Hello, everyone! Long time mod of rarepair week, first time participant.
Yang woke up in the middle of the night. Darn. She knew she shouldn't have drunk that soda before bed. She groaned. She didn't want to get up, but she had to.
Yang opened her eyes. The sight she saw was its own version of hell. White arms reaching and bleeding black ichor, screaming faces of a finally dead woman older than the shattered moon, and so much fire. All of it was a reminder that just because Salem had been defeated nine years ago, her evil would haunt Remnant for a long time, and healing wasn't a linear journey.
Slowly, Yang felt her way through the hellscape, patting her way along the bed. That was one thing Emerald's semblance had never evolved to cover. She could trick anyone with sound and sight, but touch was something grounding. Touch was a tool Yang used when she still saw Adam and his blade at the corners of her vision, when she still heard his taunts and the sounds of terrified, screaming classmates as Beacon was destroyed by Grimm and the White Fang.
Eventually, Yang's fingers made their way to her wife's tense and shaking body. Red eyes snapped open as the illusions disappeared. In the same moment, Emerald darted away, breathing heavily.
"Hey, hey, it's okay," Yang soothed. "You're okay, it's okay. You were having a nightmare. Salem and Cinder again."
"How did you…" Emerald's face fell as her breathing slowed. "I'm sorry."
Before they started dating, back when being allies was a strange and tenuous thing, Emerald had vowed she would never use her semblance to trick Yang again. In fact, if at all possible she would shield Yang from any and every illusion. Back then, in Yang's mind it hadn't made up for how Emerald and Mercury ruined Yang's name at the Vytal tournament, but it had been a crucial first step.
"Hey, it's not your fault. You didn't mean to, and you wouldn't do it if you weren't having a nightmare."
Emerald was silent, and if it weren't for Yang's enhanced darkvision she probably would have thought Emerald had gone back to sleep without moving. It was a trait Yang had picked up after she had fallen from the bridge to Vacuo. It was also one of the more mundane traits, compared to the slit pupils that were probably dilated due to the darkness and the wings she didn't always wear.
"They killed you," Emerald eventually said into the darkness of their bedroom. "In my nightmare, they killed you."
"Oh, honey." Yang shifted so that she could take her wife's hand. It was at moments like these that Yang wondered if she should sacrifice some of her comfort and wear her prosthetic to bed, just so she could hold Emerald's hand and stroke her face in a comforting manner.
"I'm okay," Yang continued as she rubbed circles into Emerald's hand. "I'm okay, you're okay. They're dead and gone and won't hurt us ever again."
Slowly, Emerald's breathing returned to normal, but she showed no signs of going back to sleep any time soon. And as much as Yang wouldn't have minded cuddling her wife until dawn broke and cast away the last vestiges of nightmare, she had more immediately pressing matters to attend to. But she could do something else known to comfort people from nightmares.
Yang stood up and stretched before grabbing her prosthetic and scaled shawl from the nightstand. "I'm going to the bathroom; do you want me to get you anything on the way back? Water? Milk? Hot chocolate?"
The idea that Yang comes back more dragon-like is a headcanon I borrowed from aspiringwarriorlibrarian on tumblr.