Chapter 1 – Arrest my frailty,
Emerald and Mercury had worked together for so long that they were nearly inseparable, and it had become almost strange to find one without the other. Cinder herself would come and go as she pleased but not them. Coming and going was precisely what everyone else in their lives did. But not them. Never them.
And in that time, they could not admit to how close they'd gotten because of it.
They bickered like children, flooding nonsense and venom into the hideouts they burrowed in, but the words were empty.
Bitch!
Bastard!
Asshole!
All of them meaningless, prodding at no truth. Because poking fun at his legs or his abusive father would be in poor taste, and jabbing at her homelessness or abandonment issues would actually be vile. So they chose their words carefully and jeer where it's safe, and it had become such a habit they'd forgotten they were doing it.
But then initiation at Beacon happened…
"Jaune Arc, Emerald Sustrai, and Nora Ren and Lie Ren. Together they are team JRNE! Led by Jaune Arc!"
The applause resonating from the crowd allowed Mercury to curse under his breath, effectively unheard. No one would see him leaving the auditorium either.
His team was called earlier, Primrose – PYMR, or something, he didn't care. He knew that when he walked up stage that he wouldn't be on Emerald's team. It didn't bother him so much but somehow seeing her up there, stood beside another guy, somebody she'd have to call partner, did terrible things to his mood.
"He'll get her killed," he mumbled, allowing himself the delusion of his excuses where no one could refute them. "Fuck it…" Should've been me.
"You seem pretty riled up." Yang Xiao Long grinned at him from behind, his scowl greeting her. "Missing her already?"
He needed to keep his cool but his bravado melted under his boiling frustrations. "You wouldn't understand," he said spitefully, sounding everything like a petulant child.
She scoffed, sporting a cheeky grin that rivaled the one he normally wore. "Try me."
"Thinkin' you can crack me on the first day? Look, blondie, you and me aren't going to get along."
"Oh, sure," she mocked, "we're only going to spend the better part of four years together. I'm sure nothing will happen and you ignoring me the whole time will totally work out."
"You'd be surprised at how persistent I can be at keeping my distance." He continued his stride for emphasis, his robotic legs were tireless after all.
She'd slung an arm over his shoulders. She caught up quicker than he expected. "And you'd be surprised at how quickly I can melt a frozen heart." Yang had a look of determination mixed with clear anger ruffling her brow and coating her tone. This was a challenge, for him and for her.
Hurried steps followed them. They turned back to find Emerald striding towards them.
Yang grinned and walked off passed Emerald.
"Merc, where you going?" Emerald asked. "I'm starving and I don't wanna have to eat with my team if I can help it."
He wasn't expecting to see her so soon so he had to steel himself. He hoped she didn't see whatever face he was making before this.
"Yeah, sure," he said easily, falling into step with her as they left. "Too bad you got partnered up with that loser though."
"You mean Jaune? Well, he isn't too bad. He took a big hit for me so I kind of owe him one."
He stopped, expressionless. For a moment she was worried.
He chuckled, eyes tainted darkly. His heart felt heavy, unbearable, but it didn't show in his eyes. "You getting soft on me, Em? Next thing you know; you'll start leaving us for them."
"Hey, I wouldn't…!" She caught a breath and steadied herself, stifling the bile threatening to breach her clenched teeth. She stormed passed him instead. "You're a complete asshole, you know that?"
Mercury tried to reach for her but his hand stilled, instinctively pulling back with a snarl. What am I doing? Not like I should give a shit.
As if reading his mind, Emerald shot him a look of disgust before vanishing in an illusion.
He knew that if he ran down the hall, he'd bump into her but couldn't bring himself to. It was too late to fix what he'd done.
It was an unconscious rule to not bring up the most sensitive parts about each other's history. Suggesting abandonment at all with her was one of them, and he'd spat it out. It wasn't unconscious either. His voice was tainted with venom and… intent. He wanted to hurt her.
Alone in the hallway as students filtered in, he walked on and, ironically, felt very alone in the crowd. Their voices blurred as he marched, lost in his thoughts.
He didn't know what bothered him the most: that he might have actually been jealous of her new partner, or that he was just afraid of not having her by his side.
[|}.{|]
Sat together in the library, Emerald took a liking to Ren. There was nothing to tolerate when he presented nothing to endure, and so she sat with him in silence, pleased at the moment of peace.
She spent all of yesterday ignoring Mercury but just this morning she found herself eating breakfast with him and they even spared a conversation. She knew such things weren't sustainable, though.
Her personal connections were few – she could count them on half a hand – so she knew what it took to hold onto them. Her little spat with Mercury would only spur back to life if they didn't address it at some point. Things left unsettled tended to come back when they were the least convenient, and she'd rather quash this before it came back to bite her.
She just didn't know how.
"Something the matter?" Ren asked. She forgot he was even there.
"Oh, sorry. Uh… how can you tell?" She didn't like the persona she put with them, being friendly and all. It felt like a second skin that didn't quite fit, but she'd only hoped that didn't show on her face.
"You've been chewing your lip and groaning in frustration," he said. "I thought you were, at first, trying to get my attention, but it's clear you're struggling with something all by yourself."
"No, it's fine, I can handle it." She dismissed easily, not wanting to open herself up. "Don't worry about me, okay?" She nearly gagged at her own tone.
He sighed. "Emerald," he said sternly. "Though I do appreciate you taking the effort to be appealing for our sakes, it clearly isn't like you. I'd much rather you be more honest with yourself."
"…Heh?" Did he just see right through her? Maybe she laid it on too thick because Mercury was pissing her off. Regardless, Ren saw passed the veneer and almost seemed… disappointed. Hard to tell with him being stoic.
"I've seen the way you act with Mercury. You're unnaturally sweet with us by comparison. I won't pry as to why you feel you should put up a front but we're teammates now. If we're to lay our lives on the line for each other, I'd rather we do it without masks on."
"Ren, I don't think you'd like me as I really am." She was, after all, a criminal and Lie Ren was everything she wasn't – an aspiring peacekeeper. That put them at odds on the outset.
"Probably not," he said rather bluntly, "but I'd prefer it."
"Okay," she began, tossing her cover aside. Opening up about Mercury was too soon for someone she'd known a day, but he was giving her an opportunity to be honest about everyone else and the thought was liberating. So with the open invitation to unleash a bit of her spite, she started by hitting home. "I think your sister is going to be pain. Offense intended, I can already tell I'll have trouble finding any peace in the dorm with her actively in it."
"Nora isn't my sister." He pulled at a thin golden chain necklace tucked behind his collar, revealing a wedding band looped into it. "We're married."
"Yikes." They weren't kidding about Mistral's loose marriage laws…
He chuckled. "And I understand that she can be a bit of a handful, but I ask that you give her the chance to prove that she's more than a sugar high and a loud mouth."
Disappointment curled her bored frown; she was expecting more of a reaction. "You're awfully calm for someone whose wife was just insulted."
He set down his book and looked her straight in the eye. "Oh, trust me, I'm seething." His small smile sold it, and for a moment she felt – not quite fear per se but something that gave her pause. He returned to his book, breaking eye contact. "I cannot fault anyone's first impression of Nora, however. While she is unwilling to give anyone who crosses us the benefit of the doubt, I have to temper myself in her stead."
"Well, sorry for that, I guess." Emerald felt uncomfortable, out of her element. "I haven't even given her twenty-four hours… I'll do better." She hated what she was letting pour out her mouth.
"You don't have to like her," he said quickly. "As long you're civil, we'll get along just fine. Nora will love you anyway and I'm sure she can manage to bring you around." His smile was genuine, soft, layered with an affection she'd not yet seen in… anyone, really. A small part of her envied it, a larger part of her wondered what it felt like.
Emerald wouldn't bet on Nora pulling off the impossible, though, but she wasn't unwilling to try. "We'll see about that," she said.
Ren's mysterious little smile was already gone, back to his normal self, but he watched her still. His book closed. "Still, I can't imagine Nora bothering so much that you'd openly grumble to yourself," he said.
He'd caught her there. She usually prepared her excuses in advance for her cover but she didn't need them here. It was strange, suddenly being caught up in what amounted to a high school drama. It was almost normal. "Me and Merc had a fight. We've unconsciously decided to move on and ignore the issue."
"What happened?"
"He said something he wasn't supposed to. The kind of thing you know you shouldn't mention."
Ren hummed affirmatively. "I didn't take you for someone to be sensitive about your past."
"Oh, I'm not," she said honestly. "Talking about it is fine, really, but using it to take a jab at me is a crossing the line."
"Would you like him to apologize for it?"
She couldn't imagine Mercury actually doing that. It would make him look too vulnerable, which went against everything he was taught. Well, not so much taught as it was more beaten into him. "No," she admitted with a sigh, "but I wouldn't be opposed to him acknowledging that he'd done something wrong."
The solution seemed so simple that Ren believed that there had to be more to it. "Would that be enough?"
She stared at him, confused. "Shouldn't it?"
"It's not normally that easy." Not that it was any more complicated with Nora. Their arguments were so sparse that he could barely remember they ever happened, and whenever they cropped up, they'd be resolved quickly.
"I don't think my relationship with Mercury can be considered normal."
"What are you two, then?"
"We're…" She wasn't sure she could say any more or less than acquaintances. Partners in crime was usually her go-to but it wouldn't work here. Reducing it to partners sparked very different thoughts. What exactly where they though? "…you know, I'm not sure."
"Is friends not adequate?"
"When you rely on someone for so long in the wilds, you forget that most people in the cities have labels for what you are. Sometimes they're your shadow or your shield, but we don't really know what that means outside of a fight. In the end I think we're more reliant than we are reticent."
"Ah, a black lily." She noticed the little smile he flashed over a cheek.
"You're intentionally being cryptic here, but I'll bite. What's a black lily?"
He chuckled to himself. "Sorry. I don't often get to talk about the language of flowers." He coughed. "In the old tongue, the black lily represented both 'curse' and 'love', sometimes it meant both."
"I don't like where this is going but… what kind of love is cursed?"
"One with caveats. It might be doomed to fail or is forbidden. To harbor it might be taboo, or to remember it might bring pain – like if you lost someone. In your case, yours is cursed to stay ambiguous because that may be where you're most comfortable."
Emerald didn't know what to say about that. It felt about right, because wanting to quantify what they have would cause issues. She let the idea stew.
Ren leaned in "Tell me," he said, "would things be easier if you knew exactly what it was that you actually had?"
"I don't know." She almost hated how little she knew about her own emotions here.
"Then I suggest you wait until you know what you want." Ren set his book on the table. All attention on her. "The way I see it, confronting this issue would ask one of you to surrender your pride to apologize or to ask for what amounts to one. And no matter how you look at it, it would suggest something more from either of you."
"I don't think it's that complicated," she said.
"Maybe. But if it was, would you be prepared to answer the same question from him? About what you are? Of him to you, or you to him?"
Ren took his book and said no more, opening it fully and never even glancing at her for the long minutes she sat there in complete silence. He had a propensity for being invisible, it seemed, as Emerald found herself alone with her thoughts despite his presence. Even as she mumbled to herself, he respectfully ignored her strained whispers.
"It's not like I hate him… right? Ugh, what am I saying…?"
Ren chose not to chuckle at that.
[|}.{|]
Mercury noticed that something was eating Emerald up. It likely had something to do with what he did the week before, but he didn't know how to act on it without putting himself on a servile platter. Being so vulnerable, even with her, felt alien to him.
Still, it wasn't like he was above seeking advice.
Pyrrha Nikos was a famous athlete, and was surely popular. She had to have had experience with this.
Thinking to corner her for a moment after class, he waited for her to leave so he could tail her and get her attention because she would return to their dorm alone to change for her twilight sparring sessions. Despite being his partner, she was at the opposite end of the amphitheater classroom, all because she had taken a shine to a completely different team: Emerald's.
Though Nora and Ren mostly kept to each other – well, more Nora really – Pyrrha was pretty animated when speaking to Jaune and Emerald.
Yang leaned into view, a cheeky grin plastered on her face. "Who you staring at?"
He ignored her and watched Professor Port wax rhetoric instead.
"Hm… Emerald would be too easy," Yang continued. "Maybe Pyrrha? You are partners, after all." He hated hearing anyone but Emerald being called that. "Unless it's Jauney-boy? Didn't know you swung that way, Merc."
She was almost disappointed with what got him talking. "Jauney boy?" He reeled. "Since when were you two close?"
"Mmph!" Ruby – Yang's cousin – waved from her lying position on Yang's lap, mouth full of cookie. "We're friends," Ruby announced after gorging another. "I introduced them the night of initiation. He's nice! Wanna make friends with him too?"
He waved her off. "Pass."
Ruby looked up at Yang who said, "He's upset about Emmy making new friends."
"Hardly," he said.
Ruby nodded. "I agree."
They stared at her.
"I think he just misses her," Ruby continued, immediately earning Mercury's ire again. Ruby watched Yang's surprised face then Mercury's apparent disgust. "C'mon, it's obvious!"
He sighed. It wasn't worth it, being evasive. "I was looking at Pyrrha," he admitted.
"Oh." Yang was genuinely surprised. "Didn't think you'd be honest there."
"Look," he began, "I just wanna talk to my partner after class. No big deal."
"Why though?"
"Could you just drop it, Xiao Long?"
"Nope!" Ruby interrupted. "She just wants to help you out. If you stopped being difficult, that is."
He raised a brow at Yang who gave him an honest shrug. "She's not wrong," she said. "Hell, I won't even pry. If you want some alone time with your partner, I can get everyone off your back so you can talk to her."
"You're being surprisingly helpful with someone whose been giving you shit for the past week."
Yang glanced over at Pyrrha surrounded by a different team. "You're our leader's partner. You were supposed to bridge us together but Jaune came along and now she's over there. When this is all over, you owe it to us to get our leader back and give us a team."
He huffed. "Sounds like a lot of work for one favor…"
Ruby got up and leaned over her desk. "Well, unless you wanna get between that, you're gonna need the help." She pointed at Pyrrha who was fidgeting from her position next to Jaune. She leaned in to listen to Emerald on the other side but retracted every time she realized she was a breath's length from the blonde.
To anyone watching, it looked like Pyrrha was smitten with Jaune. When Emerald teased them and they both shied away, he felt his tension slack.
Still, Pyrrha disappointed him. It looked like she was little more than a blushing maiden than an eccentric celebrity. She couldn't help him with Emerald that was for sure.
[|}.{|]
When Yang came to distract everyone from Pyrrha, she didn't expect Mercury to muscle in too and drag Pyrrha along with them. Together, they spent the afternoon sparring, and for the first time it seemed like they were a team. Even team SNBW joined in as per Ruby's invitation. She blew up Weiss Schnee before initiation and it somehow made them friends.
"Now you owe me," Merc told Yang when they headed for their lockers. She was too happy to make any objections.
But despite all the camaraderie, Mercury walked back to his dorm alone.
He reveled in the quiet that wasn't the sheer rancor bursting off the three sister teams. Here he could think on the unease at the back of his head.
There was discomfort, an unfamiliarity coiling underneath his own skin because he didn't know why he did what he did.
Yang asked to bring the teams together and whether or not it was his intention, he managed it. The opportunity was given so readily. Yang wrangled the two teams together save for Pyrrha and himself, and since he saw no reason to ask Pyrrha for advice, he dragged her along and suddenly they were all getting friendly. It was just so easy to do that he could have been mistaken for doing it unconsciously, but it didn't matter his intentions.
The results spoke for themselves and… he wasn't unhappy with it either. But it wasn't the budding friendships that occupied his mind – never that – nor was it his admittedly satisfying spar with Yang. Something else was there, and it was haunting him, marring footsteps and unsteadying his mind.
Emerald was waiting for him by his dorm room. There was a sharpness to her eyes, laced with what looked like the same uneasiness. Her teeth grit as she approached, a gravitas with every step, and Mercury fully expected her to erupt.
But when she arrived she looked away instead, somehow diffusing herself along the way. There was a redness to her cheeks that he hadn't seen on her before. "What's with you, Merc?"
"Huh? What did I do?"
She looked surprised. "You were staring at me!"
"Was I?" He asked genuinely.
"You were! And now the girls won't shut up about it!" She was embarrassed, still couldn't meet his eyes. She tried to glance but looked away again. "Mercury!"
"W-what!?"
"Why are you smiling!?"
"I am?" He was. And it wasn't the same one that he normally did. It was soft. Unlike him. There was relief too… familiar relief. The kind you don't notice until it's missing.
"Ugh! Nevermind!" She stormed off.
He tried to reach for her but pulled back on instinct again. There was a frustration that he knew he should have felt, wanted to have felt even, but there was none of that. That relief – that sense of normality with her – it faded as she left, vanishing into the dark like a retreating tide.
Then a loneliness flooded the senses as the silence of the hallway carried a weight he'd only felt once before in his life.
He felt his heart beat in that overbearing quiet, and with a hand to his chest, felt it beat again against his palm.
[|}.{|]
But Emerald hadn't left. Instead she was staring at him a scant few feet away. She casted an illusion to hide herself.
Her fingers twitched from her already outstretched hand, cowardice pulling it back. She was angry at him, but also embarrassed, confused, lonely and a bevy of other things that either had no name or refused to make itself easy for her to understand.
Because everything she felt right now was new. Because she hadn't had to share him before.
Mercury and Emerald were inseparable when they were pulled out of the indifferent world that let them become what they were. Outside of it was them, together. Even if that relationship came with insults and uncertainty, it had – by some errant miracle – been comforting.
A sensation lost to them as their doors shut behind them. And as their teammates filled their rooms with laughter, drama, and gossip, their world felt indifferent again – ignorant of their fitful sleep.