A/N: Shoutout to our guest reviewer who banked on us going with the worst possible option when it came to visitors, and was totally right.
- Fiercesomest
Upstairs, Cyan perched on the edge of the bed in the cramped attic with the injured townsfolk who were able to navigate the stairs. The small window in the eaves was open, admitting the first sunshine they'd seen in days.
Not only that, but it admitted the first person they'd seen in days as well. A miner with a tough face and wide shoulders angled himself to get through the window with his coat and snow shoes. Snow showered off his coat and pants as he tumbled in, and everyone cheered. He laughed a second and greeted his neighbors before he sobered, most likely under the knowledge that this was everyone who'd made it. If anyone else survived the Grimm and the blizzard, they were tending to their wounds themselves under a mountain's worth of snow.
A couple of others followed, including Gregor, whose hair and blue headband brushed the low ceiling. The metal of the claymore cannon at his back gleamed in the shaft of light from the window.
"You're all a lot more alive than I figured you'd be," he greeted them with a broad smile.
One of the women made a comment about hibernating through the blizzard, and others relaxed into the brief chance for good cheer, nudging one another, poking fun. Just for a minute.
At the tail end of that minute, hurried footsteps tramped up the stairs, bringing a bright-eyed blonde huntress bursting through the doorway, stopping just short of tumbling over an elderly woman huddled by the door's dark wood frame. Yang stood tall, radiating cheerful energy, only for it to be crushed into utter disappointment the second she realized the new faces in the room were not, in fact, her missing sister or partner.
Gregor. The brawler's guard went up the instant she recognized the town's head miner, and her very first instinct was to go right back downstairs and hide Weiss. But she stilled herself, quickly glossing over the hardness in her eyes with a warm smile. Maybe if they could just start over, get off on the right foot... Perhaps they could work together in a time of crisis? Anyway, there was always something to be said for a bit of positivity.
"Well hey there! Good to see you guys made it."
Gregor looked up from the wounded wrapped in salvaged blankets and coats to Yang, who glowed with warmth. The attic wasn't large, and one step took him across it. He extended his hand to grip hers, "Someone said you'd been injured, and that you and your sister saved some kids. The Myers', maybe."
Yang couldn't stop the sadness that flickered across her features. She hadn't saved anyone. If anything, she'd brought this upon them all.
"It's all a bit hazy," she admitted with a drop of her eyes to the floor. "But you guys seem like you fared pretty well!" She spared a quick glance around at the handful of miners in the room - had they only sent their healthiest to search for survivors or was this all that was left? "Is anyone else with you?" Her eyes darted to the window, hoping for a flash of black or red.
The towering man had apparently given Yang all the attention he thought was due, though, and had already turned to speak with Cyan.
"We've got a couple injured back at the mine," he said, running his hand over his face, "We're closing off all the tunnels we can. Something really riled those Grimm."
"We need food," Cyan informed him. The sun showed how pale and worn the townsfolk in the attic had become. "Our medical supplies are running low."
"We brought supplies," Gregor jerked a thumb at the window, where a couple of his men were wrestling a few small crates and bags through the narrow window. They'd either been excavating houses or had managed to do a bit of salvaging before the storm hit. "Have you got a way of fixing the bites? Even the nicks won't quit bleeding."
"Maybe, if it's not too deep," Cyan perched close to another woman on the bed to ward off the chill from the open window. "You want to borrow Curt?"
"I want both of you."
A tension filled the space at that declaration. Cyan demurred, shaking her head, "I'm sorry. We have to take care of things here."
"Looks like your folks are healing," he shrugged to the others in the room. "My folks aren't."
Cyan held her silence.
Gregor glanced at Yang, as if remembering she was there. His brow creased, "Where's the rest of you? Anyone else make it?"
The brawler's eyes, which had drifted to the floor at the mention of something riling the Grimm, snapped back up to meet Gregor's,
Mentioning the incredibly weakened heiress just below to the man who had threatened her more times than Yang really felt like counting did not seem like a fantastic idea. Diversionary tactics were in order.
Yang crossed her arms, catching a few strands of her hair as it shifted about from the light gust of wind that snaked through the room, "I woke up here, but I think Ruby and Blake are..." she stopped short of using the word missing, glancing once more out the window, "still out there." She tried not to look too hopeful as she added, "Have you seen them?"
"They got caught in the storm?" Gregor turned to frown at the stark white of the snow showing through the window.
A miner in a heavy maroon colored coat wiped his nose on the back of his leather glove, "Most likely holed up somewhere. Or frozen. Unless the Grimm got them first."
"Those two seem pretty resourceful," Cyan gentled the statement, watching Yang, "If anyone can figure out how to weather a storm, it's them."
"Alright, is that all the stuff?" Gregor hefted a crate under one arm while another of his men shut the window, "Let's get it down to the kitchen."
The kitchen. Weiss. Yang stamped down the bitter anxiety brought about by the miner's offhand comments and rushed to grab one of the crates herself, finding it filled with boxed and canned foods. It was slightly heavier than she'd anticipated, but nothing she couldn't handle.
"Here, let me give you guys a hand," the words tumbled out as she shouldered the crate on her less-bruised side and hurried to stand at the doorway before anyone could protest. Maybe if she led the way she could give Weiss some kind of warning... or something.
When Yang and the other miners tromped down the steep, narrow staircase to the kitchen, though, the cot on the far side of the room was quiet and still. Teammates' arrivals or no, as soon as Yang had left the room Weiss had pulled the blankets back up to sleep. She lay curled on her side, her white hair (what was visible past the covers) spilled across the pillow. The bowl of soup, still three-quarters full, stood on the crate next to the bed.
Yang arrived at the bottom of the stairs a full three steps ahead of the group of miners and made a beeline for the cot sporting that telltale spill of white under pretense of setting the crate atop the one already resting there. The bowl momentarily hindered her progress, but a woman sitting against the wall beside the crate removed it with a smile, earning a look of gratitude from the brawler.
That look quickly shifted to one worry and indecision as Yang finally relieved herself of the crate and turned to stare down at Weiss. What now? Seemingly thousands of possible actions raced through the brawler's mind, each more outlandish than the last, and the indecision was ultimately her undoing. Just as she had moved past the idea of burying Weiss in a pile of snow outside, to considering melodramatically lamenting the heiress's unfortunate passing while silently whispering to the other girl to play dead, she heard the miner's footsteps echo on the kitchen's hard wood flooring.
The brawler turned as warm greetings and cheers arose from those around them awake enough to realize they had visitors, more survivors, with supplies no less! She offered the men a wide smile of her own. Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe they would overlook Weiss in favor of helping their fellow townsfolk.
For a while, whether they would or wouldn't remained to be seen. But once they'd gotten the boxes settled, the men took a look around.
"Hey, boss," one wiped his hands on his pants in the dim light. He jerked his head towards the back of the room, "the Schnees are down an heiress."
Gregor followed the man's gesture to look at Yang. His gaze shifted to Weiss's telltale shock of white hair, "Well, would you look at that."
His boots were heavy on the tile as he headed that way, hands at his sides and a hard smile at the edge of his mouth.
Yang tensed, blanketing her reaction with a playful wink at the miner who first spoke, "Hah, no way, she's fine," she then huffed and took a seat on the edge of Weiss's cot in a show of fatigue, putting herself physically in Gregor's way. She lightly rested a steadying hand on the heiress's shoulder hiding just beneath the quilt's edge. "Just took some heavy hits out there is all."
"Yeah?" No one had taken spaces close to Weiss's cot, so Gregor had little trouble getting over to her. "Is she awake? I want to show her something."
Internally, Yang bristled at everything unspoken lingering in the hulking man's tone, but she simply put a finger to her lips and shook her head no, keeping her voice low as she whispered, "Can it wait? We've still got supplies to pass out, right?"
"Wake her up," he growled. The men across the room had gone quiet to watch. The miner with the maroon coat put an arm across the doorframe, barring Cyan's entrance.
"I'd rather not," Yang's smile was calm, but her grip on Weiss's shoulder tightened. "She's been having trouble sleeping well."
"She was on watch that night, in the belltower," Gregor reached for his back pocket, "Wasn't she?"
Yang simply nodded, sparing a glance at the subtle movements of Gregor's arm, but otherwise keeping her eyes dutifully trained on his own, carefully watching the hardened grayish-black glare currently aimed right past her. "Yep. Rang the bell like crazy, warned the town and drew as much of the swam to herself as she could." They were guesses, shots in the dark, but she threw out whatever she could to help paint the heiress in the positive light she deserved.
"Let go," Weiss groaned, her speech thick with sleep. She shifted to get Yang to stop gripping her shoulder.
Gregor ignored Yang and moved to pull the blankets aside.
The brawler complied with the other girl's wish immediately, using her newly unoccupied hand to knock aside Gregor's reaching arm as she stood, placing herself directly in his immediate proximity. Her eyes flashed in unspoken warning, daring the man before her to try something. "Go back to sleep, Weiss."
"What?" The heiress rubbed her eyes on her sleeve, trying to sit up.
"Move," Gregor snarled at Yang, stepping into her space so he looked down at her. He clenched what looked like pictures in his hand. "You think I'm gonna hurt her? In a clinic?" He barked out a laugh, "Let me talk to her."
Yang crossed her arms and held her ground, saying nothing in response. She met his gaze evenly before eventually glancing back at Weiss, waiting until she caught her eyes to ask, "Do you want to talk to him?"
Weiss's gaze flickered from Yang to Gregor, and that was enough for him to start.
"I don't care if you rang the stupid bell. This happened on your watch, you worthless excuse for a huntress," he sneered, holding up the crumpled pictures in his fist. All other talk in the kitchen had gone dead silent. His voice low, grating through his teeth, "You didn't help anybody. You didn't save anybody. Wooden shutters weren't worth crap against those Grimm. And this- this one was all you."
The heiress lifted her chin a fraction of an inch in the half light of the open stove, "You're insane."
Gregor held his silence. Maybe something about the clinic, being surrounded by his recovering neighbors, made him steadier. His dark eyes were cold with hate. He dropped the pictures on the floor with a promise, "I'll see you later."
Yang couldn't help but glance curiously at the discarded pictures. There was one of Gregor with a baby, one of him with a little kid, and one of him grinning with... Yang's heart stopped.
Jack.
The edges of her vision bled crimson and something within the brawler finally broke down.
"Hey, wait." Yang reached a hand out to grab the miner's forearm as he turned to leave. "Can we talk for a minute?" She couldn't bring herself to look Gregor in the eye and focused instead on the pictures on the floor, desperately trying to imprint that happy, carefree image of Jack's smile over the mangled thing she'd found in the Grimm's lair. "Outside?"
Gregor's face twisted with grief. "Is this about your teammate," he kept his voice low, apparently aware of others' gazes on him now, "About her not being so bad? I got enough of that from Gale."
He pulled his arm free and called his men to get ready to leave.
"No," the brawler's hand hung in the air for a second before clenching into a fist and dropping to her side, "It's about your son."
Gregor stopped. He turned to Yang, searching her. "Fine. But hurry up. I've got folks waiting back at the mine."
Yang nodded, numbed by unrelenting guilt over the gravity of everything she had done - everything she hadn't done. With one sorrowful parting glance at Weiss, the brawler's body seemed to act of its own accord, heading towards the clinic's entrance in a jerky stride fueled by a rush of adrenaline.
Before she even realized she'd started moving, she was outside, standing just inside the icy tunnel she'd carved out with Curits what felt like years ago. Yang turned to find Gregor standing behind her, looking impatient. Everything she could possibly say rushed into her head all at once, but Gregor didn't seem to be in the mood to wait around for her to sort her thoughts out, so she threw caution to the wind and started with the first thing that came to mind.
"I-... I'm so sorry we couldn't save your son." Her words were strained at first, but they started to flow the more she spoke, "If Blake and I had known he was being held by the pair of Liliac we were tracking..." She temporarily lost her train of thought, fists clenched in frustration. What could they have done? Blake's pistols weren't built for that kind of range, and her own long-range incendiary shots would have incinerated both the Grimm and their captor.
"You're telling me you followed Grimm you knew were carrying a kid?" Gregor asked, his tone dangerous.
Yang shook her head, bowing it to study the packed snow beneath her feet. "We didn't know what it was, it was too dark to see anything other than a dark blot in the sky." At least, it had been to dark for a humanto see. Had Blake known? Not that it mattered at this point. "By the time we caught up and found Jack in their lair, we were too late."
The brawler suddenly straightened her posture, fixing Gregor with burning amethyst that switched to crimson in the literal blink of an eye, "When I saw what the Grimm had done to him..." Red. Her memories were nothing but red, black, and blinding heat. She had tried to kill them all. If only it had worked.
"What?" Gregor frowned, uncomprehending. "Did you say 'lair'?"
The crimson bled from Yang's eyes and she blinked again, amethyst returning in an instant. "It might have been more like a den, or a cave or... I don't know. I couldn't actually see much other than their eyes," she grimaced, remembering the terror written on Blake's face when she had looked into the darkness. "They were endless. Blake is the only reason we escaped in one piece. They just kept coming, and the town..." The brawler squared her shoulders, "I brought this on everyone. This is no one's fault but mine."
Gregor continued to search her face, brow furrowed. Then, slowly, it dawned on him. His expression darkened, "You're what riled them."
Yang said nothing, letting Gregor's words hang in the air like the blade of a guillotine. She found no reason to deny what was true - rather, she accepted the accusation, sealing her fate with a quiet nod.
Gregor didn't say anything else. He buried his fist in Yang's jacket, hauling her one-handed back to the porch. He forced the door open-it banged against the inside wall and hung lopsided off its hinges as he dragged Yang through the hall, past his men, up the stairs.
"Get out," he roared, throwing her bodily at the window in the attic. The townsfolk there shrank away from both her and him. Gregor's face was red as he shouted his rage, hurling a large splintered dresser from beside the door at Yang.
The brawler put up no resistance other than covering the back of her head when she hit the window hard enough to crack the glass. There was only half a moment for her to wince when the sight of a dresser flying in her direction spurred her into moving. She turned away, letting the solid wood shatter across her back rather than chance deflecting it and having it careen into one of the nearby townsfolk.
Pain lanced through her bruises from both collisions, weakened spots in her defensive aura, direct feeds of energy to the flames that burned within her. Her teeth clenched with the effort it took to hold her semblance in check, and with sheer force of will she reigned herself in to the barest flick of fire from the edge of one eye. Heat poured off the brawler in waves, swirling through the silence of the room, seemingly misplaced, as her expression and posture lacked even the slightest traces of aggression when she turned back to face Gregor.
Seconds dragged like centuries as Yang scanned the faces of those around her one last time. She silently watched the townspeople's eyes dance nervously between herself and Gregor, watched the veins pop in the miner's neck as he heaved with barely contained fury, watched Cyan and Curtis arrive at the doorway and try to get past him, only for his miners to hold them back.
At long last, Yang let out a slow sigh. Resignation in her eyes, she looked to the clinic's resident physicians, wishing there was something more she could have done. Carefully removed her scarf, Yang moved and knelt down beside the nearest child, gently wrapping the bundle of orange fabric around the little girl's neck.
Without another word, she stood and turned to open the window, climbing not out into the snow, but up onto the rooftop. Slow and deliberate, her steps creaked across the shingles, then disappeared altogether.
Curtis listened, but no other sound of Yang came through the roof, "Gregor-"
"She did this," he turned, strong arming his way past his miners, hatred burning in his eyes. He'd cut his hand, throwing the dresser, but he didn't pay it any mind. "Half our people are dead 'cause of her. 'Cause of them."
Downstairs, Weiss put her head down for a second, waiting for the room to stop spinning. That crashing, splintering sound upstairs didn't bode well. She'd looked beside the cot, under the cot, everywhere she could see, but Myrtenaster was nowhere to be found.
"I don't suppose anyone's seen my sword?" she growled to hide the unsteadiness in her voice. Dust, she was dizzy.
The townsfolk just watched without responding. They didn't want to get involved, and with that cretin of a lead miner on the premises she couldn't really blame them.
Well, she could. They were all cowards. She swallowed hard to force down the bile that rose in her throat.
She sat up as best she could and set her jaw as she listened to the quick and heavy footsteps that preceded the miners' return to the kitchen.
Cyan came through the door first, attempting to bar Gregor's way, "Gregor, please."
He shouldered past her, though, fist already partway raised as he approached Weiss. The heiress brought her hands up and shut her eyes, taking several breaths to try and gather her aura for a glyph. Briefly, a circle of blue flickered around her.
Gregor's blow shattered the half-formed fragments. He caught a fistful of Weiss's already torn shirt and struck her again.
"Gregor! Gregor, stop," Curtis gritted his teeth, throwing himself on the bigger man's arm and hauling it back.
Still seeing stars, Weiss clung to Gregor's dirt begrimed wrist in a half conscious effort to get him to let go. He dragged her off the cot and hurled her to the floor.
"Take her out and shoot her," he ordered his men.
Grimly, they hauled the heiress up. She coughed and tried to get her feet under herself. Blood trickled down her face.
"You can't do this," Cyan told the men. Gregor threw Curtis off, sending him tumbling over the vacant cot.
"Who the hell says I can't? They brought these Grimm down on us. Gale's dead. Half our people are dead," his voice was a low growl of stone on stone. His fists clenched and the muscle stood out corded on his arms, "My son is dead."
The townsfolk watched him. Cyan made a move toward Weiss, but one of the miners standing at the edge of the crowd barred her way with his arm. Gregor repeated to his men, "Take her outside."
A/N: See you next week, folks.
- Fiercesomest
...Super secret second A/N: pssst, hey, Defenestrator here~ yes um, the lateness of this chapter is totally my fault.
EXTRA APOLOGY HUGS FOR AN EXTRA LONG WAIT.
Hhhhhuuuuggggssssssss
- D