One Taiyang Xiao-Long is standing by the microwave, three bites into a bowl of lukewarm tomato soup when he hears a noise so familiar yet distant in his memories that it takes him a moment to place it.
That noise like tearing fabric, a tear in space to bring two souls closer together.
Yes he knows that sound,
he knows that semblance.
He is met with the red eyes of someone he hasn't seen in a very, very long time.
Or at least, someone he hasn't seen take her human form in his present in a long time.
They both pretend he doesn't know what she looks like in her other form. If ever in those passing years had there been a black bird lingering in the trees watching, it was just any old curious corvid, of course.
Across her face was a smattering of blood to match those eyes.
Though that hardly stopped at her face.
Zwei, ever stubbornly oblivious to tension as a dog could be, trotted right up to the new guest, quick to demand attention.
Raven pet the corgi without fully processing her actions, so in need of something to keep her hands occupied while her mind caught up with what she was doing.
She had chosen to come here, yet standing in this living room, looking at a man she once knew so well, she had no explanation to offer, no solid plan of action, and no energy to make a quick egress.
"You're getting blood on the carpet." Tai spoke finally. "And… on my dog."
"It's your daughter's?" Raven hears her own voice as if it's on a delay, grimacing.
Tai, once so quick to panic and fuss at even mundane threats to those he loved now hardly reacts at all. He pales, and sighs, and sets his bowl of soup down on a countertop littered with unwashed dishes.
He opens his mouth to say something, but thinks better of it, his teeth clinking together audibly. Instead he looks at her, really looks at her, as if there were answers written across her face.
In some ways there were. She was never as stoic as she might like to pretend.
Her lack of any apparent major injuries combined with the pained tension in her eyes, the way her hand would drift to a particular spot just below her ribs, he knew those tells.
He knew the pain that bonds strained by injury or distance could bring her.
She had told him of it once, with all the vulnerability of someone handing over a knife and baring their neck for slaughter.
That was such a different time, but clearly her pain was all the same, and it answers some questions, possibly. Then again, her blood soaked clothes- blood of his daughter, apparently, only bring up more questions.
He can't think how to possibly phrase any of them in a less than accusatory way, so he doesn't. "Why are you here?" He settles on, eventually.
"I thought you might like to see her." Her words come out stilted, unsure in their casual delivery. "But- I- it will have to wait. She is probably in surgery." No sense in barging in when there was no one to see, then again there was no guarantee the medical care would work. Even then Raven could offer him a chance to say a last goodbye, those did seem important to him.
"Right." Tai nods and silence stretches on for some time.
He clears his throat. "Right. Okay. Did you… want to take a shower?"
Drying blood was never comfortable against the skin, and she still was getting it on the floor, and on Zwei.
Raven gives some noise of confirmation as she turns swiftly on her heels and towards the bathroom, muscle memory leading the way.
She turns the water up to a blistering temperature, a luxury she's not so accustomed to these days. Steam fills the room before she rids herself of her ruined clothes and climbs in.
Her hand presses more firmly against that spot just below her ribs, until the physical ache of fingers digging in was noticeable over the current of visceral pain and she leans into it. Leaning into pain was preferable over thinking about it.
The water is running cold and clear and has been for quite a while when she finally decides to get out. There are clean clothes left out for her, old pajamas of Yang's it seemed by the style and fact that they fit well enough.
She walks the halls more slowly on the way back out, meandering to kill time. Raven knows the layout, knows which rooms had always been guest rooms, which was Tai's, which had been each of the girl's.
Yang's room is bare now save for a couple of boxes and some tacks still stuck in the wall from posters that once had been there. Ruby's room- Ruby's room makes Raven's already slow steps falter momentarily as she glances in.
There's a layer of dust on every surface but the bed is neatly made, the walls still covered in photos and art, a bookshelf stocked with comics and storybooks. Raven doesn't even realize she's entered the room until she's reaching out to grab one of the Grimm toys that lined an entire shelf, snorting as she got a better look at the plush beowolf. She had always thought these things a bit morbid, material evidence of a life safe from the real threat Grimm posed.
"I know you probably think I'm 'stupidly sentimental' for keeping things like this." She hadn't heard him approaching at all, yet Tai's voice came from the doorway just behind her.
Raven set the toy down quickly, shrugging at his presumption. "There are some things I'm just not ready to let go of yet, and maybe it is stupid. I never claimed I knew how to grieve in a healthy way though, I think we both can agree on that."
She knows his words are simply justifications to himself, hardly even meant for her to hear.
Yet she still tries, and fails at first to make sense of what he's saying.
At first she thinks he's talking about Summer, central to a lot of his grief, and his tendency to mince words to the point of nonsense.
There's something not quite right about that however, for all the ways his grief might have mixed with raising his children, and for all that Ruby was startlingly similar to her mother in looks, Raven couldn't see how that would explain what she was seeing and what he was saying.
It took longer than it should have to click.
"Oh." If anyone here felt stupid now, it was her.
He wasn't grieving Summer, he was grieving Ruby.
He had thought the girl long dead already, gone without a trace like her mother before her.
This made things easier, in a way, that even if the girl didn't survive, Raven wasn't introducing any new loss to him.
"You might want to quit wasting your energy with grief, for now at least." She says, something as close to a smile that could vaguely be described as reassuring ghosting across her face.