Blake finds herself standing, shivering, amidst drifts of snow, the gentle downward falling of flakes dusting her hair to white. She never thought she would find herself here, and circumventing it was only a matter of time. But she has chosen to come. To face her past once more.
The house in question is small, a thatched roof peaking above warm wooden walls. Patch is a wooded island, and so she’s not surprised to see that it’s hewn roughly from oak logs. The windows glow like eyes of coal, very stark against the coldness of the snow around her.
Blake knows that there’s still time enough to turn back, to disappear like a shadow into the trees. But this is something she must do, or she thinks she might die from the pain and the unknowing.
She knocks on the door once.
A broad-shouldered man opens it after a few moments, cradling a steaming cup of tea to his chest with one hand. Right away, Blake is struck by how alike he looks to Yang. He has kind blue eyes, and his muscled, corded arms are tattooed around the forearm. The flowing curls have Yang’s eccentric touch to them. His messy blonde hair is the mirror image of Yang’s, merely shorter, and his eyes widen in surprise as he sees her standing there.
“Er, hello,” he says, scratching his chin uncertainly. Blake knows she must look like hell, with her haunted, sunken eyes, her scars and bedraggled appearance. “Can I help you? Not many come out to Patch, especially at this time of year, and especially during with all that’s going on right now in Vale…”
Blake swallows, a block of ice in her stomach. “You must be Taiyang Xiao Long.” His eyes widen even further. “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting anything. I know that things are turbulent right now, but I had to come for your daughter— for Yang. My name is Blake, Blake Belladonna.”
The surprise is palpable, before a frown furrows his brows. “Blake Belladonna, is it? You’re the partner that ran off on my daughter.” There’s a hint of dislike, tempered with disappointment, in his eyes, and Blake remembers Yang telling her about Raven and how she left, and her self-loathing rises in a choking tide. “You’re here for her?”
She ducks her head, as if she could disappear into the snow. “I’m here to make amends.”
A heavy hand claps into her shoulder, and she looks up, surprised. Taiyang’s eyes are warmer now, though still sad. “We all make mistakes. It’s up to us to rectify them. Yang’s been down for a long while now. If you can do anything to make my daughter smile again, then I suppose it’s only right.” He holds open the door. “Come in.”
She walks in circumspectly, looking around. There’s all the hallmarks of a home. A fire burns in the grate. The whistle of a kettle pierces the silence. Pictures hang on the walls— Blake sees a miniature Yang and Ruby, both with their hair in pigtails, and a short woman in a white cloak. She’s the mirror image of Ruby, and Blake realizes it must be Summer Rose, whom Yang told her about so long ago.
Taiyang sees her looking at the picture and his face darkens with sorrow, but he doesn’t say anything. He gestures to a hall that branches away from the main room. “She’s in there. Second door on the left.”
“Thank you,” Blake says, her heart beating out of her chest. She turns and walks down the hall, each step feeling like a mile, each step pulling her into a confrontation she swore she wouldn’t make. But it’s Yang and nothing has ever been absolutely certain with her.
She opens the door like it might detonate, the low creak humming through the air.
Yang is there. Her head is turned towards the window, and she doesn’t even look up as the door opens; her vibrancy seems— gone, somehow. Her shoulders are slumped in defeat. Blake can see her face reflected in the window. Those eyes that once were bright are now dull, all their flashfire burnt out.
The word is out before she can even think to come up with some speech, some semblance of an apology. “Yang?”
Her head whips around, eyes widening, realization crashing over her face in a tidal wave. Then she reaches for her bedside table.
Blake barely has time to duck before a vase hits the place where her head was moments ago, shattering around her in paradoxically beautiful shards. As she straightens, a blinding force crashes into her left jaw and sends her careening into the door. It slams shut with an angry shudder, and Blake regains her feet, the world spinning alarmingly as the pain fades from blinding to a dull ache.
Yang is breathing hard, her fist lowering from the blow, a feral snarl contorting her face. It’s her left hand; Blake thinks that if she looks at the stump of the other arm, all her nerve will leave her. She touches her jaw gingerly, not really feeling the pain. Her heart and soul hurt worse, by far. “I suppose I deserve that.”
“What I want to do is a hell of a lot more deserved than that,” Yang snaps, her voice hoarse, as if from disuse. “What the hell are you doing here? No, scratch that. I don’t want a half-assed apology from you, Blake. You can explain why you’re here and why you left or you can get out.” She raises her voice, looking over Blake’s shoulder. “Dad! What the hell were you thinking, letting her in here?”
There’s no response, though Blake can imagine Taiyang wincing to himself somewhere in the house.
The fire in Yang’s eyes is back, but it’s a raging conflagration, out of control and bitter as darkness. There are tears in her eyes. Blake doesn’t mistake them for sadness for a moment. “You left and you didn’t come back— I went out looking for you at ten below in the winter, Blake Belladonna, you bastard, I’m going to kill you—”
Any defenses Blake might have die in her throat. For some sick reason, the image of Yang grinning down at her the first time they ever met floats in her mind’s eye. She remembers being vexed out of her wits. It may have seemed like a funny analogy once upon a time; now it just makes her feel ill, because this broken girl in front of her has changed in incomprehensible ways, and every single one of them are entirely her fault.
“I’m sorry,” she says numbly. “Yang—”
“Don’t,” Yang says, her voice breaking, shattering. “Don’t say my name like that. Don’t say my name ever.” She turns and stalks to the window, and Blake sees her head bow, sees her shoulders shaking as she starts to cry.
“Please,” she says softly, her heart turning on itself, tearing apart from the inside. “Look at me.”
“You left us and me,” Yang says, her voice muffled as she wipes at her eyes. “Weren’t we worth that to you?” Her voice drops. “Wasn’t I worth it?”
Blake swallows but she can’t breathe, can’t speak. If she closes her eyes, it seems like yesterday that Adam stood in front of her. It seems like yesterday that she lost it all.
As if Yang hears her thoughts, her mouth twists and she gestures at the bandaged stump of her arm. “I lost it for you,” she snarls, sounding more vulpine than anything, something vicious and cold in her eyes, something ruined and broken behind even that. “And you just left. Without a word, without an explanation. Did you know Pyrrha died? Do you know that Ruby’s gone and that she’s got some crazy power that she doesn’t even know how to use? Did you even care?”
Thorns or tears making it hard to swallow, or breathe, Blake blinks at her. “I tried to contact you via Scroll, but—”
“Yeah, yeah. The CCT. Don’t make up crap excuses. If you really wanted to contact me so bad, you wouldn’t have ever left at all.” She turns and limps back to her bed, sitting down heavily. There are tears shining in her eyes. “Do you know what I thought when I heard you scream that night at Beacon when everything went to hell? When he stabbed you? I thought you died. But you didn’t give a damn, did you? Just took off when you hit the city, you coward…” No insult seemed to be adequate enough. “I hate what you did. I want to hate you.”
“I thought you would hate me,” Blake whispers.
Yang says nothing.
“It was my fault that you lost your arm,” she says, her voice catching. “I thought it might be better if you…”
“Stop. Stop making excuses. It’s over, Blake,” Yang says. “Maybe I should have guessed you would go. You’re just another person who left me behind in a long line of them. Raven, Ruby, Weiss, Qrow, Taiyang. Maybe I was stupid to think you would actually be different.” She laughs, hollow. “The funny thing is, I wanted to believe you weren’t a coward, Blake, more than I’ve wanted anything. After all those chances I gave you, all those talks… but I guess it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough.”
“That’s not true.” Blake’s jaw clenches. “It’s not.”
“Then you tell me the truth, Blake, since you’re so goddamned smart!” She shakes her head, eyes still full of tears. “I don’t know what’s true or not anymore. Hell, I don’t know anything beyond the confines of this stupid room.”
“There are so many reasons I took off,” Blake says. “And yes, I know about Ruby, and Pyrrha.” Blake’s heart twists in her chest: she remembers the red-haired Huntress, her hands lifted in supplication, her green eyes smiling. A pang goes through her. Gone. She’s gone. “I saw your sister do— whatever it was that happened that night in Beacon Tower. I saw the tower explode with silver light. And I saw a body fly out and fall all the way to the ground. You started waking up as everyone started yelling at the sight, because— you have to understand, nobody knew what happened. It was so bright, like the sun itself had fallen out of the sky. You started waking up and I realized something. You may not have blamed me for what happened when you woke up, but I was absolutely certain you would. And I blamed myself for letting it happen. And I knew I couldn’t look you in the eye when you woke up, knowing that you took a sacrifice that should have been mine. So I left. Mostly because I was so… so steeped in guilt and sadness and fury. I wanted to find Adam and kill him, more than I was ever scared of him, because he had hurt you. And he said… he is on a mission to annihilate all that I love… I thought it would be better and safer to distance myself from you, because of it.”
“Pyrrha’s dead,” Yang says, her arm hugging her knees. Blake can see, visibly, all the fight drain out of her, and she slackens, shaking like she’s pulling apart at the seams. “God, she’s dead. She had her whole life ahead of her, but she’s dead, gone forever— she’s never, ever coming back. And a part of Jaune is dead, too. And so’s…” She shakes her head, a tear streaking down her cheek. “Blake, so’s a part of me.”
Blake sits beside her, and Yang doesn’t push her away. She leans against her, allowing herself to cry, and Blake is silent, laying her hand atop Yang’s.
“The first few weeks sucked,” Yang whispers. “I think— I wasn’t there for Ruby. She just got her whole world turned upside down and I wouldn’t even look her in the eye. But she still powered through. I still want to think of her as my baby sister, back to a time when I could fix all of her problems with a batch of cookies and a bedtime story, but this is reality, and it looks like her path is going to be harder than any of ours. And her path is leading her to a place where I can’t follow, and that terrifies the hell out of me.”
“Ruby has a destiny,” Blake says. “Perhaps it leads her to a different life than any of us can imagine, perhaps not, but it is up to her to be ready to meet the challenges.”
“I just want to be there for her. But I can’t. She left for Haven with Jaune and Ren and Nora. And Qrow went after them. We were supposed to be a team, not… not divided.”
“Part of this rift is my fault,” Blake says, her skin still crawling with the memory of cold. “But being away gave me time to think. And it made me realize something.” She reaches for Yang’s hand, and her partner doesn’t pull away. She is shaking, and Blake lifts it, placing an infinitely gentle kiss on her knuckles. Scarred knuckles to mark the life of a warrior, a survivor, but Yang has always been so, so strong. “We are always and absolutely better together.”
Yang looks at her. Her eyes are shining, with something old and something new. Blake gently sets her hand down, and asks:
“Yang, I— Do you think you could forgive me? I mean, do you think forgiveness is possible, after what I did?”
“Perhaps being faced with so much of your past all at once made you revert back to your old ways of running,” Yang says quietly. “I shouldn’t. But I do understand, Blake, and I want to forgive you. So… so I will. But you need to promise me—”
“I will never leave you again,” Blake whispers, her own emotion threatening to break, to spill over like rain in a hollow. “I promise on love. I promise on life itself.”
“Then I’ll trust you.”
“Adam said something to me,” Blake says, “something that I didn’t realize what he meant until I had gone. I saw you looking for me in the ruins of Beacon, and I saw what he planned to do, and I’ve never felt such terror. Ozpin probably would have said it was borne from love. And then I knew that I loved you, and he wanted to use that against me. But I never want my love for you to be a weakness. I don’t want it to be an anchor, pulling me down. I want it to be the sails that lift me up.”
“Blake,” Yang says; she’s so close now, so close that Blake can see herself in Yang’s eyes like two mirrors, “do you think any less of me now that I’m… well, I’m different. We all are.”
Blake knows what she means. These past weeks have changed her fundamentally, in ways she cannot entirely comprehend yet. But she will not run this time. She regards Yang with utter honesty. “I’ve always thought you were beautiful. I could never think less of you. You saved my life, Yang,” she whispers, “and my heart, too.”
And when Yang kisses her, it feels like coming home.