Kaleidoscope Heart

by TheRedRoster

"Yang had already lost a family once, so when Jaune brought her into his, she swore to never let harm come to them. Even if that meant tearing a bloody swath through Vale and upset the balance of the corrupted city-state." A cyberpunk AU set in Remnant's distant future filled with cyborgs, psychics, dust mages, actual mages, rumor-born cryptids, and a violent, poisoned city.

1. Ep 1 - Today, Like Never Again

Fair warning: this story contains some taboos. If you're fine with that and would rather see them when they show up, keep reading. But if you'd rather know the taboos before jumping in, find the AO3 version with all the necessary tags. All of the necessary pairings are set up there as well.

HUGE thanks to my beta readers Maldevnine, Jayfromthe904, and MaliciousLittleCat!

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Episode 1 – Today, Like Never Again

"Patch was like a promise. It'll provide your every little need, and-and – ha ha ha! – and all it asks is that you don't ask for too much! Counter-intuitive? Never heard of the word! Ha, HA! … Ah, but in all seriousness, it's a simple place. When you're a traveled huntsman whose trudged through the filth of the city and the mud of the wilds, cornered by enough beasts and scarred by enough bandits, a quiet place like a remote island that governs itself? It sounds exactly like the kind of place you can rest your tired, old bones. Maybe hang your blunderbuss and… settle down, maybe."

~Mayor Peter Port, longest running mayor of Patch. No one else has competed for the position.

»»⋅..⋅««

Yang hadn't been home since her father died.

Patch sprawled beneath her from her perch atop the massive hovering cruise liner. The trees clasped over the island like a sheet, and parted where the tiny city carved up a different coast in the north. Every alley, every rooftop, every scar and bevel and depth, held a place in her still vivid memories. She saw herself in those places, knew how the walls felt and how the air smelt. What she did there and who she did them with.

There was warmth that welcomed her back, but it felt indifferent. As if the island had forgotten the family she'd lost.

Behind her, one of the steel portal doors was being violently assaulted from the other side. Passed the metal banging was the faint sounds of Jaune Arc and what amounted to family-friendly cursing. He outright refused to curse to the point of inability. As a consequence, Yang hadn't cursed since they met as kids.

Grabbing the circular lever, she twisted the hatch open and Jaune stumbled out. His forearms were limp.

She chuckled. "What did the door ever do to you?"

"I was trying to open it with my elbows." He slapped his limp forearms onto the railing. His hands clenched and unclenched as the early morning light cast over his arms. There was static across his forearm for a moment until a faint whir buzzed from them. They snapped open with a sound resembling a sharp klaxon, revealing the cybernetics underneath. The sides fanned out and projected hard-light round shields that sputtered and died.

"You didn't charge them?" she asked, taking him by the steel rings of his wrists and holding them aloft.

"Thanks… I, uh, slept on them."

She grinned. "You mean Pyrrha slept on them."

He looked over his shoulder before he whispered harshly. "Not out loud, please! And we weren't sleeping together."

"Of course," she conceded, smiling. "My bad."

Jaune's fingers twitched. The only organic parts of his forearm were the important bits buried in a tube. Everything else was machine – a glowing array of circuitry, charging panels, and hard-light projectors. The skin of his elbows and wrists looked like they were being sucked into the cybernetics like cloth stuck in a vacuum nozzle. It looked ugly and painful but it was anything but.

He used to have a tattoo there, but that was a relic of another time lost to the machine pulsing blood into his hands. "Remember when I got you to get my name on your arm?" she asked.

He eyed her carefully for a moment. She noticed but said nothing. "Yeah, I remember. You got my name on a henna…" he said, thinking fondly.

"To be fair, I didn't think you'd actually get a tattoo. Where in all of Glenn did you even find a tattoo artist willing to tag a fifteen-year-old?"

He shrugged. "He thought I was eighteen and I paid in cash."

"Yeah, you looked taller then." He was only an inch taller. He used to be a whole head above her. "Kissing you was a pain."

He smirked. "Only when I refused to lean down."

"You were a dumb boyfriend."

"You were cheeky. Had to get back at you somehow."

His hands came alive. He clustered his digits in a fist, fanning out the hard-light shields that glowed a translucent teal, spanning four feet across. "Ha!" he cheered. "It's good to have working limbs again."

"How long were you even at this anyhow?"

The shields folded back into his arms, synthetic skin covering the gaps. "An hour," he said.

"An hour!" she cried, making him wince. "You couldn't have at least bothered Pyrrha to help you out?"

"She was sleeping so soundly. I couldn't do it."

"So you dragged yourself out of your room, opening doors with your elbows, and slapped your crippled limbs against a steel door instead?"

"You know," said a voice, "this wouldn't have happened if you upgraded." Whitley Schnee hovered by his boots just beyond the railing with his twin sister, Weiss, who blankly waved and continued downward without him. "The offer still stands, by the way." His tone was neutral and his expression was dulled, but they'd learned to catch his sincerity regardless.

"Pass," Jaune said. "I'll stick to what I've got."

"A spinal jack isn't as terrible as you think," Whitley reasoned, his expression unchanging.

"I'm not trading my spine for better cybernetics. Like I said, you come up with shields that don't cost a spine to operate, then I'm sold. I'll even decline the freebie and pay for it!"

He hovered onto the railing and sat on it. "That might be a ways off, still. It could take years," Whitley drawled robotically. He was really trying to exclamate though, but his face stretched and snapped back, refusing to cooperate.

"Then I'll wait a few years. Meanwhile," he raised his arms and wiggled them, "I'll stick to the classics." The right arm sparked, sprang open, then shut down.

"My point proven by karmic providence aside…" Whitley hopped off and took the arm, pulling hidden tools from his jacket. "You should at least let me fix that."

"Look on the bright side," Yang said, "Patch is full of sun! No tall buildings, and the kind of natural shade that still gets solar charging. I doubt you'll find a room dark enough to do otherwise. With or without a warm body on top of it."

Jaune looked away, embarrassed, but so did Whitley, even if his face didn't show it.

Yang winced.

"Oh, hello!" greeted Pyrrha as she came down the corner. "I was feeling a lot of embarrassment this way. I knew it had to be at least one of you three." Pyrrha was – unfortunately for them – a powerful empath. She felt other people's emotions tug at her from all directions, but her friends were some of the most expressive – internally or externally – that she'd ever met, so she almost always knew where they were. It was difficult to keep away from her.

Pyrrha spared a glance at Yang. She smiled brightly. "I'm glad you're feeling better," she whispered, squeezing her shoulder. "If you'd like, I could lend you Jaune for a night. Keep your spirits up."

Yang's cheeks burned. She pulled Pyrrha away. "Pyrrha!" was her hushed complaint. "You're supposed to be flirting with Jaune, not trying to embarrass me."

"I'm sorry, but it's just so easy. You were right about being assertive. I've been having the most fun with it for weeks! I even got Jaune to lay his hands on me again last night."

Yang's eyes lit up. "I knew it!" she cheered quietly before shutting her mouth.

She glanced back. The boys were talking between themselves. Good.

"We aren't even an item," Pyrrha continued. "And you two are my best friends. I see no reason why you can't stress relieve yourselves." That was, until they actually started dating. That was part of their little agreement.

"I think you're taking my advice a little too seriously. When I told you to let yourself go, I didn't mean this."

"I can't help it. I feel so… liberated!"

"Maybe ease up a little." Her shoulders slumped. "Besides, I don't sleep with anyone I'm not in love with."

Pyrrha blinked. "That is simultaneously relieving and worrying."

"Try not to be. Jaune can tell how you're feeling, remember?"

"I don't know about that. I was anxious before our pep talk. He hasn't mentioned my mood at all."

"He was probably being polite." Yang paused, realizing something. "Like he's probably been with me…" Her eyes drifted away, suddenly lost somewhere in her thoughts. She snapped back, only to find Pyrrha looking worried.

"Yang?"

"Girls?" Jaune was approaching, but stopped to wait for them.

"Here we go…" Yang sighed. "You should go with Whitley and show him the dojo. I'm sure he'd love a lesson before his drugs wear off." They glanced back at Whitley who quickly looked away. Were he not on his suppressants, he would have been blushing. Pyrrha didn't need to be an empath to know that he was screaming internally. Yet she was, and his scream was vivid.

"You want me and him to… Oh. Okay." She nodded quickly before giving her a quick hug.

Pyrrha clasped onto Jaune first and whispered something in his ear before scurrying off. He blushed.

"You go, girl," she thought.

He was still blushing when he met her on the railing.

"You noticed?" she asked.

"Didn't wanna bring it up."

"What changed then?"

"You looked a little worse just now."

"Oh!" Her eyes widened for a moment. "Well… Pyrrha talked about how you didn't bring up her being anxious and I realized you were doing the same with me."

He groaned. "I was specifically trying to avoid this conversation."

"So was I, but I think we can share the blame." She tried to make it sound like a joke.

He didn't share her smile.

Jaune had been subdued these past few weeks. The woman who loved him had been an erratic bundle of emotions – now stumbling away with a nervous Whitley in tow. The woman he used to love was a drifting mask of put-upon mirth trying to drown her sorrows – now stood beside and sharing it with him. And the woman he loved – gods alive, the woman he loved – was getting married to his sister.

He caught a glimpse of them below. Terra Cotta, his boyhood crush, and Saphron Arc, his eldest sister. In their arms was a baby boy, Adrian. Their son… but also his son. The boy had his eyes and a shadow of his hair – a duller blonde than most Arcs but matched his browner Cotta skin.

He spared them only that glimpse and didn't dwell. They were all here on Patch for the wedding but Jaune and Yang were also here to endure each other's broiling torments. Its why he stumbled out of his room to find her, his limp arms serving as both a convenient and inconvenient excuse.

Its why he held her hand between them, unseen from prying eyes.

She squeezed.

"I don't want to see him," she admitted, words like a jagged confession that prickled her throat as it rolled out from the depths of her heaving lungs. The tears wouldn't come. Her scowl held in defiance of it.

"You do," he told her, eyes soft and melancholic.

"That thing is not my dad."

"Then why are you acting like you're going to meet him anyway?"

"Because he pretends to be…" She scowled, deeper and harsher, face twisting in buried anger. "…and he's good at it."

»»⋅..⋅««

Yang and Jaune spied him from their end of the gangplank several feet below. The rotund old mayor, Peter Port, stood out in his bright, cherry red suit. James Ironwood and Hazel Rainart, generals of the Altesian military, passed him by and went completely ignored. The Schnee twins, heirs to a global industry, were barely given a glance. In the very least Jaune's family got a passing greeting from a familiar friend but it was clear that he wasn't here for old friends or delegates.

"We could go down the other way," Jaune offered, rolling his shoulders as he leveled the weight of a heavy duffel bag slung over him. "He won't see us if we get off there."

There was a different exit on other end of the bow, but there was a crowd congesting over there that they would have had to stand behind.

She scrunched her face. "Nah." She looked at the dock floor below, where – between the departure zones – bags were collected and supplies were hauled. "Let's jump."

The single bag between them was both of theirs. They didn't own much that needed bringing and it was all just clothes really. Hence why Yang took the bag and threw it overboard. She'd forgotten they'd packed an electric icebox as a wedding gift.

They panicked.

They slammed into the railing and watched it fall, already considering that they could just get a different gift.

Peter Port then – with a grace beyond his years – leapt off a stack of crates and soared through the air, catching the bag with a victorious cheer. He landed in a roll and bounced up to stand. "Huzzah! I believed you dropped this, Miss!"

Yang and Jaune were a mixture of groans and relief. "No point in it now," Jaune said, already stood over the railing.

He jumped.

He landed on his feet, the force rippling over his legs but buffeted by his aura. Yang crashed into him. She forgot to tell him to catch her.

"Oh, uh, sorry…"

"Ms. Xiao Long!" said Port as he ambled to her and pulled her to her feet. "Congratulations!" He shook her hand with his legendary grip, so tight against the line of her knuckles that she fortified her aura just in case. "Oh! It's so very good to see you again. And on your wedding day, no less! Now where is the strapping young lad whose earned your confidence?"

"Uh…"

Jaune groaned as he slowly stood. Port inhaled in what could have equated to a gasp for a man his size. He practically peeled Jaune off the ground and slapped him across his already labored back. "Jaune, my boy!" Port greeted. "I knew you had it in you!"

He laughed, dusting himself off as his aura washed away the pain. "Morning, Uncle Port. We're, uh, we're not the ones getting married."

"Yeah, it's his sister Saph," she said, prying him away from the round man. "I'm not even his date."

"Nothing to worry about!" Port never missed a beat. "That leaves it only as an opportunity waiting in the wings!"

"I don't think so," they said in unison.

He was undeterred. More than that, his attention was fully on Yang which made her nervous. Any minute now he'd talk about Yang's father, so Jaune took that as a sign. He swiped the bag from him and tugged Yang along. "We've got plenty to do though. Love to chat but we've really got to get going."

Port barely got a word in before huntsmen started crashing around him. They'd apparently seen Jaune and Yang get zero consequences for cutting the line. He wasn't upset. Though it had scared the dock workers who huddled behind crates, hoping the huntsmen didn't miss.

Port hadn't planned on talking about Yang's father. He had a very different conversation in mind, but when he saw the girl he expected to carry a cloud over her head instead lit up as she was huddled around Jaune's sisters – looking very much like she counted among them – he found no need to worry about her.

»»⋅..⋅««

"Psst!" Joan, Jaune's twin sister, whispered loudly between him and Yang at the dining table. She pulled out a stack of loose papers and notebooks and slammed them down triumphantly. "Coral's porn fell out of her bags."

"Ahh!" came Coral's guttural scream from upstairs. Her footsteps thundered down from the third floor.

"Oh shit!" Joan grabbed only some of the papers and slid away.

"Language," Jaune warned.

Joan popped the collar of the hoodie they shared. "Got the elder hoodie, little brother. You're not the boss of me this week!"

Yang poked his arm. "Are you ever going to tell her you're actually the older one?"

He shrugged. "I like it this way. 'Sides, she won fair and square today."

"Really thought you were gonna win that bet, huh?"

"I either kept the hoodie for the trip or did the dirty tango on the way here. It was a win-win scenario."

Coral Arc, a mousy little woman with rings around her eyes passed her ivory glasses, ran down into the living room. "Where is she!" she shouted. She wasn't really asking. Activating her semblance, her eyes glowed a burning teal.

The papers in Joan's hands glowed with teal hand print marks. She threw them at the front door, as far from herself and Coral as was available. "Either get your porn or catch me. Your choice!"

Coral hesitated for only moment before she dove to the door.

Joan sprinted up the stairs, giggling as she did. She pushed passed Sky Lark as he slowly walked down the steps, apologizing briefly to him.

"Babe?" he asked Coral who was frantically pulling her papers together, only for them to fall out of her hands. He jogged the rest of the way down to her. Helping with the papers, he looked at Jaune and Yang who only watched. "Aren't either of you going to help?"

Jaune raised his hands. "Hey, if you can't handle my little sister on your own, then you don't deserve her."

"He's right, you know," Coral teased, but for the life of her she couldn't keep the snide look and turned a deep, deep red when he looked her way. She broke eye contact.

Sky pressed his lips together to depressurize his embarrassment. It didn't work. "Cut me some slack! I set you two up!"

"That was Blake," Yang called from… why was she on the floor? "You helped."

"Yeah…" Jaune trailed off, leaning over to Yang reading through some of the papers that Joan missed. "What are…" He paused, reading the words carefully. "Oh!" He slid down beside her.

Yang pointed at where she was reading.

"Twelve inches?" Jaune asked.

"I mean… it felt like it. Not like I had any experience prior."

"Don't tell me you told her all this."

"Hey, I was the only one she could go to! Not like she was about to ask you about it."

A teal handprint glowed over the papers. Uh oh. Coral breathed through her nostrils like a troll just above them, her head peaking over the top of the table.

Jaune flicked her nose.

"Ow…"

Jaune pouted. "You used our real names?"

Coral scoffed. "Of course I did. It was autobiographical!"

"This is several levels of weird." Jaune stood up. "I'm destroying these."

"My references!" Coral tackled Jaune onto a nearby sofa.

As the siblings wrestled over the papers, Sky joined Yang on the floor. "I bet you he wanted to keep them," he suggested, playing it cool.

"If that's how he wants to do it, then he's living in the last century." She made a show of her scroll as it scanned the papers beneath her. "And… done. That's the whole thing."

"You took a holo-scan? Wait, why are you making a copy?"

She tapped a few things on her scroll. Somewhere on the table, Jaune's scroll buzzed. "And sent." She looked back at Sky who was more than a little disturbed. "Because, my skinny friend, me and Jaune happen to think it's funny."

"It's like keeping a sex tape!"

"It's fiction, you dunce. Coral exaggerated everything. It's nowhere near an accurate account of what happened."

"I knew you two were close but this is a whole 'nother level of shameless."

"Sky, we use to bathe together before we even started dating."

"W-what!"

"We were six, you pervert!" She groaned. "Look, me and Jaune have just been comfortable with it all since it happened like we've been with everything else."

"It's not like it was a decade ago, Yang. You broke up just three years ago. Hell, you technically didn't even do that! You just danced around each other until you both quietly decided you were over!"

"Well, could you blame me? Mom died."

"I, uh… shit, I'm –" She pressed a finger to his lips, nearly colliding with his eye.

"Sky, I'm not some fragile little princess whose got her heart stuck on someone else's string. I appreciate all the concern you all have for me, but it ended the way it did but none of that should even matter! Just look at me and Jaune now! We are the furthest thing from not okay."

"But things weren't supposed to be this way!"

Yang stood up. Light casted over the bitterness carved across her lips. "We don't get to decide how things are supposed to be. We only get to choose how we take what's left for us." In that moment, Sky knew she wasn't talking about her and Jaune anymore.

She threw her half of the papers at the stairs.

Jaune "somehow" lost his grip and Coral pulled away with her papers and scrambled to the rest.

Sky joined his girlfriend as she frantically hugged her drafts to her chest. He spared a glance just once more to Yang. She smiled apologetically, quietly begging him to let it go.

"Nice," Jaune said, pulling up his scroll. "Never doing that again, by the way. Coral didn't bathe and now I'm gonna need another shower."

"I think I'll walk around town. Maybe see some of the old sights." Yang didn't look gloomy, but she didn't need to. Jaune's semblance told him exactly what she was feeling. So when it showed on his face, she knew she was caught. "I…"

"What did he bring up?"

"I don't wanna get into it."

He nodded. "Okay." He hugged her long enough for her to hug back. "Ring me up when you're ready. Me and Pyrrha will be with you the minute you do."

Jaune stopped at the first landing to look at her. Her smile was weak but reassuring. She'd be well enough to spend time with him and the rest just as soon as she found enough distractions.

The silence of the empty open first floor followed her as she made her way to the door. Outside, the sounds of Remnant's littlest city, Patch, bustled with distant raucous laughter, heavy nails hammered into the endless infrastructure, and the island birds that turned its woods into a paradise. Sounds etched into her oldest memories.

The door swung open, nearly hitting her.

"Firecracker!" greeted Sable Arc in her white with red and black racing suit. "Just the sparkling bit of royalty I was hoping to find!"

"Royalty? I'm not…!" She shook her head, exasperation mixing deeply with confusion. "Are you looking for Weiss?" she asked, almost hysterically.

"Nah. Just you." Sable grabbed her arm and tugged her out into the morning sun. It was almost noon. It might have smelt like fruit, since the rented home was so close to the orchard, but the smell of Sable's overwhelming alcohol addiction slapped across her face instead.

"According to the guy in jail," she began, "you're royalty. Kind of. It's complicated. Look! My bottomline is that uncle Ironwood and uncle Hazel won't let me into their stockpile until they settle some shit with a prisoner and your mayor."

"First of all," Yang maintained, pulling free from Sable as they trudged along the grooved dirt path, "he's not my mayor. My residency is Glenn, not Patch. Haven't been in five years."

Sable looked at her with a neutral, barely present, perhaps not actually listening, expression.

Yang sighed and moved on. "Secondly," she breathed and calmed herself down. "Look, Skids, I'm not in the mood to deal with some political dispute or whatever. I just wanna get my mind off some things."

"Well then, you're in luck!" Sable continued to lead the way towards the local prison. It was one of the bigger buildings in Patch, just below the allowed build height. "This shit's got intrigue." She sounded like the idea was supposed to be sexy or something.

Considering her tastes, I'm not surprised, Yang thought. "Okay, I'll bite. What's the good part?"

"Guy's got magic."

Yang deadpanned. "Really? An illegal magician?"

"No, no, no! Guy claims he's a mage! Not a dust mage either. Honest to the dead fucking gods, a real life mage."

Her deadpan deepened. "I don't believe that for even a second."

"Neither do I! But the loon says he can prove it."

Yang paused, unable to deny her stint of interest. "Okay… then what does this have to do with the generals?"

"Oh, cause they found him on the coast covered in blood, surrounded by drugs, a stolen boat, and some dead gang bangers."

Yang sprinted ahead. "You should have led with that!"

»»⋅..⋅««

"Miss Xiao Long," said the officer at the door. "You've… changed your hair."

Yang paused anxiously, feeling very much like she should just push passed him. "Can we skip the pleasantries? I need go see this guy you got."

"Oh, of course." He turned around pushed the door open. The entire precinct watched as they strode across the room. Some of them spared quick greetings for her.

"What do we know about him?" she asked the officer once they were alone in a long hallway.

"He's a missionary."

"All the way from Gods' Grave?"

The officer shook his head. "Funnily enough, no. A whole other holy land apparently. From someplace called the Bellows."

"Never heard of it."

"I have!" Sable said. They stared at her. "It's the ruins beneath Vale. Way, way down. Some upstate shlocks thought they could expand downwards; maybe even build a circuit I could run as a sponsor instead of a racer. Didn't work out. Lots of bad stuff down there."

"They ever talk about missionaries?"

Sable shook her head. "Just some weird hermits. The news called them arsonists since they kept blowing up equipment but – really – they were there first."

"Sounds like crazy cultists to me. This prisoner included."

"He doesn't sound crazy, ma'am," the officer said. "He's the calmest man this precinct has ever had behind bars. No resistance when we brought him in. Qrow gives us more trouble."

They made it to the end of the hallway where both generals and the mayor stood in some control room off to the side just before a hard-light wall into the cellblock that stretched rows of cells below and above .

"Yang!" the generals greeted.

Port laughed. "Miss Xiao Long. Sorry you had to be here. I wanted to get you here sooner to get it over and done with but it appears it can't be avoided."

"Like hell it can't be," James said sternly. "This man had Atlesian Silver."

"Covered in Valean blood," Hazel added.

"And found on Patch soil." Port sighed. "The complicated logistics of his arrest aside, he's been cooperative but he won't speak outside of demanding an… audience with you. His word, not mine."

The expanse of metallic walls and hard-light cells sat mostly empty before her, save for the only one across the control room where – beyond a long bridge – a ragged faunus man with dark brown scales sat quietly on a bed.

She didn't want go in yet. "You said he had Atlesian Silver?"

James nodded. "We thought they were narcotics at first since they were all in needles. Turns out they were gene mods. All of them."

"Needles? So last generation gene mods? What were a bunch of gang bangers doing with old gene mods and a missionary?"

"Ask him." James pointed at the missionary in his cell.

"I guess I'll have to." Yang was stalling, couldn't even bring herself to look Ironwood in the eyes. Sure he was a general but he was also her uncle. He'd forgive her for shrugging him off.

A large, meaty hand fell on her shoulder. The weight of it made her body tilt.

"Yang," Hazel said softly, "you'll be perfectly safe behind the cell but if you're not ready we can pick this up tomorrow."

Sable groaned behind them. She went ignored.

"It's okay," Yang said, steeling herself, expression sharpening. "Just a lot of unknowns here. I guess Jaune's been keeping me cautious."

"Better than being brash." Hazel smiled for her. The titanic width of the man almost made it look too wide. "It's a good strategy to hone – patience – but some things will never allow that kind of preparation. I hope you're teaching Jaune to take a few necessary risks."

"I don't give him breathing room when we're sparring. He still hasn't beaten me in a fist fight."

Hazel rolled his eyes. He'd taught her some of her best tricks and he was proud of her, but he couldn't take credit for her personality. She reminded him of Tai. "Funny. Last I heard, he came close."

"Well, half his arms are metal." Jaune also had steel lining his knuckles, her jaw always remembered that for her.

"Maybe pick up a sword again and fight him on his turf?" Hazel offered, earning her embarrassment.

"I, uh, I haven't done any swordplay in weeks, actually. We were out hunting to earn enough to even be here, and we hadn't gotten any sparring in since." It was an excuse. Yang could have taken Omen – her mom's katana – with her during the hunts but always 'forgot' it. Jaune never called her out on it, even if he knew.

Hazel knew too and just like Jaune, he didn't comment on it. "Feeling better?" he asked instead.

"Oh!" She'd almost forgotten what she was here to do. "Yeah, I… I guess I do," she said honestly.

She took a breath and stepped closer to the gate. "Alright, let me through."

The officers at the control panel buzzed her in; the hard-light gate peeled away like evaporating liquids.

The gate shut behind her and her footsteps echoed against the sterile walls. The air was soapy too, the cellblock freshly washed.

The missionary noticed her almost instantly. He stood and walked slowly to the end of his room, matching her long stride with short ones. Eerily, they stopped at the same time, just a few feet apart.

Up close, it was easier to tell he was a komodo faunus. He didn't just have scales, his skin was layered in a way that made it look loose, sagging around his neck, hanging off his forearms.

"Your omnipotence." He bowed, his voice gentle like an audible whisper.

It caught her off-guard. "Uh…"

"I confuse you… By my people's traditions, you are to be heralded as a queen."

"I'm the furthest thing from royalty, buddy."

"And yet in my eyes you could not be closer. These surface kingdoms no longer remember their sires. That the Arcs once ruled as stoic knights across the four kingdoms, that the Nikos's were conquerors who swallowed empires till Mistral was no longer a city but a continent, or that the Schnees were Mistrali nobles who fled faunus revolutionaries." He paused, eying her. "Or that the Xiao Longs fled the same revolutionaries to sire an island away from all that conflict. Yet this land here is young. Young enough to remember. To pay homage. That alone has earned my people's respect. That respect has led me to you."

She didn't quite buy the history lesson. "That's a lot of bold claims. They're also… weirdly specific."

He tapped the side of his head. "I'm a psychic. A telepath. I knew which stories to tell."

"You're a psychic and a mage?"

"Ah, so you've heard." He leaned to the side, spotting Sable who waved at him. He gave her a curt bow. "You'll have to forgive my intrusion into your mindscape. I felt it a necessary trespass to prove myself."

"Well, I'll admit you're scaring me a little," Yang said, but she held firm. "Anything else I should know about?" She needed to know what she was up against.

"Besides being a psychic and a mage, my liege, I am mostly a missionary…" He said with a hint of pride, features softening. Then he sighed. "And – though it might not suit me – your term for anyone with aura accounts me, as well," he raised his arm and flicked it with enough force to flare against his aura, "as a huntsman."

Yang squinted. You couldn't fake aura. "You came here with a bunch of old gene mods. You know what that does to huntsmen, right?"

He nodded. "It cleanses you."

"Cleanses!" she asked incredulously. She shook her head and reigned herself in. "Look, pal – Wait, what was your name?"

"Brother Amlan, your grace."

"Right, well, Amlan. Gene mods don't 'cleanse' huntsmen. Take more than a few and you lose your semblance. Take much more and you start losing your aura. Huntsmen and gene mods don't mix very well. Especially on this island, and Patch is almost ninety-percent huntsmen."

"Hence why I came."

Silence. "…What?"

"Do you know what the common people call these… gene mods?"

She held his gaze. "Silver," she answered. "But that's slang. You uppity folks from the churches and the upstate don't call them that."

"And yet Silver could not be more appropriate." The slowness of his voice was starting to grate at her. "Plucked from the bleeding bosoms of our dead gods, the people of your world are granted gifts that might epitomize them as mankind should have always been." He held out one hand, a glowing sphere like a condensed sun fizzled to life. "To abandon the ways of the God of Light." He held out the other hand, a sphere as black as night cusped with arcs of a sinister purple formed amidst a shimmering of star-like specks. "To never again forsake the God of Dark." He slammed both spheres together. "And to choose them both." His hands parted, revealing a smaller sphere, large as a thumb, hovering between his palms. It was silver, clean and reflective.

He pinched both ends of the mercurial sphere and pulled them apart. It stretched before slapping back together as a syringe manifested around it. An old gene mod. He took it in one hand, and stared at her till she tore her eyes away from the item and into his waiting gaze. "Cleanse yourself, my liege. Tell your people to do the same. Abandon the ways of the God of Light."

He placed his hand on the hard-light shield and his fingers surged with lightning. The cell shuddered from the excess energy that sparked the cellblock as distant transformers exploded! The shield shattered in a mighty crackle. The rest of the cellblock went dark.

Yang stumbled back, the sounds of those around her muted beneath her panic. Amlan lurched forward and grabbed her by the arm. She screamed as he swung the needle.

In that split second, she activated her semblance. The needle struck but she'd absorbed all of its momentum and funneled it into the muscles in her arm. The amount of force he used was astonishing. It would have been enough to pierce her unfortified aura with ease.

Pain lanced into her arm – a consequence of her semblance if she didn't use the force she stole. She pulled back and he stumbled after her, still holding onto her arm. She struck him square in the chest.

A great force threw him into the back wall of his cell, his hardened body cracking the concrete.

Yang panted, her heart pulsating with the ache in her knuckles.

The syringe fell below her and off the bridge, plunging it into the darkness of the lower cellblock.

James ran passed her, removing the glove from his right hand, revealing the fully cybernetic arm. He slapped the side of the hard-light projector that rimmed the cell and electricity surged out of his arm and into the projectors till the cell wall fizzled back to life.

"Yang, are you alright?" he asked.

She got up with Port and Hazel's help, recovering quickly from the shock. Her scowl told them that she was more irate than shocked. "I'm… yeah, I'm alright. Thanks."

"Good," James said. Amlan sat up and rolled his shoulders, shaking off the pain. James eyed him with contempt. "Don't you dare touch my niece again. No one's going to ask questions if I put a bullet between your eyes."

Yang approached the cell wall again, but the missionary stayed down, looking up at her. "The answer is no," she said plainly, pushing down her emotions. "Patch will stay the way it is."

He frowned, but then he was resigned. He knew it would end this way. "I am what your people call a moderate, but there are many in our church that have abandoned the ways of diplomacy. They are what you would call…" he winced at the word, "…fanatics. And if I cannot convert you, they will."

The cellblock power restored so James stood away from the wall and followed Yang and the rest as they crossed the bridge. He followed close between her and the missionary, using himself as a shield.

Sable gave Yang an apologetic look which she easily forgave, smiling and shaking her head in response.

A shot rang out behind them.

Ironwood had somehow shot through the cell wall with his revolver. The missionary was slumped against the floor, unconscious.

"James…" Hazel glared.

"He was using his telepathy," he explained. "Told me we would regret shunning the missionaries like they did in Vale. He promised harm would come to us."

Hazel growled before turning to Port. "We need to send him to the mainland. Can you arrange for immediate transport?"

Port nodded. "I'll have it done right away."

"Give me your best huntsmen," James said. "Have their eyes on him the entire time. I'll pay double their fee." He retained his posture, weapon still aimed at the man. "I'm taking no chances with him."

»»⋅..⋅««

Yang held out her hand, dazzled by the back of it shimmering in the afternoon sun.

Glitter mesh wrapped almost invisibly at certain parts of her silken dress. It wasn't a rental either. She and Jaune saved up for amenities, tickets, and a gift, but there was no way they were going to afford proper outfits on their own. So Weiss and Whitley had them tailor-made against their will. It was a nice gesture.

It had also made her a little nervous. Huntsmen weddings were rarely so extravagant – not that either bride were huntresses since they hadn't any aura – but there was too much fanfare with some of the oldest huntsman families gathering together on an island with the densest huntsman population in all the three kingdoms. Even if no one said it, the weight of expectation loomed over her. For what? She didn't know, only that it might have been coming.

Yang and five of the Arc sisters sat on a grassy hill together, overlooking the locals preparing the old event center for the reception tonight. More than a few of the huntsmen and huntresses had tried flirting with them. One even recognized Yang and had thought she had five sisters of her own. It was a cozying thought, being part of a family again.

Liona, the youngest Arc at just seventeen, leaned her back onto Yang's side. "I want one," she said.

"One what?"

"A wife… husband. Whatever."

"You're too young for that."

"Mistralis marry young. Ren and Nora got married there at my age."

Yang didn't want to mention that they were actually married at sixteen. "They also have arranged marriages in Mistral. Do you really wanna marry someone you hadn't met before?"

"Coral and Sky got together in a week. Same difference to me," Liona reasoned, looking up at Yang.

"It's not like they were getting married." Yang met her gaze and sighed. She ran a hand through her hair. "What's this really about?"

"Jaune and Pyrrha make being a huntress sound like a pain. I don't wanna be a huntress. Saph said she stays at home and cooks and watches the baby. I want that."

"Being a mom isn't easy."

"Certainly less dangerous." She held out her hand and flicked her palm, flaring against her aura. "I say Saph got lucky, not being born with aura. No expectations. No legacy. Mom and Dad don't make a big deal out of it but the way the other families look at us like we're supposed to hold the line and die like heroes or something… I'm not about that life."

Dahlia, the adopted Arc sister only months older than Liona, shimmied her head onto her sister's stomach. Her slightly darker skin was a sheer contrast to her sisters, but it made her stand out to the locals too. She was still coming off from a polite blush after rejecting another suitor. "Y'know," she began, slapping her cheeks as if to ward away the redness in them, "uncle Oobleck told me that huntsmen used to just unlock aura. Like it wasn't always hereditary. Like it's dormant in everybody."

Liona scoffed. "Bull."

"Language," Yang warned, glaring at her. She wilted, shrinking into her knees and apologized. Yang pat her on the head. "Besides," she continued, "what does it matter? Oobleck said that even if it was real, we don't know how to do it anymore."

Dahlia shrugged. "I'm just saying: If people could unlock aura, maybe there's a way to lock it again."

Liona lit up. "You think?"

"Worth a try."

They both looked at Yang, eyes almost begging. Despite her being only two years older than them, she was still an adult with a job. A licensed huntress too, just like Jaune. It also came with expectations.

She groaned. "Fine. I'll take you to the Beacon Museum when this is over. I've been meaning to see the Doc anyway."

Liona not-so-silently cheered.

Dahlia had a tiny smirk.

"Why do you guys call him the Doc, by the way?" Dahlia asked. "Isn't uncle Oobleck a curator?"

"He's mostly a surgeon," Yang said. "He used to be an archeologist and a teacher too. Guy's real traveled. But after he installed Blake's spinal jack, we noticed that he loved being called a doctor. So it stuck."

"Why is that?"

Yang frowned but there was a softness to her eyes. Not quite sad. Not quite willing to fall into it. "He used to be a huntsman, too. Aura and all," she said, neutral as any good storyteller, emotion hiding but wafting through the surface of her skin. "Even had this crazy semblance where he zipped across the room as long as he had coffee. He went down into the ruins beneath Vale with a team. Two huntsmen and a host of civies. While he was down there, Ren got sick and he had to cure him with Silver. A lot of it." He was paralyzed and bleeding from his eyes, but she didn't want to mention that.

Liona sat up. "What were a bunch of gene mods gonna do to cure him?"

There was a willingness to answer the question and stop the story. Maybe to forget telling it altogether. "You know the most popular gene mods make you resistant to most diseases?" she said, almost excited to dispense wisdom. It was like having kid siblings of her own. "You can poison someone and – if they had that mod – it'd just turn into another thing they'll be mostly immune to."

"That's wild."

Yang was almost disappointed that they didn't even know it existed. Silver was basically the devil to most huntsman families – including the Arcs – but an open mind would tell you that there were still benefits from it. "I don't normally recommend modding at all, but even I have that one in me. I figured that since I can take a few without losing my semblance, I might as well take the one that doesn't sound like cheating."

"So is that mod why Ren doesn't have aura anymore?"

Yang nodded. A somberness bored down the edges of her lips till her eyes met the expression. The girls, even Coral and Joan behind her, sat attentively. "Oobleck brought a supply in case of infection. Low grade stuff, just to cure diseases, prevent illness, not really meant to alter your genetics. But there was a cryptid down there with poison darts or something – molemen, you'll never hear of them cause gods know they're extinct now after Nora found out – and Ren had to protect all the civies in their team cause otherwise, they'd have all been dead."

"Oobleck had him pumped with the stuff," Yang continued, eyes on the grassy slope. She'd heard the story second hand, but the emptiness in Nora's eyes were telling, haunting. "Thing was, the vials were cracked in the panic and no one else knew how to get it into his blood. His team were archeologists, mercenaries, and miners. The only other person with medical experience was the same guy on the stretcher and they didn't have a lot of time. Ren said they had a moment of solidarity before the Doc started. They knew what they'd lose if Ren came out of that alive. So he gave him shot after shot after shot, getting the same fumes into his own skin. Wasn't long till Ren could get up and walk again, but by then they were both immune to poisons and had lost their aura."

Liona had a hard time dealing with Yang looking so down. "You sound like they died down there," she said, biting down a trembling in her lip.

Yang shrugged, trying to laugh it off. "It's how it feels. Oobleck and Ren aren't what they used to be. Ren used to gather herbs out in the Wilds, used to take bounties to feed his family, but now it's too dangerous for him. If it weren't for Roman and Neo helping them out with the money, they'd have had to bunk in with me and your brother up in Glenn."

"And the Doc doesn't go into the ruins anymore. So after teaching Oscar everything he knew about the trade – he's our friend who's dating the android?" Only Coral didn't nod. "He decided to learn all he could about cybernetics and medicine. He likes it. He's been every huntsman's go-to doctor and us calling him that makes him feel like it was worth what he'd gone through."

It took a long minute. It felt longer, because it always did when all eyes were on you. Sable was the only one among them who really knew Oobleck on that level besides Yang. The rest of them were solemn for Yang's sake.

But bless her heart, Liona was an abrasive young woman who knew when to break it up. "Was he the reason my brother's arms don't work like they should?"

She ruffled her hair. "No, nothing like that. Your brother just picked a poor time to be a first adopter."

Coral nudged her from behind, eyes stuck on her scroll. "That can't be right. Cybernetics are older than uncle Hazel."

"She means combat cybernetics," Joan answered for her.

Someone mumbled. Yang turned around and found Liona leaning on her knees. "What was that?" Yang asked her.

"I want one," she mumbled a little louder.

"Combat cybernetics?"

She nodded. Dahlia quietly and briefly laughed at her. Liona shot her a look anyway.

"You have to be a licensed huntress for that," Yang said. "You can't be civie and have combat implants."

Liona pouted. She fell back, splayed out over the grass. "F–!" Yang crossed her arms, warning her not to curse. She adopted one of her brother's curses instead. "Fudge!" she hissed quietly. They laughed at her.

Yang and Dahlia were more embarrassed for her.

"My, my, having fun are we?" came a voice.

"Mom!" they greeted. Somehow, Yang said the same. Liona nudged her for it. Coral leaned back into her other side and smiled triumphantly.

Helia "Hess" Arc sat with her daughters, looking young enough to make Coral – who was ironically one of the youngest – look much older by comparison. What with the circles around her eyes that her own mother didn't have.

Coriander, her second eldest who had come with her, chose instead to stand. "Yang," she greeted dryly. She was delighted to see her. Honestly, she was! She'd just grown up under Atlesian stricture and it made expressing herself difficult. Still, Yang found her small smile delightful.

"Cori," she greeted back.

"I see my sisters have kept you in good company." Her nod of approval got the younger girls giggling. Except Sable, who chuckled like Qrow would have. "I hope my brother has been much the same in Glenn? Sharing a house with you and all."

"Jaune? Uh… he cooks and cleans but we split the lease. If anything, he's helping me out."

Cori blinked, a moment of hesitation that Liona and Coral found entertaining. "Surely you don't leave everything to him?" she asked suspiciously.

"I do all the electrical work and the plumbing," she offered. "I'd do more cleaning passed the dinner plates but Jaune is in Uni. He gets shorter hours than I do at the shop, so he does everything before I get home. I swear I haven't seen a speck of dust in my own house in… ever."

"My fault!" Joan announced proudly. "I got my side of the room cleaner once in front of Mom and suddenly it was a competition."

Yang wanted to say that she knew all of that already, but it was suddenly clear that it was actually said for Cori's sake. She'd been with Uncle Ironwood for so long that she started calling him father, and Winter mother. Even as an adult, she still made the mistake, if only infrequently. This all meant that she'd been away from her family for so long that she was almost a stranger.

They weren't willing to give up on her though.

"Why don't you sit with us?" Sable offered. "Don't worry, you're an Arc. That's a lifetime pass to hang."

Cori rolled her eyes. It didn't look playful but it was. "Thank you, but I prefer to stand. My suit will get ruined from the dirt and dew." Cori, unlike the other girls, was the only woman in a suit. It was also her formal Atlesian uniform which was her excuse for not having to buy a dress.

Liona made a show of the hem of her dress. "No it won't. See?" It was stained with dirt and loose grass. "Oh, son of a–" Yang, Cori, and Helia leaned in. "–brisket..."

They laughed. Yang and Dahlia shared again in solidarity for their embarrassed sister.

Hess sat herself behind Yang, the older woman's heat radiating warmly. Yang heard her telepathic voice ring in her head. "I can feel you being tense," she said in her mind's ear. "So wound up. Did something happen? I heard you left the rental early with Sable."

"Nothing, really," she thought, still not quite confident that her mother-figure even heard. "We, uh, went to the station to clear up something with some crazy missionary. He's being sent back to Vale, but he managed to shake me up a little."

"Dear, you've had your fair share of crazies. I doubt a crazy missionary would unsettle you this badly… Besides, I felt you being like this since before we left."

Yang didn't reply. She tried to laugh at something Sable said, but it didn't feel real.

"I know you don't want to talk about it, and I won't push," Hess said, leaning back so her head tapped against the back of Yang's. Her warmth bloomed over her shoulders and neck like an invisible hug. "But today is a special day. Let me ease your mind…"

Yang shut her eyes. The warmth blossomed over her body. Her quickened heart steadied and she felt a giddiness that almost felt like she was cheating her own melancholy. It shouldn't have been this easy, but that's what happens when you have a semblance that just makes people feel loved.

"Thanks, Ma…" she mumbled out loud. "I-I mean – !"

Coral pulled away at Yang's sudden – if quiet – outburst. Hess, on the other hand, laughed. "Shh… I know, dear."

Yang snuggled up between them again, warm within a living nest. She shut her eyes and remembered her father. The distant echo of his laughter grew faint against the very real ones around her. It was almost like he was still with her.

And even though she had done all her mourning for her already, she even remembered her mother. Her laugh was a coquettish chortle, brief but telling. Helia Arc had the same laugh if she listened long enough.

"Ruby!" Hess said. Yang's eyes shot open.

"Hey, Aunt Hess. Hi, girls."

It was like a sudden pin drop in an empty room. Ruby barely made a sound when she walked steadily across the grass but she was felt like a change in temperature, rippling across skin. They turned to her, all of them at once, and she looked back at them almost nervous. More uncertain, really.

Yang and her stared at each other but the rest of the girls? They had mixed feelings about her. She was Yang's cousin, the closest blood would allow for a surrogate sister, but she was the furthest from it. They were close as kids, none of them would deny that, but then she grew up, picked up a scythe and – much like her parents – went on a crusade to save the world. All the world sang her praises, but to Yang's pseudo-sisters, Ruby left her to mourn her father alone.

They didn't hate her, but among them, she was the stranger.

"You changed your hair," Ruby said, by way of greeting. She wasn't very good at talking to people.

Yang, despite it all, smiled back at her. "You grew yours out." She stood up, ruffling Liona's hair. "Wanna talk? It's been a while."

»»⋅..⋅««

Yang got grass stuck on the hem of her dress. "Weiss is going to kill me."

"I'd wipe it down but I'm afraid I'll damage it. It looks so flimsy," Ruby said.

"You've just never been in a dress. Trust me, they're a lot sturdier than you think."

Ruby stood aside and gestured to her outfit. She looked like a dystopian knight with all the long loose cloth and armor plating. "This is dust-woven, dust-lined, dust-plated, and government sanctioned, and it's still full of holes. Most things don't survive me." Basically meaning it was top of the line and worth more than some companies but it had tatters and holes, dents and scrapes along the plating on her arms. It was still surprisingly intact considering what she fought day-to-day.

"You're at a wedding. Not at war in the Wilds. I have a spare dress in your size in my duffel bag. You should put it on, maybe let loose a little."

Ruby looked at her cousin's chest and frowned. "I'm not as full a woman as I used to be, Yang." She put her hands underneath her chest plating and something lit up there before mechanisms whirred and the plating came loose. She held it in one hand. Beneath a thick layer of cloth, the curve of her bust was much smaller than Yang remembered.

Yang had hoped her expression was neutral and not deeply, deeply saddened. "You shrunk them again."

"I had to get smaller," she said, hands clasped over her shockingly thin but tightly muscled waist. "I know you haven't noticed but I'm an inch shorter too. I'm faster this way."

Dread hung in the air. "Are they getting faster?" Yang asked slowly.

"Everyday," Ruby said, eyes away. "It's a wonder mom stayed alive as long as she did fighting them. It doesn't help that me and Oscar have been killing them off. I think… I think the rest get stronger when one of them dies."

Ruby looked at the sky wistfully. So did Yang.

They came upon a hill just overlooking one of the outer neighborhoods. Three trees stood there, splaying out like fingers as their roots wound together in knots. This was where they hid when they first saw a White Noise, and saw Qrow and Summer fight it.

The memory was enduring. Fear tended to etch them into bone.

Years ago, a translucent creature hovered over the city, the undulating form of its jelly-like body making it look like the very sky itself was alive. Qrow and Summer zipped across the canopy and collided with its nearly invisible mass. Long swathes of flashing steel crossed like falling stars. Chunks of gelatinous material fell across the island as the beast fell apart. A tentacled hand – its insides gleaming like bottled cosmos – crashed aggressively into an empty school. It was aiming for Summer. That night, it missed.

With the grimm extinct, Remnant has instead been flooded by cryptids. They were a race of monsters born and shaped by human rumors. And the White Noise was the worst of them all. By virtue of its size, the cryptid swallowed skies and haunted cityscapes, destroying everything beneath it.

Yang had dreaded the sight ever since it invaded Patch. There was comfort, however, in knowing that they could be killed, but there was no comfort in knowing that Ruby was one of the last few who could do it.

She, like Qrow and Summer, was born with silver eyes. This made her a rare breed of huntress. A hybrid. The kind that was immune to the downsides of gene mods. A valuable commodity in the three kingdoms. A tool for the safety of the world, but a necessary one.

Yang hated that.

She used to be a sweet young girl who used to envy Yang's height, fight over cookies, and snore on the couch after binging TV. To Ruby, those might have seemed like petty and inconsequential things now. To Yang, it was everything the world robbed of her.

Still, she was here now. They couldn't take this moment from either of them.

Ruby hadn't expected Yang to take her hand as they walked through the edge of the city limits, where the woods were fuller and the people few. She stared at her cousin's back, blonde hair bobbing in the wind.

"Ruby," Yang said without turning. Still walking ahead. "I missed you."

Ruby teared up.

»»⋅..⋅««

"Weiss is going to kill you," Whitley said, nursing a bruise on his cheek as he stared at the grass clutched at the hem of Yang's dress. Wiping it off did nothing to the sudden creeping stain of green and brown. "Maybe get it washed? I'd have a subsonic cleaner ready but Weiss is going to notice if I have it flown over."

Yang groaned as she dusted off the dress. "Can't you hide anything from your sister?"

"At this point, it's a statistical impossibility."

It was mid-afternoon and they sat upon a steep hill with a rock wall that flattened one side of it. They were a ways away from the local church where the wedding proper concluded. Ruby sat with them like a silent statue, her silver eyes flashing. She had cybernetics in her irises that flashed a ring of red. She told them she'd be in a subconscious conference call with Oscar and Penny for a while. Evidently, it was busying – even on vacation – for a superhero.

Pyrrha ran by them, sparing a moment to give Whitley another apology that he waved off with an awkward smile. He tried to tell her that he was fine but he barely finished his sentence when she was already out of earshot.

"You know she's an empath, right?" Yang asked. "She knows it still hurts."

Whitley whimpered into his palms. "My heart can't take this. I'm not used to this kind of attention."

"Don't you get swarmed by the paparazzi all the time?"

"I'm normally on emotional suppressants when I'm at public functions." To maintain their father's stoicism, the Schnee twins took a drug that kept their emotions subdued. It had worn off and Whitley was suffering the full contours of his cheeks as he blushed uncomfortably. "But it's easy when you're trying to ignore people who don't see you as another person. Pyrrha's too nice. I think she actively counteracts the drugs even if we have them on."

Yang rubbed her fingers over a stubborn stain. "That's cause you're in love with her."

"I'm not in love with her," Whitley said too smoothly.

Yang stopped and stared at him. Whitley should have been sputtering and blushing up a storm at the insinuation. He also wasn't keeping his feelings for Pyrrha a secret from them. This wasn't Whitley.

"Weiss?" Yang demanded.

Wide, terrified, eyes met her before Whitley's mouth sighed and he relaxed back into the bench. "Rotting gods…" Weiss cursed under her brother's breath. "Hi, Yang. Yes, I'm upset about the dress. No, this wasn't planned." There was a softness to Whitley's voice that resembled Weiss. It was almost shrill when she emphasized with her brother's vocal chords.

The twins frequently walked, thought, and acted in sync so their brains were basically on the same wavelength. This let the implants in their brains swap consciousness so they could cover each other's weaknesses during meetings and events. It also meant their friends didn't want them body swapping outside of business arrangements.

"What are you two doing switching bodies on vacation?" Yang asked, concerned.

Weiss pointed at the bruise. "My brother was in pain, so I offered to heal it." The bruise flashed briefly with a layer of sparked white.

"Whitley doesn't know how to heal with aura yet?"

"He never took Ren's lesson on it. Too busy learning Pyrrha's shield throw."

"I thought Ren's lesson took weeks at worst to learn. That's plenty of time to come in once or twice." Yang herself learned how to do it in her second session.

"He had trouble learning." She lifted her brother's hand, aura wafted off the skin like smoke. Yang felt its warmth in the short distance between. "He'd frequently told me that it was an area he was sure he had a defect in."

"Ha!" Yang grinned. "Sounds like he wanted to be there longer than he should have."

Weiss let out a single chuckle. It was befitting Weiss and Whitley both. "Trust me, he wouldn't have delayed on purpose. He wants to beat her now. Just once. He's even learning new defensive forms from Jaune as we speak."

"In your body?"

Weiss gave Yang a dangerous look.

"Oh, c'mon," Yang whined, "you can't seriously be offended by that."

"I am not that frail."

"Weiss, you haven't been in a fight ever. You don't have the strength and you barely have the stamina." Yang stood up, prepared to go find her brother. "I need to stop them before he gets you hurt."

"Wait!" Weiss grabbed her arm. "They're not sparring in real life. They're in VR."

Yang sat back down. "Why didn't you say that first?"

"You know I'm sensitive about how weak I am…"

Yang held her hand. "So you lived your life as a civie. You should be happy. You'd be surprised how suffocating being a huntress can be."

"I'm not sure being an heiress has had any more freedom. The only difference is that I've been traveling to exotic locations for business meetings instead of hunts. Besides, that isn't why it bothers me." She stared at her other hand, Whitley's hand, and felt the roughness of every digit with the thumb. "It's about the only thing Whitley and I don't share. I want to try but I know it's too late."

Yang hadn't any answers. She was out of her element, so she squeezed Weiss's hand tighter instead. Weiss didn't squeeze back but leaned her head on her shoulder. "Yang, why are you a mechanic?"

The answer spilled off her tongue. "Because spending your life killing things is precisely the kind of life that stops right here –" she gestured to the island expanding below where, even with them so close to the coast, the city of Patch stretched until it swallowed the horizons as readily as the ocean swallowed the sun. "–on an island of huntsmen. But fixing bikes and cars in Glenn? It makes me feel like I'm contributing in a civilian way. Like I'm a part of it and not one of its staunch defenders like I'm ripped out of some story."

"I didn't take you for one who wanted to be a normal girl."

"Oh, I'm not," she said quickly. "But it lets me live a life that's just Yang. Not Yang Xiao Long."

"It seems we've all a shadow to escape from."

"On our hands and knees if we have to." Yang paused, her expression shifting to realization. "Is that what this is about?"

Weiss didn't answer, eyes locked onto the sea beyond the coast. Yang knew not to press.

Pyrrha leapt onto the short cliff landing in front of them. She blushed suddenly. "Oh! Am I interrupting something?"

They were still holding hands.

Yang rolled her eyes. "It's Weiss."

Pyrrha pouted. "Body swapping on vacation? Please tell me you're not here on business too."

Weiss shook her head softly. "I'm not here as a Schnee. I'm here as Weiss," she said, echoing Yang's sentiments.

"An inherent contradiction," came a grisly, masculine voice as it traveled up the hill. Apolian Arc, Jaune's dad, lumbered his way to them, his wide and girthy frame casting a shadow over their bench. "Being in your brother's body and all."

"Uncle Polly!" Yang greeted.

"Ladies," he said. He leaned down to inspect Whitley's bruise. "Let me have a look at that…" He touched Whitley's cheek. "Really did a number on you, didn't she?" Eyes fell back onto a nervous Pyrrha. "You're lucky she used the other end of the spear for this one."

"I, uh, I didn't," Pyrrha confessed. "It was the flat of my spear tip." Pyrrha doesn't miss like that. Which meant she was deliberately restraining herself but trying not to show it.

"Still holding back on him? He's not gonna like that. Still," – his hand glowed over the swelling. It vanished in seconds – "if you can't trust that he can take you at your worst, then maybe you shouldn't bother with training him at all."

They flinched. Pyrrha, however, steeled herself. "No, I believe in him. He has what it takes."

He smiled. "Then do him a favor and kick his ass."

"I – yes, sir!"

He pat her head. "Good kid."

He turned to Ruby next who blinked and sweat as he stared her down. She blinked too, looking very embarrassed. "How did you know?"

"Your friend Penny was tugging that boy, Oscar, around. He was in that little trance you were just in minutes ago. Then I come up here to find you pretending to still be in a call that wasn't on-going."

Ruby turned sheepishly to the other girls. "Sorry. I, uh, didn't want to interrupt."

Yang grabbed her shoulder and squeezed her into her side. "I'll admit, I'm glad you're still awkward."

Ruby shrunk into her neck. "I don't know how to take that."

"Take it like your sister's making fun of you," Weiss suggested.

"She's not my –" She stopped at the sight of Yang's hopeful smile. Not quite desperate, but reaching out. Despite the distance that chasmed between them. So she pouted and nudged Yang, still latching onto the half-hug.

They laughed and Ruby allowed herself to feel like she belonged.

»»⋅..⋅««

Yang stepped out of her ancestral home in a hurry, her outfit now completely clean, if a little wet. She tried to ignore how the silk clung to her leg. "It'll dry," she thought, but the sun was setting so she'd maybe need some time under the heater lamps.

Ruby waited for her in their yard. There was a flattened patch of dirt there – worn from a decade of spars in their youth – but it was mostly paved over with a field training space; replete with obstacles, mud, training dummies, and climbing walls. There also used to be a garden here but without Tai or Summer alive to take care of it, everything there wilted.

"Hardly looks used," Yang said, kicking a tire only to scatter dust left behind from neglect. "I think Uncle Qrow's been slacking off on their training."

"No…" Ruby sighed, "Dad hasn't had the chance to see to them. Uncle Tai's had them for months."

Yang froze. "Oh…"

"He misses you, Yang," Ruby said. "You should see him more often. He can't spend what's left of his life on someone else's kids."

She stared at nothing, lost in the swirling ephemera of something deeply forgotten. A thousand laughters, quiet warmth huddled in the sheets, little things she could not specifically place but could say, with all the confidence of the inevitable tide, that they happened. A part of her felt that – with a twinge of some monstrous jealousy – that it had been stolen by someone else.

"Maybe tomorrow," she said weakly. Uncertainty wracked her with stillness, adrift without direction.

"Are you taking him with you, then?" Ruby asked behind what she hazarded was a smile. The sadness clung to her eyes still, trapped in a melancholy that had haunted her for years. Ruby hadn't looked young in the longest time. "We can take a ship to Glenn in the morning," she continued, practically begging her to join her. "It'd be a head start from everyone else. It can just be you, me, and Jaune again. We can even hook up Uncle Tai to Jaune's holo-projector. Get him to teach us how he makes his paninis again."

"I… I don't know yet," she answered.

Ruby's half smile held. Then her left temple beeped as it flashed a pale green light beneath her skin. She pressed an index finger to it, accepting the call. A red light rimmed her irises. "Penny…? Ok, calm down… I'm on my way." She looked up at Yang who stood aside and stared off at the yard. Ruby hugged her. "We don't have a lot of family left." Silver eyes, still the largest she'd ever seen, pleaded with innocence unforgotten. "Please see him."

Yang wanted to interject, but she bit her lip and hugged her back instead. Wordlessly they separated.

She eyed the sky above as Ruby left. It was overcast with darkened clouds that spat rain over the invisible hard-light shielding that hung over the city. The Xiao Longs founded the Patch and made every effort to modernize it.

But she longed for the little noises her cut away of home that Patch was: Her uncle groaning on the couch from a hangover. Her mother's panicked screams over burning another meal. Her aunt singing on the porch early in the morning. She'd even missed her father's haggard grunts over chopped wood, of loose sap and burning sunrise.

Her sigh carried those ghosts in the growing cold, misting off her breath, as if the specter itself greeted her.

"Maybe I should go see him…"

She stopped at the door again as her once happy home loomed over her, faint lights over the first floor windows like shifting eyes. It looked haunted. It might as well have been.

Her hand was pressed flush against the door, and the ease of which it gave at her touch was almost inviting. But the allure of it felt wrong, as if walking up there and confronting her father would not lead to any satisfaction. Perhaps more questions. More grief.

Her fists tightened. It was not courage that plunged her into the cold, deathly quiet. It was inevitability.

She was always going to chase his shadow. Even as a ghost. Even as an imitator.

»»⋅..⋅««

Jaune always wished he had grown up in Patch with Yang and Ruby. In his frequent visits, it always felt like a tucked away paradise, where there was a quiet space for every soul. Idyllic in a word. Home in another.

The island's old event center resembled their auditorium at Mount Glenn High, wide and lined with glass walls. Stood outside he could barely hear the muffled tunes blared for the dancing crowds that circled his sister Saphron, and now sister-in-law, Terra.

"They look so happy together," Pyrrha mused beside him as Terra spun her wife and was spun in turn. "Wouldn't you agree?"

"You asking me or Adrian?"

Pyrrha wiggled a finger in front of the surprisingly behaved baby in her arms. "Adrian," she answered. "You've talked up this wedding so much that I was even starting to wonder if you forgot I was your plus one. Or that you were actually supposed to attend it."

Jaune blushed. "To be fair, even Yang almost forgot to prepare for the wedding." He eyed Terra with a longing he knew he should no longer feel. "Besides, can you blame me? This means more huntsmen. We're in such short supply nowadays and… Terra wants another kid." Jaune couldn't decide if he was excited or so very not. His face, like all of him, was restless.

Pyrrha held her smile even when she felt it waver. In her arms, Adrian looked up at her passed his dusty blonde hair and big blue eyes. Jaune's eyes.

Adrian tilted his head away and reached for Jaune and he took the baby gently. He swelled with adoration and pride that was separate of anything that had to do with Terra. Adrian was biologically his son, the product of him being the donor, but it sparked an envy in Pyrrha that she struggled to swallow.

She and Jaune were almost woven together since their chance meeting in high school, both the prodigal huntsmen in their respective lines. With how often they were together, if her family was more traditionally Mistrali, she might have been betrothed to him. Not that there was a universe where she would have been opposed to the arrangement, but in this world she was always the second woman in his eyes. Some might even say the third.

Jaune sidled alongside her so quickly that it startled her. "Look at that," he said looking elsewhere from either her or Adrian.

She expected to follow his eyes to Terra but, instead, saw their reflection against the glass wall behind some loose drapes. In her arms, Adrian reached to take her hand. "We're like a family," Jaune said, almost knowing, almost sad, but optimistic.

Pyrrha, at that, dared to hope.

Jaune was trying to reciprocate her feelings, and even though he knew he wasn't in love with her just yet, it was only a matter of time.

She'd taken a few notes from Yang after all. She'd learned ways to expedite the process. "I don't know, Jaune," she said, turning on the charm and the bedroom eyes, "I love little Adrian, but I think I'd like one of my own."

Jaune had gone stiff, blushed even. Pyrrha felt a tingle in her nerves that she knew he was feeling.

A camera snapped.

"Sorry," Terra said, "but this is a good picture." She and Saphron snickered as they came up to them and showed off the telling photo. "I hope your flirting's been tame around my son's juvenile little ears?"

"Nothing of the sort," Pyrrha dismissed quickly before Jaune could correct her. "We were just admiring the view."

"Sounds like flirting to me," Saphron added, much to Jaune's growing embarrassment. "He's smart for his age though. Can read the mood in the room better than most people." Adrian did have to tendency to stay quiet when needed. It was almost supernatural.

"Didn't think either of us had any empath in our blood," Jaune said, hoping he sounded nonchalant.

"I don't think he is. We Cottas have a history of psychics but never as empaths."

"I'd argue that puts your family closer to them…"

Jaune and Terra continued as Pyrrha tuned them out. As both a telemagnetic psychic and an empath, she had everything to add to the conversation but chose to leave them be and step back.

Saphron took one of her hands and gave her a sympathetic smile. "Little brother's still got his head in the clouds, huh?"

"At least he's focused in other areas," Pyrrha defended with a shrug, easing the tightness in her stomach. "He's doing very well in university."

"Hm… You know, if you followed him into Medicine, you two would have spent more time together. Might have even shared his room in that house of his."

"Oh no, we spend enough time together as it is. He's not even surprised when we wake up next to each other anymore." Pyrrha resisted the urge to slam her teeth shut. She shouldn't have said that. As if she couldn't get any redder.

Saphron blinked. "I am so sorry, I didn't think he'd be so dense. I thought he got over that in high school."

Pyrrha looked away, not sure she could look her in the eyes for this one. "He, uh, he did. He knows how I feel about him and when I – gods alive – when I goad him enough he… he…"

"Returns the favor?" Saphron suggested, eyes widening when Pyrrha nodded. "All this time? But why aren't you two together yet?"

Pyrrha winced. "I don't think he's processed his feelings yet," she said, a sideward glance cast to the man she loved and the woman he was still in love with. "Besides, he's still got a lot to sort through. Says it'd be unfair to make it official if he had eyes elsewhere."

Jaune and Terra laughed when Adrian pulled on his nose, and in the reflection in the glass, it almost looked like the image fit.

Saphron gave Pyrrha a half hug, their expressions matching. She didn't just have sympathy for Pyrrha, they shared a camaraderie, what with Jaune stood there with her wife and their son. It wasn't that she felt that Jaune could ever take Terra from her, but when they talked about Adrian she felt like she was on the outside of that conversation… just like she was now.

Lips dry and unbalanced on her own heels, Pyrrha almost mindlessly opened her mouth to speak. "Saph, you think I – ?"

"Saph?" the older woman chimed. "Getting pretty familiar with me, aren't you, Nikos?" she teased.

Her hands waved in a panic. "I – I'm sorry, I – !"

Saphron took those frantic hands and gave her an easy smile these Arcs were somehow maddeningly adept at. "It's okay. In fact, keep doing it. It's like you're another step closer."

When relief washed over her, she realized some of the apprehension she was feeling wasn't all her own, or even just Saphron's. Jaune had been glancing her way, checking on her. She was feeling his concerns too.

Jaune and Terra chose that moment to rejoin them. Terra took her wife away – both of them winked back at Pyrrha. Adrian waved.

Jaune took Pyrrha's wrist, the feel of his hand over hers was warm like the sun cast over a groaning valley.

"We should dance," he said, determined and apologetic passed his uncertain smile. "I've had enough baby talk and I can tell there's a few things you want to say."

There wasn't a hint of hesitation to him when he led her to the dance floor, and she relished in his genuine concern but mostly at his quiet affection that she felt radiate off of him. Not love, but almost. Close enough to carve a smile over her vanishing gloom.

She stopped before they even stepped into the entryway. Something else was tugging at her heart. Someone was feeling a lot of things all at once and it was practically screaming at her.

"Pyr?" Jaune followed her eyes to the Xiao Long household up the hill. There they saw Yang stood by the door. She was tense and steely as she wrenched the door open and disappeared into it. She looked like the genesis of a rampage.

"What happened?" he asked.

She felt Yang being strung along by a deep pain in her chest. "She's upset, Jaune."

Jaune glanced back at the ballroom then back at her. "Are you sure?"

Pyrrha let the fact that he was still thinking about her sink in. She took that moment's breath to smile at him. "Yes. I'm very sure."

He was thankful, she felt as much off him when he took her hand pulled her to the house. "I'll make it up to you."

"I can think of a number of ways you can do that," she teased.

He gasped, blooming red.

»»⋅..⋅««

Inside, the living room was pierced by moonlight streamed passed the dusty old windows. Yang ignored the silhouettes she swore she saw in her mind's eye, of her family waiting in the spaces between.

The steps leading into the second floor vanished halfway into an oppressive darkness. When she was younger she used to be afraid of that lightless passage, but she'd conquered it since. Her fingers traced the walls and found the notches she and Ruby carved into it when they were thirteen. Like guide lines in a blizzard.

Midway down the path were two bedrooms, labeled Rose opposite Xiao Long, but not Branwen. That was a name her mother readily abandoned, and her uncle had – with some estranged conviction – held onto. "It's worth something," he'd said. "Enough to keep, but not to pass on. Shit's like a curse. You're all better off leaving that burden with me."

Branwens didn't wait for the reaper. They never died of age. Her mother proved that.

Down the path was her and Ruby's old bedroom. Furthest from the approach so their parents could protect them. Yang didn't go there, afraid to see the cobwebs and left behind things that might reflect some neglect on her part.

She was transfixed on the Rose labeled door as faint light trickled through the gap beneath.

She pushed through the door and found her uncle laid on his side of the bed unceremoniously, empty flask in hand. Several wine bottles were scattered across floor beside him. One hung off his draped digits. Summer's side of the bed was untouched, neatly flat, nigh immaculate.

At the other end of the room was his boyfriend, Clover, who sat on a stool against the vanity. He was asleep too, eyes worn and his dress shirt damp with tears. The man he loved was hung up on the woman he lost, and he'd spent their time together trying to fill the space she left behind. An attempt frequently met with failure.

Yang almost didn't enter. She didn't know what she wanted to say to Clover, but anything that would have amounted to 'don't do this to yourself' would have sufficed. Any hesitation melted away at the slumped, barely held-together state of him. Clover needed saving.

"Can't leave well enough alone, can't you?" Qrow asked, scaring her. She bit her tongue to swallow a curse.

She glared at her disheveled uncle. His eye peeked over his sleeve, rimmed red from his fitful sleep.

"Why did you bring him up here?" she asked.

"I didn't." Qrow's bones creaked and his muscles groaned as he righted himself and sat on the bed's edge. "He followed me in here while I was asleep. I just wanted some time alone with my thoughts…" A tired eye rose to meet his niece, and somehow his gaze still managed to soften. "Up here to see your old man?"

"He's not – !"

"– Alive?" Qrow nearly laughed, held it in a chuckle burrowed in his throat. "Just cause Tai ain't in a human body doesn't mean he's not livin' it up. Just ask the kids that go in there to train with him. Same old Tai, last I saw. He'd have picked a favorite brat if he didn't hope you'd come around and spar with him again, maybe show you off to the little shits." He took a swig. The flask was empty.

"I –"

He raised his hand.

She shut up.

"I don't actually care right now if you agree with me or not. Thing is, you're up here and it wasn't to find me at my lowest."

She didn't know which one she had broiling inside her that pushed her to answer, she just knew she didn't like it. "Fine, I came here to see… it," she said, tasting venom.

"Yang, don't be like that…"

"Why not!" Clover was roused by Yang's outburst. She ignored him with a steadied breath and a hand gripped over the vanity, old wood creaking ever so slightly. "He died out there in Vale, Qrow, and no microchip drowned in Dad's brain is going to convince me he survived that city! Whatever is in that room is a thing… not a person." She breathed. Heaved through the sullen air with difficulty as her bile simmered. Fear mixed deeply with anger till it was less cocktail and more molotov.

Qrow rubbed a thumb over his flask, over the rose engraving on one side. He wished Summer was here to lend him her wisdom. "Maybe," he said finally, "but I'm sure even his ghost would want you to see him. He wasn't put there to teach huntsmen-in-training how to throw a punch. They put him there for us. For closure."

She crossed her arms, scoffing. "You don't looklike you've found it."

He chuckled darkly. "I got a wife, a sister, and a best friend in the ground." He got up and walked over. "No one said a ghost in a machine was going to make it any better, but it could have been so much worse. I chose it over nothing at all. At least I got to say my goodbyes…" He hobbled a step before he found his balance, his affinity with inebriation as natural as a handshake between friends. He stood between Yang and the drowsy Clover, a sympathetic hand for his stubborn niece. She waited for his excuse – anything to be said in an attempt to quell what boiled inside of her – but she didn't find one under the swollen sockets of his broken gaze, drunk on sorrow rather than wine. "Maybe don't do it for him…" he said slowly, "but find it in yourself to do it for you."

"Q-Qrow?" Clover mumbled as he was hoisted to his feet, his boyfriend's arm slung across his shoulders.

"C'mon, golden boy. Winter will kill me if I bring you back like this. There's coffee at a place by the docks. I'll treat you. Sound like fun?"

"Mm…"

With a flick of his wrist, a swirl of feathers spun around them, his semblance manifesting. A gust followed before they vanished in the black haze. It seemed Qrow saved her the embarrassment of answering him. Ever the one with a quick escape; another confrontation left hanging.

Yang didn't want to be alone with her thoughts. She left just as hastily.

There was a dull glow from the Xiao Long door. The machine inside was never off.

When she entered, she almost thought she was in the wrong room. It looked nothing like she remembered.

A span of metal walls covered what used to be fading wallpaper, once scrawled with crayon and hastily written cartography calculations. A broken circle of tangled wires, tatami mats, and neural headsets shaped like crowns with glowing blue gems spanned the floor where there was once an old carpet with its faded colors; the swirls and flourishes in its design a younger Yang once swore hid dragons in its patterns. And at the end of the room where a sturdy queen-sized bed had sat was replaced with a leaned-back metallic chair with a neural interface crooned over its head like a steel claw with blinking blue nails.

There was no familiarity in the room. Even the shape was wrong. It wasn't a place that felt lived in.

Pressed against the wall behind the metal chair was a bulky machine where all the wires ended at a port on its side. And atop it, beneath a glass dome was what was left of her father, a memory chip encased with a pale pink liquid – the melted remains of Taiyang's brain. The thing that pretended to be her father.

Her fists tightened. Loosened. Tightened again. Gone slack at the last with her steadied breath. She refused to cry.

Taiyang died a long time ago in Vale. She'd already gone through the grief, had already accepted his death. When they came to her with this only days after the funeral, it felt like a slap to the face. His brain survived, but that was a piece of a corpse. It wasn't a person. It wasn't him.

Fleetingly, she considered sitting in the chair and meeting him in the virtual, but she buried the thought. On top of confronting a digital clone, it would put her through that grief again. It might not even help. If anything, she could come out worse for it but Qrow's quiet plea to make peace with it anyway brought her hand to the machine's console. It buzzed to life, requesting a password she hadn't bothered to ask for. It was almost a relief. A blockade, an excuse to walk away. Her foot scraped back, and her heel made contact with one of the headsets.

She stared at it. She almost forgot that he had students here. His students. Their teacher.

They came frequently, and every visit further eroded what was left of her father because a liquidized brain could only survive for so long under constant use. Forward into another death she'd have to live with. A selfish and hypocritical part of her wouldn't allow it.

Her hand clasped over the glass dome. It was made of refined earth dust, a Schnee invention. More bulletproof than bulletproof glass. It would hold if she tried to shatter it… so she took to tearing the machine apart instead. A fist raised and clenched till her knuckles were white and her nails dug into her palms. She roared as she dented the side of the machine, the reverberation of the impact surged over her aura.

It hurt to scream, but it hurt more to leave him.

»»⋅..⋅««

Color Sense. That's what Yang called Jaune's semblance when they were kids and it stuck. He saw everything in the world in bold, single colors. Concrete was the cold shade of the dullest blue, trees were vividly green down to the bark and up to their fruits, and the moon and sun were indistinguishable balls of plasmic white. They normally stayed one color until people got involved.

People didn't have the same single colors though. They were usually a shade of their skin all around but when emotions intensified, they glowed in a myriad of shades. They had a friend before, Ilia, who was very much like that.

Pyrrha's palpable concern for Yang shaded her in a dull grey, but once they walked astride and she felt his hand touch hers, she glowed pink. Pink was passion and embarrassment, two states – he found – that she was frequently in.

Jaune stood at the door and saw Yang's hand print pressed against it. It was glowing faintly in a dull red. Anger and sadness both. His semblance picked out the way people felt when interacting with things. It wasn't always there. Someone really had to feel something deeply to leave imprints.

He pushed passed the door.

To Pyrrha, the living room was dark and dusty.

To Jaune, the room was aflush with an oppressive and gloomy blue. It hung off the walls, drapes, and furniture like ice, clung like a pale sheet and dripping off the edges. All in varied hues from teal to navy blue. Even the shifting dust resembled snowflakes.

He stepped into it and didn't quite feel cold so much as he felt alone. The room seemed old but unlived in, lonely and unwelcome, as if the souls that trekked and breathed into its spaces were ripped out of it. He remembered when it used to be a happy home. When it was orange, yellow, and gold. Warmth filling every space. A home as it should have been.

Pyrrha stood at the doorway, staring at him as he was steeped in the deep dark of the unlit room, save for the rivulets of light that cast through the dusty windows and faintly against his side. She didn't move to join him.

"Aren't you coming?" he asked her.

"Jaune, it's dark in here."

He looked around. "I-Is it?" he asked sheepishly. It was easy to forget that Jaune couldn't tell a dark room from a lit one. A consequence of his semblance.

"I can't see in the dark like you can," Pyrrha said, her smile aglow from the doorway. "Just go on without me. I'll only slow you down. Just get to her and we'll take care of her together."

"Are you sure?"

"Oh, don't worry about me. I'll be here when you get back. Promise." Her wink sank his heart, because he knew what kind of courage it took to show such open affection without stumbling over herself.

She shut the door behind her. Faintly, he heard her ring up Ren and Nora, who were in Vale on family business, whatever that meant. He heard their daughter, An, squeal happily over the scroll. Pyrrha would be alright.

He wished he knew how he felt about her. His semblance never worked on himself and it would have been useful just to know if he loved her for certain, but that's why he depended on Yang to help sort out his feelings.

He stepped into the kitchen where he saw the sink glimmer with patches of yellow, the mark of a fresh imprint undisturbed by much else. Fingers of grass Yang had gotten stuck on her gown were scattered over the damp floor. Looked like she used the sink sprayer down here instead of going upstairs. 'Figures she didn't want to go upstairs passed her folks' room,' he thought.

Yang wailed from above. For some reason she was up there after all.

He briskly left the room to take the stairs. He waved a concerned Pyrrha off when she winced at him through the window.

The dark hallway was splattered in a kaleidoscope of color, twisting and turning like a rotating tunnel. Emotional imprints like these were normally static – like Yang's hand print on the door and sink – but when they were in motion like this, that meant Yang was bursting with them. He plunged into that vortex of color till he found them funneling into the cracks of a bedroom door.

When he opened it, he saw Yang and the mess of emotions she was; a silhouette of burning colors surging in errant beauty. The dull grey of grief, the burning anger of red, the sickly green of envy, all ricocheted off her fists as they collided against the thickness of the machine she pummeled.

She paused before her colors warped into the blood orange of vermilion. Frustration. The machine was dented and beat but it was not broken, and her prize was still out of reach.

She struck again. The bleeding of her knuckles was always red.

»»⋅..⋅««

Yang had hoped that taking the memory chip would have been one and done but she'd forgotten what built the damn thing. Atlas had a habit of making things sturdy.

She made little progress and it had fought back. Her knuckle would take a while to heal before she could go out in public again. The irony of it was that it resembled Taiyang's unwillingness to go easy on her. The thought would have stung if it had any time to sink in.

She'd managed a single somber chuckle. Weakness sagged into her arms. She felt weak. Defeated.

Then a broadsword stabbed into the machine, just below the glass dome.

"C'mon," said Jaune beside her, "it's mech steel. Gonna need a second pair of hands to wrench it open." He smiled, both nonchalant and warm, a goofy surprise out of nowhere.

And in that instant, he'd defused her. Tossed her fears back far enough in her mind so she could remember to laugh and think herself embarrassed. With their hands on either guard and joined at the grip, they pushed Crocea Mors down till the glass popped out like wine cork.

Jaune made a show of his weapon and spun it in his hands. "Some things require a little more finesse, Xiao Long," he teased.

"Then why haven't you beaten me in the ring yet, Arc?" she shot back.

"Hey, that's not fair! I'm still picking up hand-to-hand. Let me put a sword in your hands we'll see who hits the mats first."

She hugged him suddenly. A hand pressed gently against her back. "…Yang?"

She sighed with a shudder. Her heaving heart quieted.

He saw her color normalize into a deep, even gold.

"Tell me what I'm feeling," she said, almost whimpering. Breath tickling his earlobe.

"Calm," he said slowly, running a hand down her back and over her hair. Her arms unraveled from his neck and onto his chest, but he felt her flinch when her fingers grazed the metal sheath poking out of the back of his collar. "Warm too, I'm guessing?"

"You're a furnace." She chuckled. "You need to fix that sheath of yours."

He shrugged. "Maybe when we get back to the mainland. I'll visit Vale." He slotted the blade back into the sheath beneath his blazer, the mechanized whirrs of the machine cooling the steel as it locked into his back.

"Too bad there's no decent forge in Glenn," she mused, glued to the center of his chest instead of his eyes. "Please don't go there alone. Vale is still a cesspool." She clutched his lapels.

"I'll take Whitley, maybe see the guys too. Make it a boy's night. I'll send you embarrassing pictures. Promise."

"Good." She smiled. He'd defused her again. "Blake and Em would hate it if you left them out though. Neo too. Expect spiked drinks and other sabotage."

Jaune laughed. "Tempting. Now it just sounds like they'll just make the night interesting. Permission to stupid and leave the girls out?"

"If you wake up in a dumpster with drawn-on moustache, I expect documentation."

She turned to the now exposed machine as it hummed quietly, as if her father was patiently waiting for her. With a single, labored breath, she plucked the memory chip from the machine. The tiny, octagonal thing sat squarely in her palm. Like thin ice, it looked fragile, felt weightless, as if it might crumble and melt in the heat of her hand.

"I thought you didn't believe machines had souls," Jaune said. "Why did you even go through the trouble?"

She shrugged, uncertainty in her half-hearted smile. "I'll tell you when I figure it out myself."

»»⋅..⋅««

Dressed in a suit just half a size too large, Jaune looked disarmingly normal. It was by design, as he specified as such to Whitley's tailor. None of his muscles bulged, his cybernetics tucked away in his sleeves, and his blade – always at the ready – sat snugly beneath his jacket. Among the Arcs, he seemed the most approachable; the least threatening. So when a bunch of suitors wanted to be introduced to the Arc sisters – blonde hair and blue eyes were apparently exotic on Patch – they asked him to do it.

They were surprised to find him unyielding.

"I'm sorry. I can tell you now that she isn't interested," he said to a dejected suitor who slumped away in embarrassment. Jaune waited for the prying eyes around him to respectfully look away before he pivoted and returned to the bar where Sky was admiring his girlfriend, Coral, from afar.

"Another one down?" Sky asked, adjusting the collar on his Atlesian dress suit.

"Asked for Coral," Jaune said, clasping the neck of his waiting glass and sipping his strawberry sunrise.

Sky's face scrunched, eye twitching. "Tell me you told him off."

"Her," Jaune corrected. "Fan of her work too." Coral didn't like meeting her fans. Her pen name was outed years ago and she'd been avoiding the public. As if she didn't spend enough time in-doors… "But no, I turned her down like a normal person."

"Like you did that last one?" Sky drawled sarcastically.

Jaune quirked a brow at him.

"Your fist was shaking," Sky explained. "Yang nearly jumped in."

"He thought Dahlia was nineteen." Jaune sipped his drink again. Thankful, at least, for the tenth parts alcohol. The buzz was quiet and subdued, but he was a lightweight and the flush to his cheeks was equally subtle. "I told him she was seventeen. He apologized and left. It was a mistake on his part."

Dahlia was across the way, whispering something to a giggling Liona who – for the life of her – could not contain herself. Dahlia had a rich brush of dark skin, and her faded blonde curls made her stand out even amongst the Arcs. She stood straight and proper, looking more woman than girl.

"She looks our age. I guess I can see that," Sky said. "Still, I would've knocked his lights out of him on the spot just at the mention of her. I wish I had your restraint."

"Restraint implies I'm holding something back. I just have a lot of patience." He meant he was a pacifist outside of a spar, but saying so often embarrassed him.

"One of these days, Jaune, you're gonna find someone who'll deserve it. Can't be a pacifist with sisters this hot and a best friend who looks like one of them." Sky took stock of the room, spying the curious array of unfamiliar faces just lounging about. Suitors, all of them. "Would've cleared the room if you did too. All these people just waiting for something to happen. It's either one of them gets lucky or one of us gives them reason to not stick around. I know this event center is for public use but maybe we could have convinced Port that this was supposed to be a private reception."

"I don't know about you two," said Cori who appeared out of nowhere, "but I'm enjoying the extra company." She took a gulp from her flask but there was fragrance to it that made it hard to tell if it was alcoholic. "Also, I agree with Mr. Lark. I'd have floored him if he so much as said her name."

"You can call me Sky, y'know?"

Cori grabbed his cheek and shook it like a grandmother would her grandchild. "Not on your life, cadet."

She smiled and Jaune secretly loved it. She noticed – her smile turning nervous – and he turned away so as to not embarrass her further.

"I'll be off," she said, rolling her shoulders. "I feel I should retire early…" Cori paused mid-stride. Her eyes flashed gold for just a moment. "I… no."

"Another hint?" Jaune asked.

Sky leaned in. "Hint?"

"It's her semblance. She gets a hint on whether or not she should be doing something."

"That sounds useful."

"Often detrimental," Cori said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "What my semblance believes is 'good for me' is completely arbitrary. I've embarrassed myself at enough gatherings to know that I'd much rather hide my lack of social skills than be forced to adapt them."

"Still not seeing a downside. You can still leave whenever you want, can't you?"

Cori looked at Sky then at Jaune. "He makes a point. What do you think, little brother?"

"I think you should do what you want."

"Ah," Cori paused for long enough for it to feel awkward. "As indecisive as ever, I see. It's no wonder Pyrrha isn't an Arc yet."

"C-Cori!"

Sky howled and slapped Jaune in the back.

Cori pinched his cheek and shook it like she did with Sky. "I only jest." She looked away, at the end of the room. Jaune's eyes followed hers to find Pyrrha and Yang mingling with their mother, Hess. "But you've already lost one girl to that fickle little thing you call love. Just take it, would you?"

Jaune slumped back as his sister left. "Maybe I should just…" He caught sight of Terra with Adrian again, sat at a different table. He couldn't help but stare, and his mind screamed at him to look away. There was a pulse at the back of his head, like a headache he knew was coming. It told him to leave them be. It wasn't like he was hoping for anything, but it was like his heart was in denial.

"I'm proposing," Sky said, shocking Jaune.

"What?"

Sky snorted, smiling too wide in embarrassment. "Yeah… Was even gonna ask Saph to toss the bouquet my way but I think I'll just bring her outside and just… ask? What do you think?"

"She'd prefer it private, yeah." Jaune said before he stopped and squinted at him. "Are you… are you not even going to ask my permission?"

"Ha! Like you'd say no."

"I could."

"What! C'mon, man, what else have I got to prove?"

"Not to me. And Coral can decide for herself. It's about you. Are you ready?"

Sky crossed his arms. "I'm about to propose," he said proudly, as confident as any spry young man so painfully in love with his first girlfriend. "Hell yeah, I'm ready!"

Jaune nodded solemnly. "So, I'm assuming you have a safeword?"

Color drained from his face. "A… A what?"

Jaune nodded again. He pat Sky's shoulder. "Good luck."

Pulling away from the bar, Jaune made a beeline to Pyrrha. She glanced his way – likely sensing him empathically – and she turned pink under his semblance. She looked away, unable to hold her cool as she peeked glances at him. Yang looked between them. She was brimming yellow – for joy – and it was a relief to see it. Her smile (like Pyrrha's) was equally alluring, beckoning.

Then he was blocked bodily by a blue-haired man in an expensive suit.

"Jaune Arc, I presume?" the man asked, hand outstretched. He was stood at a distance, just far enough for Jaune's hand to reach. "Henry Marigold. CEO of the Gold Standard. Of luxury cars and leading the steel trade," he said, sounding like a sales pitch.

When Jaune took his hand to shake it, he was surprised to find a roughness to his palm and a prominent cut scarred along his pinkie to his wrist. These were practiced hands, used to labor. He was almost impressed at what was clearly an upstate noble unlike the rest.

He allowed himself to listen.

"I'm here to present my availability to your twin sister, Joan. I heard she was poorly dressed and so very clever. I had to meet her."

Jaune glanced over Henry's shoulder to Joan. Like him, she was dressed spartan. Her gown was unflattering and reused from prom. It was very slightly larger than it should be, making room for the dual short swords and steel parma tucked into her back. Her shoulder-length hair was wild and unkempt. Her posture slacked and improper. But she moved with a vibrancy that belonged to her, born under the setting sun so she could bottle that sunlight and flood it in her veins.

"Why her?" Jaune asked. He knew why Joan could make someone happy, but did he? "Two of my sisters are already established in the upstate. A circuit racer and an Atlesian specialist. Why ask to meet the one in a prom dress? Did you know her?"

"We've never met, but I've recently come to the understanding that people like her do not hide themselves behind lies. There's a lot of posturing with the upstate, you can imagine. My cousin has grown tired of it and, as a consequence in mutual clarity, so have I." At this admission, Henry's hands shook ever so slightly as he stared through Jaune instead of at him. He seemed deeply troubled.

"Are you in love with her?"

He chuckled. "Gods, no. But I've come to desperately need someone like her." Henry pulled out a business card of all things. "She may call me whenever she likes, but I'll wait by the terrace if she wishes to meet me tonight."

Henry seemed bizarre and a little full of himself but he seemed to see Joan for who she was. Maybe she was the reflection of someone else in his life. And though normally that didn't mean much, he was the only one who asked for Joan specifically. "You know you can try talking to her yourself. If she thinks you're worth your salt, you can go out there with her. I'll warn you, she's a little wild."

Henry smiled. "Nothing a little gene modding can't fix."

Jaune's body froze, heart lurching. "…W-What? No, no. In case you haven't heard, she's a huntress. A proud one. Silver – I mean, gene modding – doesn't mix very well with our aura."

"I'm aware but the proud era of huntsmen is fading," Henry said, tone sincere still. "There haven't been any grimm for centuries and cryptids aren't nearly as numerous by comparison. Silver is the way of the future. Huntsmen are our past."

Jaune could tell that Henry wasn't trying to be insulting. He appeared genuinely convinced that gene modding made normal people equals to huntsmen in a fight. "Look, I don't like sounding like I have a superiority complex, but you Silvers can't fight cryptids like we do. Doesn't matter that you can punch harder, think faster, or can thicken your skin. Aura protects huntsmen in ways gene modding can't yet. A watchman can still tear you in half."

Henry sighed. "We can agree to disagree, but I'll not have the decisions in my household dictated by someone else or their traditions."

"Household? You're thinking way too far ahead, pal. You haven't even met yet."

"It's all but certain, isn't it? What huntress wouldn't want to wed into the upstate? I'll be securing her future, taking her from a life of blood and guts into nothing but luxury."

Jaune wanted to say that it was more than slaying monsters, more than glory. It was invaluable work, thinning out the cryptids that stalked the settled lands, but that's not what his stance had to be. He didn't need to defend huntsmen around the world. It was Joan he needed to stand behind. "And if that's not what she wants?" he asked.

"How can that not be what she wants? What madness compels anyone to a life of peril? You huntsmen throw your lives away for pointless causes, all to reclaim a heroism that means even less! You should see that by now. How can you not! One of your friends is an orphan now because of it and another is a shadow of himself because he thinks he's less capable without aura!"

Jaune thought of Yang and Ren. His teeth grit, clenched beneath the flat line of his sealed lips.

Henry stepped closer, glowering with anger but also with a broken softness that told him that it was also deeply desperate. "I refuse to let my family be attached to a legacy doomed to die."

Jaune's semblance shaded Henry in red, but there was a melancholic blue that shifted over his skin till it nearly engulfed him completely. His admission was wrought from someplace personal.

But he demanded that he also take Joan's agency, so Jaune buried his sympathy. He leaned in, eyes narrow. "Then maybe you should look somewhere else."

Henry's eye twitched, but he smothered whatever bile he had left and settled back into a subdued state. Then he pulled out his glove, and slapped Jaune across the face. "Jaune Arc! I demand satisfac – HUNGH!"

A fist practically caved his face in.

Yang shook her knuckle as she stared down at the now unconscious Henry laid out on the floor. She hadn't expected to knock him out.

She was then very aware at the amount of eyes on them. Most of the suitors had fled from the spectacle, but the majority now were familiar faces – friends and family – now wondering that was all about.

She chuckled awkwardly at the crowd around them before her eyes fell on Jaune who kept his arms crossed and his brow raised. "Eh, too much?" she asked.

"I'd say so but I'll thank you for coming in my defense. It wasn't strictly necessary but I know you can't help it." Jaune swallowed the twinge of guilt in him.

"Well someone had to defend your honor," she joked, still brimming yellow, still happy.

"I see chivalry isn't dead," Jaune said. "I guess this means I owe you a dance."

She tapped her cheek. "I'd settle for a kiss, milady."

He did so. She giggled.

"We should probably –" Yang glanced at Henry then did a double take at the empty floor "– Where'd he go!?"

"Probably scuttled off to his high-rise. C'mon, I wanna forget about him right now."

They made their way to Pyrrha and Hess who were stood by their table. Sable was there too, but she was slumped over it with a bottle in her hand and dressed in a muddy racing suit.

Sable's eye peeked out at them. "Should have decked him yourself, little brother."

Jaune raised his hands. "I just don't like fighting people."

"You spar all the time!"

"Give it up, Skids," Yang said. "He won't even spar with me when he's mad. Even if I'm not the one he's mad at."

"Hey," Jaune said, "I just don't want it to be personal."

Hess sighed dramatically. "Nine kids and my only son is a pacifist."

'Nine?' Yang paused at that then pointed at herself, mouthing 'me?'

"Yes, dear. You too. Every bit another daughter." She picked up her neck of wine and let it swirl. "Though, the gods know the in-law ship has sailed on that."

Everyone blushed. Sable laughed. "Ha!"

Yang's hair was a mess at this point, one eye lost in the jungle of her locks.

"Still," Hess said as she pushed Yang's bangs behind her ear, "if you're to stand with my daughters, you'd do well to look your best."

"I'll certainly try."

"Good. I've already given up hope for Joan and Jaune." She glanced at Sable still cradling her head and her drink. "Might have with Sable, too, were it not for Kali. Apparently Mirror-Mirror said the grease was part of her charm. Now it's a trend."

"Which is weird cause that journalist was an asshole," Sable said.

Jaune glared at her but couldn't bring himself to tell her not to curse. She gave him a cheeky grin.

Sable grabbed his wrist. "Quit pouting, it'll wrinkle that pretty face of yours." She slid her bottle to him. "Give it a swig! Take the edge off!"

He took the proffered bottle. It had a crystalline pattern with a golden brown glass that resembled amber. It likely should have ended in a gem-like cap but that, unsurprisingly, was missing.

"Vacuan Diadem. Plucked nectar of a dead kingdom! Too bad all those crazy fucks are dead." She shoved it into his chest. "Drink up! They'll never make that stuff again. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity!"

"You know they make these in the Vacuan embassies, right?" Yang said. "Just cause they lost a kingdom doesn't mean they're all dead. You have a sister who is literally from there."

She pressed a finger to Yang's lips. "Shhh! You'll ruin the mystique. I almost had him too."

"No you didn't," Jaune maintained, carefully putting down the very expensive bottle. "You know I'm a lightweight. Besides, tonight is supposed to be memorable." He looked at Pyrrha. Their eyes followed. "I don't want to forget any of it."

Hess snickered. "Is, huh? Watch your tone, son. It's starting to sound like tonight's highlight has yet to come."

"I – I mean! I didn't – !" Jaune sputtered.

"Is it?" Pyrrha asked, quieting the rest as they stared at him.

He didn't notice them. Only her. "Yeah," he said, breathlessly and forgetting himself. "I promised."

The bedroom eyes between them stayed for a whole minute before Yang rolled hers and grabbed them by the arms. She shoved them in the direction of the dance floor. "You two are gonna make me sick. Dance already! I'll get mine later. From both of you."

"I should go too," Hess announced, waving her scroll. Kali was on the video feed, waving at them.

Left alone with Yang, Sable frowned.

They watched as Jaune and Pyrrha swung each other expertly, carrying each other's weight in their momentum. Stopping once only to pivot, swing, twirl, and hold. They were as dazzling as planets caught in each other's orbit.

"You cool with this?" Sable asked, sounding very much sober all of the sudden.

Yang huffed. "Why do you people always think I still have feelings for him? It's over. We're over. And we're okay with that."

She sounded so genuine that Sable nearly tore herself apart for it. Her face scrunched up, her frown deepened. "I'm sorry," she said. "If I had gotten Saph to come clean about her and Terra, Jaune wouldn't have latched himself onto someone else. Shit, if things cleared, you'd have been back together in no time." Sable's face practically melted into the tablecloth

Yang looked her over. She wasn't mad. In all honesty, she didn't much care. It happened the way it did and she didn't torment herself with it. "You had your reasons."

"I did," she admitted, "but it's not like I ever stood a chance." She pulled herself up, not bothering with the bottle. "I got uncle James and uncle Hazel to let me try out the buggies out of their stockpile. Pulled fresh from the ruins in Vacuo. They're vintage. Sturdy. The kind that used to kill grimm when they were still around. You should come with me. Give 'em a spin."

"I'm gonna pass on that, Skids. I don't think I could beat you anyway."

"C'mon, I swear I won't use my semblance. I'm not the same girl who crashed into your garage. I do street races fair and square!"

"But you cheat on the circuit?"

"Everyone cheats on the circuit. Not getting caught is part of the sport." It was an upstate pastime. If you didn't grasp at every edge, you weren't playing hard enough.

"I'll never look at your races the same way again…"

Sable grabbed her bottle again, her face reflected in its amber sheen. She didn't look so good, and she was about to look worse. "Hey," she said, "about your place in Glenn. I think you should move out."

Yang paused, her confusion only exacerbating the tightness in Sable's chest.

Her eyes fell on the still dancing pair. Pyrrha nearly tripped and they laughed it off.

"If things go Pyrrha's way tonight, she'll start staying over. And knowing them, she might start moving in not long after that. When that happens, people are gonna talk."

"So what? It's not like the three of us would care."

"Doesn't matter. Like it or not, being a Nikos makes her upstate like me. And believe me when I say that when the upstate decide you're one of them, they'll get your hooks in you no matter how tough you think your skin is. They'll start seeping into everything around you. Tabloids, TV, whispers and glances on the street. They'll wonder everything from a powerful marriage to a meaningless fling, and they'll never get it right. High or low, they'll set expectations you'll never meet and pretend that you're the one at fault for proving them wrong." Her bitterness was palpable, fist balling over the neck of her bottle. "It's the little things that get you the most, though. You can point at an article suggesting you're a whore and just shrug it off cause it's just a bunch of faceless nobodies trying to sell copies of their ass-end-to-nowhere magazine… but when a friend just looks at you differently?"

Sable was staring straight at her now, the pinched crease of her brow both frustrated and pained. "Maybe she might shrug off rumors and bullshit better than I can, but that doesn't mean her life doesn't get any less complicated." She eyed her bottle. Amber liquid swished against the crystal-like glass, decadence and amnesia sloshing like an ocean's promise. She downed it in one. The raw, burning alcohol made her wince. "Do whatever you want, Firecracker, but it might be your last chance to dance with Jaune the way you do. So do yourself a favor and make tonight mean more than the dead dad in your pocket."

"How did you – ?"

"Ruby told me on her way out. I'm sorry but she's gone again. She fights the good fight but I know how much it hurts that she doesn't have time to say goodbye."

Yang said nothing. Of course Ruby knew. She knew she'd take Dad. All these years apart and she still understood her better than most.

Sable walked away, waving.

At times like these Yang normally deferred to her father's wisdom, but instead of trying to remember what he'd said or would have done, she pulled out his memory chip from a seamless pocket in her dress. She had the means to ask him herself, and the fleeting thought spiraled an ache somewhere inside.

Hard to imagine that all he was had been condensed into a pale pink liquid in a glass case above some circuitry. A loving father, a proud huntsman, a stoic teacher, now barely the size of her palm.

Pyrrha stumbled onto the table, clutching her head. Jaune caught her quickly.

Yang stuffed the chip away. "What happened?" she asked.

Saphron was with them, helping Jaune steady her as she ran a soothing hand down her back. "My guess: Liquid courage," she said.

Jaune held Pyrrha's hand. "She hasn't been drinking though. Not tonight at least."

Pyrrha pulled herself up. Looking faint but fought through the pain. "I'm okay! I'm sure I'm just empathizing with someone. Sable, maybe. I certainly feel like the way she looks right now."

"Doesn't matter the cause," Saphron said, taking the girl by the arm. "We've still got those remedies Ren left us when Terra had morning sickness." She looked over her shoulder to the concerned pair behind her. "Don't worry about her, alright? She'll be fine, I guarantee it. Why don't you two have fun in the meanwhile?"

Jaune hesitated, almost unwilling to let her go. Yang bumped into his shoulder with a smile. "Have a little faith in Saph. Pyrrha's in good hands."

He tore his eyes away. "Just us again, huh?" Jaune said. "It's weird how that hasn't been the case lately. Y'know, sharing a house and all."

She slung an arm over his shoulders. "Let's cut to the chase. We've both been busy, Uni and the shop haven't given us much time to be home and we're both sorry about it. We're not about to blame each other so how about we skip to the good part and dance?"

He blinked. "You never want to make things difficult for me, don't you?"

She grabbed at his loose collar and fixed it. "I hate to see the old you dancing around apologies as if Pyrrha doesn't already hold the record on sorries-per-minute. I have enough fun giving everyone else the run around. And as the guy who cooks my meals, you get the exception."

Jaune rolled his eyes. "That all I am to you? The cook?"

"If I told you the rest, I'd look like the sap." He gave her a look that told her that he wasn't budging. "C'mon, don't I embarrass myself in front of you enough?"

"Hey, don't I? Fair game, Xiao Long."

She headbutt his chest. "You cheat!" she cried, laughing. "You don't even give me the satisfaction of seeing you blush anymore."

"Fine." He pivoted, taking her arm. "We can be saps in the morning when we get home."

"What?" She stopped, tugging back before they made a step onto the dance floor. "Don't you have to go back to your dorm?"

"I'll take the day off. I'm sure Professor Ozpin will understand." He wouldn't, but he'd take it anyway. "Won't they need you at the shop?"

"Unlike you, I thought ahead and cleared the week." She practically dragged him along, a giddiness tingling her spine and filling her cheeks. "You can have your fun with Pyrrha, but at noon tomorrow, you're coming home. Got it? You, me, and a marathon. Just like high school."

He winced at the mention of Pyrrha. "I… Maybe things are going too fast right now. What if… what if I can't get over Terra in time? I want to do this right by her and get over Terra first. I'm… not sure I'm ready for Pyrrha just yet…."

"Then be ready," she said, squishing his cheeks like a not-so-little brother. "If you keep waiting for your feelings for Terra to disappear, then you'll wake up one day hating yourself for all the other opportunities you missed cause you wouldn't even try." Her eyes danced over him, a mirth in her half-lidded gaze bore the unshakeable confidence that he would make the right decision with or without her suggestion. "You'll do fine. You're not exactly the best at assessing yourself, so take it from me. I know you and her will be fine."

The weight of that confidence was met with his smile, heart easing as he found his center with her like he always did. He followed her momentum like currents in a river. "You're a good friend, Yang," he said with honesty as old as their friendship.

"The best. Now dance with me."

Jaune spun and swung her with a speed that made her feet feel weightless. Her only anchor was her flat-foot shoes that curled, kicked, and stomped at his behest, but even that only felt like a pivot point to ease the spin or land after he tossed or hoisted. Even when they were younger, the first time he held her waist and dipped her low enough that her bundled hair touched the ground, she had felt no fear that he'd ever miss a beat and drop her.

Yang's lips were thinned, barely containing the smile that forced a smirk on her anyway. She loved dancing with him. He felt freer, sure of himself. More than he'd ever been as a huntsman, or a med student. More than even as a man. Jaune was a dancer, and she reveled in that aura, basked in it till it sent chills down her spine.

It was any wonder she used to love him.

In Jaune's eyes she brimmed a blooming yellow, of vibrance and bliss. It was almost golden. He wished he could keep her like this and not like the mess she was earlier.

A deep, quiet part of him vowed to guard this side of her forever.

A rumble shook the earth at their feet. "Jaune?" Yang asked as his eyes saw a harsh red writhing and slithering over the wall behind her like boiling blood in the gap of a wound. Hatred. Hatred so strong that it pulsed like a heartbeat. He'd never seen it like this before. For a split second it was blue before it was swallowed again in red.

"Someone's angry," he barely whispered before the red bloomed brighter. Something was coming and Jaune acted quickly. He spun Yang behind him. Crouched them both low. His head craned over hers protectively.

The wall exploded in a violent blast. Dust, concrete, and rebar scattered out into the crowd.

Jaune held her as they were flung across the tiled floor, shielding her with his back.

Yang groaned when she opened her eyes, staring at the ceiling. With Jaune on top of her, she tried to push herself up with her hands. Pain lanced through her arm like the bones were all snapping at once. She screamed as she fell onto her back again. She couldn't feel her left foot either. The adrenaline was already kicking in, but the pain could only stop for so long.

It didn't make sense. Aura should have protected her. Should have protected them.

Jaune wasn't moving. Likely unconscious. She didn't have time to check as the sound of a fight outside funneled through the hole in the wall.

Greta Rainart, uncle Hazel's sister, back hopped out of the hole to avoid something, skidding along the tiles in a wide, aggressive stance. A tall blue-and-white android jumped in after her, its eye – a vertically slit blue visor – beamed down at her. She ducked under its fist. She uppercut it, sending its head into the ceiling.

"Greta?" Hazel cried as he ran to her from across the room.

Her eyes widened at him. "Hazel! Don't – !"

A man emerged from the dust, dressed in all brown with handlebar moustache. His right hand was glowing a blinding white. Greta noticed him instantly and crossed her arms to shield herself, aura pouring out of her skin as it fortified visibly. The man's glowing hand struck and Greta flew across the floor. A streak of red followed her.

Yang's scream was drowned out by Hazel's, his voice booming like a howl. He ran to his sister's side, completely ignoring her attacker with all the shock clawing at his face.

The room erupted in panic.

Yang crawled back with her uninjured arm, dragging Jaune along as he hung loosely around her neck. It was slow but she was strong. Strong enough for them both. "I'll get us out of here," she whispered. He groaned.

"Watts, you traitor!" shouted Ironwood, freeing his magnum revolver from his holster and firing off three shots. Jaune's parents joined him as they sprinted with weapons in hand. The Arcs were always armed.

A wall of ice blocked them, absorbing the shots and trapping Apolian's chain blade.

The missionary from the jail walked out of the rubble with a huntsman in his hand and more androids in tow. He flicked his free wrist and the ice wall extended further to continue blocking off James and the rest. He dropped the huntsman at Watts's feet before his eyes caught sight of Yang. "Your highness," he greeted with a smile.

A coin shot through his cheek ripped out of a tooth. He hissed before he turned to snarl at Sable outside who continued to accelerate small objects at them. Another coin through Watts's stomach. Then through an android's head – it fell at Yang's feet. Even through another ice wall.

Yang cursed under her breath. She needed Jaune's help. "C'mon, Roomie, I could really use your help right now!" She shook him then felt a dampness on her hand. "…What…"

The screams and the fighting were muted around her. Dread filtered into her twitching digits. She couldn't see the back of his head so she propped herself up to see. A section of his scalp was blasted clean off, all the way down to the skull. Any further and she might have seen his brain. She gasped. Panic overtook everything else.

"No, no, no, no…!" Ignoring the protest in her other arm, she hoisted him up to lean over her shoulder but in doing so she caught sight of his face. He wasn't unconscious at all. His eyes were wide open, darting every which way, lip quivering. Harsh breaths came out in erratic gasps, as if he'd forgotten how to breathe. He couldn't form words. Neither could she.

She let him lean on her shoulder as she ripped out the sleeve of her silken dress and wrapped it around his head. Briefly, she felt what she hoped wasn't his brain. Squeezing her eyes shut, she found herself breathing rapidly, tears forming in her eyes.

The wound soaked the makeshift bandage entirely. He was losing too much blood.

She hugged him close, letting him breathe over her shoulder.

The noises of the room came back slowly. The clashing of steel. The explosions of dust. No doubt people noticed her but there was a more immediate threat and everyone able bodied was too busy.

Beside her she saw Hazel crawl towards his sister. His arm was missing, as was half of his face. With his semblance, he felt no pain, but it didn't mean he couldn't tell when he was dying. Greta didn't move. He slumped beside her, his remaining hand fell over her motionless fingertips.

On the other side was Dahlia, slumped over the floor. Her shield covering her wounded chest. Her hand was outstretched to her. Yang took it and squeezed. It was cold and unmoving. She squeezed tighter.

Jaune's breath slowed then stilled. Her tears mixed with his blood.

A guttural scream ripped through the air somewhere but there was no terror in it. She felt its raw anger. It was Pyrrha's.

Yang didn't know where Pyrrha was, but she did feel the way the room shifted at her command. The pipes underground, the rebar between the walls, the beams and supports, all the metal around them bent angrily like gnashing teeth struggling to bite down against a brace.

The androids folded like paper under her telemagnetics, some erupting from the exposed oil and circuitry. Watts and Amlan, the bastards behind it all, turned in horror at the sight of Pyrrha somewhere. Watts said something to the missionary, likely about Pyrrha since his hands raised to cast something, and Yang knew she had to act.

She set Jaune down, leaving a brief kiss against his cold neck as she pulled his sword from his waist. Against her body's protest, she hobbled up with the sword as a cane.

The moment her left foot tried to support her weight, her body screamed to give out but she refused. With labored breath, she stomped forward… then ran.

Every step threatened to topple her, but she fought through the pain. She was a Xiao Long. She was unbreakable.

Yang ignored the array of blonde hair slumped against the floor. It was like running through a field of sunflowers, each a memorial. Her fist tightened over the sword, needing to avenge them like she couldn't for her father or her mother or her aunt. For the life that was twice stolen. The family twice robbed.

She knew Watts was the one to blame – he was the one dropping huntsmen like flies, likely even the Arcs, – but Amlan was the one she had to stop. Neither of them saw when she lurched and struck him in the face.

The missionary cursed but Yang struck him again in the mouth, scraping the blade against his teeth. Amlan responded with a swift punch to her gut. She coughed blood and fell back, refusing to fall completely. Defiance painted her bloodied teeth.

Even with a surprise attack against unfortified aura, she knew she couldn't kill them. She knew she might die, but she also knew she could buy Pyrrha time.

The metal around them groaned until it splintered and flew with Pyrrha's final wail. It wove passed the bodies and flew over her, colliding readily with Amlan and Watts like steel rain. Their bodies were torn through from end-to-end with clear holes like scattered buckshots dotting them.

Yang inched forward as Amlan knelt, weakened. His fingers pressed against his wounds and cauterizing them with fire magic.

She pulled up Jaune's blade and pressed it to his neck.

He panicked when he realized that his throat was being punctured, shaking hands feebly grasping at the sharp edge. She slid it through anyway, cutting his fingers. He continued to resist so Yang turned the mechanism in the hilt to load one of Jaune's dust rounds. The blade's edge glowed with fire dust funneling through it.

Amlan couldn't even scream as she burned through his fingers then through his neck. He looked up at her, eyes wide, fearful. That look stayed there when he died.

She ripped the blade out of the side of his neck and limped to Watts. Her anger suffusing the still burning pain in her shattered arm and leg.

Pyrrha's breathing was the only sound that accompanied Yang's footsteps. She glanced back to see her losing consciousness in Saphron's arms, baby Adrian reaching for her nose. Terra was nowhere to be seen.

She turned back to Watts.

He was leaning against the ice wall which was impaled with rebar and jagged steel, as if he was trapped in a maw and half eaten. Much of the lights were blasted from Pyrrha's stunt, so what few remained had casted over the ice like a pale blue lamp. The glow made Watts look smaller in the aquamarine haze.

He looked up at her. It wasn't pain in his eyes but amusement. She nearly snarled until he said, "I hadn't believed your sister when she talked about how resilient you were. I can see I was wrong. A mistake I'll not make again."

She raised Jaune's blade and pressed it into his chest. Her teeth grit. "I'm not giving you the chance!"

"You don't have a choice in the matter." He raised his gloved hand, the material looked like cloth but had the gloss of steel. It melted off his fingers and formed into a polished white ball that quickly flew outside.

Yang swung her sword in a panic, managing the clip the ball but it only skid along the floor before it flew further away.

She snarled at Watts. "What did you – ?" He was dead. Eyes lifeless and hollow.

The angry rumble of an aircraft engine flooded the silence behind two massive headlights. It was coming through the hole in the wall. A ship hovered over the grass and, somehow, cast against the lights was another Watts. Unharmed and whole. His glove glowed as he approached her.

"Tower," he called back at the ship.

"Yes, sir?" came a robotic female voice.

"Record this moment." He looked at Yang as she slumped to the ground. Tired. Defeated. Awaiting death. He gave her a look of pity. "Taiyang, when you're watching this, I want you to know…" He tilted his head over his shoulder, as if speaking to Tai's ghost. "You should have listened."

He raised his hand. Yang shut her eyes.

The ship exploded.

"Tower!" Watts spun to see a green blur floating out of the shrapnel of his ship. "Pine!" he snarled. He swung his glowing hand out to him but a red blur flew beneath him and sliced off his legs.

Ruby's veins pulsed angrily with silver, glowing across her skin as her muscles bulged and her scythe shined menacingly in the moonlight. As Watts fell, she swung again through his back and out his chest in a splatter of gore. Then spun with her scythe overhead, the whole of its weight on one hand as it crashed through his skull, disintegrating it through force alone.

The ground cracked from the impact.

She breathed, hot air casting off her lungs. Ruby turned back at her cousin, stunned and worn. She floated to her gently.

Yang looked up at her for only a moment before she turned back to Jaune.

"Ruby…" she whimpered as her cousin held her close.

Jaune's sword clattered to the floor.

Ruby's scroll beeped. The soft tittering voice of Penny came out of its speaker. "He's alive," she said.

Yang's eyes widened. She pushed off of Ruby and scrambled to grab his hand. It was cold, but it twitched. "Jaune? Jaune!" Her broken body screamed along with her.

Weiss slid beside her and quickly removed Yang's hand. Her right arm was broken and her cheek was bruised from a different fight. "I'm sorry." Weiss swung her arm and froze Jaune's body on the spot. She left just as abruptly, going off with Whitley to preserve anyone they could.

Ruby helped Yang sit up, leaning against her.

Her hand reached out to touch the ice. It was like staring at him through a transparent coffin. Her body felt cold and broken, feeling as if she might collapse and turn to dust.

Maybe she was delirious from the pain and the grief, but a warmth bloomed from her pocket, from the memory chip. Like her father was trying to comfort her. As if he knew. As if he was watching over her still. So despite everything, she leaned into it. Just for now, at the brink of losing everyone else. She clung to that warmth as if it was all she had left.

»»⋅..⋅««

Twenty-Three Huntsmen Massacred in Patch

"Quite the headline, isn't it? Huntsmen are notoriously resilient, so when I reported on the tragedy I expected worse things to come. What I hadn't expected was that they'd turn the tables… Yang Xiao Long, that was her name. When I saw her huddled by that ambulance, I thought I'd seen a woman broken, but when I saw her tear a gash through Vale's underworld only a few months later, I knew I'd never see her so beaten ever again."

~Lisa Lavender on her blog 'Making Twists in Non-Fiction'