Blake is sitting in the library crying over a book. Over a book, not over some girl. The fact that she picked a tragedy and opened it to the middle without reading a word does not make the book a transparent excuse. No. Blake is doing an entirely reasonable thing here.

"Blake?" a faint squeaky voice calls over the tops of the bookshelves. It's Ruby. Blake doesn't really want to talk to anyone, but she can't exactly run away from her team leader.

"I'm over here," she calls.

It takes Ruby several minutes to make her way through the labyrinthine stacks of books, and Blake waits, burying her face in her book in an effort to make it look like she really was reading.

"Are you okay?" Ruby asks, tugging the book down a little.

"I'm fine," Blake says, but her voice gives her away. Or maybe it's the puffy red eyes, or the fact that she's spending another day in the library away from her team and didn't even eat breakfast with them today.

Okay, nobody said Blake was good at hiding her breakdowns.

"I'm just worried," Ruby says. "I mean, I know things are weird with you and Yang now –"

How does she know? Does she know or is she just guessing? Is Blake really that bad at spying?

"What? No, things aren't weird," Blake tries, but she's aware that it's not going to do her much good.

"I know that you can deal with your own problems, but I am your team leader, and you can trust me."

Blake's lungs aren't working again, but she has to deal with this. She tries to say that Ruby doesn't know what she's talking about, but it comes out as a "how did you know?", which is possibly the worst thing she could have said. Now Ruby's going to tell Weiss and Yang, because Ruby can't keep secrets to save her life, and Blake will never be able to show her face to her team again.

"Um, I probably shouldn't be telling you, but –" Ruby finally succeeds in prying the book out of Blake's hands and leans closer – "Yang told me."

"Yang knows too?!"

Ruby seems oblivious to Blake's imminent heart attack, and just looks confused.

"Yeah, she knows. I mean, it'd be weird if she didn't."

That's it. Blake is going to die. Nora must have blabbed, because obviously Nora doesn't understand that some things are secrets for a very good reason and she has no filter. And now Yang knows, and Ruby knows, and by now the whole school probably knows that Blake is pathetic and creepy and spies on her team.

"Remember, you can talk to me," Ruby insists, and now she's leaning even farther into Blake's space and Blake genuinely cannot deal with this right now.

"No, I can't. Not right now."

"But you're literally talking to me –"

"Ruby, I need to be alone for a little while." It's not quite the truth, but Blake really doesn't want to be alone with Ruby, not when she knows so much but is apparently still so oblivious.

Ruby pouts a little, but she walks away, leaving Blake alone to wallow in her misery.

Or not, because her scroll has started beeping.

Sun: Blake, want to get food today?

Sun: Why aren't you getting back to me?

Sun: Did I do something wrong?

Sun: I'm sorry, whatever it is. Please don't hate me.

All four messages are sent in a span of thirty seconds. She rolls her eyes.

Blake: I'm not mad, Sun. Some people don't spend all day glued to their scrolls.

As an afterthought, she adds:

Blake: Sure, we can get food. Just somewhere we won't run into anyone from Beacon.

…

"Why the long face?" Sun asks when she shows up at a quaint (read: decrepit) little café on the East side of Vale.

"I'm fine," Blake mutters. She's not going to wallow in her misery. She's going to put all that aside and have fun for once, because that may or may not be a healthy way to deal with problems, but it's certainly better than being miserable.

"Repressing your feelings won't help either. You have to talk them out."

Damn, this whole dealing-with-emotions thing is harder than she thought.

"All right, I'll talk my feelings out." Blake tries not to sound sarcastic. "Weiss and Yang kissed two nights ago."

"And how did that make you feel?" Sun prompts, leaning forward over the rickety table.

"Can we not do this?"

"Just tell me how you feel. It's not complicated!" Sun insists.

Why does everybody keep saying that it's somehow easy to actually express emotions?

"That made me feel – angry, I guess." Blake shrugs.

"So angry that you hid in the library and cried for two days?"

"You're a terrible therapist."

Sun ignores the jab and starts tilting his chair back on two legs, hands folded on the table in front of him, looking peaceful and bored and severely irritating.

"Fine, I wasn't really angry," Blake admits. "Um, I felt like an idiot. I guess I felt jealous, but mostly I'm just –"

Sun's chair falls over in a cloud of splinters and an alarming clatter. Sun himself gets to his feet in moments, ignoring the newly formed sawdust, and leans over the table, suddenly looking far more interested in the conversation.

"Jealous of who?" he asks.

"Um, jealous of Weiss, obviously. I mean, Yang is – Yang is a lot of things." That totally counts as expressing her feelings.

"Called it," Sun says, apparently completely back to normal after his brief chair-slaughter. "Gentlemen – and gentlewomen – prefer blondes, after all."

"What? Is that a reference to something?"

"Never mind." Sun perches on the edge of the table, tail twitching in what Blake is pretty sure is excitement. "Weiss and Yang, huh? I wouldn't have expected that."

"Weren't we talking about my feelings?"

"Didn't you hate talking about your feelings?" Sun shoots back. "Besides, I now have two friends who stand to benefit if I break them up, and to do that I need information."

"Who's the other friend? Ruby?"

"Neptune. Obviously. Wait, is Ruby in love with Weiss too? Ooh, so much drama."

"I kind of thought Neptune was, you know –" Blake flaps her hands vaguely, in a gesture that communicates a lot despite being completely unintelligible to straight people.

"I have my suspicions," Sun admits. "But for the time being, my sole purpose in life is to break up Weiss and Yang. I shall not rest until I have completed my mission."

"Please don't do that," Blake says, but Sun ignores her and walks out, with an "always happy to help!" thrown over his shoulder.

All of this is very bad.

A/N: Far away, in a distant universe, the author cursed to themselves and tried their best to tape over the growing cracks in the fourth wall, muttering about infrastructure and load-bearing pillars.

All jokes aside, Sun is absolutely the kind of person who'd help someone he had feelings for get with their own love interest, and go way overboard in the process, and I love being able to deal with a love triangle in a different way than the standard "demonize the third wheel". Although "triangle" is kind of an inadequate word for the spectacular mess of pairings that are showing up in this.