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Yang doesn’t usually find herself in the studio common room at 7:43 in the morning, but they’re doing promotional shoots between seasons, and she hasn’t been sleeping enough this past week to make it through without a generous helping of caffeine.
Actually, if Yang’s being honest, she hasn’t been sleeping well for almost two years.
The cause of that wanders in as Yang’s pouring out her second cup. Blake Belladonna, beautifully casual at this hour on a Friday. She’s wearing the scarf that Weiss bought her for Christmas and the coat that Ruby bought for her birthday. She always goes out of her way to show her appreciation for the things that people give her – to the point that Yang isn’t sure where the divide sits between genuine enjoyment and self-enforced obligation.
“Please tell me that coffee’s hot,” Blake says by way of greeting, and Yang nods as she steps away.
“Freshly brewed and all yours.”
“Thanks.”
Yang sometimes wonders what people would think if they learned that in real life, Blake Belladonna despises the taste of tea. She knows from experience that people have a hard enough time reconciling the fact that their voices are deeper than the ones they hear on the show. There’s a disconnect in the understanding that there’s a line that defines where Yang ends and Barbara begins. And it’s not just the voice, either. There are characteristics – tics – that Yang taught herself how to mimic because they were better suited to the voice that Barbara provides.
And that’s saying nothing of the ways people fail to discern between Yang and her character. She still remembers what happened the summer that she cut her hair.
The thought sends a shiver, and the shiver draws Blake’s attention. “Thinking about the hair thing again?” she asks.
Yang laughs because of course Blake would read her that easily. She’s been picking apart Yang’s thoughts for years.
Just never the ones that Yang really wants her to.
“It just shows up sometimes, you know?” She pulls a lock of hair forward and twirls it through her fingers. “I wanted to go short again for Barbara’s wedding, but I don’t think I can handle the aftermath. Not again.”
“You know my opinion on the matter.”
“Fuck the haters?”
“Fuck the haters.”
There’s no stopping the smile that follows. There are just some battles that Blake makes Yang feel invincible in fighting.
“About the wedding,” she says. “Figured I’d ask if you wanted to come with me.” Not as a date, is the panicked caveat she doesn’t voice. She doesn’t have to. Even if their job didn’t present them as a matched set, the fact is that they’re friends and they enjoy one another’s company. It’s not exactly uncommon for them to attend events together. God knows Yang has no one else to take.
God knows why, too.
“I’m going with Arryn,” says Blake. “We have this whole celebratory weekend thing planned around the same time, so we’re just tacking it on the end of that.”
“Right. Yeah. For the uh…” Yang rotates her hand as she searches for the words she’s looking for. “The mobile game, right?”
“That’s the one.”
“Yeah, I’ve been watching the trailers.” She turns so that Blake won’t see the blush that’s about to follow and heads towards the beat-up couch in the centre of the room. “Can you imagine if they ask her to start voicing Blake like that?”
“I can imagine the bloodbath.” Her tone is deadpan but Yang can hear that there’s a hint of a smile as she says it. She follows Yang towards the centre of the room but sits whilst Yang continues to stand.
“I think you’d enjoy playing to that.”
Blake makes a gesture with her hand that implies Yang isn’t entirely incorrect with that assumption. “It would be different. But I like the softness we’ve been working with. It’s nice.”
“Yeah. No, definitely.”
The conversation slips and Yang feels the creeping tension that’s been waiting for this moment. It’s familiar but unwelcome; a distracting, clawing thing that’s been tightening its hold on her every time she and Blake are in the same room. Yang’s handled it before, and were this any other day, she would handle it again. But it’s early, and she’s tired, and it’s been months since she last saw Blake in person. And now she’s looking at the way Blake’s eyes look through the lenses of her glasses and the way that her hair curls above the edge of her scarf, and she’s realising too late that there’s not enough of her left to stop the words before she says them:
“We should probably talk about that kiss.”
Blake watches her over the rim of her coffee cup. As she lowers it with methodical slowness, she asks, “Which kiss?”
It’s a question that sounds like an out, like one with a safe option and a dangerous one. But it isn’t. Because Yang could say she means the kiss they shared for the camera. The one that had taken them ten years to build up to. The one that offered every payoff they’d hoped it would. But if she says that, then she has to say that it was the kiss that only took one take. That she only needed one opportunity to kiss Blake Belladonna with enough passion and conviction that it looked like the final release of a breath held for a decade.
She has to say that that night, when they were done filming, Yang had kissed her again.
“Both. I suppose.”
Blake’s coffee cup rests in her lap. She’s doing that thing where she cups the bottom with one hand and has the other curled round the edge, restless fingers tapping against the cheap polystyrene. She’s nervous. Yang knows she’s nervous because after a decade of shared spaces and friendship and closeness, she knows every one of Blake’s tells.
“We don’t have to,” she hedges, stepping back from her own wants to leave space for Blake’s comfort. “We can just move on.”
Blake’s gaze drops to the floor before it finds Yang’s eyes again. “Is that what you want?”
Of course not, Yang wants to say, along with about a million other stupidly cheesy things that have been building up in her mind over the past five – six? – years. Things like how easy it was to play the yearning fool when the person she’s been yearning for is right in front of her. Things like how she has spent every night since that kiss wishing and hoping for the return of that spark of courage or stupidity that had spurred her to seek it out in the first place.
Things like how desperately she wishes she could voice aloud how much she regrets that it was only one.
Instead, the only thing Yang has, is the same cowardice that she’s been carrying since the moment she woke up and realised she’d given her heart away without meaning to. “What do you want, Blake?”
It’s an old impasse; the crossroads where Blake’s insecurity meets Yang’s fear. One of them has to be the first to step forward, but they both know for a fact that they won’t.
“What if…” Blake begins, and her voice is so soft, so quiet, that a whisper is too strong a word to do the sound justice. She pauses like she’s bracing herself for a blow, her expression going as rigid as her spine, but she pulls her bottom lip between her teeth and holds it, and Yang understands that particular motion well enough to understand what she’s actually doing with her body.
It doesn’t prepare her for what Blake says next, though. She doesn’t think there’s anything that could.
“What if I said it was you?” She sounds so sure, that’s the thing that throws Yang. There’s a shortage of confidence but there’s an abundance of certainty, and the sound is so different – so foreign – that Yang can’t quite make sense of what she’s hearing.
She’s read about this – about quiet truths and the power they wield. How they slip through cracks in walls that loud confessions only know how to strike down. Yang’s never been a stranger to love and its creeping hold, so she thought she would be able to stand against something as delicate as a whispered truth. But here she is, helpless as her heart blazes under the fires of seven words.
“Then I’d say it was you. For me, it’s always been you.”
There’s nothing romantic about this. This isn’t a platform of flowers in the middle of a fairytale. It isn’t the will of the universe pulling them aside and saying “Now. It has to be now.” It’s a tiny common room in the back of a studio and a couch that’s more patches than original fabric. It’s cheap, bitter coffee in polystyrene cups, and ten years of memories made in these scratched and paint-chipped walls; and it’s Yang, and it’s Blake, and it’s the first of the words they’ve never said and were always meant to and, well…
The truth is…
Yang wouldn’t have it any other way.