Blake leaned against the terrace railing and stared out, tracking the few early risers already making their way through the streets of Mistral down below. Though the sun warmed her skin, the cool breeze stirring her hair and collar reminded her that autumn had nearly arrived, eager to set the world ablaze in color for a brief moment before it fell dormant beneath muted snow and ice.
Blake had only met Ruby and Yang's uncle briefly at the Vytal Festival, the alcohol-scented encounter cementing him in her mind as "abrasive," but she'd heard countless stories about him from the two sisters. He'd struck her as a sort of kindred spirit, one used to their own space but never quite used to loneliness, so she wondered what he thought of the sleeping people taking up every bed and bit of floor space of his house. In the moments following the Battle of Haven, Qrow had taken a single glance at Sun and Ilia hanging behind Blake and waved them over. "What's another two kids?" he muttered as he trudged off, the young boy trailing behind. "Already got enough of 'em to start an Academy of my own." He promised that everyone would reconvene the next day to discuss the next course of action after they'd all gotten some rest.
Several hours later, Blake found herself staring at the ceiling of the room she shared with her team, unused to their close proximity and their soft sleeping sighs and shifting after nearly a year of separation. Finally, she slipped outside just before dawn.
Her ear flicked as footsteps approached behind her. "What do I have to do to convince you to get some sleep?" Weiss asked. "Backflips? Sing you a lullaby? Balance a chair on two legs? That one is not an easy trick."
Blake turned to find her team standing behind her. Weiss held a tray with four mugs, while Ruby, unable to suppress a grin, hid something behind her back. Yang stared at the ground, her metal hand gripping her wrist. "Don't worry," Blake said, smiling. "I think I broke that habit a while back. Just a little wired from last night, I guess."
"Well, a cup of tea might help with that." Weiss said, handing her a mug before settling on the ground and taking one for herself.
Blake blew on the tea to clear away the steam and took a sip. Chamomile, steeped to perfection. A favorite of hers for late-night study sessions and post-exam and post-combat relief. She was surprised Weiss had remembered at all, being the coffee aficionado that she was, but even then, Blake had only mentioned her preference for the tea once or twice.
"What's that you're hiding there?" Blake asked Ruby as they sat down.
"Oh, this?" Ruby snapped her cape back to reveal a thick white binder, likely pilfered from Haven Academy, stuffed with mismatched sheets of colored and lined paper.
In the process, she bumped her mug, leaving Weiss scrambling to catch it before milky-white coffee spilled onto her leg. She rolled her eyes, shifting her grip to hold two cups. "That's Ruby's project."
"OUR project, Weiss."
"You've done most of the work."
"We both helped," Yang said. "We're bound to the binder in her eyes."
"Aha, exactly!" Ruby stuck her tongue out at Weiss and snatched her mug back. "So," she said to Blake, "we've been separated for a while now, and lot has happened since Beacon. And I mean, a LOT. At this point, it could take days, maybe weeks, to catch you up, so I figured, Blake likes to read, so why not just give her a book?" She turned the binder around to reveal the cover. The Adventures of Team RNJR was scrawled across the top in red, surrounded by cartoonish doodles of Ruby, Jaune, Nora, and Ren, along with several toothy Grimm. At some point, the title was amended to add several crooked letters in black and blue ink, resulting in the new patchwork title, The Adventures of WRNJYR & QO.
"Oh, is Weiss leader now?" A smile crept across Blake's face. "And how do you even pronounce that team name?"
Ruby pouted. "You try coming up with a name for this many people! It's supposed to be like 'Team Ranger and Company.' But now with you, Sun, and Ilia here, I have to fit in three more letters." She sighed, somehow sounding even more world-weary than her uncle, and stared off into the distance. "Anyway," she said, "I don't think I can handle another living room lecture from Professor Ozpin. He goes on and on and on. Doesn't he realize we're not at school anymore?"
"Professor Ozpin is here?" Blake asked, mug paused halfway to her mouth.
"Sorry! Spoiler alert."
Blake raised an eyebrow at that, but took the binder from Ruby and flipped through it. The first twenty or so pages were undoubtedly Ruby's work, filled with thumbnail sketches depicting small towns and team hijinks and detailed Grimm fights, supplemented by scrawled notes to form a comic book-style narrative. At some point, the drawings gave away almost entirely to journal entries, with the exception of one modest attempt at a rough sketch of the Mistral landscape. One entry was marked with several blacked-out lines of text and freckled with water stains. Then Ruby's bubbly letters gave way to several pages of Weiss's cursive and later Yang's careful printing. Detailed inked illustrations took up the margins: Ruby wielding her scythe; Yang's prosthetic with a gun barrel mounted on the wrist; Yang riding her motorcycle down an empty road; a dark-haired woman releasing a black bird into the air. The final dozen pages were a collaborative effort, with alternating paragraphs in different colors, first between Weiss and Yang and then with all three girls. Blake paused on the last page, a charcoal sketch of Ruby, Weiss, and Yang on the terrace overlooking Mistral.
"How long have you been working on this?" Blake asked.
"Oh, since back when we were on the road. There was one night when I had a n—when I had a hard time falling asleep, so I just started drawing on the back of the map. Jaune and Ren weren't very happy with me, but considering they'd both already lost the map once… It just became a hobby after that. And once Weiss and Yang met up with us, I knew they had to add to it." Ruby fiddled with the hem of her tattered cape. "Besides, I figured that maybe one day it might be just as important to someone else as it was to me."
Blake's grip tightened on the binder. "Did you—did you ever think I would come back?"
Yang stiffened but kept quiet. Ruby and Weiss glanced at her before exchanging a quick look with each other. "I can't speak for all of us, but if I learned anything at Beacon," Ruby said, "it's that nothing is ever as clear or predictable as we think it should be. You think, this is what you're going to do, and this is how it's going to happen. You'll go to Signal Academy for the full four years and then onto Beacon. Hopefully you'll be on a team with someone you know from Signal and your big sister will have her own team, and maybe you'll go on adventures together once you've both graduated and are full-fledged Huntresses.
"But then things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. You skip two years and end up on a team with your sister, you meet these wonderful friends, you lose others. Sometimes for good. But maybe they come back. You get hurt, broken even, and it takes a while to recover. You also grow, get stronger. And sometimes you get dragged into an ancient battle against the evil leader of the Grimm for the fate of Remnant." Ruby shrugged at Blake's baffled expression. "It's in the binder. But point is, I keep moving forward even if I can't predict what's coming. Some days, that's incredibly difficult, but then others," she glanced up from her mug to look at her team, "I find you."
Blake shifted to get a better look at Ruby. Her hair was a little longer and messier than it'd been at school, and her face had thinned a bit with maturity, the features sharpening. Countless sleepless nights smudged the area under her eyes, but somehow, they were still just as bright as Blake remembered, catching the morning sunlight and glowing like Remnant's shattered moon. Blake smiled and leaned back on her hands. "So we did."
Weiss rested her hand on Ruby's shoulder, and Ruby clinked their mugs together.
"Well, you found us," Yang said, drawing her knees to her chest, "but are you going to stay?" Her mouth pressed into a hard line, and her left hand twitched. She kept her eyes trained on the ground, unable to hide how they'd dulled from lavender to indigo, a radiant sunset lost to the onset of dusk.
Memories flickered to the surface. Screams and the rushing of flames. Searing pain in her gut, her chest, her throat. Blood staining the floor, her hands, the blade. Her partner crumpled on the ground, her nightmare looming above.
Running from Adam, running from Beacon, running until there was nothing but Blake and crashing waves and salty air. Fear and guilt consuming every inch of her until it burned through her veins and settled in her bones and scorched her skin. Never quite dissipating even after she returned to the island she never could bring herself to call home, because after all, she'd always found that word more fitting for the people and experiences who took up residence inside her heart and memories.
No matter how hard she tried, perhaps she was simply doomed to the life of a vagabond.
Blake faced Yang and reached out to take her trembling hand. "I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't run away anymore," she said, extending her right pinkie. "I want to make the same promise to you. All of you."
Yang stared for a second, before extending her own pinkie and hooking it around Blake's.
"You know," Blake said, drawing Ruby and Weiss's attention away from the one cloud in the sky. She held up the binder and tapped the cover. "I think you'll have to change your title one more time. But it might be easier to come up with new team names now, since Team RWBY can stand on its own."
Ruby's face lit up and she threw her arms in the air. "Aw yeah, Team RWBY back together again!" she said, drawing laughs from the others.
"We probably have time before everyone else wakes up," Blake said. "Maybe we could read this together? After all, sometimes all a story needs to be perfect is the right narrator."
Just maybe, in finding them, she'd finally made it home.
Author's Note: I binged the first four volumes of RWBY this past summer and was immediately charmed by the world of Remnant and its inhabitants. So charmed that I've been forced to set aside any original writing and make a brief foray into the world of fanfiction.
Edit: I'm a major perfectionist, so I cleaned up a few minor errors and moved a line to make the ending more impactful.