Weiss finds home in three separate pairs of arms.
The first are small but sturdy, two years below and a whole attitude apart from her, the sharpest contrast she could imagine and yet the counterpart fate decided would be the eyes in the back of her head for four long years. The first touch is a quick casual thing and it leaves her muscles stiff and her lungs reeling, skin on skin having compressed her chest into something incapable of sustaining life. The slender arms start to pull back ever so slowly, suddenly on guard at the stiffness of the limbs they've encircled, and she sharpens her gaze into icicles to pry the touch away faster. The contact is gone, her lungs fill again, and she passes the day a barbed ball of nerves only more so than usual. It's not the first time she's been held-she has vague memories of softness and peppermint and wind chimes from a childhood before alcohol poisoned the blood, and even after that she's touched one other person willingly, but that body is even more taut than hers, hardened and tall and frostbitten in a manner she still dreams of some days. That touch holds no warmth-two frozen hearts create no heat, only solidarity. It's weeks before she touches her again, a small brush of fingers, a hand on her back, a flick on the nose, gradual and gradual until it's a deliberately slow nonchalant grasp of two separate jittery hands after a mock battle gone right. She lets it happen this time, and her lungs clench and release, a seventeen year tension leaking from her bones at a childish grin. Slowly the flinch retreats until those small but sturdy arms stop hesitating in surrounding her, and there are days where she herself initiates the touch, and she finds her first real home in years.
The second home she finds is a rickety one built by two, on a foundation once crumbling and wooden beams rotting from the inside out. There's too much gasoline past and nearly just as much struck match words, one dropped on the wrong tile and the already-ruins go up in smoke. And the building burns, and they let it, standing on either side, and she's too stubborn for too long to look through the flames to see the light reflect of the tears streaming down the shrouded cheeks. It's not the first house she's burned down, the ice queen somehow a pyromaniac, setting fire to her last name and all the contacts that falsely claim her love. One more filthy ruin won't hurt. Except that it does, and suddenly she's reeling because it's her fault-she poured the gasoline, she dropped the match-and just as quickly as she let t start she's put it out. This time it's her snow angel arms tentative and reaching for an equally skittish body, the tiniest of sighs escaping lips when cool skin meets cool skin and the smoke fades away on the wind, leaving the home to be rebuilt into something inhabitable, and for the first time, they smile together.
She doesn't find the third home for months. Not until after her first is as familiar as herself, and the second has all the classic furnishings and a few look-at-those-dorks smiles, not until after she's forced to walk her own wreckage like a specter, burnt-husk structures with whiskey-and-murder rivulets tracing through the cobblestone, the cold arms she loves nowhere to be found, the only places she calls home anymore out of reach. Not until she's fed up and trying to be hard like her sister and stealing away from her grave and back to her freedom, searching for answers, and for her makeshift family. And of course it falls apart, it always falls apart, and when her only home was subzero she would have shattered, she would have submitted, but there's a warmth inside her marrow now that is rooted in her teammates and the lessons she's learned, and so she doesn't break and she hardly bends and she stands her ground even from behind the bars of a new literal cage and still her mind is calculating freedom. But the sun shines light on her escape plan and she's breaking free from second captivity, and the battle's over before it starts and her heart is breaking, melting, because she's not hard like her sister and this ball of fire is her family too and she's launching herself at the broad body before her, soaking in the heat. That's where she finds her third home, steel strong arms humming with power both electrical and blood, a safe embrace she lets herself melt into.
Weiss finds her home in the arms and hearts of her team, in a pout and flicking ears and a wild laugh, in three girls so different the world looked at them and swore they'd harbor nothing but disdain and fractures. But when finally they all four have their bodies pressed together inhaling the scents that have become so precious, so familiar, the images of classrooms and sunlit windows and bunk beds and board games behind eyelids, each of them knows they've found their home.