Chapter Text
“I need to see Gambol Shroud.”
Blake recoiled at the request, hand automatically reaching to touch the blade at her back. Weiss hadn’t even looked up from her desk as she spoke, hunched over a forest of brightly-colored vials and cartridges of varying sizes. She had been like that all day, working on god-only-knows-what, combining carefully measured dust samples and referring to the cryptic scribbles in her many notebooks.
She turned to meet Blake’s eyes after the moment of tense silence had dragged on long enough to become awkward, a frown tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Blake?”
The faunus stood frozen in place. She felt the hands on her, pulling at the ribbons. She heard voices, mocking growls at her ear, what right does an animal have to carry around a weapon? Put that down, kitten, you might hurt yourself. The whispers morphed into shouting, accompanied by pinpricks of black aimed at her heart. DROP YOUR WEAPON!
The memories surfaced in an instant, there-and-gone as the Schnee Dust Company heiress asked for Gambol Shroud with all the emotional investment of someone musing about the weather.
“I don’t usually let people touch it,” was all she could manage as explanation.
Blake expected ridicule, or personal offense, or some assurance of competency accompanied by an eye roll. She was met instead with silence. Weiss’s face remained impassive as she considered her teammate, gears turning in her head before she broke the stare and reached beneath her desk. Her hand closed around Myrtenaster’s blade, extending the sword hilt-first.
The move surprised Blake, who stared at the weapon in the air between them for a long moment before closing her hand around the hilt and gently pulling it from Weiss’s grip. The steel was cold to the touch, an effect that was likely enhanced by the light-blue dust currently selected in the revolving chamber.
“Turn it,” Weiss instructed, watching carefully as Blake’s hesitant fingers moved to the mechanism, spinning the wheel until a soft ‘click’ sounded and the red dust chamber was centered. Heat ran the length of the blade, warming her fingers as the weapon responded to her touch. The faunus ran her fingers over the intricate guard, admiring the symbols etched into the steel.
“I have a few theories I’d like to test out,” Weiss continued, turning away from Blake’s silent exploration to lean back over her notebooks. “Have you ever loaded Gambol Shroud with dust vials?”
“No.” Blake raised her gaze from Myrtenaster, peeking over her teammate’s shoulder to inspect the notes in front of her. Most of the page was filled with Weiss’s neat scrawl, but what drew her attention immediately was the small sketch of Blake herself, frozen in the middle of a jump. Behind her was a softer, less-detailed copy of herself, surrounded with notes she couldn’t discern before Weiss’s hand moved to cover the drawing.
“You might want to try it,” she advised, free hand reaching for a metal cartridge half-loaded with vials. “The right combination with your Semblance could produce some interesting results.”
“Such as?”
Weiss flipped a few pages in her notebook, too quickly for Blake to examine the details of the other drawings as they flew by. “You described your Semblance as a sort of rushed, imperfect cloning process. You throw out energy when you activate it, and the process is so quick that the energy doesn’t have time to undergo any sort of transformation. So, it solidifies and immediately takes the image of its source: you.” Weiss looked up from her notebook, blue eyes betraying a trickle of self-consciousness. “If any of this sounds wrong, stop me. It’s a bit difficult for me to conceptualize. My own Semblance is typically very focused, centered on one specific point. Yours incorporates your entire body.”
Blake shook her head, turning her attention to the cartridge in Weiss’s hand. “No, you’re doing fine. Where do the dust vials come in?”
Weiss turned another page, revealing several more sketches of Blake, now shadowed by clones drawn with more substance. One copy was made of stone, making it look as if she had left a statue of herself in her wake. Another was bathed in flames, barely maintaining the outline of her body. A third had been highlighted with lines of light blue, a perfect ice sculpture. “I believe that, with a special dust cartridge, you would be able to focus this energy the instant you emit it. Instead of just a shadow of yourself, you would produce a clone infused with the properties of the dust vial in your cartridge.”
The images on the page stared up at Blake, filling her with a sense of wonder. She saw the logic in Weiss’s words, felt a thrill of excitement at the possibility of filling her shadows with substance. The detail of the sketches struck her as she examined the pages thoroughly. “You’ve been studying me.”
A slight blush crept up the sides of pale cheeks. Weiss’s concentration broke, and she faltered for just a moment before remembering herself and closing the notebook in front of her. “I…I study everyone,” she explained, “I have notes on Ruby and Yang’s Semblances, too. Yours just…gave me some ideas.”
Wordlessly, Blake slipped Gambol Shroud from her back and placed it on the table in front of Weiss, free hand instinctively gripping Myrtenaster tighter as she let the other weapon go. “Show me what you’re thinking.”
Weiss reached for the weapon, slipping it out of its sheath. She took a moment to examine the blade in its ninjato form, letting her fingers run over the length of it. Blake watched tensely, biting back the urge to guide the white-haired girl’s exploration. She saw the concentration etched onto her face, the little smirk of satisfaction when she heard the blade ‘click’ and fold into a pistol.
Her fingers found the magazine well, and she unloaded it, pulling out the old cartridge and angling the pistol up to peer down into the well. A full minute passed as she examined every detail. Blake fidgeted with Myrtenaster as she worked, turning the revolving chamber to feel the blade pulse. Finally, Weiss slipped in the cartridge she had previously loaded, smiling when it fit correctly the first time.
“In lieu of a selection mechanism, you’ll have to order the vials beforehand. I might be able to shape one for you, but for these first trial runs, just fire the trigger. Let the dust feed your aura in the instant before using your Semblance. The first vial is ice.”
Blake nodded and extended Myrtenaster. Weapons changed hands as Weiss stood up and turned to face her. Blake looked down at Gambol Shroud, her fingers wrapping around the grip. It was cold, colder than metal should be on its own, colder than she had ever felt it. Despite the difference, it seemed to pulse with an energy that hadn’t been present before.
“Do you feel it?” Weiss asked.
She nodded, curling her finger over the trigger and closing her eyes. She took a deep breath, grounding herself, letting the chill seep into her. It was not unlike the cold that seemed to permeate the air whenever she stood too close to Weiss while her Semblance was active, icy blasts rolling off of her in waves. Though she spoke of focus, Blake knew that she was not always quite so centered, having felt firsthand the temperature drops that could so quickly plunge a warm room into midwinter.
Still, this was different, drawn inwards, as if the force of a winter storm was building within her veins. It pulsed in time with her heartbeat as her eyes slid open to meet a crystal blue gaze watching her with determination. “When you’re ready, fire, and activate your Semblance immediately.”
Blake obeyed, training the gun at the wall, taking one final inhale. Just before she felt certain that she would freeze if she channeled the energy for a moment longer, she squeezed the trigger.
She moved to dart backwards the instant she fired, feeling all of the cold within her body rush to the surface as she created the clone. Ice crystals exploded from her skin as she moved, a sudden arctic blast filling the room and threatening to topple her as she stumbled, barely managing to land on her feet as a powerful shiver jolted through her spine. Her eyes squeezed shut to combat the onslaught of brain freeze as Gambol Shroud slipped from her stiff fingers and clattered to the floor.
“Blake!”
Weiss’s voice reached her ears, and she felt hands on her a moment later. The touches were warm, her first clue that something was wrong. She had never once touched the white-haired girl without taking note of the chill of her skin.
The hands receded as she shivered, replaced by a warm blanket draped over her shoulders. She opened her eyes to find Weiss staring at her with concern, resting a hand to her forehead and muttering apologies. “That was too concentrated, I should have started you off with a weaker mix…”
“It’s alright,” Blake whispered as the numbness began to fade from her limbs. “I’m fine, just need to warm back up.” Her eyes moved from Weiss to settle on the figure behind her. “Is…is that…?”
Weiss turned around, a smile threatening to surface as she took in the perfect ice sculpture that now occupied the room where Blake had been standing. “Deep freeze aside, you got it on the first try,” she said encouragingly, moving to examine the sculpture from all angles.
Blake followed her, pulling the blanket closer as she inspected the clone she had just created. Weiss was right – it was a perfect likeness of her, every detail looking as if it had been chiseled expertly onto the shimmering surface. Her face was a perfect mask of determination, lips parted just slightly with the breath she had taken before moving. Her arm extended towards the wall, where an icy replica of Gambol Shroud was still pointed.
“Wow,” was all she could say.
“It’s beautiful,” Weiss whispered. Her cheeks flushed pink again a moment later, and she seemed to return to herself as she moved away from the ice clone and grabbed one of her notebooks, scribbling furiously as she spoke. “That went remarkably well for a first trial. Some of the discomfort is likely just the fact that this is new to you, but I’ll work on the dust concentrations and we can run more tests later to figure out what works best.” The pen stilled in her hand for a moment. “Er…if you want to, that is.”
Blake couldn’t help but smile at the girl’s enthusiasm. “I’d love to. Thank you for doing this for me, Weiss.”
Weiss looked up, surprise evident on her face. She opened her mouth to speak, but was suddenly cut off by the loud BANG of the door hitting the wall that never failed to announce Ruby’s entrance.
“We’re back from the mall!” their leader exclaimed, hurling a stack of magazines up onto her bed unceremoniously. A copy of Weapons Weeklyslipped off the top of the jumbled pile and fell onto the floor, but Ruby’s wide-eyed stare had already been drawn elsewhere. “Whoooaaa what is that?”
Yang poked her head in from behind, placing the huge stack of video games she was carrying onto the floor before following her sister’s gaze with a low whistle. “We leave for a few hours, and you feel the need to carve an ice statue of Blake?” she asked with a raised eyebrow. “Jeez, ice queen, there are more traditional ways of telling someone that you’ve got the hots for them –”
“I didn’t carve an ice statue of Blake!” Weiss sputtered, pink face morphing to bright red, “It’s a dust-enhanced shadow clone. She made it herself.”
“With Weiss’s help,” Blake clarified, tossing an appreciative glance at her teammate and trying not to read into her partner’s words.
“Awww, but I want an ice sculpture of myself!” Ruby pouted, stepping closer to the ice and examining it with awe.
“Learn to clone yourself,” Weiss answered, burying herself in her notebook again and trying very hard not to meet Blake’s eyes as Ruby’s whining faded into background noise.
——-
Night found Blake curled up around her sheets, eyes wide in the darkness as she fought to fall asleep. Her gaze had been fixed firmly on the opposite side of the room, where Weiss was sleeping peacefully, her slow breaths audible to Blake even over the sound of Yang’s gravel-in-a-blender snoring.
She thought of the stack of notebooks on the desk, of the pages she had managed to sneak only glimpses of as she flipped through them. She felt utterly silly that a few sketches could cause her to lose sleep, but here she was, unable to stop thinking about the drawings. A few weeks ago, the scrutiny would have made her enormously uncomfortable, especially coming from Weiss. But the more she thought about it – the more she contemplated the deep blush that filled the girl’s pale cheeks with color – the less she seemed to mind.
Still, she couldn’t deny the burning need to know what was in those pages.
After hours of debating with herself, she finally gave in, tiptoeing from her bed in perfect silence as she approached Weiss’s desk. She picked out the notebook from earlier, bringing it into a shaft of moonlight. A single deep breath did very little to assuage the pang of guilt in her chest, but she brushed it aside, slowly cracking the book open.
The first pages were clearly Ruby’s domain, a few quick sketches of the girl scribbled in among detailed depictions of Crescent Rose in its various forms. Two full pages titled “speed calculation” were completely covered in numbers and formulas, many of which appeared to have been crossed out in ever-increasing states of frustration. Yang’s pages came next, bathed in sketches of fire, with tables recording number of hits taken and approximating the strength of hits returned.
Blake quickly found that she had more pages than both of the other two combined, filled with various drawings of her combat stances, usually accompanied by a lightly-drawn clone. Several pages seemed devoted to theories about the combination of different forms of dust with her Semblance, the newest of which described the events of the afternoon experiment in brusque shorthand. Another page was covered in drawings of Gambol Shroud in each form, and another with a depiction of Blake standing inside of what she recognized as one of Weiss’s time-slowing glyphs, quick pencil slashes representing a wild series of shockwaves coming from Gambol Shroud. Several more glyphs were depicted, some identified as having potential for future combination attacks. Blake was particularly intrigued by one section that mused on the possibility of shooting multiple clones into the air using a combination of time-slowing and repulsion glyphs. They’d have to test that one out sometime.
She reached the end of the used pages and nearly set the book down before realizing that the last page was gently wrinkled from use. She turned to it and held her hand to her mouth to stop the gasp that threatened to escape at the sketch on the page.
Blake was staring at a picture of herself in perfect detail, standing confidently with a gentle smile on her face, a small splash of gold for her eyes as the only color on the page. The biggest surprise wasn’t the amount of effort Weiss had clearly poured into the drawing, but rather the absence of the bow she was always very careful to wear in the presence of the heiress. Apparently, her teammate was able to draw from memory exceptionally well, as she had perfectly depicted her feline ears. Blake felt her heart skip a beat, and after quickly checking to confirm that Weiss had not in fact drawn exquisitely intricate drawings of her other teammates, she let the notebook fall to the desk with a soft ‘thud.’
She looked back at Weiss, still peacefully sleeping, a rare and gentle smile visible in the moonlight. She lost track of how long she stood there, knees threatening to buckle underneath her before she padded back to her bed and slipped under the covers, wondering what in the world she was to her teammate…and what her teammate was to her.