AN: This is about as self-indulgent as it gets.
You don't remember your mother.
You are told she was taller than your father, broader too, a solid wall of muscle with snow white hair and a gentle smile. That she was a huntress of some renown, a skilled fighter, a fiercely passionate woman. The kind of woman who would fight to the death for those she loved.
You are told that she left when you were an infant.
You are not told why.
Your father is a small man. You don't know it yet. To you, he is a giant. To you, he is the strongest person in the world.
He comes home tired most days. You learn to read the lines of his face, to anticipate his moods. You know when to push and when to back off. You know how to get what you need from him.
You did not always know, but you have learned, and you think that is what really matters.
He calls you his lark, his lovely little sparrow hawk.
He tells you that he loves you.
He does not mean to hurt you, but you are small and fragile and he does not know how to raise a child. He worries about you. He worries about himself. He hates that your mother left you to him, but he does not hate your mother, and he does not hate you.
This, he does not tell you. That is okay. You will figure it out on your own.
When you are four, you first learn what a faunus is.
Your mother is a faunus.
It makes you feel close to her in a way you never have before. You hold the knowledge close to your chest, bury your joy in the deep recesses of your heart where you keep all your most precious things.
In the dead of night you run your hands through the downy feathers in your hair and try to remember a woman you have never known
When you are eight, you learn what being a faunus means.
You are good at climbing. It does not quite satiate you, not when the sky is so crisp and open just beyond your reach, but you have no wings and it is enough, most days.
It worries your nannies, but your father trusts you, trusts you, and so you swell with pride and dare yourself to go to even greater heights. You get to being very good at dodging your caretakers.
Sometimes you meet your father as he returns home, perched on rooftops and windowsills, shouting and waving for his attention. He smiles bright and waves back with both arms when he sees, no matter how tired he is or how much paperwork he drops.
You weren't meant to see it.
It wasn't meant to happen at all, but more than that you were not meant to see.
They take the body down before dawn.
A maid finds you huddled under your father's bed hours later. Her lips thin to a stark white line and she pointedly does not look at your feathers, your claws, your tail. She resigns a week later.
It is kindness, you think.
Kinder than what the others offer you, anyways.
Your father gains new lines to his face every day. He doesn't smile much anymore.
You are certain it is you fault.
You take to plucking the feathers in your hairline. They burn and bleed for hours afterwards, but you bite your lip and refuse to cry.
White Fang. Excuses. Filthy animals. Another attack. Three dead. Fucking animals! Should just wipe them out, wipe them all out!
When you are ten your father takes you in his arms for the first time in years.
He tells you that all he wants is to keep you safe.
He says that he knows you will not understand and that you might hate him for this.
He tells you that he loves you dearly.
You want to scream.
But you don't.
You roll around in your head all the words you've learned since you were eight. Your chest feels hollow.
Your father holds your hand as a man in white sticks a needle in your arm and your whole world goes grey.
A bird's tail is its rudder and its brakes.
You are not a bird.
You don't miss it when it's gone.
You don't hate your father.
You might hate yourself. Just a little bit.
Rehabilitation takes a long time. The muscles of your back must knit back over the void where bone and fat once laid, and even with the finest doctors money can buy and careful Aura manipulation, it is a while before you can walk again.
You learn to step carefully, to carry yourself straight and tall and proud. You learn to pretend that you aren't hurting.
Your father calls you his little dancer, sometimes.
He tells you that you are so graceful, so strong, so brave.
He tells you that he loves you.
You tell yourself that that is enough.
You are greedy, though.
When you are eleven, you tell your father you want to be a huntress.
"Like my mother" remains carefully unsaid.
He indulges you. He always does. You are very good at getting what you want.
The influx of tutors is jarring. You have grown used to a stable roster of faces and names, and seeing new ones makes you feel itchy at the root of your spine and the tips of your fingers.
With them comes a barrage of new experiences and responsibilities. Your life is cut up and parceled out, every hour, every minute, every second of your time dedicated to the pursuit of perfection. You do not know if you like it, but you have always been a stubborn girl. Shouldering the burden is the only option you can see.
The gravitational center of your life shifts to accommodate. Your father is no longer the center of your universe. You are.
This is not a pleasant thought. It might never be.
It occurs to you, amidst the barrage of new experiences, that none of these people know.
It occurs to you that you do not want them to know.
It is another accommodation you must make. A subtle shift of priorities. Being a huntress, being strong, becomes dependent on deception.
Faunus are monsters. Faunus are animals. They are both lesser and more, threats to be destroyed and resources to be utilized. You are none of those things.
You are not a faunus.
At least, not anymore.
And so you grow.
You grow and you grow.
You grow wrong.
Of this you are achingly certain.
You grow, your skin and bones and muscles stretching upwards and out in the illusion of normality, but you, your organs, your soul, puddle around the pit of your chest cavity, too small for their container.
You are a hollow creature.
You are sick.
You are sick.
Mirrors are liars. They show you a girl, a pretty young girl with snow white hair and clear blues eyes. A strong girl, if small. An intelligent girl, if young. A huntress in training. An Aura manipulator of some talent. A girl, proud and bold and firm. The girl in the mirror knows who she is and where she's going.
The girl in the mirror is a liar.
You are a liar.
There is no way out. There is no backing down.
If you are ruined, if you are wrong, then, well. It is only what you have done to yourself.
If you are hurting, then, well. It is only what you deserve.
It is tiresome, being a liar.
You are forever holding yourself on the brink of collapse. You are a scaffolding of bone and skin built to hide a core of rot, and it is not enough to just be. To just be will get you discovered. To just be will crumble you.
You are a brittle thing.
You must excel. You must be the best. You must be perfect, because if you are not, if you slow down, if you let yourself fail, you may never get up.
You receive your acceptance letter to Beacon a few months after your seventeenth birthday.
Your father is so proud of you.
It surprises you find that you don't much care.
Your father is a small man, but you find that you have no room for him in your heart anymore.
Your father is a small man, but you are even smaller.
And so you leave.
You leave, and your world explodes into colors and light.
Beacon is a noisy place.
You meet a girl.
You meet several girls, actually, but one in particular stands out. And, surprisingly, it is not the one who causes a small explosion right on top of you.
She's. You're not sure how to explain. She sets the hairs on the back of your neck on edge. No, more than that. She makes phantom feathers bristle. She is, familiar? Wrong? You don't know.
The worst of it is that there's no way to explain it away. She is quiet. Alone. Taller than you, but most people are. She's no more a threat than any other student, and yet.
And yet.
You don't have the energy to deal with this. You resolve to avoid her.
You cannot avoid her.
Her name is Blake, and the universe is mocking you.
She is a part of your team. The team lead by a fifteen year old girl. The very same fifteen year old girl that bowled you over and wasted several hundred dollars worth of Dust.
The team is a problem.
Not just Blake, and not just Ruby, though you suppose they don't help.
You can't say you have never before been subjected to personal scrutiny, but this is of a rather different flavor. They are girls, girls of your age. They expect many things of you that you do not understand. They expect you to be nice, not just to succeed.
You are finding this to be very difficult.
You have never been overly concerned with being nice.
Anxiety drives hooked claws into the lining of your stomach. Privacy isn't an option, sharing a room with three others. You yourself are undeniably odd, in ways you are not quite sure how to pin down, to sort out. There is a code, you think. A secret girl code that you are not privy to, made up of movies and games and bands you've never experienced, never even heard of, and you struggle to keep up.
Discovery seems inevitable.
Still, you have come this far.
Coursework does not test you to your limits, as the brochures promised. You are used to intensely focused one-on-one training from specialists, and the classroom environment is startlingly lax to you.
The strain of sociability more than makes up for it, you suppose.
You learn, though. There is a formula for every interaction, and these girls are no more difficult to decode than your father.
Ruby, your partner, is bright and loud and inquisitive, but with all the clumsiness of youth and the softness of a well loved childhood. She asks much of you that you are not prepared to give, but she unrelenting and she is kind and slowly she grows on you.
For her you have clipped compliments and curt corrections and late night coffee breaks. For her you laugh and smile and it feels almost natural.
Yang is too loud, too forceful, too much, a sensory overload wrapped in skin and muscle and what must be twenty pounds of hair. She's a whirlwind of a girl but her attentions do not linger.
She is content with a quiet roll of the eyes, a disdainful snort, a muffled laugh in response to whatever ridiculousness she's cooked up, and then she is gone, you amounting to little more than a prop in the background of her life.
Blake does not like you. That is okay because you do not like her. She is quiet and languid but hides iron in her spine, and she frightens you. That she frightens you grates, but it is a feeling you are used to. You are well equipped to deal with fear. You are not so well equipped to deal with what else she makes you feel. She fills your limbs with heat and your head with static, she makes you want to scream and cry and beat at your chest like some sort of animal, and you don't know why.
You avoid her and she avoids you.
It works, somehow. Not always. But it is enough, you think.
There are people outside your team, but they go largely ignored.
Teachers are teachers, and you are impressive, if not always as much as you want to be. You excel, and if they do not like you they at least acknowledge your excellence, and that is what matters.
Your classmates have no such obligation to fairness, but you catch admiring glances thrown your way alongside disparaging words, and if the later sticks deeper then it is not for lack of trying.
Things are good, you think.
Better than they could be.
There's a girl. Older than you. Stronger too. She must be to have made it this far.
Velvet is her name.
You hate Velvet, you think.
She's just so stupid, you think.
She lets herself be alone, lets herself be vulnerable, lets herself be picked on, and if she will not defend herself than why does she even bother showing up, day after day, to the same old abuse, regular as clockwork?
She makes you angry, angrier even than Blake. Blake at least is sensible. Blake at least warrants respect. Blake doesn't leave herself raw and open for the taking, doesn't simper and cry as boys years her junior tug her ears and call her vile names.
You want to take her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. You want to scream, to tell her that she doesn't have to take it, that she could be safe and happy if she just had the good sense to hide. All it is is a pair of extraneous ears. A quick bit of knife work and a few days and no one would ever have to know.
All it is is flesh. Flesh is for the molding, with diet and exercise, with aura manipulation and knives.
This pain is only what she has brought down upon herself.
Pyrrha feels sorry for Velvet. Pyrrha and her team sits at the same table as you and yours every single day. Pyrrha watches with a disapproving scowl as Velvet is hassled every single day.
Everyone watches Velvet. Velvet is still hurt.
You do not feel sorry for Velvet.
Why doesn't she just cut those damn things off, is what you say.
You want her to mutilate herself, is what they say, faces hazed over with anger, voices pitched high and sharp.
It won't help, is what Blake says, a low hissing undercut that slides under your guard like a razor to the gut. She looks at you like she's a thousand years old, like she's seen so many different shades of pain and absorbed them all like beams of light swallowed by the black of her eyes.
Theirs is a loud anger, popping and fizzling like fireworks against the night sky. Hers is an ancient, creeping thing, deep and dark and cold, like the space between stars.
And caught between, you, hollow thing that you are, crumble.
It's natural to fight back when cornered.
And so you are punished.
Barely. This is a combat school. Students fight.
You are reprimanded, told to keep it clean and within the proper locations. You are informed that your father will be contacted if it happens again.
It will not happen again.
Mostly because the others are reluctant to talk to you.
Pyrrha flashes disappointment every time your eyes meet and steers her flock away from you.
Blake's gaze skids off you like you are nothing but a greasy splotch on her vision.
Yang laughs and claps your shoulder and calls you a crazy bitch, not disapprovingly, but keeps herself between you and Ruby anyways.
Ruby doesn't get it. None of them do, but that Ruby doesn't, can't, understand makes you feel worse, somehow.
She wants to, you think. You know. She's told you.
But she doesn't really want to, you think. You know.
You are sick. You are sick, and your sickness expands to fill the hollows of the body you've failed to grow into, fills you up with a swirling miasma of blood and bile and heat. What little that is left of you is rotting.
You are a hideous thing, you think.
She doesn't deserve to know, you think.
And besides, the quiet suits you well enough. It gives you time to focus on your studies.
Your grades suffer.
Your teaches ask you questions you don't know how to answer.
Are you okay, is anything wrong, do you need help.
You don't know, you don't know, you don't know, and you wouldn't tell them if you did.
After a time, Ruby reinstates midnight study sessions. She tells you she needs help with her coursework, each word deliberate and careful, like any misstep will end with your teeth at her throat.
You ought to know better, but you are greedy.
She puts too much sugar in your coffee and trips over herself chasing stray thoughts, but somehow you both manage to cobble together a passing grade on your next test.
It is not enough, you know, but it ought to be.
And what is enough?
You certainly are not.
Ruby tries, but she has only so much to give. The enthusiasm that seemed so boundless to you withers away before your eyes, and still you cannot bring yourself to act.
She stops trying to talk to you, eventually.
You are very tired.
It occurs to you one day that you have no more room in your heart. Not for Ruby, not for school, not for Blake or your father or your mother or yourself.
The last of you has rotted away, dripped cold and liquid down your spine and pooled in slimy trails marking your path through the years.
And as you have no more room for love, you have no more room for fear. You are a hollow thing, and that emptiness which once frightened you so now gives you a bitter sort of strength. You are a hollow thing, and there is nothing left to fear. The worst has come, and you are still here, a living corpse in the guise of a girl.
So. What now?
You wonder idly what dying would feel like.
Your charade sustains you, barely. You are an automaton, a creature of driven by habit to affect the illusion of purpose.
All things are tiresome, but intervention slightly more than most. So you lie. You are well versed in the art, by now.
Your grades recover. You speak when you are spoken to. You even manage to flaunt yourself, some days, a feeble parody of arrogance.
You do not know how well the act holds up, but you are beyond caring. People avoid you, and that is all that matters.
Until they don't.
The weekend of the Vytal Festival manages to shock you out of your stupor.
Firstly, Ruby still cares for you, enough to drag you out of bed on Saturday morning to attend. She assures you that you ought to love it, that a change of scenery will do you good. Yang trails by her side, characteristic exuberance muted with something you refuse to think of as concern. Even Blake hovers, amber eyes skittering off your own blue every time you glance her way.
Secondly, you are still capable of caring about things. Faunus things, bafflingly enough, given your long ingrained habit of ignoring every aspect of their (your?) culture and heritage that isn't shoved down your throat.
The White Fang are familiar to you, at least.
When you hear that name, you can't help but picture twisted bodies in the wreckage. Your blood pounds in your ears, and the knot of scar tissue at the base of your spine throbs. You are eight and and a pile of shattered masonry is a person you knew gone cold and damp and bloated, flesh once vibrant and firm giving pliantly beneath your hands. You are nine and the voices of your teammates twist and warp into harsh, garbled condemnations you are too young to fully understand. You are ten and you will never be whole again.
Your own voice startles you.
It's like some long dead, festering thing inside you has cracked open. Anger flows out of you like pressurized pus, coiling sickeningly up your throat and spraying through the cracks of your teeth. Words tumble over each other in a putrid jumble you are only barely in control of, but you cannot stop, lest they pile up in your throat and choke you.
And then.
You hate her you hate her you hate her.
It's not fair.
It's not fair how easily things fall into place, how all it takes for her to be whole again is to slip off a scrap of cloth.
It's not fair how she walks, talks, breathes faunus, every fiber of her being screaming alien familiarity, and still she is hidden, still she is human. Even revealed, she is still human, still faunus, still Blake, truly and wholly herself, without repercussion.
It's not fair how the others accept her, how easy it is for them to do so, how they know her and love her even when it's revealed that they don't know her, at least not like they'd thought.
Liar, traitor, frigid bitch.
Better than you could ever hope to be.
You've gotten so used to apathy that your rage tears you apart at the seams. You throw tantrums like a child, words you don't mean tearing up through your throat like jets of hot bile.
Disgusting.
Your façade frays at the edges, and some part of you wants nothing more to finally be seen, be rejected, be thrown away like the useless broken thing that you are.
But.
She's our friend, Weiss. We don't give up on our friends.
When they go out next weekend to search for her, you follow.
You find her.
Of course you do. When has fate done you any favors?
You mean to apologize. You mean to recite the script you've worked on these past few days, to say the magic words that will make everything go back to normal.
But.
"I want to die."
The look on her face makes you want to laugh till you choke.
You smile your corpse smile and repeat it, again and again, and it's the funniest joke you've ever heard.
She hates you, you think. You have nothing to lose, you think.
So you tell her. Everything.
You haven't been held since you were ten.
You don't even remember the last time you cried.
It comes out, in fits and spurts.
You tell the others. Not because you believe they have any right to know, but because you want to.
Yang and Ruby don't get it, not how Blake does, but they're solid people, those sisters, and you trust them.
You don't know how the rest of them figure it out, but you're not hiding anymore. You suppose it is inevitable.
They don't know what to do with you. You know the feeling. You are unclassifiable, an abomination, a victim, a liar, a freak. Your sickness seeps from you like caustic sweat. You are a knotted whorl of scar tissue wrapped around a brittle scaffolding of bone and this weakness makes you untouchable.
But not forever.
Still, you are not alone. Full trust will not come for years yet, but when come the jeers and taunts your team, your friends, stand by your side. And admitting weakness has not defanged you. You are a Huntress, whole or not, faunus or not, and you have survived far worse than coarse words.
And so you grow. You grow and you grow. And if you are never whole, if you are always wrong, hollow, empty, sick, then, well. Then at least you know that you deserve to be happy.
And that is enough, you think.
That end was lackluster, but fuck it, I'm sick of having this thing in my files.