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Blake Belladonna was born on January 19th into the big, bad world. She was born into a world of monsters and danger around every corner, of tragedy and sacrifice. But, as she would come to learn at a young age, the Grimm were not the world’s true monsters.
No, the monsters that roamed Remnant were human and faunus.
Not all of them, of course. There were genuinely good people in the world. There were her parents, her team that she would meet later in her life, and plenty of others she had yet to meet. There was light. But light never shone without a shadow. There were bad people in the world, Blake knew. And there were people that seemed to be more monster than man.
With the Belladonna name, Blake was bound to see the horrors of reality sooner rather than later. So Kali and Ghira made an effort to never shield her from it, lest she be unprepared upon the inevitable instance in which evil came knocking on their door.
But that didn’t matter right now. No, right now Kali and Ghira Belladonna were holding their newborn baby girl, stroking her soft, tiny ears and memorizing every feature of their child in unwitting preparation for the day she would leave. For now, they were just a family. Together.
For now, they were whole, and Blake was innocent.
On her thirteenth birthday, she attended a White Fang meeting with her parents. Because of their name and the target on all three of their heads, she was brought along so they could keep an eye on her. Blake didn’t mind going to the meeting anyways. She had always been involved in the White Fang and her parents’ work ever since she found out their mission, determined to fix the bad in the world even at a young age.
She had spotted him in the crowd when he was singled out during Sienna Khan’s speech detailing his and Ilia’s mission gone wrong, resulting in the capture of the rest of their party. She had stared at him, and something seemed to whisper in her ear to run. Her sense of danger only grew when he moved his head to stare right back at her.
Blake turned to Kali and tugged on her sleeve.
“Mom, I don’t,” she stole a glance back at Adam, who was still staring at her with that emotionless expression. It scared her beyond words. “I don’t feel so good. Can I go back home?”
Kali turned her attention away from the speaker to look at her daughter in concern.
Blake continued, desperate, her ears pinned down to her skull. “Please, it’s just a few blocks-”
Before she could say anything else, Sienna singled out Kali and Ghira in the crowd, drawing her mother’s attention away from her for a second. Blake took the chance and moved to go home. But before she could leave the vicinity, she saw him. She saw Adam punching the wall, mask in hand, and snarling, sobbing, looking and acting unlike anything Blake had expected him to be. At that moment, he seemed hurt. Blake always did want to help anyone she could. So she ignored the voice in her head, the wind turning directions as if coercing her to follow it far away from him...and changed the course of her life with a single word.
“...Hello?”
Immediately, he turned.
He turned on instinct, eyes and face open to the world and anyone who dared take a closer look.
Blake was never a coward. She dared.
He hastily put his mask back on, and in a conversation she could no longer remember clearly, convinced her to let him walk her home.
She did remember one thing clearly, though. He had told her, as the stars shone yet refused to bathe him in their light, “You never know what monsters are out in the dark.”
She never thought that he could be one of them.
(Evil never came knocking at her door as her parents had feared. Instead, it took her by the arm and led her home.)
A year passed, Blake’s parents left the White Fang, and Blake left them in return in pursuit of justice and equality. In pursuit of a better world, and in pursuit of Adam. They had shared a short conversation in front of, what Blake would later note with bitter amusement, a waterfall.
She was fourteen and the world had never been wider.
He had told her, “You’re not afraid.”
And she had said, “Nothing you could do would frighten me,” with a cheeky smile on her face and all the confidence in the world.
She would repeat similar assurances over the course of their time together. “I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid.”
She should’ve been, she would think later. But still, she would realize the truth in those words in front of a waterfall once more years and lifetimes later.
“I’m not alone,” she will say. And, in a way, she’ll be telling him, one last time: “I’m not afraid.”
Years pass and Blake can no longer recognize Adam Taurus. She realizes that she might not have known him at all. It is then when she makes the decision to leave him and his thirst for bloodshed. She can no longer look at him the way she once thought he deserved. She could no longer fight at his side as he took life after innocent life. She could no longer look at that mask and feel no fear.
Blake had once heard that eyes were the windows to the soul. Perhaps that’s why Adam always wore a mask. Perhaps, even he couldn’t stand to see what laid within.
So, on her seventeenth birthday, she cuts the cable, severs their bond, and never once looks back.
Her next birthday, she thinks, will be better. She’ll be at Beacon with a team, on her way to truly make the world a better place.
Beacon falls and Blake spends her eighteenth birthday wishing that she wasn’t alive anymore. She left her friends, she left Yang...and Adam came back. Just like he said he would. She spends the first half of the day wishing it would all end.
But then she sees the picture. She sees the picture of a stranger, a young, smiling and innocent Blake, her parents on either side of her. Their joy was contagious. Even now, Blake found herself smiling for the first time in what felt like forever.
It didn’t last long.
Who was that little girl? Could that really have once been her? How did it all go wrong?
A tear fell onto the picture frame. I’m sorry, Blake thought to her former self. I’m sorry that I’m your future.
. . .
Blake remembered a quote. It had said that children guaranteed to break your heart. Simply because you want so much for them and know that most of it will never come to fruition. You want them to live a life devoid of heartbreak and suffering, but it’s impossible. Because you can’t remake the world. You just have to live with it, whatever that may entail.
Her former self was locked in her gaze. So innocent and full of life...and Blake decided that whoever said you couldn’t remake the world was wrong.
They were wrong, because here she was, despite all she’d been through, making the world a better place. She was changing it every day she was alive.
She took a breath and stood. She gingerly placed the picture frame back where she found it on the dresser, grabbed Gambol Shroud on the way out the door, and went off to make a better world. She might not have a chance. She might not have been who she had once thought she would be.
Blake decided she could live with that.
She could live in this big bad world of theirs, because every day it was a little closer to being rebuilt.
Because one day, children would no longer break hearts.
Blake spends her 20th birthday in the middle of a warzone. Not an active one, though. Not yet at least.
Their group is settled in an abandoned house on the outskirts of Mantle, huddled together for warmth and security. Yang’s on her right side, Ruby on her left, the rest of them scattered about. Despite their situation, despite the danger on their doorstep, they celebrate Blake’s birthday.
Because she lived another year, and not all of them can say that. Because they love and cherish her and want to celebrate her existence.
In place of a cake and candles, Yang takes a lighter out of her pocket and Blake blows it out with a smile and a wish.
She wishes that they all make it safe and sound out of this war, that children will no longer have to become soldiers, that the world will soon be the one they dream about.
There, in the middle of a warzone while a storm rages on outside the walls, Blake celebrates her 20th birthday with her family. And she feels like she could touch the sky.