Scarlet Soul
This is not how a sister should feel.
Yang brushes the hair from Ruby's eyes, letting the strands linger on her fingers. It is three in the morning. Outside is dark and silent, and it is also dark and silent inside, but even without eyes Yang knows each feature of Ruby's face, and gently she touches her brow, her nose, her lips, because Yang knows, too, that Ruby is a heavy sleeper. And it is strange, she thinks, that even though Ruby is too young to use perfume – not to mention too disinterested – a scent lingers around her, sweet as a Strawberry Sunrise and just as intoxicating, a mix of apples and strawberries and – yes, quite clichéd – of roses. In her mind the scent is irrevocably tied to the word red; Yang mourns that she cannot bottle it up and dab it on the nape of her neck, the small of her back, the crook of her elbows.
Ruby murmurs something in her sleep. Yang humors herself by imagining Ruby has called her name. Does Ruby dream the same dreams as she? The same sinful nightmares? On a bed of roses they make love every night and disappear in the morning. Dreams make fickle lovers.
Yang closes her eyes and remembers a ring of braided flowers.
Has it always been this way? Impossible, yet Yang cannot remember feeling any other way. Before Summer's death, perhaps, but Yang's memories of those times have been swallowed by the tumult afterwards, and her clearest memory of Summer's death (even in her memories Yang cannot bring herself to call her mother) is not of Summer but of Ruby clutching her arm, looking up at her with starry eyes and a question on her lips. Yang had cried then; she has not cried since. The grown-ups left them alone. Their father locked himself up in his room. The house lay dead and silent. For three years, before Qrow entered their lives (to this day Yang is not sure if she should thank him or resent him), Yang shed the role of sister and took up the role of mother, and when Ruby became old enough to take care of herself, Yang shed the role of mother only to find that she no longer knew how to be a sister, like a pair of clothes she had outgrown.
But they are sisters. In that exists taboo twice over: sibling and sibling, girl and girl. The faintest rumor of love will destroy them both more surely than any Grimm. The unfairness is maddening; Yang's fist clenches, and her eyes flash red before she is immediately defeated by the futility of her struggle, a battle she has lost before, a battle she will never win. There is nobody she can ask for advice, and nobody she dares ask for advice. The poison circulating through her blood grows more potent with every passing hour. Better let it kill her than a whiff reach Ruby's ears. Unbearably, she yearns for the time when she did not know shame, when love did not squeeze her heart and grasp it pumping in its talons. A child's love is simpler than a teen's love.
Six-year old Ruby plays in the sun. She plucks flowers and gathers them in a pile, daisies and asters and bryonies and those strange purple flowers that's the bane of their garden. To Yang it all seems rather pointless – after all, Yang is eight years old now and far too old to be playing with flowers. Still she keeps an eye on Ruby, so she wouldn't hurt herself, or get lost, or follow a stranger home. But the day is warm. Crickets drone. The sky is blue and cloudless. In the shade of the oak tree in their backyard, Yang wakes up to Ruby tapping her shoulder.
"Here, sis!"
She presents Yang with a ring of flowers. Most of them have been crushed by a child's clumsy fingers, pigments leaking out in mottled splotches of color, but it is beautiful all the same. Yang turns it over in her hands.
"What is it?"
"It's a wedding ring!" Ruby beams. "Like the one Dad gave Mom!"
"For me?"
"I'm going to marry you when I grow up!"
Eight-year old Yang laughs and tells her that it is impossible. No, she doesn't know why. It just is. But she puts the ring on anyway, staining her fingers with pinks and reds and blues in the process, and as she holds the ring up to the sun to admire it, she cannot understand why her heart feels as if it would burst out of her chest.
With a shake of her head, Yang is back in the dorm room.
The darkness and silence are utter. She wants to go back to sleep but she knows she can't. She doesn't want to go down to the practice room again but she knows she will. The punching bag is an old friend. More than anything, she wants to hold Ruby in her arms. She wants to whisper in her ear that she loves her and watch Ruby's face turn red, and then Yang will kiss her even though her face is red also, and after a few scant seconds – surely a worse-delivered first kiss cannot possibly exist in the world – they will break apart, laughing and gasping for breath and too shy to look each other in the eye. And the second time, perhaps, it will last longer.
Yang bends down and kisses Ruby on the forehead, because that is how sisters should kiss.
She closes the door behind her with the taste of salt on her lips.