Before anything else, I own nothing but the original characters, and content therein related to them. RWBY is owned by RT, and any mentioned creator's work belongs to them, and them alone. Rest in peace Monty, your vision lives on in us all.
CHAPTER 2
There was pain. Searing hot pain. Burning metal being sent in every direction, the smell of meat cooking, and the sound of flesh tearing. Gunfire, and blades clashing against each other… Yang opened her eyes, and saw that she was on the floor of Beacon's cafeteria, limbs shredded and lightly bleeding, her surviving weapon on the floor some few feet away still around her left hand. And there he was. Adam. Standing over her and her wounded friends like some deity that was above them… Then the pain faded, and her limbs had come back. She was standing in an empty wheat field now, Halcyone a few meters away, back to her.
"Halc?" Yang asked, approaching her girlfriend, who turned to face her, free of the many scars that covered her thin body.
"Yang…" Halcyone said, reaching her hand out.
"Where am I?" Yang asked, looking around at the bright sunless sky.
"Your happy place… Where the world is as you wish to see it. It's not my best work, but it's usually where I take people when I want them to be influenced… I wasn't going to just force you to feel better… That… That never lasts long… Instead, I want to show you what I did to cope with my own injuries." Halcyone said, before she began walking, the empty field turning to a dense forest, as trees sprouted and the wheat withered away. "You won't remember any of this when you wake up. At least not completely if you decide you don't want to. In that case, I'll erase this. But the changes will happen, so long as you let them." Halcyone said, as the two came to a clearing.
"So, what are we doing?" Yang asked.
"Giving you a challenge… What makes you who you are?" Halcyone asked, before she faded out of existence. Yang spun in place as she heard a growl from the path they had travelled up, only to see it was blocked off by trees. "What makes Xiao Long Yang the dragon of the sun?" Yang spun back around as she heard the creaking of a wooden door behind her, the clearing now replaced by a barn… One she'd remembered from her childhood. She raised her fists, only to see that they were smaller than they should have been. Checking her arms and her clothes, she found herself to be much younger. The age she was when she left home to look for her and Ruby's mother…
From the barn, a single Beowulf emerged, the wood fading out of existence. Yang closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and spoke to herself. "This isn't real. I'm not a child, and this grimm can't hurt me." The sudden impact of a large demonic paw swatting her into a nearby tree quickly made her believe otherwise. Pushing herself off the ground, Yang looked through teary eyes at the grimm as it came closer… Dream or not, the pain she was in felt real.
Shoving herself to her feet, Yang readied her fists again, and glared at the beowulf. She felt fear. The same fear she felt at Beacon, an intimate understanding that she was going to die. This time there was no uncle Qrow to save her, no friends to rush her to medical care. Just her, and the monster. How was she even supposed to fight this thing? Hardly any aura, no semblance yet, no weapon to be used… Looking around, Yang decided that wasn't entirely true. Primitive as it was, beside her was a long straight stick. Picking up the improvised weapon, Yang started charging at the grimm. She held the stick high, and attempted to swing it into the beast's face to injure it, only for the wood to bounce off, and the grimm to smack her away again. The branch still in her grasp, Yang's eyes widened in terror, as the beowulf began running at her. Shuffling back on her butt and hands, she tried to put some distance between her and the monster, only to back into a tree. Looking between the large oak backing and the rapidly advancing grimm, an idea came to mind. Digging one end of the long stick into the crux of the tree's thick roots, Yang propped the improvised spear up with her arms, just as the beowulf leapt to attack her. With a sickening squelch, the grimm had impaled itself on the stick.
Backing off of her, the grimm swatted at the massive splinter jutting out of it's chest. Taking the small moment of reprieve, Yang grabbed the next thing she saw, a rock about the size of a school textbook, and charged at the beowulf. Distracted by it's injury, the grimm did not notice Yang run up to it. Raising the rock over her head, Yang smashed the large stone over the bone armored skull of the grimm, causing it's head to hit the ground, the stick in it's chest puncturing deeper into it's body. Raising the rock once more, Yang brought it down onto the grimm's head, over, and over again, until her hands were covered in fading black blood, eyes still full of fearful and angry tears.
Her small chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath, Yang looked up to see an older version of herself standing there. The same confident smile the 17 year old wore any time she'd gone into a battle. "Nice moves sis." The younger Yang smiled weakly at the compliment. Those were the words she spoke to Ruby when she'd killed her first grimm with a sickle, an ursa that had wandered into their backyard. Standing next to the older her, was Halcyone.
"So, you're a survivor?" Halcyone said, as the older Yang faded away. Standing up, Yang found she was back to her original body. Looking down, she could see the metal replacements that had been made for her. "A survivor… Just like me."
Yang came out of her own head, and looked up at Halcyone. She could still remember the time she spent in her own mind, unable to know if any time had actually passed in the real world. But now the memory of what happened to her at Beacon was clear. When she was blown up, she clung to every bit of life she had to stay alive… For her friends. And she'd do it again if she had to. "Halcyone… Call Dr. Song… I need to schedule my operation."
Halcyone stood outside of the operating room with Yang's father. Details were limited, but she was certain that Yang was heavily anesthetized. Halcyone had seen the replacements. They were anatomically correct when it came to the joints and flexion, with full articulation of every finger and toe, the more sensitive mechanical muscles being protected by metal plating that acted as skin and an exoskeleton. The only thing that creeped her out about the entire process was that the things weren't simply strapped to her like a more basic prosthetic such as Pale's. The limbs had to be wired to her bones and nerves, everything had to be integrated. And it went further than a simple end cap. To implant a bionic prosthetic that was going to be as functionally strong as the original and not simply break off, the limbs had to be completely grafted to Yang's body. Work began at the shoulder for her right arm, which was basically useless as the cartilage had been shredded by shrapnel anyways. A bionic joint would replace it, and what remained of her humerus was going to be replaced or coated with titanium. Much like on her right arm, her right knee joint would be replaced with bionics to make it functional, and a small section of her femur would be coated with metal. Her left arm was easier to fix, the amputation was close enough to the wrist that her radius and ulna only needed to be reinforced. Her left leg was by far the one that cost the most money. Since the sight of amputation was only 6 inches from the groin, she needed to have her hip and what remained of the femur replaced with bionics.
Once the necessary work had been done to allow the installation of the replacement limbs, the final touches were put in place. At each amputation sight, an end cap was put in place with a cluster of needles and razor thin wires that would be slowly inserted into the stumps of each limb, where they would fuse with the organic soft tissue and lock into the replacement bones, allowing the limb to read nerve signals. After the caps were in place the limbs themselves could be planted or removed rather easily, but that wasn't the part that worried Halcyone. As a result of Yang's lumbar injury she would be unable to use her new legs, which was why before the doctors even bothered attaching the limbs themselves, a spinal bypass had been implanted. The flat segmented metal mimicked the bones of Yang's lower back, from where her ribcage ended, down to just above her pelvis, 4 wires per segment dug into her spinal cord to reestablish lost signals from above the disconnected tissue. With the spine issue resolved, the bit of shrapnel still in Yang's brain became another point of concern. As a huntress, Yang was going to be doing strenuous work and the bit of metal couldn't be left rattling around in her skull, so it was being removed as well. The cavity in her temple was going to be replaced with a scroll interface. Now that freaked Halcyone out. She messed with people's minds semi-regularly back in Vacuo, and knew it was a fragile thing, to implant electrical components for the sake of making scroll calls faster and searching the web easier was batshit crazy, and Halcyone knew crazy.
79 hours passed by, before the doctors opened the door to the operating room. Halcyone and Taiyang stepped in, as Yang was just waking up, covered in a paper apron, and bare metal. Lifting her head off the semi upright table, Yang took her first steps with her new limbs, and promptly fell over. "Still need to calibrate them." She said with a chuckle.
Author's note. "Guess who's back?"