Cinder's world was Silver.

Not just silver. Silver .

Proper noun.

As a marked change from the last several times Cinder had found herself in this odd state of Color—the count got a bit fuzzy after eight—she wasn't screaming in pain. As a fighter with Huntress-like training, Cinder was practiced in the ability to control when, and how much, her brain was smacked upside itself with fight-or-flight hormones to better allow for endurance in combat situations. Against the Splitback Cinder hadn't so much as splashed her face with adrenaline. Once the Silver entered her senses though, her previously controlled adrenaline had spiked in anticipation of pain that never came. For the first time since Cinder's discovery of Silver Eyes and their effects on Grimm-infused humans, her insides weren't being shredded by an unholy passenger as it raged against its anathema. Nor was she being ripped apart at a primordial level, left convulsing against the feeling of her nerves not just burning but being actively destroyed as the Silver sought out its prey along every branch and cluster that made Cinder able to feel the physicai world. Her very soul wasn't being subjected to the magical equivalent of bleach and steel wool, worked at back and forth with a simple yet strong abrasive until either the imperfections were hewn away or her body was.

No, this time Cinder's entire existence just felt… minty .

Was this what normal people felt as the Silver washed across them? Could they even perceive the feeling at all? Cinder found that with the relaxing and invigorating feeling of being wrapped in an old blanket, her mind was able to move surprisingly quickly. So quickly that during the otherwise meaningless seconds she had an epiphany relating to children: while screaming for their lives they could be mind-shatteringly loud.

As the Silver light faded, Cinder looked to where the Grimm had just a few seconds ago been attempting to breach its way through the thick window. She knew there wouldn't be more than a pile of dust left of her prey, but she still felt an almost primal pull to make sure the Splitback was truly gone.

Cinder ignored the collective noise from the students above, and approached the scattered stiles of the observation window; still pumped up on that previous spike of adrenaline, but curious as to why Ruby was here at all—she was supposed to be helping one of their students install a belt feed into their weapon today. Expecting a calm and collected Ruby to be offering fresh picked strawberries—or something equally inane—through the empty window frame, Cinder was surprised to see two not-Rubys on the ground instead.

One wore armor that had seen better days, and they were seemingly conscious, and propped against the wall. A second figure's head lay across their legs, their two-tone gold and silver hair being slowly combed by long fingers—

If Cinder had been pleasantly showered in adrenaline before, recognizing the second figure as Ruby's daughter sent a veritable waterfall through her system. It was one thing for a Grimm fight to have some collateral damage and maybe break a few auras, but here were two students with legitimate injuries— and one of them had more (lethal) mothers than Cinder had real limbs. And all four of them were perfectly capable of making the mom:limb ratio even less in Cinder's favor with extreme prejudice.

Luckily, there was a standard shared between both the servants of dark queens and current beacon faculty: first aid training so thorough and intense that Cinder had once successfully posed as a paramedic using it.

Step one: specify somebody to call for help.

"Marble!" Cinder shouted over her shoulder at the professor in charge of the halted Grimm Studies midterm. "Call for medical. We have two students who were caught in the attack."

Step two: Panic. But assess the situation anyway.

Cinder cleared the window frame and surrounding area of any trace of broken glass with barely a conscious application of her semblance and Dust channels in a simplified mimicry of Maiden magic, before hopping through herself and reaching the injured students. With her vision no longer obstructed, she could recognize the still-conscious student as one of the regular visitors to Ruby's lab hours; normally somewhat quiet during class, Reaper Abyss was a first-generation Hunter and it showed in everything from their wearing of actual armor plates to how they tried to put on a show of knowing more about trivial things than their peers.

The normally collected Reaper Abyss stared off into some far away place, clearly in shock, until Cinder tried physical contact to get their attention. "M-miss Fall!" they stammered out as the fog was lifted from their eyes just a touch.

"Pleasantries later, Abyss. Are you hurt?"

They just stared at Cinder at first, before snapping their attention back down to the form of Jade Lilly. "Jei—"

"—will have to wait for the medics anyway," Cinder spat. She had no patience for stupidity at the moment. "Your armor looks like a pile of scrap you'd find in a clueless millionaire's art collection, but you can at least speak, so answer my question. Are. You. Hurt?

Abyss winced, as they fought to hiss fragments of sentences. "S-scraped and bruised... Barely breathe... Grimm. Crushed armor... Right leg. Tingling. Asleep."

There. Now she was getting somewhere. Crushed metal plating anywhere on the body was no joke, but survivable. "Right, now you know why so few Hunters wear armor like yours. Try to stay still, and breathe as deep as you can. Keep your Aura down too, if you can: it can complicate the healing procedure in this case. I'm going to check Jade. Medical should be here any second."

Kneeling down, Cinder did her best to get an idea of her condition. Jade was breathing, and her pulse was acceptable. No blood or injuries were evident along her front, sides, or the ground around her, but Cinder wasn't able to check her back—moving the spine of someone who might have been recently thrown like a ragdoll was less than stellar medical practice. No broken bones. Her silver eyes seemed to be responding to light, though Cinder lacked the requisite pen light to really be one-hundred percent sure. She seemed physically fine, just unconscious.

Cinder breathed a sigh of relief as she finished her evaluation, no long-term injuries were likely to come to either of her students. Her optimism was encouraged by the sound of approaching footsteps. Three impressively muscled medics approached and began preparing to repeat exactly what Cinder had just finished doing. She interrupted them before they even got their crashbags opened.

"The blonde—Jade Lilly—has no physical injuries, but isn't conscious. Reaper Abyss is suffering from light wounds and an impacted chest and leg plate, possible bone damage; I couldn't get beneath the armor."

Without missing a beat the three nodded and jumped ahead in their procedures. One wrote down what Cinder had just told the group in medical jargon, while the other two prepared two collapsible stretchers and worked together to position the students for transport. Cinder would have admired the efficiency of their work had she been able to actually think beyond the autopilot of drilled procedure.

Her mind was racing with all sorts of cyclical, anxiety-inducing questions with no immediate answers. Everything from ' What went wrong ' to ' Wasn't Ruby unsure if Jade could use her abilities with only one silver eye? ' bounced around behind her eyes. Cinder was so distracted that she didn't even realize she was following the stretcher holding Jei until she was stopped from entering the medical ward by a nurse.

"Miss Fall, are you injured?" the pink-haired roadblock asked sweetly.

"Nothing aura won't fix."

He nodded in response. "Only family members are allowed in for now, so if you would please have a seat," he gently maneuvered Cinder towards a chair with gente, guiding fingertips, as if she were a patient "you've got a mild case of shock, and the only thing keeping you on your feet right now is probably adrenaline. Can I get you anything to drink?"

Practically falling into the chair, Cinder discovered he was right about her energy. Of course he was right, he worked in the medical wing of an Academy. He'd probably seen more victims of shock than she had seen Grimm.

She wanted… she wanted to do something. Eat, maybe. But she was completely unable to stop staring at the water cooler long enough to form a coherent thought. Instead she just allowed her brain to work without her meddling, hoping her autopilot knew what to do right then. "Something warm, please. Tea, preferably."

Hmm. Tea does sound nice. Good job, Cinder.

Why thank you, Cinder. It's so nice to feel appreciated for my talents outside of killing and… not-quite-killing. What's that called again?

The discussion in Cinder's mind should have seemed completely inane, but instead was mildly entertaining. Especially when she tried to remember the word 'syringe' (the closest she managed was 'people-juice baster'). Cinder was so caught up in the strange mental sitcom that she didn't even notice a disposable cup of warmth was clasped in her hands until she was pulled back to reality by flashes of red and yellow in the corner of her vision.

Cinder knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that Ruby and Yang were probably there to check on their daughter first and foremost, but was still slightly surprised when they didn't approach Cinder at all. They talked between themselves, shared some kind of agreement, and left her alone in the waiting room. Cinder couldn't tell if she was relieved or offended by that, but the thought didn't have much staying power. Before she could completely let the real world fall away again though, even more people arrived to give Cinder something to not really pay attention to through her cloud of adrenaline crash.

First came a dapper bear of a man surrounded by a small posse of bodyguards all dressed in matching blacks and reds. All four guards smoothly split off and took up positions to either side of both doors, leaving the man to enter the ward alone without any signal that Cinder could see. A pair of students who were probably Jade's other teammates arrived next and were given the same treatment as Cinder; Professor Pie was equally unsuccessful a few minutes afterward. Weiss and Blake blazed their way through the doors not long after that, nearly bowling over the guards and pink-haired nurse as did. Cinder saw everything that happened in front of her, but nothing stuck to her brain as it should have.

At least, not until Emerald stepped into the room.

There was no fanfare when Emerald entered. No swarm of bats or singing angels accompanied the woman crossing the aperture of the doorframe. Emerald entered as smoothly as the Thief she had been once upon a time; or someone trying to catch one. She didn't look panicked or overly wary at the sight of the unusual security detail, but did scan the room like the security chief she had become since. Sweeping the corners and hidden places from her vantage point at the door to find security flaws and gaps to either exploit or fix. Her hand automatically reached aside and prevented the door from being anything but closed.

As Emerald's eyes met Cinder's, an almost exaggerated frown crossed her face. She turned away from the waiting area with a scoff that would make Mercury proud.

Unlike the rest of the waiting room party before her, Emerald approached the man at his desk first, instead of approaching the door beyond. He seemed to appreciate the gesture, if his reactionary smile was any indication, but still denied her entry with a shake of his head. Emerald seemed understanding about the—unnecessary, frankly, to Cinder's now less-addled mind—family-only rule though. Just as she turned to leave the nurse alone, Emerald's face turned so that Cinder caught the tail end of a question being asked.

At the volume they had been speaking and at the distance they stood, Cinder couldn't hear their words. But she didn't need to hear to see a finger pointed directly at her.

Emerald barely hesitated in her reaction to whatever information was shared by the nurse; her eyes locked to Cinder's and not so much as blinking while she crossed the distance between them.

Cinder was feeling her first real wave of emotion in cognitive hours—in reality it had only been a bit less than forty-five minutes since her fight with the Splitback had ended—and it wasn't playing well with the butterflies in her ribcage. For the second time in recent memory, Cinder was on the receiving end of Emerald's full, unfriendly, focus. Unlike at the SDC market, however, Cinder was actually somewhat aware of the possible reasons Emerald could be so intensely directed: one of those Emerald considered hers had found themselves in harm's way, and Cinder had been singled out as someone involved.

If she survived whatever Emerald had planned, Cinder's list of enemies was about to get longer by one pink-haired entry.

"Cinder," Emerald said with a tone like the Vacuan salt flats. "Joist tells me you were the one who brought Jei and Reaper in," Emerald punctuated her disbelief with crossed arms before turning towards Cinder's blind spot. "Or was he pointing at you, Marble? Maybe my eyes are going with my age."

Marble, her face probably in its usual state of 'resting bitch', gave something like a laugh in response. "Like you'd miss a detail like that. I had a whole class of weapon-happy bundles of joy to deal with. I had no idea those two were down there until she"—Cinder could practically hear Marble's thumb jammed through the air to indicate her—"said something. Lilly and Abyss are all Cinder's work. Even the medics."

Cinder, deciding that she'd had enough of the waiting room chair she had called home for the past hour, tried her best to stand without showing how tired and stiff her legs felt. She needed to get home and just collapse. But the first step towards that was being able to walk.

"Yes, yes. I'm a—" Cinder didn't get a chance to so much as snark before the fatigue in her muscles caused her to overcompensate just a hair more than she could recover from at the moment. Luckily, Cinder's left side met a very soft, yet sturdy support well before the ground could meet her like an old friend.

That surprisingly comfortable support then did something unexpected.n.

Emerald wrapped Cinder with solidly muscled arms, and said "Thank you."

It was an awkward thing at first, especially with Cinder literally being held up from falling by the contact. Bas the seconds ticked by and it showed no signs of being a mistake Cinder slowly found her footing and… leaned in to the hug.

She'd shared quick, friendly hugs a few times since her reintroduction to society. One or two were longer, or meant something extra than just 'hello'. For the first time Cinder felt something beyond just a pair of arms around her, slightly sweaty from shared heat.

Cinder had felt the heat of Light burning away a creature so deeply rooted within her that she could feel it writhe against her soul.

She'd stood in the ashes of burning cities and walked the tunnels of Atlesian Burn Dust mines without a scrap of protection.

But for the first time, Cinder felt warm.

And for the first time, Cinder felt a little bit of warmth flowing the opposite way. Felt a sense of something unfamiliar moving and flowing both ways between herself and Emerald. Unintuitively, no matter how much of the new unknown she felt move out of her, Cinder never felt like she lost any of her own.

She could probably get used to this feeling.

A/N:
Yay! back to the old Cinder/Ruby/Emerald cycle of chapters!

Damn, I did not mean to take... three weeks to get this one done. but moving (again) kinda threw me off, as did getting a new job and a few other personal happenings.
You know, like my own birthday
(which is today, the 23d)

Anyway, thanks for reading as always, and thanks to WhatOtherPlanet and MellowYelloww for the beta work they do.

feedback is always appreciated