morendo, adv.
with the sound gradually dying away
Most people think drowning is noisy and physical. Shouting, thrashing arms, and kicking feet? That's the prelude to drowning, the last vestiges of self-control leaving your body.
Actual drowning is surprisingly calm and quiet.
As water replaced air in your lungs, your body shut down and there was nothing you could do anymore. Your throat closed, sealing off both water and calls for help. You couldn't move your arms to wave for attention. Your treading slowed to nothing. Your grip loosened from the debris you were clinging to, and the last thing you felt was a nail tearing through your wrist as your arm slipped down and numbness pervaded your body. All you could do was wait as you were gradually pulled under. Wait and hope that someone nearby knew that this eerie silence was the sound of you knocking on death's door.
You, an orphaned faunus, homeless, penniless... haunted, hunted, hated. Giving up that life to cross the cold doorstep sounded like a bargain. Maybe you shouldn't have hoped for rescue at all.
But you were rescued from that deathly cold doorstep, and the trauma of drowning was quickly displaced by the demands of survival, leaving but a faint scar and a fear of open water. He was your lifeline that day on the river, and soon he became your new life. The White Fang became your first family, and the revolution of faunus rights your crusade. But you gained these through him.
He saw your potential and nurtured it. When you closed the gap of years and surpassed him in scholarship, he found you a tutor to teach you more. He laughed and hugged you proudly when your semblance manifested for the first time in a spar. You never could best him in combat, but he always encouraged you to try harder.
He became your everything: a mentor, your closest family, your dearest friend, your greatest love—he was the only one who could love you. He understood you and accepted your flaws and failings: his touch never faltered when brushing across the familiar scars on your skin, and he soothed away the nightmares that tormented your sleep. When you had to bathe in the river and occasionally the water became too much to bear, he was there to draw you out of your living nightmares. His dreams were your dreams. You both believed in your shared destiny. The two of you worked tirelessly for peace and equality between humans and the faunus: he gave you purpose and a place at his back supporting him. Together, you could make a fairy tale out of this imperfect world.
The White Fang continued its civil crusade, but the promises that humanity had made after the war never came to pass. Your youthful optimism lost its sheen as the rallies and boycotts began to devolve into riots more frequently. He said that they were just sparked by accident—with more protesters and counter-protesters, naturally there would be more friction. You were overjoyed to see faunus customers being served at a previously-unfriendly human establishment, until you noticed the quaking employees and terrified owners. You learned that he'd broken the last owner's legs in self-defense when he was attacked. Your occasional errands to steal from corrupt and racist businesses had become regular occurrences, and he was gone on longer and longer missions, coming back with more and more injuries.
He told you not to worry.
At first you couldn't place the smell mingled with his; it was blood—you were certain of that—but it was alien. It wasn't until the next mission when he came back with the front of his coat glistening black-red, but no wounds to explain it, that you realized it was human blood. You were afraid to ask him what he was doing. All you could do was ask that he not put himself in danger clashing violently with humans. You couldn't bear to see him hurt; you didn't want to see anyone hurt—faunus or human.
But he dismissed your concerns about him and bristled at your concerns about humans. He insisted that the White Fang had spent long enough on passive tactics with no progress. He reminded you of the worthless promises from the mouths of human scum, the never-ending scorn, the brutal attacks, and the blind eye that the police turned. It was the humans, he had snarled, that forced the faunus to resist however they could, and if the whole world conspired to deny the faunus justice, then the faunus must fight to make their own.
Your eyes stung as you reached out to him in an embrace, repeating the dream you both once shared. What kind of peace and equality could grow from soil watered with blood and tended to with hate? There had to be another way.
His eyes glinted, hardened with loathing, and he roughly shoved you aside. There was no other way, he insisted as he rounded on you. His hand flew to grasp his katana as he stared you down in anger. How could you defend them? How could you betray your own species for their sake?
This was not the reassuring presence that had pulled you from the river and steadied you in times of uncertainty. You froze with his glare skewering your feet in place, and his anger felt like searing shackles on your limbs. He wouldn't draw his sword on you, he couldn't.
He didn't.
But your relief was short lived. Instead, you found yourself on the ground with your cheek stinging hot from a vicious backhand, but the humiliation burned deeper. You could see his boots advancing towards you, the blood-red soles flashing ominously. You barely had time to gasp before a dark glove reached down to grab your scarf. The heat in your veins turned to ice as you were hauled to your feet and forced to stand on your toes as he lifted you bodily to look him in the eye.
How could you hurt him? His voice was dark with emotion as he recited every human slight visited upon him and you. The humans were the ones that hurt the faunus, and to stand with them in any way was to stand against him. By the end of the litany, the painful memories had drawn tears from your eyes. When he finally asked if you understood, all you could do was tilt your chin up and whimper. And with that, he let go and strode away.
It wasn't until you collapsed in a boneless heap that you'd noticed the desperate ache in your feet and the wrenching strain in your neck, and the tears began to flow again.
He was always destined for leadership. When he took over the White Fang, the future of faunus rights fell heavily upon on his shoulders—and yours. He cut the protests and rallies and replaced boycotts with more proactive measures. The White Fang began to organize attacks against companies that abused their faunus labor force and intimidating those that denied service to your species. The missions became more demanding, more violent, and the faunus began to see results.
He could be demanding, too. He was always demanding. But he was always demanding for your sake: be the best you can be, be the best for you, for me, for us, for the faunus. You needed to be strong for him, for the White Fang, for all the faunus. Under his new leadership and the new flag, your failures didn't just hurt him: they hurt the whole crusade—his life's work. Punishment was justified, necessary. But he was always hurt to see you hurt, and you took solace in the fact that it would only make you stronger for him.
Then came the masks. You asked him why he wanted to wear the grimm mask and oblige the very humans who denigrated the faunus as monsters. He snarled and his right hand moved towards his hip. You backpedaled, quickly apologizing for asking, for stepping out of line. You needn't have worried this time. He relaxed and said that the humans were becoming more violent and the masks were a way to protect the faunus. A little anonymity and intimidation to save faunus lives was a small price to pay. You conceded to his rationale but you rarely wore a mask yourself—a scrap of black cloth tied in an innocuous bow was enough of a mask on your own, less dangerous, missions.
He, however, always wore his mask on missions, donned it for public appearances, and conducted White Fang business with it on. Soon he took to wearing it at all waking hours. From your usual position behind him it looked like he hadn't changed at all, but he was a different person face-to-face with the mask on. The dark eye slits shuttered the windows to his soul and that grotesque visage haunted you, haunted him. Every time the mask came off it took him longer to set aside that grim and violent persona, took him longer to come back to you. You began to forget his handsome face and his eyes once bright with the hopes of a beautiful future. With the pressures of leading the White Fang and revolutionizing faunus rights wearying him, wearing on him, sometimes... he forgot himself.
Maybe if you'd been able to carry more of the weight of leadership for him he wouldn't be so pressured and he could be himself. You always felt the wrench of guilt when you thought about the happier days when the demands of revolution didn't weigh so heavily on him. But how could you be so selfish? He'd always loved you wholly and without question, and he still loved you.
He was always there to keep your head above the water.
Until he held you under.
You needed to jump off the moving train and land in the middle of the river, but the extra moment you took to swallow your panic left you landing closer to the bank and the accumulated debris. Your wrist snagged on a submerged branch, your momentum driving the wood deep into your tendons, tearing the dust case from you grip and tearing apart the fragile hold you had over your fear of drowning. Your mouth opened for an agonized scream, but all sound was suffocated by the water.
Suddenly you were no longer a White Fang operative; you were just a little girl who'd been thrown into the river as a mere afterthought to a savage beating at the hands of a human mob. You were helpless and drowning again, and once more you found yourself at that cold doorstep.
You felt an iron grip on your hair pulling your head above water, the pain bringing a moment of clarity as you gasped for breath. You heard him shouting about the dust case, but your throat constricted in terror and more water rushed in when you tried to speak. You could only bring your empty hand and shattered wrist up in a silent declaration of your failure. You thought you heard a snarl over the sound of rushing water as the painful pulling sensation on your scalp shifted and inverted. Dizzy from the oxygen deprivation, panic, and blood loss, you only dimly realized you were underwater again.
You dreamt you were desperately trying to outswim a monster from the distant deeps. A grimm with a red mane and protruding horns, its eye slits hollow with fearful symmetry. As it prepared to swallow you whole, you awoke to the sound of his voice angrily denying the White Fang's aid to a human cause. You wanted to know what was going on outside, but the cold chill of terror lingered in your chest and the symbolism of your nightmare lingered in your mind. Though you didn't believe that anything could be pure evil, seeing that grotesque visage hunting you had weakened that conviction; you couldn't help but wonder if you were wrong.
Since when did you fear his voice and tremble at his touch? You were supposed to build a beautiful fairy tale together! How had your shared dream distorted into his dream and your nightmare? Try as you might, you couldn't assemble all your memories: there were pieces missing, blank spots that twisted at your stomach when you tried to look closer. You finally stopped trying to pin down the tipping point and accepted that he had long since stopped protecting you and had become a danger, and that the White Fang no longer stood for a cause you believed in. The certainty that you had to leave before you were drowned—literally or metaphorically, you didn't know and it didn't matter—weighed heavily on your heart. The realization that you had aided and abetted atrocities in the name of faunus rights both clawed at your conscience and buttressed your conviction that you had to leave him and the White Fang. You had to free yourself to try and make things right—to atone for those sins—no matter the personal cost.
When he dismissed the lives of the human crew members on the train with nary a second thought, you knew it was time to leave.
He must have understood: those hollow eyes in the mask radiated anger and hatred. He reached out his hand in a way that you may have once interpreted as pleading, as supplication, but you knew what that hand had done, the cruelty of his touch. You bid him goodbye as a final courtesy—far more than he deserved—before steeling your resolve. With a single swing of Gambol Shroud you left everything behind and began to chip away at that monstrous mountain of debt starting with the handful of human lives you'd just saved.