You began to wake.

Your eyes were gummed shut from long-dried tears, but you didn't remember why you were crying. You blearily searched your memories for what happened.

A scream and a crash of fear that froze your heart.

An overwhelming need to protect something. Someone.

A roar of anger tore from your throat as your semblance burned hotter than it had ever burned before, but the blaze did nothing to dispel the chill that flooded your veins.

A flash of red.

Then falling into darkness.

The ground was cold and hard so you tried to sit up, but rolling to your right sent a wave of agony through your body. You lifted your arm to inspect it for injuries and found only a bandaged stump. Between the pain and the shock, your mind shut down and darkness overtook you again.

You woke a second time, but the nightmare didn't go away.

You saw several familiar faces hovering around you, but not the ones you most needed to see. Weiss was the first to update you: Ruby was alive and uninjured, but unconscious. And Blake... Blake had run. You stopped listening.

That scream had been Blake. You'd attacked the masked man who had stabbed her. His single strike cut clean through your aura and arm, and you'd blacked out. Weiss said that Blake had carried you back to the city center but refused to explain what happened. She refused to respond to anyone at all.

But why did she run?

Sun saw her go. He tried to talk her down, but she wasn't listening to reason, and he couldn't physically stop her without making her barely-treated injury worse. He said that all Blake could do was apologize to you. He was sorry, too.

Why did she run? You didn't know, and you didn't want to care.

The fall of Beacon and the destruction of Vale were disasters too vast to fully comprehend.

You'd lost an arm. The dominant hand of a hand-to-hand fighter. You could never use Ember Celica in the same way again. Prosthetic technology could step in, but with Remnant-wide chaos, you were a low priority. You'd barked in rueful laughter at that—a low priority, of course. Always.

You were treading water, but who knew that losing an arm would feel like leaden feet?

The hospitals were overloaded with more pressing cases. So much the better: you hated hospitals. But moving was agony. Hell, being awake was agony, and sleep brought nightmares. You retreated into yourself to escape. It felt like a waiting room—but you had no idea what you were waiting for—and the only entertainment was a TV broadcasting your failures around the clock.

You were a husk of a human. Little wonder you were shuffled around like so much baggage. Your father and uncle arrived to take you back to Patch without once asking if that's what you wanted. But with no other options, you went along.

Home wasn't a place of sanctuary—it was a place of heartbreak after heartbreak. This was where you were abandoned by Raven. This was where you learned that Summer died. This was where you watched Tai ditch his role as father. This was where you traded your childhood for Ruby's sake. You'd trade it again in a heartbeat, but selflessness has human limits and you were no saint. What had you gotten out of life in exchange for all of that? Well, you did get a painful, personal lesson on the definition of irony at the age of six. You were effectively orphaned, even though your parents were still alive.

Abandoned. The story of your life.

Looking back, you were born into abandonment. But you'd known that for years. The ache of loss had dulled and the wounds scabbed over.

You hated dwelling on all the things you'd lost in your life, but sometimes you just couldn't keep your head above water. The loss of Summer Rose broke your father, and so a single loss became two. And learning why he couldn't cope had brought the losses to three. When your mother left you newly born, there was nothing you could have done to provoke it nor prevent it, yet the sting of that loss was far bitterer than the others because it had been a deliberate choice on her part. You didn't know why, and it haunted you, choked you.

But you pushed your mourning aside and masked your feelings to become a parent in your father's stead. Protecting Ruby's idealism and nurturing her potential became your new life. It gave you purpose, and purpose gave you hope. Yet this life, this purpose, this hope was not your own. You were living a borrowed life. You'd tried to fill the void with laughter and friends, but there was a bone-deep emptiness beneath it all.

In those stark moments where truth cut like a knife, you hated yourself. Everything else in your life seemed to, so why not you? Sure, Ruby loved you, but she loved everyone unconditionally. You weren't special to her. You were born into uselessness.

Maybe you weren't a prodigy like Ruby, but non-prodigies still deserved love, right?

Ruby did love you unconditionally, but she still left. You didn't blame her for choosing to leave, but that did little to ease the sting. You were sorry that she had to leave without you, but you were sorrier that you hadn't said "I love you" back. What was wrong with you?! The one person who'd loved you unconditionally, and now you might never have the chance—No. No. NO. Think of something else. Anything else.

But everything else that came to mind only dragged you deeper underwater.

You were almost ready to move back into the shared bedroom, but it felt a thousand times emptier when you knew she'd left without hearing "I love you" in return.

Even when your young life had fallen apart, you were able to push aside the hateful emotions. But this time, you were helpless against the storm. You were directionless, and for the first time, you had nothing to live for. There were days where you could wallow in numb apathy, but the gusts of anger and hurt swept through from time to time. As fiery as you were, these feelings were overwhelming, as crippling as any physical injury.

So you stayed in the guest room. A guest in your own home.

At times you felt like you were an unwanted guest, too.

Unwanted. The word sank like an anvil in your heart and echoed in your mind. That feeling of being born into the world unwanted... it sounded familiar.

But where?

This time, you heard it in her voice.

Blake had used similar words to describe her own childhood and how faunus were treated. The stories were usually short, clipped. Recounted like a dry history book. But sometimes the façade cracked and emotion seeped through. Being abandoned by your mother was one thing, but being hated by the entire world? That sent shivers down your spine as tears welled in your eyes.

You didn't want to think about her, but deep down you cared.

She just ran. And you didn't know why. You insisted you didn't care, that bad things just happened. But the ache in your chest only tightened. Why? Why did this loss in particular twist at your gut? But it wasn't a new feeling. When your own mother—the one person in the world who was supposed to love you unconditionally—just walked out of your life... what else could you really expect from others?

She was your partner, the person you worked most closely with throughout your time at Beacon.

First she'd run from her life in the White Fang. Then she'd run because the team found out she was a faunus and had been part of the White Fang.

This time...

She ran when someone in the White Fang had stabbed her and crippled you. Did she run because her partner was now useless? The thought gnawed at your mind: you certainly felt useless lying in a disheveled heap in the guest room. You're sure you looked useless, too. But this wasn't the only path you could have taken, a small voice reminded you: you could have sought out rudimentary prosthetics to tide you over—plenty of respectable hunters had missing limbs. You ignored the snicker at "respectable" that came from another part of your head.

While she had a history of running, there was always a reason. Surely she had a reason to run from you?

If so, what?

Why?

Did she not care?

You were fairly certain that she did care. After all, hauling an unconscious body while sporting a fresh stomach wound was not precisely indicative of not caring. So, why did she run? Those who cared, stayed: your mother didn't care. Your father cared enough to stay, even if he wasn't always... present. Everyone else banded together to pull through together. And even though Ruby left, you watched her leave with others, together. Just... not with you.

Yeah, wallowing didn't suit you, but what else did you have on your to-do list? You're pretty sure you'd checked off "brooding" at least twice before dad came in with lunch, and you'd checked it off a third time as you picked listlessly at the meal. Your brain clicked at the "to-do list" and "listless" connection, but your heart just wasn't into puns these days.

You weren't "okay," but you also weren't the only person with a closet full of tragedies.

You had declared Blake a lost cause within moments of meeting. And she'd agreed, but now you regret that assessment and ever affirming her idea of it. What if you had never spoken those words: might she still be here?

There were moments when you feared you weren't reaching Blake, but you thought you'd finally had a breakthrough when you got her to stop obsessing over the White Fang enough to get some sleep and come to the dance. You didn't even know she had ribbons in colors other than black!

You were horrified when you sent her into a panic attack with a casual touch.

She was hunched over her desk, deep in concentration. Your shoulders twinged in sympathy at the uncomfortable position. You'd come up behind her and gently placed a hand at the small of her back to get her attention, and perhaps coax her into sitting up straighter. But the moment she did, you knew something was terribly, terribly wrong. Her entire body trembled minutely with tension and her breaths came fast and shallow. You'd immediately moved to face her, but her amber eyes were glazed and unfocused. She was elsewhere.

You'd dealt with Ruby's panic attacks when Summer's death was fresh on your minds, so you used what you knew. Counting to ten slowly, you got her to regulate her breathing. Asking her simple questions distracted her: favorite color? Purple. Favorite food? Tuna.

You were running out of mundane questions to ask when the pallor finally retreated from her face and her eyes brightened. Unable to stop yourself, you asked with a grin, "And who's your favorite person?"

This time she didn't answer mechanically, nor right away. Instead, a heavy pause filled the air. Her eyes refocused in a glare, directed at you. "Yang..." she warned.

You chuckled quietly now that she was back to her old self, and offered to bring her some dinner so she could stay out of the crowded cafeteria. A terse nod was the only response you received, but you were fairly certain you heard her whisper her thanks as your left the room. You made sure to find tuna for her—even pestering the staff to pull some strings, since it wasn't on the day's menu.

It wasn't until hours later that you realized the implications of the episode and her general discomfort with touch. Her high-strung nervousness that you had chalked up to being a faunus or some ninja training was probably the result of trauma. Cats bolt, but she'd frozen. When she refused to speak about it, though, you pushed it to the back of your mind and let it be.

You learned to appreciate the quiet moments around her.

One day you realized that she'd play along on occasion. It took you months to notice because you'd never thought about silence as playing along, but there was no other way to describe it. You'd put together a classic bucket-over-the-door prank, so you were lagging just a little behind the rest of the team as you returned to the dorm after classes on Friday. As Ruby began to enter the room, you saw Blake's eyes flick to the top of the door frame and then suddenly you were at the receiving end of a piercing amber gaze. But before you could react, she quickly turned away, as if something important on her Scroll had caught her attention. The side-step neatly kept her outside of the splash radius, and you swore she wasn't looking at the screen when Ruby finally tipped the bucket. She had jumped back in surprise, but you were pretty sure the reaction was faked. She could have stopped the prank, but she deliberately chose not to.

That revelation stretched a smile on your face for the entire weekend even as Ruby and Weiss both chewed you out.

She did care, and yet she ran.

You didn't know all of it, but you'd seen hints of past trauma: the near-silent nightmares that haunted Blake regularly, her skittishness. Her approach to trust was like a young child approaching a fire after being burned—timid, but still seeking the warmth on a cold night. She made it out of the White Fang and into Beacon—and if she made it out, couldn't you? Was a physical injury necessarily harder to overcome than emotional trauma?

Physical therapy wasn't going to regrow your arm, but there were other steps you could take. You didn't know if you even wanted a robot arm, though. Sure, mecha with lasers and rocket launchers were cool to discuss as kids, but this wasn't playtime anymore. It meant that a real part of you was gone, leaving a void that technology just couldn't fill.

It meant letting go.

Perhaps it was time to let go.

And you were committed to taking that first step tomorrow. You pushed aside the jeers of procrastinator! that filled your head: it was well-past stupid o'clock—what the heck were you going to get done at this hour? You'll get out of bed and eat breakfast on your own in the morning. As for what you'd do after that... well, that was a question for tomorrow.

But sleep eluded you, and you fell back into the ocean of dreary thoughts.

You weren't okay because you were missing your arm and your team, but you wondered: was Blake ever okay?

Despite her preference for shadows—and the darkness that haunted her life—she had her own luminescence: her eyes glowed bright amber like the moon glowing in the night sky. Perhaps the analogy was too apt: you'd caught glimpses of how broken she was and how she'd shatter in stages—in phases—before she pulled herself back together into something resembling a whole. It gutted you to watch the cycle again and again. You wished you could be the sun that brought that bright look to her eyes.

You knew that she was hesitant to trust others, but deep down, she wanted to be able to trust. You'd earned that trust in time, but after the tournament, she didn't believe you had acted in self-defense. You knew what everyone said they saw, but Ruby and Weiss believed you. At first all you could feel was betrayal that your own partner refused to believe you, but what proof did you have? "Hey, partner, everyone else in this room has been willing to ignore what they saw! Why aren't you jumping on the bandwagon?" didn't seem like it would go over very well. Not that you could have managed such a flippant response while fighting back tears. But she did give you an opportunity to earn her trust, even though it flew in the face of everything she'd seen. You resolved to give her a similar chance. If she asked.

If...

Blake.

You could see a thin sliver of moonlight from your window, but it wasn't enough. The need to see all of it seized you, the need to see it before the sun had to rise again. Might as well put that nervous energy to some use. You braced your hand on the bed and swung your legs out over the floor. Your muscles and joints groaned a little from disuse as you padded down the hall, but you could manage a short walk.

A quiet noise at the entryway drew your attention—was that knocking?—and you thought you could hear "sorry... so sorry..." seeping under the door.