All in all, Yang Xiao-Long could honestly say that her life had sucked lately.

It all started with the Vytal Festival. The entirety of Team RWBY had been absolutely thrilled. They were cleaning up! The first round was a breeze, Yang and Weiss managed to scrape a win against the FN of Team FNKY, and then Yang just mopped the floor with Mercury Black. That fight was absolutely thrilling; a one-on-one match against an opponent of equal skill. Times like that were why she loved it; the thrill of the fight, the rush of testing your skills and finding them adequate, the constant feeling of balancing on a razor's edge. That was why she wanted to be a Huntress. Then it had ended. Mercury's aura dropped to almost nothing. The punk had jumped at her, tried to get in some kind of sneak attack.

Yang had snapped.

She'd admit to that. She lost her temper. This was supposed to be a friendly spar, an exhibition, not some sort of fight to the death with underhanded tactics left and right. She'd always had a fiery temper. In hindsight, a block, a counterattack without Ember Celica engaged, would've sufficed. But in the heat of the moment, Mercury Black had the gall to attack her when her back was turned, and she wanted him to pay. The shotgun fired as the fist connected, the trigger engaging as her fist recoiled from the crunching impact, and the leg snapped like a candy cane.

She didn't understand why everyone was so upset with her. Sure, she shouldn't have shot him, but that's an occupational hazard when you sneak attack someone who's trained most of their life to put down monsters. Reflex actions are kill shots most of the time, and Mercury was honestly lucky she hadn't gone for anything vital. Then she'd seen the footage, seen herself shoot Mercury while he was on the ground. That wasn't what had happened, but the cameras didn't lie. Nobody believed her. Ironwood thought she was off her rocker, Qrow thought she'd just lost it in the fight, and Ruby didn't know what to think. The last two hurt the most. Ruby and Qrow, her own family, thought that she might just lose it and break someone's leg for no reason.

If anyone had bothered to force her into therapy, the therapist would say the depression started because of that. That was when Yang stopped feeling well, at any rate. No energy, no motivation. Getting out of bed and getting something in her stomach was a Herculean effort, possible only with the assistance of Blake Belladonna, her partner and possibly the only person who believed Yang's story, believed that something fishy was happening.

Cinder's plan had happened without a hitch. The Vytal festival was interrupted with a massive Grimm assault. The Atlas mechs were hijacked by Torchwick. Everything was going to hell, and Yang was happy to have something she could punch without a fucking military tribunal coming down on her. She'd tracked down Blake and they'd fought their way through the Grimm and mech-troops. Then they'd seen that red-haired Faunus in the white mask, and Blake had panicked.

Blake Belladonna, the most reserved and calm member of Team RWBY by several orders of magnitude, panicked.

The guy was a real creep, too, going on like Blake was his. Menacing her. Threatening her. Yang stood back at first, letting her partner fight her own battle. The brawler knew a thing or two about those fights you had to win for yourself. But when the redheaded White Fang creep beat her partner and made to finish the catgirl off, Yang had lost her temper again. None of her technique, none of her training, none of her skill. Just Semblance, heat, fire, rage. She didn't care if he was a Faunus or not. She was gonna rip off his arm and beat him with it; Blake wasn't his property, and nobody but nobody hurt Yang's partner.

The funniest thing about what happened next is that it didn't really hurt. One second, she'd been rushing the stupid bully, ready and willing to commit murder then and there. The next, her Aura was depleted and she couldn't feel her arm. The shock of going from about 80% of her Aura to absolutely none had dropped her more so than the actual loss of that Aura, and the next thing she knew, she was at home in Patch, arm bandaged, Ruby in a coma, and Blake and Weiss nowhere to be found.

Ruby had woken up soon, tried to reassure Yang, support her. Yang couldn't bring herself to care. Blake was gone. Possibly dead. Her dad had told her the story; Blake had dropped Yang off just before Qrow brought back an unconscious Ruby, and had left without saying anything, to anyone. She'd already been bandaged, but Tai had to change them when the first set had soaked completely through with blood. She saw the first binding in the trash. Simple cloth tied with a familiar black ribbon, stained with dry blood now. Damn her, where did she get off just leaving like that?

Yang couldn't even bring herself to work up a proper anger. For a while, she sat in bed. Learning to eat left-handed was a pain, but she managed to keep going, remembering the handful of times Blake had forced her and using that as motivation, or else just waiting for Taiyang to get worried and drag her out of bed and to the table.

Then Ruby had run away. The little girl left a note, said that she had to bring the team back together. That did it, that brought back some kind of emotion. Too bad it was blistering fury. Bring the team back together. Then why was Yang still here? They could've run away together, or better yet, brought Taiyang with them. But Yang was down an arm and Taiyang was vital to the restoration effort, not to mention Signal being past capacity now that Beacon's students and teachers had been forced into the smaller combat school. No, Yang knew what she meant. Ruby needed all the members of her team that weren't useless, that weren't cripples. She wasn't part of RWBY anymore, not with one arm down like this.

Yang had stormed out of the little house in the woods of Patch, hair aflame, stating her intention to "bring that little girl back home, and missing arms be damned," but Ruby was long gone. A little asking around had revealed that she'd been with some familiar faces. The rest of Team JNPR, to be exact. The blonde with white armor could be anyone, but the kid with a pink streak in his hair and the ginger girl with a hammer and more energy than a power plant couldn't be anyone but Ren and Nora. At least Ruby was with people who knew what they were doing, but they were way out from Patch by this point and nobody was going to take Yang over to the mainland, not with Tai going right behind her and checking all the docks for both his kids.

In a moment of clarity, Yang realized that two choices lay in front of her. Either she could go back to her house and sit in bed, wait, worry, and fall back into the funk she'd been in since the singles round of the Vytal festival, or she could get out there and do something.

So when her dad found her, she'd asked him if any of the kids at Signal wanted to learn how to fight with their hands. Taiyang had seen his fair share of hunters go through similar trials to his daughter; loss of limb was serious, but loss of a partner was even worse. He'd been in that boat before, too. So he'd understood what she meant; is there someone I can help so that I don't feel so worthless?

Even better; he'd known just the kid.