Emerald's sigh of relief caught in her throat as she opened the door to her apartment. The quiet clicking of her lock should have signaled to some primitive part of her instincts that she was safe and home. Tonight the sense of something being not right kept that part of her brain subdued. She wanted to relax in her own home, but ever since the night on the sill the apartment she lived in was no longer only hers.

The not-Cinder could often be found living a mundane, everyday life that orbited Emerald's in wistful, comfortable ways. It would do everything from folding laundry that didn't exist to sulking on the couch for reasons impossible to decipher while watching nature documentaries and eating junk food.

Even now she could sense a specter of activity somewhere beyond the entryway to what should have been her oasis in the desert of the world. And as the kitchen came into view , Emerald's brain locked up for just long enough that she almost believed what was in front of her. She would have believed it—if it wasn't completely and totally incorrect.

Standing by the stove, hair tightly curled and stirring something in a large pot that Emerald didn't own, was Cinder. Humming some meaningless tune while barefoot and heavily pregnant, attending the matters of the home. It wore a frilly pink apron and… nothing else.

Emerald immediately slammed her eyes shut and smacked herself in the temple to try and rattle the image she'd just subjected herself to out of her head. Think about anything else, brain, she mentally pleaded. Please. I'd even accept Mercury in latex right now over this. Work with me here.

Thankfully, the utterly horrifying slice-of-life was gone when Emerald finally pried her eyes open. Replaced by an empty kitchen featuring a single set of dishes drying in the open dishwasher and a messy stack of envelopes—mostly junk mail and bills—near the coffee machine.

Just the normal, lonely, vaguely depressing sight of her kitchen, just as she had left it this afternoon.

Tentatively, she let her shoulders unstiffen and tried to let the feeling home find its way to her. She did her best to let herself relax during her regular just-got-home routine. Keys went on the hook by the door, and she bent down and lifted the hem of her robe to remove her boots and socks before stepping into the carpeted living room. As she rounded the couch, she half expected to see another fake eating chips in a bathrobe or something equally ridiculous. She nervously ran her fingers along the beads of her Tov bracelet, trying to anchor herself to reality through its familiar constancy.

So many people at her circle said their prayer beads helped them find their center during crises. It had to have some basis in reality, right? Maybe tonight it would finally work for her.

"Welcome back, hon." Emerald jumped at the sound of Cinder's voice from the hallway. Expecting the worst, Emerald looked towards the source and saw a bleary-eyed Cinder wiping sleep from her eyes with the overlong sleeve of a button-down shirt that ended almost at her knees. "How was it tonight?"

"You're not real," she answered automatically.

By the Cycle, Emerald hated how weird everything got when her semblance was involved. Even something as simple as talking to herself got caught up in the mess.

"So?" she countered, nonplussed. "You can still tell me about your night with your friends, can't you?" The vision of perfect domestic life shuffled over to the couch as she spoke. She took up a position of laying her head on top of crossed arms without ever taking her eye off Emerald. "I want to hear about it."

Emerald stared at her for what felt like several minutes. Mulling over what was being offered. Weighing the options and hoping beyond hope that someone would rescue her from the wonderland she was crafting for herself. Of course this fake Cinder wanted to hear about the things Emerald enjoyed. What better way to get her to let her guard down and…

And what? What's she going to do with that information? Tell fake-Weiss?

Emerald pinched the bridge of her nose before settling on her decision. She wanted to talk about her day. And she knew it was a risk to her mental and emotional health to do it like this. Maybe she could call someon-

"Do you not want to talk about it?" the fake interrupted with a pout, possibly bored of watching Emerald in silence. It was all the catalyst she needed to make a decision. Emerald would be fine if she just talked to 'Cinder' a bit. Just a bit of wish-fulfillment self-therapy. Some nice conversation and maybe light venting. What could go wrong?

"It went really well. I needed to be around people." She paused to think about the night in more detail before continuing, "Even if one of them was being a fruitcake."

The fake gave an absolutely endearing snort-giggle in response to Emerald's name-calling. It was the kind of laugh you only heard when someone was completely at ease with you around. It wasn't at all what Cinder's laugh sounded like, but Emerald wanted to hear it from her again. "Don't leave me hanging, sweetums. I may not be real, but that doesn't mean I don't have feelings."

"That's exactly what it means, Ashes" Emerald countered. The fantasy of speaking to a Cinder who wasn't Cinder was intoxicating in it's own way. She needed something to pull her back into the real in case she got too caught up though. She'd found out, rather painfully, in her previous life of crime and villainy that strong memories or emotions could break through her illusions. Ironically, they could also make people more susceptible to believing them in the first place.

Susceptible like she was right now.

Emerald wrapped her hand around her Taw bracelet and tried to feel the subtle textures of the different beads. It wasn't exactly the way her religious accessories were meant to give support in a crisis, but the grain of the wood contrasting the skin-warmed smooth stones helped her to perceive more than just one thing at a time. And because of that she noticed that the fake was adjusting herself on the couch without making the sounds of fabric or skin brushing against upholstery.

The fake finished laying herself on her back and stared up at Emerald. She wasn't translucent, but she was far less present than she had been. Her hand rested back-first on her forehead in a mock-swoon. "You wound me, sah! I am naught but a real woman. One such wit' feelin's."

The illusion had been broken. Emerald was no longer caught in the pretend life for the time being. "Never again shall one so fair as I walk these halls. No more shall the smell of sweet woodsmoke tickle thine nostrils, dear gem. I see a light. I hear the cries of the damned calling me! Goodbye...Dear...Rosebud…" Emerald did her best to ignore the fake cramming as many cliches into her death as she possibly could before fading back into the aether of subconscious nonexistence.

Rolling her eyes at the antics, Emerald started back towards the dining space to organize the stack of mail before calling it a night. There was an odd smell lingering, one that Emerald knew but was having trouble placing. She still wanted someone to talk to, but her need had been subdued. Her inner demons were helpful like that sometimes.

"Well that's not very nice," the voice of Cinder admonished from behind her. "I won't say it's completely unwarranted. But we both know I'm not that kind of demon."

Emerald spun to face another Cinder—scantily-clad as the first one had been—lounging in her bay window. This time, a skimpy bikini which left next to nothing to the imagination, revealing tracts of bone-white skin. Grimm-graft horns, wings, and limbs dominated the rest of the fake's body in simultaneously grotesque and seductive ways. "Unless that's what you want?" she purred as she lounged.

Not real. Not real. Not real. She forced herself to think it over and over. It wasn't that the hallucination was particularly believable, something so clearly surreal should have been easy to disspate. Mixed with that smell, the smell she now understood as the scent of Grimm, contiguous memories and sensations were coming around en force.

Yeah. Totally those reasons. Emerald didn't imagine Cinder being consumed by her Grimm-grafts on a regular basis at all. Didn't think of the horrors she'd watched crawl from the pools of Destruction every sleepless night. Didn't remember the fear in Cinder's eyes as Salem summoned a personal demon just for her.

Her screams as the tar-like substance first fused with the stump arm she'd been left with after Beacon also definitely wasn't one of Emerald's most vivid memories.

Emerald clutched the beads of her bracelet again, crushing them into her forearm, hoping the pain could make the visions go away. She failed to notice that, through her haze of panic and fear, she couldn't feel the beads digging into her skin, or even their textures. Her eyes were fixed on the monster in front of her. The perversion of nature that might have been.

She felt herself shaking in panic as the monster slithered into a standing position and began to stalk towards her. She should have known the creature in front of her couldn't be, in fact she knew it wasn't, but her primal instincts were screaming at her that it absolutely was.

The monkey brain afraid of predators and fire had no way to deal with the creature which embodied near all of Emerald's nightmares. The monster that chased her from dark rooms and paralyzed her between sleep and wakefulness.

Emerald collapsed to the ground, thoughtlessly. The jolt of impact catalyzed her body to action. "Go away goawaygoawaygoaway," she cried. She kicked herself across the floor, desperate to go anywhere but near that thing, until she hit something heavy enough to stop her retreat.

"Awww. Poor Emmy. I thought you didn't want the fake Cinder anymore." The monster grinned like a shark before twirling playfully and flicking its smoky tail just in front of Emerald's face, causing her to flinch. "So here I am."

"N-not—You're fake too." Emerald said with more courage than she expected to have in the moment. She couldn't tell if she believed her own words and the courage they held, she was still frozen in place and unable to form many coherent lines of thought.

But she had years of experience dealing with living nightmares.

The monstrous hallucination arched an eyebrow at her response. An almost maternal amusement played across its scarred features as it looked Emerald up and down. "Oh?"

"You're just… ideas. Dumb fears."

"Emmy, Emmy, Emmy. I'm anything but 'dumb fears'. You know that. I'm what you really want."

Emerald braced herself and began to stand. She recognized the table she'd backed herself into—more specifically just what she kept strapped to its bottom. Her willingness to face the monster grew as she reached below.

Emerald unclasped her oldest friends from their home of the last several years. She felt the familiar weight of her Respite, and drew more courage from running her fingers along their well-loved assemblies. She could still smell the sour tang of Grimm as she locked eyes with her tormentor. "Not what I want," she challenged. "Just what I used to think I deserved."

"Deserve. Want. It doesn't matter. I'm what that weakling could only dream of." It squared its shoulders and began to advance on her. Jabbing its finger towards Emerald with every new point made. "I'm everything she was and more. The power she held. The abuse she doled out. The demand for subservience." Emerald's vision was consumed as smoke began billowing off the monster, obscuring its features and making it look even larger. "You wanted her to wake up every morning and find you waiting beneath the table for her to enjoy alongside her coffee," the fake shuddered in mock arousal. "You wanted to go to a concert for a band you hate, because she got you the wrong tickets for your anniversary," it let out an exaggerated moan. "Don't run from your penance. I'm right here. All you need to do is beg."

She scoffed in response to the almost hilariously villainous monologue her own mind was set on delivering. At some point she might have wholeheartedly agreed that she deserved that kind of treatment for her life choices. Some part of her obviously still did agree, but she'd already beaten back that side of her through years of effort and guidance to the point that it had to try schemes like this to make her believe it.

She looked at the thing in front of her, created entirely from her deepest-rooted terrors and experiences, and saw clearly for the first time exactly what it always was.

"You're just a monster that crawled out from under my bed," Emerald said, squaring her shoulders to match it's posturing in challenge. Drawing her line in the sand here, refusing to let some half-baked personal demon control who she was. "And I've lived with monsters worse than anything I could imagine already."

The monster's features twisted strangely, and an expression not dissimilar to Tyrian's manic glee and Watts' vitriolic sneer plastered across her wickedly curved teeth and red eyes. Quicker than anything could actually move, and with limbs twisting in a way only an imagined creature could survive, it closed the distance between them. "What a terrible thing to call the woman you love."

It was now in Emerald's face. Its breath was so strong she could taste it. Like canned breadfruit and sex. Itstopped, just for a moment, before pressing their noses against one another harder than Emerald's Semblance could simulate, forcing her mind to adapt to the strange sensation of pressure being where it shouldn't be and blurring the lines of reality even further.

But the sensory assault on that level was counterproductive. A lesson Emerald had learned the hard way during her years on the streets. So many went their entire lives believing that they were limited to only six senses, taking for granted the bounty of Things Which One Perceives they truly had access to. And even within those six, so few understood what it meant to really use a sense in its entirety. When the brain was signalled to accept a reality that it couldn't accept, the reaction was almost always violent.

Case in point: triggering so many fear reactions at once overloaded Emerald's senses to the point that her primal instincts shoved her more rational, combat-trained mind out of the driver's seat in much the same way a brick shoves consciousness out of a head.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise to her, what the hallucination said. Emerald knew it was true, and had said as much for the past several years. Therapy and her friends had helped her reach the point of what she had thought was acceptance of the words. But just like the words she had bound so tightly and finally released while watching the snow blanket Vale, the smallest action seemed to bring with it a chain reaction of breaking points.

It began as a blinding rage. A blazing pressure which pounded against the back of her ears until all sound irrelevant to her goal was drowned out in a rush of blood and feelings. Emerald had heard enough of this pretend Cinder's words, and seen enough of its grotesque face, and thought enough about its bygone ideas. She could feel her pupils shrinking to pinpricks and her focus sharpening as her mostly-dormant survival and combat instincts came to bear for the first time in a very long while. Emerald stopped thinking in poetry and abstracts, instead sorting her world into two categories: useful for killing the thing in front of her, and the thing she needed to kill.

Her enemy needed to be removed from the space in front of her. Distance needed to be gained. A rolling somersault backwards over the table she'd been backed against achieved the latter, a strong kick to its side sent it flying towards her target and fulfilled the former.

As the large wooden projectile landed with a mighty crash, Emerald's enemy made itself known several feet to the side of where it had been, no worse for wear.

That wouldn't do.

Moving from one action to the next without any true plan other than 'destroy the enemy', Emerald let out a scream and lunged for her enemy as it stood in the splinters of her previous attack. She landed, hissing, on her arms and stomach, hard enough to warrant a backfire from her Aura. Small round beads scattered beneath her, but she ignored them and blindly flung out the chained blade from her weapon, sweeping the room behind her in a wide arc.

Feeling only the brief resistance of a vase being shattered and the solid thunk of Jasmine's head burying itself in the drywall, she gathered that her target had likely attempted to reposition between attacks. Standing up, she unloaded several rounds into the shadowy corners on the other side of the couch in a surprise assault—only to find them empty.

Spinning in place, she felt their familiar weight return to her hands as she searched the room for her enemy. Ran her fingers along the triggers she knew better than her own name.

As she inspected their marks and signs of wear, their personalities, the weapons lived up to their name and brought her a moment of calm, one long enough for the rage to dwindle and for her to remember who she was through the anger and the panic.

And she had no doubt it was panic.

But panic could be subdued. Counting from five was a common trick, but Emerald often needed more than just numbers to think. She was the tactile type.

Five things she could see. Painting. Couch. Interlink. Credenza. Door.

Four things she could hear. Distant Sirens. Running water. Air rushing out the vents. Faint speech through the walls.

Three things she could smell. Wood. Air freshener. Dust discharge.

Two things she could feel. Splintered wood beneath her feet. The contrasing warm wood and cool metal of her weapons.

One thing she could taste. Emerald struggled with taste every time, even more so when her mouth was dry like it was now. She finally settled on the taste of 'fear'. It wasn't perfect, but the fact she could tell that meant the calming exercise had worked.

Taking a deep breath, Emerald attempted to sigh in relief. She placed the twin revolvers on top of the unmarred coffee table and fell back onto the fluffy-yet-firm cushions of her couch. Gradually, she worked herself out of the adrenaline high and felt the weight of the world return to her shoulders as her muscles unclenched and the reality of just how many bullet holes there were in the wall registered.

With trembling hands, Emerald rubbed her eyes and took several more deep breaths. Her living space was covered in the debris that had once been her table. She was suddenly starving, and tired, and full of energy, and needing something she was having a hard time placing.

Something loaf-like.

Fumbling with the folds of her now-sweltering robe for her scroll, she eventually found it hiding in the too-small back pocket of her pants. While trying—and failing—to remember her password, it tumbled from her fingers several more times than her emotionally weary mind could handle.

After the fifth failure, she felt tears welling and the shock begining to wear off. She hung her head in defeat, only to be interrupted by the scroll vibrating with an incoming call.

Emerald nearly dropped it in surprise, but when she looked to see who could possibly be calling so late her mood immediately improved at the sight of the name 'Strong Getter'. Serendipity, thy name is ever changing.

After three attempts to press the 'accept call' icon, she lifted the the scroll to her ear and felt tears of relief begin to roll down her cheek at the sound of Mercury's stupid voice.

"Hey, Em. It's late, but you want to go get something? Just you and me. You seemed out of it ton—"

"Come get me?" She interrupted, probably harsher than she thought. probably sounding like she'd just been crying too. but hopefully not like she had just tried to shoot a stripper-Cinder in her apartment during a mental breakdown.

"On my way."

A/N:

so it's been... 2 months.

At least Mercury is doing things again!

I wrote this chapter 3 times over before I was finally happy with it, and lemme tell ya: Em has some serious issues.

anyway, big thanks to WhatOtherPlanet, ShockFactor, Junior, and Mellow for pulling my head out of my own ass when i was trying to write "Emerald gets yelled at by her subconscious" and not "Emerald is a strong, independent black woman who desperately needs some love and therapy"

i love feedback, please give.