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It’s during the long summer break between third and fourth year -- when the softer years of their schooling are almost at an end, students beginning to evaluate their futures with hopeful, ambitious eyes -- that Weiss goes home to Atlas.
If Blake’s to be honest with themself, it makes them extremely nervous. It’s not the first time she’s gone home since attending Beacon, of course, but never for as long as this summer promises to be. It’s not without reason, and they do understand why she’s leaving, Weiss’s commitment to her departure bolstered by a thousand well-intentioned ideals and promises, but it doesn’t quell the twinge of anxiety that laces their gut. The few sparse days she’s spent in the distant north over the past three years always see her return with an edge to her jagged smile, colder than the ice her home is often rimed in, and it leaves everyone tentative until it fades away again. Who knows what the multiple months of continued exposure might do?
But Weiss wouldn’t have been dissuaded even if Blake had tried, tracing the lines of her blood and chasing the truth with squared shoulders and hardened eyes, and Blake can sense that when they return home at summer’s end they won’t be the same person, not any more. Something new, something reformed. Something that carries a weight both burden and freedom. Blake’s not sure if that’s what’s making them so anxious, the thought that Weiss might return a different person altogether.
It doesn’t matter, in the end; Weiss will be home again before they even really realise it, Yang says, and she’s right. There’s no time for Blake to sit about worrying when Ruby has planned a whole coterie of missions and jobs and exterminations and extra credit to fill the humid summer weeks. That’s just what the summer holidays are now, after second year — just a different sort of work, students taking the chance to get a taste of the real rough-and-tumble world of hired Hunters and Huntresses. It also means getting to have some money in their pockets and experience under their belt, and for most, that’s better than lazing around for weeks on end.
The back-to-back missions do turn out to cause time to fly by fantastically well, though. One quest down to the southern end of Sanus sees them crash (almost very literally) into the recently-graduated CFVY, hunting for big game as a fully-fledged team, and when Ruby asks what it’s like to be out in the big wide world without the stress of an exam or a grade hanging over your head, Coco just makes a face and goes, “Well, I sure wouldn’t miss the constant stress of maybe dying. Catch myself even missin’ Goodwitch, sometimes.”
The job up north that follows — helping a trade caravan through Grimm-infested woods on their way to a handful of towns — takes the longest by far, and it caps off their summer with an impressive amount of Lien deposited into their personal accounts. Or, at least, it seems that way until Pyrrha had pointed out that they’d have had more had Beacon not also taken their mandatory cut.
“Gods,” Yang replied with a grin. “I can’t wait to be outta this school. I don’t care what Coco says about almost dying when she’s gotta be making bank!”
“We’re doing this because it’s the right thing, Yang, not for the money!” Ruby whined, elbowing her sister in the ribs, but Yang had just tossed an arm about Ruby’s shoulders and tugged her close, both of them now almost even in height.
“Hey, you can work fuckin’ pro bono all you like, but I’ve got big plans for bumblebee that require some, how you say, fat stacks—“
Blake laughed, and didn’t contribute to the conversation. The money is, in the end, more or less inconsequential to them — a position of privilege to be sure, their surname proof enough — but they’d already told Ruby they wanted to help out Faunus communities for free anyway, to protect them against the humans who’d mercilessly rip them off for a tidy profit. It’s a small thing maybe, but enough that Ruby had sworn that no matter the distance between them, she’d always be available for backup.
However, for all their conversations of money, Blake has no idea what Weiss does with theirs. She’s never had access to the family accounts, apparently, and there will be no inheritance for her to expect. Her sister helps her out every now and again, slipping them money whenever she can convince Weiss to accept it, but otherwise Weiss is pretty frugal, the type to research every purchase thoroughly. Everything she owns is obtained only after hours — days — of thought, the pros and cons weighed down to the gram.
Which is why it is something of a shock when Weiss returns to Beacon as summer begins to wane and fade and die, with their duffel bag slung across her back, their hair clipped short by professional hands, and the announcement that she’s gotten a tattoo.
“Well,” she starts, and pauses. “Maybe it counts as more than one. Three?”
There’s a scene to be set here; the team is sat in Blake and Yang’s dorm room -- fourth year is when partners are divided into their own rooms, preparing them for a life in which their team may never come together again -- and even though they’ve all only been back for a few days at most, the room is quiet so rarely that the silence that follows Weiss’s little proclamation is weird. Yang is laid back on her bed, staring at Weiss in that open-mouthed and awe-struck sort of way she does when Weiss does anything she considers mega cool, whilst at the foot of Blake’s bed is sat Ruby, who raises one hand to tap at the red headphones slung about her neck, silencing a tinny guitar solo and letting Blake hear the beginnings of a squeal right in the back of her throat. Blake, however, is looking Weiss up and down, and they think they know what she’s done; they’re wearing a long-sleeved Beacon shirt, the body in black heather and the sleeves a lighter grey, but Blake’s only seen them wear it maybe four or five times before. Weiss, as a rule, doesn’t like clothes that cover too much skin, that’ll cling uncomfortably if she gets them wet in an emergency dip, so the shirt’s a rare occurrence.
But it is good at hiding things.
“Where?” Yang is first to blurt out, and she rolls off the bed and onto her feet, approaching Weiss with heavy-footed steps like she’s gonna strip them down herself. “How big? A tattoo? I expected this shit from, like, Ruby, or Blake, or definitely Nora, but you?”
Blake’s not sure why Yang thought they were a prime suspect -- their tribe has no particular association with tattoos of any type, so maybe it was just a personality or aesthetic thing. Still, they’re also pretty surprised. There’s a lingering Schnee image around Weiss, with her white hair and blue eye, and imagining any Schnee with a tattoo is a weird thing to try and envision.
“They’re, um, pretty big,” Weiss says, unslinging her duffel bag from her shoulders and dumping it at the end of Blake’s bed, moving slowly as if Yang will pounce at too sudden a motion. “If you wanna see them, though, you might, uh, have to see a bit of my chest.”
Yang rolls her eyes and scoffs, and she looks between Blake and Ruby whilst jabbing a thumb towards the shorter Faunus, as if saying get a load of this idiot. “Weiss, we shared a room for three years. We are all familiar with your tits, Blake more than most.”
Blake yelps as Ruby snickers, murmuring something about shitties (shark titties) under her breath, but Weiss just laughs, stepping back to test that the door is locked before she hooks her fingers under the hem of her shirt. “Okay, then, lemme just--”
The shirt rises up as Weiss brings it up and over her head, and at first glance there’s not much different, the pale skin of her stomach and gills no different than before. The stiff, dark material of their binder obscures their chest for now, but it’s when the neckline of the shirt is tugged free and the shirt slips down her biceps-- oh, then it becomes obvious.
“Oh, okay,” Yang says. “That big.”
That big happens to be both arms, from the shoulder right down to the narrow slip of their wrists, being covered in a blue gradient like a cross-section of the ocean. It starts with pure midnight black that fades into navy up her forearms, and from her elbows it slowly lightens up into a pale cornflower hue at the curve of her collarbones, the ink spilling free like water escaping the edge of the world. Even from where Blake’s sat at the other end of the room, they can see tiny details scattered across her skin -- the silhouettes of fish passing underneath beams of sunlight, bubbles rising to the surface. They’re the most gorgeous sleeves Blake’s ever seen, and they’re just about to say that when Weiss takes in a breath and starts to pull her binder free, Blake instead averting their eyes so they don’t just stare blankly at the soft curves of her chest instead. It’s only once she’s turned around, feet padding against the floorboards, that they glance back up… and when they do, their jaw lands square onto their sternum.
“Weiss,” Ruby whispers. “Holy shit.”
Ruby doesn’t cuss very often, so the fact she does at all really stands as a testament to what everyone’s seeing, what Blake can’t quite believe they’re seeing. The gradient isn’t just on Weiss’s arms; instead, they’re both connected to a full back tattoo, like a triptych of the ocean. Across the width of her shoulders are waves cresting against the uneven peaks of jagged rock that jut from choppy waters, and the tattoo gets darker as it runs down their back, ending at their hips where Blake can see put into colour the very word abyssal. Schools of fish have glittering scales, the distant shadow of a shark giving chase, and on a dark and uneven seabed Blake has to squint to make out a capsized and sunken ship, anchor tangled around needle-like spires, seaweed almost seeming to shift with the tides yet locked into stasis, as though captured and printed directly onto Weiss’s skin.
Nobody follows Ruby’s exclamation for a good, long minute, and once it starts turning from awed to awkward, Weiss glances over their shoulder with her cheeks stained a soft pink. “I-- is it, uh, too much?”
It sounds like she’s waiting for their approval -- as if they can cut it back a little, as though it’s not there forever -- and so Yang starts, stops, curls her fingers under her chin, and then grins.
“You know you didn’t have to give Blake even more reasons to find you sexy, right?”
The next thing that comes out of Yang’s mouth is a shout of laughter as Blake leaps off their bed to tackle her onto her own, planting a few soft punches into her ribs with a hiss of shut the fuck up, but Yang’s -- once again -- right. To be perfectly frank about it, the tattoos are so mouth-wateringly, mind-melting hot that Blake’s pretty sure their brain just refuses to comprehend them as real, lest their libido shoot through the roof and leave another hole on the moon.
“Well,” Weiss starts, and Blake can hear the smile in their voice, the way she looks over her shoulder and away again when they make eye contact. “It doesn’t hurt to encourage them, I suppose.”
Ruby makes a gagging sound as Yang whoops, and Weiss laughs as she makes to put their binder back on. Not that they can, of course, because Blake’s standing up and crossing the room and reaching forwards automatically, almost making contact before they remember there’s an audience, not quite able to run their hands mindlessly down her arms, her back, her everything, not yet.
“Sorry,” they say instead. “May I-- may I touch you?”
Weiss just sort of look at them, probably able to see the want that confirms Yang’s claim, but they nod anyway. Blake’s first touch is down their spine, light enough to make her shiver, but Blake pauses just long enough to look at their hand as if they’re expecting the ink to come free, to smear and smudge and cling to the whorls of their fingerprints instead, like slick oil paint yet to dry. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t, and Ruby comes up beside Blake to look closer, leaning forward to catch the most minute of details, painstakingly etched by a steady hand.
“You say it doesn’t hurt,” Yang pipes up again, still reclined on the bed. “But, shit. That had to have stung a bit.”
Weiss hums, giggles when Blake’s fingers dare too close to the edges of her gills where they’re especially sensitive. “A little, yeah. I’ve had worse pains before, but there were a couple of spots that took a lot of willpower to muscle through.” With a murmur of assent, Weiss lifts one arm for Ruby to see where the ink runs along the softer inside of their bicep. “Honestly, though, the sessions were pretty long, so it was mostly just mind-numbing.”
Blake tries to imagine how much this must’ve cost, trying to calculate it off a very limited understanding of tattoos, but they stop once it starts making their head spin. “Did you-- how did you pay for this? How much did it cost?”
“I saved up,” Weiss says with a shrug. “Last summer’s missions paid for the bulk of it, and what I needed to strictly save I scraped up elsewhere. I mean, I could’ve--”
They stop, swallow, think for a moment. “I could’ve gotten it cheaper, but… I had a specific artist in mind, in Atlas.”
They don’t add to that, but that’s because Blake understands. A Faunus artist, they’ll bet, who knows the tribal ways of the north, who respects the meaning as it’s woven into every drop of blood and ink alike. They’re always pricier to make up for fewer customers, but Blake can see the skill inherent, all the shades of blue blended together like watercolours, the waves shifting as Weiss rolls her shoulders, cracks her neck.
“It’s gorgeous,” Blake says on an exhale, and they drop their hands, giving them space to slide her binder back on. It covers the top half of the back tattoo, but the restless waters and steeples of rock still jut out from above the neckline, the lower half dark and rich against pale skin. The two sleeves make up for the part that’s hidden away, in Blake’s opinion, but they’re still struggling to believe it’s real. Half of them fully expects for Weiss to take a shower or something and come out with blank, damp, pinkened skin and go surprise!
They don’t say any of that, too distracted by how Weiss blushes and smiles, having to look away when they can’t quite hold their gaze. It only means she gets a faceful of Ruby’s hair when they’re dragged into a hug instead, the taller teen pressing a kiss to the top of Weiss’s head.
“Welcome home, Weiss. We missed you.”
A couple of years ago, Weiss would have hesitated to return the gesture. They’d have stood, stiff as a board, with grit teeth as they endured any affection freely given, barely able to conjure up a smile afterwards. That was then, though, and this is now, when Weiss holds Ruby closer instead, the ocean on her skin shifting over her muscle, smiling as they press their face into the crook of Ruby’s neck.
It seems Blake hadn’t been far wrong, though, when the summer had begun; Weiss has come back new, with a wider smile and a body Blake doesn’t recognise as well as they did before. Whoever they were when they left is gone for good, but Blake knows it doesn’t matter. If anything, this Weiss is more like herself than they’ve ever been before.
“I missed you, too.”
This Weiss, Blake thinks, is the one they’ve been looking forward to meeting.