Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Most people think drowning is noisy and physical. Shouting, thrashing arms, and kicking feet? That’s the prelude to drowning, the last vestiges of self-control leaving your body.

Actual drowning is surprisingly calm and quiet.

As water replaced air in your lungs, your body shut down and there was nothing you could do anymore. Your throat closed, sealing off both water and calls for help. You couldn’t move your arms to wave for attention. Your treading slowed to nothing. Your grip loosened from the debris you were clinging to, and the last thing you felt was a nail tearing through your wrist as your arm slipped down and numbness pervaded your body. All you could do was wait as you were gradually pulled under. Wait and hope that someone nearby knew that this eerie silence was the sound of you knocking on death’s door.

You, an orphaned faunus, homeless, penniless... haunted, hunted, hated. Giving up that life to cross the cold doorstep sounded like a bargain. Maybe you shouldn’t have hoped for rescue at all.

But you were rescued from that deathly cold doorstep, and the trauma of drowning was quickly displaced by the demands of survival, leaving but a faint scar and a fear of open water. He was your lifeline that day on the river, and soon he became your new life. The White Fang became your first family, and the revolution of faunus rights your crusade. But you gained these through him.

He saw your potential and nurtured it. When you closed the gap of years and surpassed him in scholarship, he found you a tutor to teach you more. He laughed and hugged you proudly when your semblance manifested for the first time in a spar. You never could best him in combat, but he always encouraged you to try harder.

He became your everything: a mentor, your closest family, your dearest friend, your greatest love—he was the only one who could love you. He understood you and accepted your flaws and failings: his touch never faltered when brushing across the familiar scars on your skin, and he soothed away the nightmares that tormented your sleep. When you had to bathe in the river and occasionally the water became too much to bear, he was there to draw you out of your living nightmares. His dreams were your dreams. You both believed in your shared destiny. The two of you worked tirelessly for peace and equality between humans and the faunus: he gave you purpose and a place at his back supporting him. Together, you could make a fairy tale out of this imperfect world.

The White Fang continued its civil crusade, but the promises that humanity had made after the war never came to pass. Your youthful optimism lost its sheen as the rallies and boycotts began to devolve into riots more frequently. He said that they were just sparked by accident—with more protesters and counter-protesters, naturally there would be more friction. You were overjoyed to see faunus customers being served at a previously-unfriendly human establishment, until you noticed the quaking employees and terrified owners. You learned that he’d broken the last owner’s legs in self-defense when he was attacked. Your occasional errands to steal from corrupt and racist businesses had become regular occurrences, and he was gone on longer and longer missions, coming back with more and more injuries.

He told you not to worry.

At first you couldn’t place the smell mingled with his; it was blood—you were certain of that—but it was alien. It wasn’t until the next mission when he came back with the front of his coat glistening black-red, but no wounds to explain it, that you realized it was human blood. You were afraid to ask him what he was doing. All you could do was ask that he not put himself in danger clashing violently with humans. You couldn’t bear to see him hurt; you didn’t want to see anyone hurt—faunus or human.

But he dismissed your concerns about him and bristled at your concerns about humans. He insisted that the White Fang had spent long enough on passive tactics with no progress. He reminded you of the worthless promises from the mouths of human scum, the never-ending scorn, the brutal attacks, and the blind eye that the police turned. It was the humans, he had snarled, that forced the faunus to resist however they could, and if the whole world conspired to deny the faunus justice, then the faunus must fight to make their own.

Your eyes stung as you reached out to him in an embrace, repeating the dream you both once shared. What kind of peace and equality could grow from soil watered with blood and tended to with hate? There had to be another way.

His eyes glinted, hardened with loathing, and he roughly shoved you aside. There was no other way, he insisted as he rounded on you. His hand flew to grasp his katana as he stared you down in anger. How could you defend them? How could you betray your own species for their sake?

This was not the reassuring presence that had pulled you from the river and steadied you in times of uncertainty. You froze with his glare skewering your feet in place, and his anger felt like searing shackles on your limbs. He wouldn’t draw his sword on you, he couldn’t.

He didn’t.

But your relief was short lived. Instead, you found yourself on the ground with your cheek stinging hot from a vicious backhand, but the humiliation burned deeper. You could see his boots advancing towards you, the blood-red soles flashing ominously. You barely had time to gasp before a dark glove reached down to grab your scarf. The heat in your veins turned to ice as you were hauled to your feet and forced to stand on your toes as he lifted you bodily to look him in the eye.

How could you hurt him? His voice was dark with emotion as he recited every human slight visited upon him and you. The humans were the ones that hurt the faunus, and to stand with them in any way was to stand against him. By the end of the litany, the painful memories had drawn tears from your eyes. When he finally asked if you understood, all you could do was tilt your chin up and whimper. And with that, he let go and strode away.

It wasn’t until you collapsed in a boneless heap that you’d noticed the desperate ache in your feet and the wrenching strain in your neck, and the tears began to flow again.

He was always destined for leadership. When he took over the White Fang, the future of faunus rights fell heavily upon on his shoulders—and yours. He cut the protests and rallies and replaced boycotts with more proactive measures. The White Fang began to organize attacks against companies that abused their faunus labor force and intimidating those that denied service to your species. The missions became more demanding, more violent, and the faunus began to see results.

He could be demanding, too. He was always demanding. But he was always demanding for your sake: be the best you can be, be the best for you, for me, for us, for the faunus. You needed to be strong for him, for the White Fang, for all the faunus. Under his new leadership and the new flag, your failures didn’t just hurt him: they hurt the whole crusade—his life’s work. Punishment was justified, necessary. But he was always hurt to see you hurt, and you took solace in the fact that it would only make you stronger for him.

Then came the masks. You asked him why he wanted to wear the grimm mask and oblige the very humans who denigrated the faunus as monsters. He snarled and his right hand moved towards his hip. You backpedaled, quickly apologizing for asking, for stepping out of line. You needn’t have worried this time. He relaxed and said that the humans were becoming more violent and the masks were a way to protect the faunus. A little anonymity and intimidation to save faunus lives was a small price to pay. You conceded to his rationale but you rarely wore a mask yourself—a scrap of black cloth tied in an innocuous bow was enough of a mask on your own, less dangerous, missions.

He, however, always wore his mask on missions, donned it for public appearances, and conducted White Fang business with it on. Soon he took to wearing it at all waking hours. From your usual position behind him it looked like he hadn’t changed at all, but he was a different person face-to-face with the mask on. The dark eye slits shuttered the windows to his soul and that grotesque visage haunted you, haunted him. Every time the mask came off it took him longer to set aside that grim and violent persona, took him longer to come back to you. You began to forget his handsome face and his eyes once bright with the hopes of a beautiful future. With the pressures of leading the White Fang and revolutionizing faunus rights wearying him, wearing on him, sometimes... he forgot himself.

Maybe if you’d been able to carry more of the weight of leadership for him he wouldn’t be so pressured and he could be himself. You always felt the wrench of guilt when you thought about the happier days when the demands of revolution didn’t weigh so heavily on him. But how could you be so selfish? He’d always loved you wholly and without question, and he still loved you.

He was always there to keep your head above the water.

Until he held you under.

You needed to jump off the moving train and land in the middle of the river, but the extra moment you took to swallow your panic left you landing closer to the bank and the accumulated debris. Your wrist snagged on a submerged branch, your momentum driving the wood deep into your tendons, tearing the dust case from you grip and tearing apart the fragile hold you had over your fear of drowning. Your mouth opened for an agonized scream, but all sound was suffocated by the water.

Suddenly you were no longer a White Fang operative; you were just a little girl who’d been thrown into the river as a mere afterthought to a savage beating at the hands of a human mob. You were helpless and drowning again, and once more you found yourself at that cold doorstep.

You felt an iron grip on your hair pulling your head above water, the pain bringing a moment of clarity as you gasped for breath. You heard him shouting about the dust case, but your throat constricted in terror and more water rushed in when you tried to speak. You could only bring your empty hand and shattered wrist up in a silent declaration of your failure. You thought you heard a snarl over the sound of rushing water as the painful pulling sensation on your scalp shifted and inverted. Dizzy from the oxygen deprivation, panic, and blood loss, you only dimly realized you were underwater again.

You dreamt you were desperately trying to outswim a monster from the distant deeps. A grimm with a red mane and protruding horns, its eye slits hollow with fearful symmetry. As it prepared to swallow you whole, you awoke to the sound of his voice angrily denying the White Fang’s aid to a human cause. You wanted to know what was going on outside, but the cold chill of terror lingered in your chest and the symbolism of your nightmare lingered in your mind. Though you didn’t believe that anything could be pure evil, seeing that grotesque visage hunting you had weakened that conviction; you couldn’t help but wonder if you were wrong.

Since when did you fear his voice and tremble at his touch? You were supposed to build a beautiful fairy tale together! How had your shared dream distorted into his dream and your nightmare? Try as you might, you couldn’t assemble all your memories: there were pieces missing, blank spots that twisted at your stomach when you tried to look closer. You finally stopped trying to pin down the tipping point and accepted that he had long since stopped protecting you and had become a danger, and that the White Fang no longer stood for a cause you believed in. The certainty that you had to leave before you were drowned—literally or metaphorically, you didn’t know and it didn’t matter—weighed heavily on your heart. The realization that you had aided and abetted atrocities in the name of faunus rights both clawed at your conscience and buttressed your conviction that you had to leave him and the White Fang. You had to free yourself to try and make things right—to atone for those sins—no matter the personal cost.

When he dismissed the lives of the human crew members on the train with nary a second thought, you knew it was time to leave.

He must have understood: those hollow eyes in the mask radiated anger and hatred. He reached out his hand in a way that you may have once interpreted as pleading, as supplication, but you knew what that hand had done, the cruelty of his touch. You bid him goodbye as a final courtesy—far more than he deserved—before steeling your resolve. With a single swing of Gambol Shroud you left everything behind and began to chip away at that monstrous mountain of debt starting with the handful of human lives you’d just saved.

Chapter Text

The first confrontation with the White Fang on the docks shook you to the core. You had desperately hoped they weren’t involved in the attacks around Vale, that the accusations were baseless. You nursed that tiny spark of hope that the organization you’d dedicated nearly your whole life to hadn’t strayed so far from the ideals that birthed it. Seeing the White Fang working willingly as little more than hired thugs under a human criminal had doused that spark. It felt like drowning again as the shock of reality became overwhelming and a terrible chill suffused your body. It felt like betrayal.

The authorities were informed, of course, but the police were useless. You’d listened—barely holding back a snarl—to their insipid observations as they investigated the robberies, and you read the blotters with growing frustration. They had no idea how the White Fang operated, had no idea of the scale of operations. How could you trust such bumbling ineptitude to take down the White Fang?

You couldn’t. Your distrust of the authorities, though, paled in comparison to the anger you directed at yourself for thinking you had time to complete your huntress training, for being so blind to what was happening right in front of you, for not realizing that your debt would be accumulating interest at a breakneck rate. For everything.

Your priorities shifted. The mundane things you’d grown used to became alien again. Classes were barely a concern and socializing was a blatant waste of precious time. You began to retreat into your shell and shut people out. Although you trusted your teammates—especially after they had been willing to trust you in spite of your heritage and history—you still found it hard to entrust things to them. After abandoning a team game in the library, you’d retreated to your dorm room in a daze.

As you sat on your bed, a flurry of memories and feelings rushed through your mind. You’d run from your past to begin a new life as a student in the hopes of atoning for that past. The moment you saw the White Fang on those docks was the moment when that new life began crumbling away. It was as if your past was following you, hunting you. Or, more chillingly: you could never leave your past and it would continue to defy and define you. But when you had left the White Fang, they were a force for faunus, not humans. What had changed? But—more importantly—what did the change mean?

The ruckus of everyone returning derailed your thoughts. You headed out to find a quiet corner elsewhere but your team confronted you about your concerns. You had made no effort to hide your disquiet from your team—you’d simply spent your free time alone, looking for leads—so you told them. While you knew that they didn’t understand the White Fang like you did, their blasé attitudes shocked you all the same. When they finally agreed to help, you couldn’t shake the feeling that they were merely playing along and had utterly failed to understand the magnitude of the threat.

Then you attended the White Fang rally. There you saw how the faunus were being pushed towards militarization and violent coups, saw how they had hungrily embraced the promise of bloody anarchy. They had started down this path years ago, and you had marched with them. With growing horror you realized that you, too, had failed to understand the magnitude of the threat that you helped create.

You knew your dream of peace and equality had been dying well before you left the White Fang, and now you knew with dire certainty that you had helped drive a knife between its ribs. Knew that you had killed innocent humans though inaction and complicity. But even if you’d already squandered your chance at a happily ever after, even if you were no white knight from the fairy tales, your bloodstained hands could still wield a sword against the forces threatening innocent lives—faunus and human. You had to. You had nothing else to live for. The stakes grew higher, the sand in the hourglass ran faster, and the need to do something, anything, to stop them now consumed you.

So you threw yourself at every last scrap of information, hunted through the newsfeeds and articles, and tapped every resource you could think of. Everything else was secondary, including yourself. Perhaps especially yourself, if you were honest. Self-punishment was a component of penance, after all, and you’d earned a great deal of it in your short lifetime.

You discovered that drowning in madness wasn’t much different from drowning in water.

At first you had clung to the task of stopping the White Fang as a lifeline, the only thing keeping you from drowning entirely. Then you pushed away your teammates with a final thrash of barely-rational logic: you didn’t want to drag them down, and you thought you were the only one who could do it. You thought that you could do it alone. The search for leads on the White Fang became an obsession that monopolized your listless waking hours and plagued your paltry sleeping hours.

Taking care of yourself was like treading water, and even that began to slow and fade. Each meal you forced yourself to eat was smaller and blander than the last, if you ate at all. Though you kept up with regular showers so as not to offend your keen sense of smell, the hot water did little to soothe away your stress. You’d dozed off once in the warm spray, but water trickling into your feline ears dredged up terrifying memories of the river. After that you’d decided to stick with cold showers, though a distant voice in your mind tried to tell you that—as logical as it was—it was hardly an appropriate solution.

But you couldn’t continue forever on obsession and fumes. Every so often you’d go under from sheer exhaustion and wake up with hands shaking and lungs burning. Sometimes, though, you’d wake and find yourself at a cold doorstep. Trapped in that liminal space where seconds dragged on for eternities, you’d wonder if you should knock on the door. But before you could dredge up the courage, you’d wake again for real. And each time you woke, everything felt detached, unmoored: reality seemed a little more distant, a little less real, and your own body—your own self—seemed off.

You used to enjoy silence, but now it was a void that gnawed at your mind. In a misguided attempt to quell the silence, your ears tried to fill it with discordant ringing. You first noticed it one day returning to an empty dorm room after class. As you shut the door, suddenly you found that external silence had become profoundly deafening. You’d dropped your bag in shock at the sound that filled your head from within your head: an internal, infernal ringing. It staggered you. By the time you’d recovered your breath and reorganized your spilled notes, the rest of your team had returned to flood the space with chatter. You fought to contain both an exasperated sigh and a gasp of relief, instead busying yourself with pulling the materials you needed in the library and then hurrying off before anyone could intercept you.

True to their word, your teammates had aided in your quest to stop the White Fang, but it wasn’t enough. None of this was enough. You deflected polite inquiries about your health, pointed remarks about your grades, and blunt questions about your mental health. You brusquely denied their entreaties for you to take some time off, and you obstinately ignored their pleas for you to just get some rest.

You finally realized that you’d begun losing your grip on your lifeline—on sanity—and you were horrified to find that you were trapped in your own psyche, unable to reach out. You knew what the honest answers were; you knew what you needed to say, to ask for. The distant voice in your mind implored you to get help, but your throat constricted when you tried to voice that short little phrase—help me—and the momentum and magnitude of your obsession ruthlessly silenced it. Silenced you.

Somewhere in your subconscious lay the hope that something, anything, could break through the eerie silence that muzzled you before it was too late.

The minutes blurred into hours, hours blurred into days.

You preferred working in the library where the ambient noise kept the infernal ringing in your head at bay. You’d been at the terminals for entirely too long—or not nearly long enough?—when a glowing red dot appeared on your screen. By the time the glow moved off the screen and across your keyboard and hand, you could feel the last shreds of your attention span snapping, but you tried to continue your research. There was no surprise, only resigned irritation, when you realized that you wouldn’t be able to focus on the screen with the bright visual distraction. With no culprit in the immediate vicinity, you got up to find and stop the distraction at its source. When you found it, your lack of surprise and abundance of irritation only intensified when your partner hauled you bodily out of the library to talk.

You tried to preempt her—you both knew you weren’t going to stop, but she simply asked you to listen. Whatever argument you expected, it wasn’t this. She told you about the loss of her mother, shutdown of her father, and the truth of her birth mother—and the immediate abandonment—her life collapsing like a house of cards. And she told you about her naïve quest to find answers about her birth mother, a foolhardy outing that nearly cost the rest of their family.

Your heart broke for her and you empathized with her need to find answers, even at great cost. But you pushed back, urgency fueling your words and exhaustion blunting them: you weren’t a child, and your mission to fight the White Fang had human and faunus lives in the balance. These situations were not comparable. The threat of the White Fang escalated the stakes far higher than an individual’s search for answers, and stopping your search—

She wouldn’t let you finish. She hadn’t stopped her own search, but she had learned to not let the search control her, to not let it destroy her.

You were barely listening, much less comprehending. Your mind splintered into a thousand disparate thoughts, a hundred myriad emotions—all darkness and dread—as your tenuous grip on yourself broke.

But! You knew how the White Fang operated, you had enough clues to start looking for real answers, and stopping them was the one thing you had left—the only thing keeping you from going under and drowning: your only hope of redemption. You couldn’t just set it aside—that would leave you with nothing! You didn’t want to face the interminable darkness and uncertainty that loomed large in your head. You couldn’t. You wouldn’t be able to survive it. You were terrified that letting go of the search, even for a moment, would be tantamount to admitting that it wasn’t worth everything you had, everything you were. And if preventing bloody anarchy was worth less than your own pitiful existence, then... then...

Would it really? asked a voice in the back of your mind, but it was swept aside by a tide of panic.

Even with your unique background, you could barely begin to understand the web of interconnected events, threats, players, and pieces. But your limited insight was better than none. Of course she couldn’t understand—

Her tone escalated into scorching anger as she rounded on you, insisting that you didn’t understand. What, she mocked, could you even do in your current state?

The menacing tone and building heat provoked the overwhelming feeling of being cornered in spite of the open room. You had a choice: fight or flee. Your past, present, and future collapsed into an irrational whole as you chose to fight: you’d fight your past, you’d fight for your future. You’d fight her.

And you lost.

You found yourself half sprawled across the desk, vulnerable. The shock had stalled the charybdian maelstrom of thoughts, but it took several long breaths for you to come out of your daze and stand up. A different interpretation of what had happened descended upon you: she had been trying to help you, but you had hurt her.

You could see her boots advancing towards you, and for a moment the soles flashed blood-red. You couldn’t bring yourself to meet her eyes—fearful that you’d see him—and dread anticipation chilled your body. You had tensed in a defensive posture, but her comforting hug shocked you more than whatever violence you were bracing for. You were too exhausted to flinch at the embrace; the warmth brought with it a sense of calm that you had long forgotten.

She simply asked you to get some rest and then quietly extended another invitation to the dance that weekend. As she left, you thought about her words: the people you cared about.

Chapter Text

You blinked the nascent tears out of your eyes as you took a deep, shuddering breath—your first real breath in days. For several long minutes you stood in the empty classroom as the world came back into focus. You did care about more than just your hunt for the White Fang. That lifeline had turned into a noose. You couldn’t let it control you. You mustn’t.

She was right.

Yang was right.

You cared about your team and they cared about you: they weren’t nameless placeholders you could keep at arm’s length or behind a wall. Not anymore. You knew that your single-minded hunt for the White Fang had worried them—hurt them—but you’d turned a blind eye. They deserved better than that.

Instead of returning to the library, you made your way to the dorms. A vague sense of unease prickled down your spine: what if your team confronted you again? What if they were angry? What if, what if, what if—? But you grit your teeth and opened the door. The mild alarm at seeing all three teammates in the room began to dissipate when they did nothing more than quietly greet you and then returned to their tasks.

Grateful for the reprieve, you quickly got ready for bed. Despite the exhaustion weighing down your limbs, however, your mind was still churning. You simply sat, half-slumped, under the covers and tried to calm down. Was this what it felt like after being pulled out of the river? Having spent so long drowning in madness, even the desperately needed rescue made your head spin, and your thoughts were in a million pieces, scattered like flotsam. You took a deep breath and began to pull yourself together from the wreckage.

You had initially run when your faunus heritage came out, and you had resigned yourself to losing everything once again. But eventually you realized that you had resigned yourself to truly losing everything: Beacon was your home and your team was your family. That paradigm shift was staggering, and you weren’t sure you would have had the will to run had you been fully cognizant of what was at stake.

But your team surprised you.

The sisters had barely blinked, though you suspected they itched to pet your ears. Even Weiss overcame her lifelong prejudices in a matter of hours. It still beggared your belief that they wanted you back and had accepted your past so easily. It hadn’t gone smoothly, per se, but the fact that you were shouted at for barely a handful of minutes and then promptly forgiven was shocking.

It was jarring to realize that you felt safest and most loved amongst a group of humans, yet the vast majority of your life was defined by humans as the other: the oppressor, the tormenter, the enemy. The White Fang had been your family once, but by the time you left it all behind they had become the enemy of everything they had once stood for, everything you still stood for.

Everyone had wanted something from you before. Your role was as a part of a larger whole, but you, as an individual, were nearly meaningless. You were little more than a cog in the machinery that would advance faunus rights. And he—you felt your gorge rise and tasted bile—he merely wanted you as an object he could control and dominate.

But Ruby, Weiss, and Yang cared for you, not just for your skills nor just as a quarter of a team. This was a mutuality of exchange that was simply different from everything you had known before. There was an easygoing give-and-take that you’d never known could exist, and watching Ruby and Yang interact as siblings gave you a world of insight into what family could be like, should be like.

When had these nameless placeholders become the most real family you’ve ever had? Once again you found yourself searching for a tipping point before realizing that it didn’t matter. The when and how were secondary to the simple fact that they were.

They were your heart, hearth, and home.

Ruby: the soul of the team and the mediator who kept it from falling apart. She wore her innocence and idealism like armor, and you saw a great deal of your younger, more innocent self in her. Despite what you knew about the senseless cruelty of the real world, you found yourself hoping that she would never lose that bright optimism, never go down the paths you had.

Weiss: tactician, taskmaster, but not as cold as her name and usual demeanor suggested. Perhaps your conflicting backgrounds and personalities made it harder to get along without friction, but both of you had made important strides towards setting aside the differences that your heritage and her upbringing had caused. That willingness to change also earned mutual respect, even when clashes were inevitable.

Yang: the beating heart of the team, the visceral analogue to the ethereal soul. An irrepressible comedian, bright flame, and anchor. Yang’s story of her childhood cast her buoyant personality in a new light. You’d suspected—and now knew—that Yang’s brash and boundless spirit did not grow from an idyllic life; it had grown in spite of fathomless tragedy. Perhaps even to spite it.

At times you marveled at how the two of you got along so well, but you usually pushed the thought away as if thinking about it too hard might shatter the delicate illusion.

Yang had declared you were a lost cause within moments of meeting. The offhand statement was devoid of judgment: it was a blunt statement of facts as she saw them. As painful as the declaration was, it assured you that she would be reliably forthright. Sometimes you regretted giving her cause to make that call, but at that moment all you really wanted was to be left alone: you were overwhelmed and surrounded by strangers in a foreign place. At that moment, it was simply true.

At times you wondered if she even remembered that declaration, but your curiosity shriveled at the possibility that she still believed it, even if her actions suggested the opposite.

At initiation, you knew that circumstances would limit your partner choices to students who landed nearby. Yang’s location was painfully—quite literally, with your faunus hearing—easy to pinpoint, and you were close enough to follow the crashing and explosions as she descended to the forest floor. You hadn’t much chance to observe most of the other students, so she was a known quantity. Though you weren’t precisely eager to partner up with someone with a personality so antipodal to your own, you’d seen enough of her blunt honesty and caring nature that you didn’t entirely mind working with her. And, perhaps, the differences would make it easy to keep her at arm’s length.

Then you saw her facing down ursai with bright joy at the challenge and not a shred of fear. Even her retribution—wild and strange though it was—against the grimm for damaging her hair evoked dark memories only through sheer contrast: it seemed neither tainted by malice nor twisted by malevolence, and so very different than the life you desperately left. Thus, when you confirmed that she was a capable fighter with a skillset that complimented your own, it was an easy choice to reveal yourself and make eye contact. That moment was portentous, yes, but the entire initiation ordeal was full of such moments that it stood out no more than any other at the time.

You knew, to an extent, what joining Beacon entailed. Partners and teammates imposed a sense of mutually beneficial obligation: an important—but cold and transactional—commitment. But living and facing danger constantly with the same people you needed to trust with your life usually created deeper bonds. You’d expected that as well. What you didn’t expect was how easily it came to you. When Yang chose the cute little pony chess piece, you had rolled your eyes and deadpanned your response, but you felt a smile tug at your lips in spite of yourself. Moments like that stopped surprising you, but when you started looking forward to them... now that surprised you.

A lifetime of running, hiding, and meager survival had created instincts that should have found rowdiness alarming, jokes frivolous, and trust nigh unattainable. Yet you took Yang’s boisterous nature and flippant attitude in stride, tolerated her teasing and antics, and even—very, very secretly—grew fond of her terrible puns. But most of all, you trusted her. And that surprised you even more.

She, in turn, put up with your brooding and recalcitrance, never seemed to give up on her attempts to draw you out of your shell, and was always delighted if you played along—but never seemed to mind if you rebuffed her either. Nor did she pry too closely when you made it clear that there were things you didn’t want to discuss. There were many instances, too, of keen perception and circumspection from the brawler. She’d quickly adapted to both Weiss’ and your unease around most physical contact and judiciously kept her bear hugs to Ruby. Not that it took a keen observer to notice a panic attack that first time, but ever afterwards Yang would try to approach you from well within your peripheral vision and minimized any initiation of physical contact. Curiously, you found yourself as the initiator more and more. Perhaps that was the most surprising of all.

There were moments untainted by ghosts of your past life. You dared not say you were happy—that seemed far beyond your reach and more than you deserved—but even mere contentment was so rare that you’d failed to recognize the feeling at first. But as those peaceful moments filled with light and warmth became more frequent, you began to grasp just how long you’d lived in the dark.

A few months into the semester, you noticed that you weren’t reading as much as you used to. Sure, you still read a great deal—too much, according to some people—but the usual half-dozen books you checked out weekly to supplement your personal library had dwindled to a mere four. At first you thought it was an increase in the demands of schoolwork, or, when less charitable moods intruded, the bad influence of your less bookish teammates. But you found that it was your lighter reading that took the biggest hit. It was a Friday afternoon when the pieces came together, and you smiled as you walked away from the shelves empty-handed to respond to Yang’s text on your Scroll. You didn’t need to escape into books so much now that you could find moments of contentment outside of those quiet pages.

It wasn’t until Ruby slipped off her headphones and leaned over to bug Weiss that you broke from your ruminations and noticed how quiet the room had been. It was still fairly early in the evening and though all three teammates were in the room, the usual banter, roughhousing, and shouting had been absent. But before you could mourn the change in noise levels, Yang shot them both a death glare and silence immediately returned to the room.

For a moment you cringed, but the ringing in your head was barely noticeable and the gnawing black void was nowhere to be found. Was this tranquility? You smiled at the thoughtfulness of your teammates as you basked in the comfortable feeling of being surrounded by family. You were finally ready to go to sleep.

Looking back at how much you’d changed since you arrived at Beacon, you drowsily noticed that—as vast as those changes were—most of them were built upon a single foundation.

A single person.

Yang...

You woke in the middle of the night with a start, breaths ragged and shallow. You hoped that the rawness in your throat wasn’t from screaming in your sleep, and you tried to quiet your breathing to prevent disturbing your teammates any further. You felt Yang stir from the bunk above you, and your heart dropped. Before you could whisper an apology, you heard her climb down and perch on the low shelves at the head of your bed. You could see the concern in her lilac eyes. You tried to assure her that you were fine, hoping that the darkness would hide your sallow face and the sweat that dotted your brow, hoping that she couldn’t hear your harsh breaths.

Yang was no fool. She reached out to clasp your hand—the pressure and warmth immediately soothing—but you shook your head when she motioned to pull you into a hug. She backed off at your reaction, but you hastened to squeeze her hand and reassure her that her presence wasn’t unwelcome, but a hug was still a little too much.

She simply held your hand for a moment before standing, never letting go, to retrieve a pillow from the upper bunk. Folding it, she used it as a floor cushion as she sat down next to your bed.

When you indicated that you didn’t want to talk about the nightmare, Yang didn’t pry any further and simply murmured that you should go back to sleep. You tried to release her hand and insist that she go back to sleep, but she squeezed your hand and shook her head. All you could do was thank her as her reassuring presence lulled you into a deep, dreamless rest.

You opened your eyes to late morning sunlight streaming through the windows, one hand still outstretched to the edge of the mattress. As restful as your sleep was, you hoped that Yang hadn’t sacrificed her own to stay up holding your hand.

The room was quiet; your teammates were probably setting up for the dance that evening. You smiled to yourself for the first time in a long time and started searching for your teal ribbon. You had an invitation to accept, after all.

Chapter Text

Your world narrowed in an instant—and collapsed—as you watched his sword arc through her arm.

Save her.

Heedless of the agony of moving, you wrenched yourself upright and moved to shield her.

At any cost.

Summoning a shadow clone as a distraction, you hoisted her limp form into your arms. Nothing mattered except the next step you took and the weight you carried.

Your vision swam with each step you took. Every time you blinked, you were afraid that you would open your eyes to find yourself alone at a cold, silent doorstep.

You had no idea how—everything was a bloody, ashen blur—but you finally reached friendly lines.

You must have blacked out. You woke to find your stomach wound being treated. You don’t remember who it was, but you remember the trembling hands and gentle touch blunted by exhaustion. Everything was lost and everyone was running on empty.

You reached out to clasp her hand, her only hand, and the world fell away again. The only things that remained were her and a sea of apologies. All you could do was apologize. The words tumbled from your lips as tears tumbled from your eyes.

Of course you loved her. You loved all of your teammates and many of your classmates. Naturally, as her partner, you were—by necessity—closer to Yang. But necessity was such a cold, uncaring word for such a warm, caring presence.

That’s what you associated with her: warmth.

At first it had frightened you. Everything you’d been warmed by had betrayed you, yet the very personification of fire had only ever filled you with feelings of safety.

Just one step at a time.

Whatever you had to do to improve the odds of her safety was worth the personal sacrifice.

Your mind raced: you knew that prosthetic technology was quite advanced in Atlas. Perhaps Weiss would be able to help? But your mere presence jeopardized everything if she needed to rely on her family connections to do it. You were a liability to your team. To Yang. Especially to Yang.

This was all your fault.

She had a family, friends, a future. All you had were an accursed heritage, an unsavory history, and hateful monsters from your past. What could you possibly offer her but a chain around her ankle, or certain death?

You licked your cracked lips to make sure they weren’t bloody before you drew yourself closer to Yang and laid a penitent kiss on her knuckles. You held it for a tearful moment, taking in the smell of leather and gunpowder, and the coolness of Ember Celica at your forehead. It was strange: you half-expected the metal to be warm. In a brief, irrational moment, you imagined that—even at the height of her semblance in battle—those gauntlets would only ever emit a soothing warmth.

Gauntlets? Gauntlet...

Another wave of agony crested in your heart.

You apologized for what had happened when she tried to help you. And you apologized for what you needed to do. You concentrated your remaining scraps of aura on your stomach wound, willing it to knit, but the pain of your injury was nothing compared to the pain in your heart.

Everyone around you had a target painted across their backs. Once again you found yourself leaving everything behind, hoping that your sacrifice could save another life. But this time it wasn’t a handful of anonymous human engineers: you needed to save Yang’s life.

You left in the dead of night without bidding her goodbye—though she deserved far, far more than that—because you didn’t want to think of it as a parting. You couldn’t bear to think of it as such.

You didn’t make it very far that first night, but there was plenty of chaos and abandoned buildings that you were able to hole up in, despite your injury. You lay on a makeshift pallet, too troubled to sleep but in too much pain to do much else. All you had were your tumultuous thoughts and the nagging fear that you would lose even more than you had already.

He threatened to destroy everything you loved. And in many ways, he’d already proven he could: he’d turned into a monster and—in turn—that monster had corrupted the White Fang that had stood for equality and peace.

His love—but was it ever really love?—for you had festered into something ghastly. Those old terms of endearment took on a deeply sinister quality, twisted into terms of hate and malice. You were barely conscious the last time you’d heard it from his mouth—that he was doing it out of love.

Why did you ever believe him? Why was it that you got burned by everything you trusted?

But you believed her without hesitation when she said that she was attacked during the tournament. Her simple claim was enough for you to jettison what you’d seen with your own eyes, what everyone had seen. But it didn’t take long for the parallels to start haunting you: she had—just as he had—broken a man’s legs in self-defense...

The enormity of what you’d done without a second thought crashed over you. Was that all it took for you to willingly rewrite what you’d seen? The degree of trust you’d given her—at the expense of ignoring reality—terrified you. You wanted to believe her, you did believe her, but your past experiences were a poisonous reminder of how things could change, did change.

It was her look of desperation in her eyes that finally tipped the scales. That vulnerability gave her words the glow of truth when nothing else could. His changes were half-hidden behind that damnable, monstrous mask, but she hadn’t changed. Hadn’t hidden away her humanity. For all her brashness, truth was never in question when it came to her. You hadn’t been burned yet.

Yet.

Despite everything, you didn’t think you ever would be. Not by her.

You loved her.

This wasn’t an infatuation or a schoolgirl crush: this was a missing part of your soul that you hadn’t known was missing. You were complete in her presence. Within a single moment you realized what made you whole... and that you were bereft of it. The irony locked you in a gasping heap as your limbs fell numb from the shock. Why couldn’t the revelation have hit earlier?

The guilt of it all hung around your neck like a millstone even as you struggled to keep from drowning. You loved her. He wanted to hurt you by hurting her. By killing her. You could feel yourself dying inside just thinking the thought.

And in a way, you ran to save your own life: you would rather live without her than live in a world without her. As much as you yearned for her warmth, staying in the cold meant protecting her. Hopefully he’d choose to hunt for you and not anyone else.

Please, please, not her.

It was probably the only thing you’d beg him for.

You tried to survive on your own.

The desperate need to feel something other than choking despair drove you to reckless and destructive actions. The word on the street was that the leadership of the White Fang wanted to take advantage of the instability in Atlas, leaving barely a skeleton force behind in Vale. So you hunted down whatever grimm crossed your path, and you set yourself to acts of sabotage against the few White Fang cells that still plagued the city. Perhaps your explosions were a little more destructive than strictly necessary, and the interrogations harsher, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care about consequences. You learned little from your endeavors, took no pleasure in your successes, and the failures blurred together like muddy water. The vigilantism could only occupy so much of your waking hours, and sleep never came easily.

The only moments when you felt true freedom were when you were fighting. Focusing your mind on the immediate threat meant that nothing else mattered. Spotting a small pack of beowolves, you threw yourself ferally into the fray. Your strikes often left your defenses open, but self-preservation was low on your list of priorities. Regardless, the grimm fell one by one, their dark forms dissolving into the night air as they died in the alleyway. As you drove the last one into a corner, the threat of being attacked was gone and your blows lost every shred of finesse as you pummeled at its head. A wild swing sent your knuckles into rough brick, and you dropped your sword from the pain. The cleaver soon followed with a clatter, and you were left with nothing more than a storm of emotions and your fists.

You were no hand-to-hand combatant; hitting with unarmed fists was never your forte. It was always hers. But a primal rage sized your limbs and you sought to drive the ghosts from your head by reducing the beowolf into a pulp. It dissipated into nothingness soon thereafter, but you didn’t stop punching.

When, at last, you withdrew your knuckles from the wall, senses barely returning, you felt the odd sensation of peeling and pulling. You focused your eyes on the fist still ground into the brick, and noticed that the blood splatters were matte and rusty—dried. How long had you stood there? And how long ago had your aura given out and let the wall tear up your hands?

You wondered, but you didn’t care.

You threw yourself into whatever you could to distract yourself. A particularly brutal confrontation with the White Fang saw you slinking off to recover, a rare moment of sanity driving you from the fight. The scent of blood was still clinging to your clothes when you headed towards an apartment tower in search of easy rooftop access. A dark puddle was seeping around the corner of the building, and you froze when you saw the tattered end of an orange scarf soaking up the brown-red liquid. As you blinked, you saw blond hair splattered in blood, surrounding lifeless lilac eyes. Gasping, you tried to banish the vision as you reached desperately for support, terrified at what you might find if you turned the corner. In the end, your body made the decision for you: your knees gave out and you were forced to stumble forward.

And it was nothing.

It wasn’t her.

But for a moment you thought you were in a world without her. For a moment, your own world had ended.

You reeled back, feeling your muscles straining as your expression twisted into a rictus of pain as a snarl escaped your lips. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real! You nearly choked on that realization. But you needed to know what was real. You needed something sharp. Of course your blades came to mind, but you’d sworn not to spill any more innocent blood with your weapons. Innocent! You’d doubled over in silent laughter bordering on hysteria. Innocent? You were anything but.

Across. Always across, never down.

Your debts couldn’t be paid in blood, not like this. But feeling physical pain was a nice change of pace from feeling nothing but emptiness, or—worse—the soul-crushing mental pain that lurked around every corner.

Shame gnawed at you. You knew it wasn’t constructive behavior, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and that empty void had grown to the point where, soon, even begging would be impossible. You wondered just how long you could keep it at bay, what blood sacrifices it would demand of you before it was sated. If it could be sated.

Black cloth conveniently hid the scars of the whips and scorns of time, but you knew that the hidden wounds of the oppressor’s wrongs burned deeper still. A scavenged kitchen knife was no bare bodkin, but you wondered, nonetheless, whether you had done enough—suffered enough—to earn a discharge for your lifetime of debt.

And when the sharp edge reached the top of where your armband normally rested, you realized that it was at exactly the same height as the strike that... the strike that took her arm. The tidal wave of anguish hit you full force and you crumpled to the ground under the weight of emotions. When the world stopped spinning, you found yourself half-propped up against a rough wall, knife still held against your arm. This time, the sorrow cut through you and your hand convulsed, drawing the blade deeper than you intended. With a clatter, you dropped it and numbly tried to staunch the blood that beaded into red-black rivulets down your arm. A distant part of your mind laughed mirthlessly at your panicked actions: how pathetic to worry over such a shallow cut when she had suffered a thousand times worse for your sake.

She was the day to your night, the light to your shadows.

She was stability, reassurance, warmth. Home.

You’d tried to be selfless throughout your life, but there was nothing left to give.

You’d spent so long fighting your past, fighting yourself. And all of it came to naught. You were well and truly a lost cause.

You were lost.

Your footsteps were unnaturally heavy, leaden, and they echoed down the abandoned docks. You felt the cold seep into your bones but you were too drained to shiver. The lapping waves reflected the already-shattered moon into even smaller fragments, but you thought you could see a faint light across the water—Patch, Yang—as you walked towards the edge of the pier.

Once again you found yourself at a cold doorstep, and once again you were helpless. The numbness pervading your body was hauntingly familiar, too. You would have laughed if you had the air in your lungs for it, but all you could do was conjure up one more warmth-suffused memory as you steeled yourself. You reached out a trembling hand to knock on the door as you whispered “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” into the eerie silence as darkness drowned you entirely.