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Blake runs.
She runs until her lungs burn and her legs collapse underneath her.
~
Beacon is a shell, broken and burning with the acrid stench of dead bodies that no one wants to come back for in the chaos. Not when it’s overrun by blood-thirsty Grimm, flocking like moths to the one frozen on the crumbling tower that Blake used to recognize as her school.
Now it was a breeding ground for everything she had tried so hard to stop.
And Adam…
Blake tears the ribbon from her ears, letting her ears twitch in the breeze, trying to catch her breath (but every breath grates on her dry throat like sandpaper). She doesn’t have a plan, but the abandoned city is full of shops, corner stores that have first aid and water, grocery stores filled with food. She can survive here. She can…
She…
I couldn’t even protect Yang .
Tears burn at the corners of her eyes and she wants to scream until her throat tears apart (but Grimm are still near and she’s only half patched-up with gauze wrapped around her torso and forearms and marks around her neck from Adam’s calloused hands.
Food , she thinks as her breathing evens out. She’s rested in one place enough, the rooftop she remembers having tea on with Sun the first time she ran from her team.
(But this time… Blake remembers Yang’s arm, blood pooling around her like a blooming rose. It’s her fault, everything is her fault, if she could have only stopped--)
She’s cried enough tears to cure a drought, but there’s still more in her, rolling down her dirt-covered cheeks. She doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t know where to go.
What am I trying to do anymore?
~
Blake is tempted to go back. Back to the cabin in the woods that Yang once described to her. Wooden walls with surprisingly awesome insulation, a teeny tiny kitchen that still managed to fit all of them plus their baking mishaps. The room that Yang had grown up in, with posters of her heroes, Huntresses, covering the walls, and the single picture she owned that starred her mother on her bedside table.
It sounded wonderful, having a home.
(Sun had offered her his, not that he had one either, but he extended his hand and said it’d be less lonely if they stuck together.)
(He was probably right.)
~
Blake rests in someone’s apartment, one on the outskirts of the city, away from where the Grimm continued to congregate. A parade of Grimm makes their way down the main street, day and night, and she avoids it like the plague lest she alert them.
She still doesn’t have a plan, but she takes out Grimm that stray from their packs, accumulates cuts and bruises that she tends to with first aid kits stolen from empty drugstores. She doesn’t take more than she can handle. She doesn’t bite off more than she can chew.
(She wonders where Adam went, retreating with the White Fang when it was obvious that the city was too dangerous, too overrun to continue whatever mission operative they’d been given this time by corrupt humans who wanted to watch them and the world around them burn to the ground.)
~
Blake stares up at the cracked, broken, half-shattered-in ceiling of the latest hideout. The sky, still a swirling, foreboding overcast of greys, is almost comforting. In the haze of pain and the wind-down from a mental breakdown, she thinks about dying.
(Nothing good has ever come out of her decisions.)
Joining the White Fang, hiding her identity, joining a school full of people who potentially hate her, making friends, trying to fake some semblance of a normal life… Everything seems like an uncomfortable dream, bordering on a nightmare, like nothing really happened and she’s always been alone, always been crazy, always been paranoid.
She reaches her hand up to the sky, the same hand that had clutched Yang’s as her thoughts had raced and she ran because fighting Adam Taurus was a losing battle every time and she would have lost something too. Something worse.
(Maybe he would have carved out her heart after stabbing the rest of Yang’s life away.)
More tears roll down her face and she curls up on the carpet, wondering if there will ever be anything that only she can do to make things right again.