May spends the vast majority of the chapter in the depths of a depressive funk, motivated in part by her aura not having come back in the ten weeks that have passed since the Fall of Beacon, and part by the realization she got from reading newspapers that she is now Hated by All. She spends several weeks doing nothing but lying in bed, dreading the occasions where she has to sneak out to get food and otherwise letting her room turn into Trash of the Titans. It's also mentioned that whenever she sleeps she either suffers nightmares, which are bad, or wonderful dreams about how things could have been, which is worse when she wakes up. At one point the fic devolves into simply saying that another day has passed over and over again.
• Pyrrha and the rest of team JNPR is brought up to speed on Salem, the maidens, and the relics. Even though they all agreed that they wanted to know, it's obvious that it hits them hard how much their world has changed with what they now know. Especially Pyrrha, who wants nothing more than to just have a normal life, but knows she can never have it.
• Team RWBY is not doing great either. Like in the show, Blake has left and Yang is not dealing with it well, which clearly causes Ruby no end of worry.
  • Jaune expresses worry about Weiss, who was forced to go back to Atlas with her father, since he talked to Winter and suspects how awful Jacques is. Pyrrha assures him that Weiss will have Winter with her for support, not knowing that Winter lives in Mantle and is completely cut off from her sister.

Chapter 17: The Feeling's Mutual

• Jacques actions towards Weiss is if anything much more despicable than in the show, which is made all the more heartwrenching by the reader being in Weiss' head the whole time. Aside from "just" berating and slapping her like he did in the show, Jacques also continuously misgenders and acts transphobic towards Weiss, tells her that he'll have her branded as mentally unstable so he can keep custody over her despite her being of age, and donates Myrtenaster to a museum, calling it a gesture of good faith to the kingdom because Weiss clearly can't be trusted with a sword. The last part utterly breaks Weiss, as the weapon she considered an extension of her soul and had vowed to never lose or replace has been taken away from her with no chance of getting it back.
• Because of the scars she received before the Fall of Beacon, Emerald has self-image issues and can't imagine anyone seeing her as attractive.
• May asks Emerald if she wants to sit out the mission to Haven, which Emerald initially assumes is because May doesn't want her. After clarifying that that's not the case, May explains that Cinder Rhodes never once cared about her wellbeing and blackbagged her when she got inconvenient. While it's sweet to see how much May cares about Emerald, it also brings a bitter reminder that May and Cinder's hatred of each other is built on neither knowing what the other was going through. In Holding the World, Cinder did genuinely start to see May as a friend and cared about her, but Ironwood's military brainwashing got to her first.

Chapter 18: Countered

• Pyrrha is, as usual, not doing great. Her sense of obligation, plus the guilt over Qrow dying for her, has caused her to deny herself any chance at happiness or joy, even pushing Jaune away out of fear that associating with her will get him killed. Her new outfit even includes Qrow's cape as a literal weight on her shoulders. There is also the matter of how she picked her new outfit; Alone and in silence, just like May all those years ago.
  • Pyrrha refuses to reforge her shield, Akoúo̱, feeling that since May used a broken piece of it to murder Qrow Branwen, it's corrupted forever and can never be used as a tool of protection again.
• When Lil' Miss Malachite jokes that May is paying for her services with "daddy's money", May bitterly gestures to herself and says that her father wouldn't give her allowance when she looks like this. She is still not, and likely will never be, over her parents neglect and transphobia.
• Cinder and May were never close, and were mostly at each others' throats throughout their time in Atlas. Still, they did consider each other friends. Now that they finally reunite, the years and their own actions have turned that spark of friendship into nothing but hatred.
  • Cinder claims that she tried to protect May in Atlas, and would have supported her if she came out as trans. How true that is is up for debate, but it's clear that Cinder truly wanted to do her best as team leader, but her determination to be the best, along with Atlas' military brainwashing made her act in ways that only alienated her from her team. May for her part wants none of Cinder's protection or support, arguing that Janus would have gone the exact same even if Atlas did everything to support her transitioning. While these two could probably never have been good friends, it's undeniable that their current hatred for each other is a product of the horrid system they knew each other in.
  • When May starts to draw on her grimm infusions out of desperation, Cinder stops her attack in shock and can do nothing but ask what happened to her old teammate. Her tone of voice reminds May of the "almost-concern" Cinder used to show in Atlas, which does nothing but infuriate her further.
  • The partially transformed May's attack is so violent and savage that Cinder, the proud Atlesian specialist who dedicated herself to being the best her entire life, is left stumbling backwards in terror.
• Pyrrha's aformentioned situation is not helped when it turned out that she is soul-bonded with May, a situation that may eventually destroy her identity entirely. And the only times when Ozpin can help her train to resist it is when she's already exhaused and missing her aura.

Chapter 20: Look Who's Talking

• May wakes up in a prison cell and, while she quickly assures herself that she's not in Cerberus, she is still clearly on the verge of panicking, especially when she tries to contact Salem and gets no response, and probably can't for weeks.
  She felt like she was going to vomit.
  
  No one was coming to help her.
  
  She was on her own.
• Emerald's betrayal. Clever readers may have seen it coming given the metric buttload of setup, it does not make it hurt any less to see how devastated May is. For a good while she struggles to even process that Emerald, her closest friend for years, a girl who is like a sister to her, would stab her in the back. Once it fully hits her, she's torn between fury that another friend has betrayed her like everyone else, and hurt over losing someone who's been with her for so long.
  Emerald: I’m… I’m sorry, May.
  • Emerald for her part clearly doesn't want to do this and begs May to see reason, that what they are doing causes nothing but misery, and that what Salem is doing is wrong. May is too furious and hurt to listen.
  • Afterward, in her cell in Argus, May is left reflecting on the betrayal and starts to wonder if Emerald was right, that everything she has done was wrong and that everyone who has opposed her, even Cinder, may have been right all along. The fact that she's right about this makes it all the more heartwrenching.
• Yang accuses May of letting innocent people die for a revolution they didn't even know about, but May tells her that she has nothing to say about revolution since she grew up in peace and prosperity. Yang fires back that May killed her uncle, so she has very good reason to get involved.