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When she and her team, alongside Jaune, returned to Vacuo, Blake had expected to be greeted by a good amount of people as soon as they reached the root of the city, but she didn’t expect this many.
It’s as if the entirety of Vacuo knows who they are, and that entirety is here to receive them. They touch down on the sands and the people swell around them like the tide, parting where they walk and cradling their wake as if it itself is something sacred.
She knows why there’s so many. This is the combined population of three kingdoms; she has to remind herself. Shantytowns have been set up to handle the unexpected boom in inhabitants, and she can’t help but frown. Cast out from your home, forced to shelter somewhere completely unknown—this is all too familiar.
Blake gazes out at the gathering, at the fathers, mothers, children. There are veterans and bakers, mercenaries, huntsmen. Blake feels all their eyes, but most of it is directed at Ruby. Ruby, who stands tall and brave at the forefront of them all.
Her heart contracts in her chest as she watches her leader hold steady, silver eyes gleaming and jaw set fearlessly.
A shallow pulse of air diverts attention and then Winter is there, landing with a spray of sand, and Blake has to look away at the raw emotion displayed—the flash of icy blue eyes swimming with tears, brows knit in disbelief—when Winter sinks to her knees and crushes Weiss in her arms, dissolving with sobs.
Weiss kisses her sister’s hairline and cradles the Maiden to her chest, and a huff of wet laughter resounds from Qrow, standing just feet away. He’d been almost part of the main mass, a familiar shadow. Trying to keep himself away, possibly.
But he echoes the sentiment nonetheless by stepping forward and scooping Ruby into an embrace, hooking Yang in with an elbow. Amusingly, Yang struggles for a moment but eventually admits defeat, hugging her uncle back tightly. Blake hears Ruby giggle, a sound that falls apart into a whimper as Qrow murmurs something between them.
Blake feels a tug at her coat.
One of her ears flicks in surprise, and she glances downward to find a young Faunus boy, three or four years old at most, staring up at her with a green-orbed, awed look of such innocent fascination. His hair is dark and cropped, nearly black, sticking up in places. On top of his head, little ears, resembling that of a leopard or jaguar.
She kneels next to his side, not sure what to say, but she doesn’t need to, because he reaches up and she reaches down, and she has him cradled in her arms before her brain can catch up.
A small gasp leads her to a fretful looking Faunus woman with a mortified look on her face, but Blake merely smiles and gravitates towards her. The little boy fists the air and both the mother and Blake laugh in tandem.
Thank you, the woman murmurs, her son back in her arms, and then something in the air releases, like air from a balloon.
Then there are Faunus.
Her identity as a member of Team RWBY and daughter of the chief of Menagerie overlap as she weaves through them, Faunus from Vacuo and Atlas and Mantle and the like. She sees their hope, feels it like a weight lifting from her shoulders, and she’s overwhelmed.
Then Blake hears him.
It’s before she even sees him, a particularly familiar hoot and holler from amongst the throng of people.
The sound of her own name reaches her secondary ears and she knows that voice, knows it like the back of her hand.
“Blake? Blaaaaake!”
Her ears dart towards the familiar noise. “Sun?”
And then a head of pale yellow hair bobs up from behind a group of refugees, just high enough for her to catch a glimpse of bright blue eyes and an enthralled grin. “Blake!”
Shock shoots through her veins, coupled with a crushing relief, because it’s him. “Sun!”
He disappears momentarily.
However, Blake then sees him scaling the trunk of a nearby palm, drawing more than a few eyes. Once high enough, Sun surveys the area and pushes off like the tree is a springboard, clearing a multitude of heads and tucking and rolling once he hits the ground.
Something like glee and relief and exuberance jumbled into one exciting emotion bubbles up in Blake’s chest, and Sun’s not even back on his feet when she moves for him, crossing the distance in a few quick strides.
Blake takes in a few significant things in a very short amount of time. There's blond stubble on the other Faunus’ chin. His hair is longer— in a low ponytail. There’s a nasty scar on his chest, fully healed but raking down diagonally from his shoulder to his solar plexus. “Holy shit!” Sun cries, mouth crooking into a grin. “You—I thought—we thought, I mean, woah, your hair! A-are you—”
His questions are cut off as Blake slams into him with all the force of several very large trucks, nearly knocking him right off his feet.
She slings her arms around his neck, nuzzles into the juncture between his neck and shoulder, trusts him to catch her, and of course he does; he laughs full-winded as he locks strong arms around her waist and spins her in midair.
Sun’s cackles are contagious, they’ve always been, and she smells his smell of salt and sand and melts into the embrace. His tail brushes happily against her ankle and Blake’s still hoisted up when she pulls back, grasping his face in her hands.
Blake’s thumbs brush the prickly hair on his cheeks. “Okay, what is this.”
Sun grins up at her like a shark. “What, my soon-to-be goatee?”
He sets her down, bending forward to let her feel, and a playful kind of dread sits low in Blake’s stomach. “Don’t even joke about that. If I ever see you with any sort of beard, we're no longer friends.”
Sun gasps melodramatically, straightening back up and swatting her hands away. “Ouch. What, you can get a haircut and I can’t?”
“You’re not cutting anything. In fact, it’s the exact opposite, so your argument is invalid.”
“Yowch.” Sun shifts his weight to one hip, resting a hand on it and snickering. “You and Neptune, both bashing on the beard. Brothers, I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too,” Blake admits quietly.
He tilts toward her, making tentative grabby-hands, and Blake snorts and lets him fold her back into his body and into a hug once more. He shimmies them left to right, chin tucking Blake’s head so she’s practically smothered against his collarbone.
Once he’s had his fill, Sun loosens up, humming appreciatively into her hairline.
“Hair … wanna touch …” he pleads.
“Hmph,” Blake mumbles, shoving back just enough to get a better look at his gnarly pectoral scar. “Yes as long as you tell me how you got that.”
Sun puffs up proudly. “Jackalope. Those antlers are nasty.” He feathers his fingers along the ends of her hair, tail curling in wonder. “Didn’t get the jump on me, but there was a kid in danger. I got reckless.”
“The Sun Wukong, admitting to recklessness?” Blake meanders, brushing two fingers against the jagged scar tissue. “Who are you and what have you done to him?”
“What? I’m trying to be a better leader, remember? The boys all gave me one thing to focus on that I was lacking in, and Scarlet’s was transparency.” The monkey Faunus makes a little viola gesture with his hands. “And so, transparent.”
A little wave of sadness washes through Blake’s body, and she hopes it doesn’t show outwardly. He’s grown. Grown without her. And while that was honestly a good thing, a selfish prick of longing threatens to drop her secondary ears to her hair.
Just how much has she missed?
For her teammates, she knows she’d miss it again, and for Yang she’d miss it a thousand times more if she had to, but it still manages to hurt. Sun means a lot to her. She knows they … sort of talked it out in Mistral before she and her team boarded Argus Limited for Atlas and Sun went his separate way with his own team, but she hopes he knows that.
“That’s good. Communication is good,” she answers instead. Something clicks in the back of her mind as she observes the remnants of the tear. “Hey, it covers up the one that …” Blake trails off, unable to finish the thought as her throat swells up.
“—that Ilia gave me?” Sun provides, and when Blake winces at the memory he squeezes her shoulder consolingly. “Don’t. Plus, this one was much closer to getting rid of me. I scared the shit out of Neptune.”
“Sure did,” a rather irritated-sounding voice pipes up from behind Sun, and a turn of his shoulders reveals Neptune himself, approaching with a disgruntled expression. Sun’s teammate doesn’t look all that different except for the length of his hair, which has grown out a bit, but his voice is deeper than Blake recalls. “Don’t look so satisfied with yourself, babe. You almost died.”
Babe.
Slowly the word turns itself around in Blake’s brain, and when it finally registers, she slow-swivels to look up at Sun, who has his bottom lip trapped between his teeth with a barely-stifled look of pleased embarrassment. “Before you say anything, I was going to tell you,” he says carefully. “Um. Surprise?”
“Y-you two—what?” Blake gasps. “Since—since when?”
“Only a few months now,” Neptune admits.
“He’s my boyfriend. He’s in looooove with me,” Sun sing-songs, draping himself over said boyfriend playfully.
Neptune blushes a warm red, sticking his palm in Sun’s face to push him off. “Take the ring off. We’re getting a divorce.”
“Noooooo,” Sun whines, flailing his arms about.
Blake can’t stifle a giggle of overjoyed amusement and chooses to ignore Sun’s delighted smile behind Neptune’s hand at the reaction.
“Well, uh …” Now it’s Blake’s turn to blush as she gains the courage, folding her arms bashfully. “We may be even on surprises, because I …” Her ears lower timidly, but her heart soars with a sense of accomplishment and pride. “I … may have confessed my feelings for Yang and also kissed her while we were in the Ever After.”
Silence.
“What?” Sun yelps at the same time Neptune splutters out a “where?”
It’s loud enough that several people beside them startle and a small flock of birds scatter out of a nearby palm.
“Shh!” Blake hushes them, ruffled, though her cheeks are traitorously hot.
“Where is she,” Sun states rather than asking, an expression of absolute mischief on his face; “because a double date is in order.”
Blake hisses through her teeth pleadingly, pushing him back as he attempts to seek Yang out above the crowd. Her partner is only around the corner, likely still crushed into a hug with Qrow and Ruby, but he doesn’t need to know that. “Nope. No. We haven’t had time to talk about … anything, yet,” she whines, lowering her voice. “Leave it be for at least a few more days.”
Sun immediately eases off, raising his hands placatingly. “Fine, fine. Duly noted.”
Neptune leans up against Sun, curious. “Whuzzat? Talking?”
“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it,” Sun says, reaching sidelong to snap his boyfriend’s goggles against his forehead, making him yelp. “She just needs some space for a while.”
“Hey!” Neptune splutters. “My head is not … oh.” He blushes, again. “No, you’re distracting me. Stop doing that. Not cool.”
“Hehe. You’re fun to distract.”
“Am not.”
“Are not.”
“Am too—augh, fuck! Stop it!” Neptune groans, stumbling back with his head in his hands.
Sun sniggers, pokes his tongue out through his teeth at Blake discreetly, and she has to muffle another snort through the back of her hand.
“Ridiculous,” she murmurs.
“Lovingly so,” Sun purrs, curling his tail around his boyfriend’s leg and tugging the blue-haired boy back into his tanned arms, and it hits Blake at once, the carefree domesticity of it all.
When was the last time they could converse like this—freely, happily, unbound?
There was always a factor of stress and strain, an obstacle they could never surpass. Whether it was miscommunication, distrust, fear, or a mixture of all of those, life had been constant since Beacon, and there just wasn’t time. Even now, Blake pushes the threat of Salem to the back of her mind and it looms darkly, waiting to resurface.
Sun, to his credit, never let Blake get herself down. He stuck by her side not because he was obliged to or because he desired something from it, but because he simply cared about her and wanted to support her.
What friends. What a world. It feels impossible to have both, but here they are.
Then, Blake hears a shriek that nearly jumps her out of her skin. Coco Adel from Team CFVY stands several feet away, absolutely flummoxed and in a humorous stance of shock at the sight of a very alive and very not-dead Blake Belladonna.
“What the fuck?” Coco yelps. The rest of her team materializes from the street: Velvet gasps and halts mid-stride, Yatsuhashi almost smacks into her, and Fox dodges the both of them, looking confused.
Coco points at Blake, points behind her, looks around wildly, rubs her eyes a few times, and points at Blake again; Blake watches Velvet visibly sigh and step past her, approaching with an overjoyed wave.
“Oh boy,” Blake mutters, not exactly looking forward to other interactions to come.
“Yup,” Sun laughs, tipping his head to rest on top of hers, tail swishing happily, looking not at all sympathetic. “Welcome back.”