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Yang can’t decide if she likes the shimmering, swirling sky here. Sometimes it looks like there are no stars at all, but then the strange imitation of night comes, and the darkness is so diffuse and thin that she wonders if the sky is actually filled with too many stars to differentiate from each other. She does know she likes it best when it’s this shade of violet, preternaturally vivid. It’s like someone spilled an entire tube of thick acrylic paint and tried to wipe it up with their palm.
She isn’t sure what she would have done if her teammates hadn’t found her. Gone insane, probably, trying to figure out the patterns of the sky. Just when she thinks she knows what’s coming next, it turns pink instead of yellow. When she thinks the radioactive green fireflies are about to come out, a swarm of moths drops from the canopies instead. No matter the time of day, she’s always in the dark in the ways that matter. This place is a fever dream and a nightmare rolled into one.
It’s impossible to know how long she’s been down here. Days can be twice as long as nights or twice as short, and Yang isn’t sure when she last slept a healthy amount. Probably not since before Atlas, if she’s being honest with herself.
Yang sits on a broken stump of petrified wood, or whatever it is that makes up the uncanny trees here. She stopped trying to comprehend every aspect of this place a long while ago - or a short while, again she isn’t sure - and she’s tired of the sky leading her on.
She digs the steel toes of her boots into the gritty sand. Her team sits around her, equidistant from the small bonfire Weiss and Blake built out of dry grass and tinder. It’s not going to last long unless they find something more robustly flammable, but this is the first time they’ve been back together and relatively safe since landing down here, and no one wants to be the one to step away first.
Aside from the oddities and impossibilities of their new environment, it almost feels like their first field mission all over again. Crackling campfire, makeshift bedrolls. The air was heavy then, too, rife with shared secrets and uncertainty and excitement.
But this feels... different. Wrong.
Yang almost says that she wishes Zwei was here, but her desire to make jokes is deflated, sunk to the bottom of the unsettlingly viscous water surrounding the beach. So she stares at the sand and imagines she’s anywhere else.
A rustle divides her attention, and she turns to see Ruby coming out of the forest. Her cape is wrapped around to her front and cradling a heap of what looks like berries.
“I’d be careful about eating those. Trust me,” Yang says, reaching through the hanging silence. She doesn’t need her little sister hallucinating on this weird limbo beach, and she knows from experience that some of the supposed food here can have unexpected effects.
Ruby casts a look in Yang’s direction - and pops a berry into her mouth.
“Or not,” Yang mutters.
Across the fire, Ruby sits down. Yang can’t look directly at her without her retinas burning. When she tries to blink it away, the edges of her vision are still singed with orange. She keeps her eyes on the sand.
“You’re really going to lecture her about being cautious?” Weiss says.
Her arms are crossed, and Yang isn’t sure why she’s being petulant about this. “Uh, yeah? I don’t want my sister to eat suspicious fruit that makes us all look like talking fish or something.”
Ruby is too quiet. She’s just sitting there, picking through her berries, not offering to share with anyone else. For all the time she’s spent being the world’s most enthusiastic team leader, now it’s like her teammates don’t even exist. At least she still seems lucid.
Blake isn’t saying anything either. That used to be normal enough when the four of them were together - she used to listen carefully and only offer input when she had something blazingly important to share. Lately, though, she’s been talking more, and Yang is glad for it. She always likes hearing what Blake has to say.
“Yang,” Weiss’ voice says.
“What?” Yang doesn’t mean for it come out as a snapping snarl, but it does. She chalks it up to exhaustion.
“What you did...” Weiss starts, choosing her words meticulously, as though she’s assembling magnetic poetry on a refrigerator with the utmost gravity of intent. “Yang, what you did was reckless and stupid.”
Okay, maybe she wasn’t trying to be delicate after all.
Yang blinks. She knows she shouldn’t have tried the fruit with skin the color of an oil slick, but she’d like to see Weiss go a day without food and see how much self-control she manages to invoke. “My bad,” Yang says. “I was hungry.”
“I’m not talking about eating the fruit, you dolt.”
“Hey--”
“I meant what you did up there.” Weiss points in the direction they all fell from.
Yang looks around the fire. On her left, there’s Weiss doing what she does best: pointing fingers and criticizing like it’s a truer calling to her than being a huntress.
On Yang’s right, there’s Blake. Her eyes shine in the warm, amber light, and her jaw is set with staunch resistance to her lip quivering. She stopped wearing masks long ago, but right this second, Yang wishes she wasn’t so in tune with every microexpression in Blake’s features. She’s upset, and Yang hates seeing her upset. Moreover, she hates being the reason for it, and she can’t shake the feeling that she’s somehow responsible now.
Across the way, Ruby is still dead silent.
“Seriously, were you even thinking when you decided to throw herself in front of Neo’s sword?” Weiss asks.
Yang’s temper flares. “I was thinking that I was going to save my sister’s life.”
“By trading your own?” Weiss asks.
“I’m not dead, am I?”
“We thought you were,” Blake cuts in.
Oh.
Yang remembers now - she fell first.
They thought she was gone.
“I’m--” Yang starts, but she cuts herself off, considering.
She’s not really sorry, is she?
“No, you know what?” she goes on. “A ton of people got out of Atlas safely because of what we did. I’m not apologizing for trying to make sure my own sister was one of them.”
“I don’t care if you’re sorry or not,” Weiss snaps. “Promise you won’t ever do something like that again.”
Yang looks to Blake - it’s become a reflex she can’t shut off. They’ve made plenty of promises to each other, but one rings in Yang’s mind loudly enough to dull Weiss’ tone.
“We’re perfectly capable, you know. It’s insulting that you don’t seem to think so,” Weiss concludes, crossing her arms sternly. “It’s not your job to keep us safe.”
Yang can feel heat rising in her face, blood rushing in her ears. She laughs, incredulity sharp around the edges, puncturing any humor the sound would ordinarily carry. “It’s literally my fucking job, Weiss.”
“News flash: we all want to keep people safe. That’s why we’re huntresses.”
“And here I thought we were all rebelling against our dads,” Yang jabs.
“Yang,” Blake cautions. “Don’t be mean.”
“She started it,” Yang replies.
“Please,” Weiss dismisses.
Blake tries again. “Guys, come on.”
“Tell Weiss to quit being a judgmental asshole.”
“Tell Yang to stop being a reckless idiot. Clearly she only listens to you anyway--”
“Stop.”
Ruby’s command is quiet, but unquestionable.
She finally looks up from the fire, her gaze meeting Yang’s. The fire’s gold clashes with the silver of her eyes - fury isn’t something Ruby knows how to hold.
Suddenly, Yang is free-falling again, suspended in the moment before reckoning.
“Ruby, I...” Yang loses whatever words she was going to say. What’s she supposed to say? Sorry I saved your life? She isn’t. She could never be.
“I might not be here if you hadn’t done what you did,” Ruby starts, “but all I could think about was that I was gonna have to tell Dad.”
Yang stops breathing.
“Bet you didn’t think of that,” Ruby adds softly.
Blake’s voice comes again, a balm to a burn Yang didn’t even feel scald her skin. “Okay, I think we should get some rest and talk about this in the morning. It’s been a long day.”
“No,” Yang counters. “If you all have something to say to me, I wanna hear it. Now.”
Weiss glances around the fire again. Ruby looks like she spent all her energy for the next three days on voicing that one thought, and Blake is waiting, watching carefully, bracing to mediate the next fight that breaks out.
“I think we need to have a serious talk about your fighting style,” Weiss decides. With her hands on her hips and her head cocked at that pretentious angle, she looks just like the girl who yelled at Ruby for mistakenly bumping into her on the first day of school at Beacon. Needless to say, Yang isn’t particularly happy to see this version of Weiss resurface. “If we’re actively worrying about whether you’re going to do something exceptionally dangerous during battles, it’s more harmful than it is helpful.”
Yang glares at her.
“How come none of you ever brought this up before, huh?” she asks. “Like that time I got smacked around by Roman’s giant mecha? Or after Beacon fell?” She won’t say exactly what happened, but she knows - and Blake knows, a haunted shadow creeping into her features. As if either of them could ever forget.
Ruby speaks again, her expression graver and more defeated than Yang would ever have thought possible. “Just because Mom was your hero doesn’t mean you have to do what she did.”
Nothing in this realm or any other could have prepared Yang to hear those words come out of Ruby’s mouth.
Yang rises from her seat, turns her back on the campfire, and walks away.
She doesn’t know how long she walks, but it doesn’t take long for her to get lost among the twisting trees and the distorted shadows they throw against the graying light of dusk.
Every bone in her body feels rattled out of place. Half of her wants to rush back and hug her sister, hold her tight and apologize and promise to never let her down like that again; but she can’t. Something holds her here, alone.
If Yang isn’t the protector, then who is she?
Something builds in her chest, too far removed from anger be reasonably mistaken for it. But Yang doesn’t know what this feeling is, and she doesn’t know what to do with it, so she smashes her metal fist into a tree trunk anyway. She knows it’s not a good idea - who knows what’s lurking out here - but how is she supposed to deal with new, heavy, terrible emotions when she doesn’t even know what they are, when she’s exhausted, when her whole team has just announced that they don’t trust her anymore?
A stick cracks, and Yang freezes. She’s pretty sure it wasn’t an aftershock from hitting the tree. There’s another sound, shuffling, and Yang turns around slowly. She expects to see something large and looming behind her, but there’s nothing.
Until Blake slinks out from the translucent darkness.
“Blake?” Yang says, surprised. “You followed me?”
“Believe it or not, you’re not all that hard to find when you go stomping off,” her partner responds. “Plus, this isn’t exactly my first time tracking you through a forest.”
Yang wants to smile. She really does.
“Are you okay?” Blake asks.
Yang is confused, to say the least. “How come you’re not angry at me, too?”
Blake shifts, still standing an odd distance away. “I’m not not angry,” she says, “and I don’t think Weiss is wrong. But mostly I’m just... relieved.”
“Because she called me out?”
“Because you’re here,” Blake clarifies. “We thought we’d lost you, Yang.” Her voice cracks over the name, too much anguish memorialized in it to stay in one piece. “I thought I’d lost you.”
Again, Yang is torn in two.
Blake takes a tentative step closer, then another, more confident. Her hand finds Yang’s shoulder, grounding.
Yang leans into the touch instinctively, like a plant growing towards the sun. “If Weiss is right, what does that mean? For me?”
“What?”
“Do you remember our first mission, with Professor Oobleck? How he asked us all why we wanted to be huntresses?”
“Of course.”
“I know what my reason is.”
Blake’s hand finds Yang’s jaw, and the other brushes Yang’s wrist through her gauntlet.
Yang continues, “I can take hits that would knock other people down for good. If I hadn’t jumped in the way, Neo probably would have...”
There’s a slight pressure against the inside of her wrist, tracing to her hand. Encouraging.
“I just want to protect the people I love,” Yang says plainly. Who knew it was so simple all along? “I finally figured it out, and now everyone’s mad at me for it.”
Blake presses her lips together, considering. “Remember back at Beacon when we figured out the White Fang was up to something?”
“You mean when you didn’t sleep for, like, weeks?”
“And you told me that I needed to take care of myself before I could save the world,” Blake counters.
Yang concedes by refusing to meet Blake’s eyes.
“We don’t need you to take every hit for us,” Blake says. “We just need you.”
That makes Yang’s gaze snap up from the ground.
Blake doesn’t hesitate when she adds, “I need you.”
Yang closes her eyes just as their foreheads meet.
“We’re supposed to be protecting each other, remember?” Blake whispers.
Yang gives a fragile nod.
“I’m not asking you to stop being you, because you... you’re incredible, Yang,” Blake goes on. “But I can’t lose you again. Okay?”
Yang melts into it when Blake’s arms circle around her neck. “You won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Blake pushes herself onto her tiptoes and tangles her fingers in Yang’s hair, kissing her forehead. “Good.”
“You’re gonna make me go apologize to the others now, huh?” Yang asks.
“Mmm, in a minute.”
Blake runs her hands down over Yang’s shoulders and back up, fingers grazing her neck, the edge of her jaw, the corner of her lips.
“What are you doing?” Yang asks, her breath caught somewhere between her lungs, her throat, and infinity.
“Making sure you’re real,” Blake answers. “And... we should talk sometime. Just us, I mean.”
They have a lot to talk about. At some point. Not tonight. It’s like a train rushing towards a station with the brakes out, a wave crashing towards the shore. Inevitable. “Yeah. Soon,” Yang says.
“Soon,” Blake agrees. “After you talk to Weiss and Ruby.”
Yang groans a little. “Fine.”
Blake kisses her cheek this time, lingering before she puts space between them again. She takes Yang hand and leads her back towards their campsite. In that moment, Yang understands that her team does need her strength - not just her ability to get hit and get up, but to keep her heart intact. Even when she’s afraid she doesn’t have anything else to give, they only need her to be strong enough to survive.