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When she passes out, chest heaving and pain shooting through her like bolts of lightning, she feels a warm hand grasp her own. When she wakes up, she’s nothing but cold, and more than just her arm is gone.
~
The airship’s infirmary is loud, turbulent winds a white noise that rumbles over the hushed nurses and doctors, the scratching on pencils and pens on clipboards and heart monitors beeping irregularly, regularly, flatlining completely.
Yang’s familiar with it all. It’s not the first time she’s been strapped into hospital bed that feels more like a slab of concrete than a soft haven for sleep. But this time, of all times, she doesn’t have the energy to crack open her eyes, heavy with exhaustion and drugs, or speak, mouth dry and throat constricted.
She feels a nurse gently replace her IV, more drugs coursing through her system with every determinedly steady breath, steady beat of her own heart monitor.
Blake…
~
The next time she wakes up, it’s completely silent. It’s a real hospital this time, no turbulence around her, no wind rushing past. A Haven hospital.
The immediate battlefield dangers are gone, the nurses and doctors are no longer in a flurry. Yang is isolated in a curtained-off room to herself, and when her eyes finally open, she finds herself staring at dotted ceiling tiles and listening to her heartbeat.
It takes ten minutes on the analog clock beside her bed for a nurse to come in and start fretting over her, telling her with a soft smile that she’s glad Yang is awake.
She’s fine, the nurse tells her, and there were few complications. She should be released soon, just after a few more tests. But… Yang glances down at her arm, the one that’s gone, and remembers the burning hot pain of it being sliced off that made her blackout.
The doctor walks in, clipboard in his hands, stethoscope around his neck. Before he can say a word, Yang finally speaks.
“Where is Blake Belladonna,” she asks, voice as even as she can get it. The doctor won’t look her in the eye. “Can I see her?” If it breaks at the end, she doesn’t know, because the doctor is frowning, exchanging glances with the nurse.
“She’s already been released,” he says. “We no longer know her whereabouts.”
Yang feels tears prickle at the edges of her eyes, brow furrowing in frustration. “When can I leave?”
“Tomorrow evening. Your father has already been notified and will be picking you up.”
Yang is silent as they finish their tests. That night, she can’t sleep.
~
Everyone’s been released. Everyone is fine.
Everyone except Penny. Except Pyrrha.
Except… me.
(The rest make sure to see her off. When she asks about Blake, Sun can only stare at the ground. “She’s gone, Yang,” he says. “We got to the city and she left, and no one knows where she went.”)
~
Home is a house that’s cold and nothing’s the same. Her dad looks at her with pity. Ruby stills sleeps, watched over by Qrow.
Yang confines herself to bed. She won’t eat the food that her dad brings to her on a tray she used to use when she and Ruby made breakfast for him every Father’s Day. She won’t move, comatose in bed as her thoughts are a freight train of anxiety and anger and frustration and a billion other things that she needs to imprint into her old punching bag that she can’t even hit anymore.
She screams, strangled and raw, in the dead of the night. Her father runs to her, his footsteps loud and panicked. Qrow watches on, eyes understanding, or at least trying to, as he leans against the old frame of her door where the wood’s still splintered by cuts of her height as she grew up.
Ruby still doesn’t wake up.
~
It hits her one night.
Blake ran.
Blake… ran .
(Yang doesn’t know why she expected anything different with all her warnings, why she had faith that Blake could change just because they were friends, because they were…)
~
Qrow’s words echo in her head, over and over: “She wanted me to tell you that she saved you once, but you shouldn't expect that kindness again.”
But Yang’s tired of waiting, tired of her mental prison, tired of everything.
Tired of the phantom limb that keeps trying to grab the remote to turn on the news, that she tries to wrap herself with when hopelessness drags her down in the middle of the night, that tries to clasp her other hand to remember Blake’s touch only for Yang to realize it’s no longer there, that it will never be there, that nothing will be the same, and that Blake left her.