[2-A] Hunters, Hounds, and Hickory
It was a ritual, by now.
Blake stopped as she always did, on the banks of a brook that wound along the forest floor. She unlaced her boots and leaned them against a rock. Barefoot, she stepped over the stream, curling her toes into the bed of soft moss on the other side. It was late afternoon, with the sun slanting in between the leaves and glinting gold on the wet rocks.
She moved down a rocky incline, careful where she placed her feet, and followed a curve in the landscape that dipped into a shallow valley. The gigantic oaks and maples she'd been passing through gave way to hickory. Dappled shadows flitted across her face.
Head bowed, she approached the tallest tree in the grove. It was really two trees, grown so close together that their trunks had fused. The smaller one was all dry, dead twigs, and its only leaves sprouted from where it met the larger. Strips of bark covered them like jagged scales. Their roots were gnarled together, digging deep into rich, black soil.
She stopped in its shadow and placed a palm flat against its larger trunk. "Hi, Yang."
There was a laugh behind her. "You know you could've done that to any one of 'em, right?"
"This one seemed more fitting."
"More dramatic, you mean."
Yang was leaning halfway out of one of the lesser trees. As Blake watched, she stepped into the grove and stretched. Her skin, covered in the same spiny bark as her trees, rasped against the trunk she'd come from. The hair tumbling down her back went from mossy green to blonde. In deference to what she called 'meat-people rules,' she was wearing a shirt and shorts woven from the leaves around her. Blake still had no idea if she'd made them, or just grown them.
"So." She put both hands on her hips and narrowed her eyes. "You're back."
"Yeah."
A smirk. "And when you said you wouldn't be..."
Blake winced and looked at the ground. "I know. I do, I just—"
"Wasn't a complaint. I'm messing with you."
"Right." There was an awkward pause, as Yang waited patiently for Blake to unravel. Then, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to impose, I just..."
"Who's chasing you this time?"
"...The townspeople."
Yang raised an eyebrow. "Then who chased you into town?"
Blake's ears flattened against her skull.
"Same guy?"
"Yeah."
"Well then." Yang gestured around the grove. "What's mine is yours! You know the rules. Don't break off any bark, don't start any fires, don't let me see any hatchets—"
"Hands off the trees. I remember."
"Hands are fine. Steel, not so much."
Blake roamed around, stopping when she noticed vines hanging from one of the trees. They had rounded leaves and pale white berries. Last time she'd been here, there hadn't been anything in the grove but hickory, and some smaller plants underfoot. Now that she knew what to look for, she could see signs of the new plant all over. There were even a few sprigs on the central tree, the one Yang called her heart.
"What are these?" she asked, using her finger to tilt one of the leaves up for Yang to see.
She made a face. "Mistletoe."
"...What?"
"It's mistletoe."
Blake took another look, trying to imagine the berries in bright red. It still didn't look right. "Aren't the leaves supposed to be spiky?"
"You're thinking of holly." Yang grabbed the vine she was looking at and ripped it violently from its perch. Blake gaped at her.
"But... what are you doing?"
"Killing it." Yang crumpled up the vine. "With extreme prejudice."
"...Not a fan of kissing, then?"
Yang gave her an odd look. "What's kissing have to do with anything?"
"In some places there's a tradition where people kiss under the mistletoe."
"Meat-people are weird." Yang gestured with the broken vine. "I'm killing it because it's a parasite. Saps nutrition from my trees, and then it spreads all over."
"Oh."
"Remember my no blades rule? Might make an exception for some hedge clippers. If you come back."
Blake soon realized why it had taken her so long to notice the infestation of mistletoe. Most of the vines had been pulled away, except for a few here and there. And, she soon realized, in one spot where they hung from two trees and met in the middle, forming a little dip. When she got closer, she saw that the inside had been filled with moss.
"Did... did you make this?"
"Yeah, well..." Yang turned away, ostensibly so she could glare at one of the vines. "I figure if I'm gonna be taking in strays all the time, I might as well have somewhere to put 'em."
If it were anyone else, Blake might have being bristled at being called a stray. She could still remember the first time she'd shown Yang her ears—it had been their second meeting, when she'd broken her arm and fled into the grove from the northern mountains. The dryad had kept staring at her, like she was still waiting for the big reveal. Blake had to explain that some humans thought she was little better than a wild animal because of them.
"Don't flatter yourself, two-legger," Yang had said, grinning.
Besides, she couldn't really argue with that description. Not when all her visits could be summed up by a list of injuries—broken arm, stab wound, cracked rib—and the names of the people who were hunting her.
Adam was the first person on that list, or at least the first one that really mattered. They had boarded a train heading from Vale to Mistral. He said the explosives were for opening up the vault in the second car. That changed when they realized there was an SDC executive on board. From there... there was a choice to make. To be a fanatical monster or a cowardly traitor. She decoupled the cars.
That created a gap between her and Adam, but she was left stranded on a train full of enemy guards. She escaped, barely, with a hole in her shoulder and her thoughts bleeding into a hazy fog. The night sky had opened up above her, scattered with stars like a trillion staring eyes. She stumbled into the forest hoping to find a quiet place to die.
Instead, she woke up in the grove with her arm wrapped in leaves and a pile of hickory nuts by her elbow. Blake thought at first that some hiker had found her and done what they could. She turned out to be a talking tree instead.
Right about then there was a campaign in Vale to cut back social welfare programs aimed at helping homeless faunus. A lot of humans supported the movement, and almost all of them hid their most vile rhetoric behind palatable excuses. One didn't. John Winchester went on record saying what everyone was thinking. "If you feed them once, you can be damned sure they'll come back."
It was a major talking point in the weeks after Blake left the grove for the first time. Indignant rage mixed with fear for the future boiled up in her, in everyone she knew. And in everyone she used to know. Winchester turned up dead less than a month after his statement.
Not long after that, Blake returned to the rural town of Patch and hovered there in limbo, hating herself for coming back. But even as she traced the route from the village to the grove for the first time, she told herself this didn't prove him right. It wasn't food she was looking for. It was safety. It was falling asleep somewhere she didn't have to worry about waking up at knife-point.
Blake left after around a week. Then she came back. Left again. Rinse, repeat. Yang stopped looking sad when Blake left, never to return, after about the third time. She started laughing after the fifth.
She thought she'd finally managed to kick the habit when she moved from Vale to Mistral. Life went on, and she'd known for a while now that safe didn't stay safe very long if you kept coming back to it.
She made friends with Sun like everyone did—completely by accident and against her better judgment. He was almost like a second shadow sometimes, if a shadow could be loud and annoying. Unlike the humans she'd been on decent terms with, she could talk about the mess of shame, fear, and rage she felt, and he'd understand. But he wasn't like her old friends in the White Fang either. He understood why she was angry, but he wasn't. Not really. She chalked that up to a combination of his good luck, and the fact that there wasn't a malicious bone in his body. He was... wholesome. She didn't have enough of that in her life.
He liked to walk home with her at night. She tolerated the company, even though it took twice as long with him getting distracted by street vendors and gaggles of children playing ball and, once, an actual honest-to-gods butterfly. Mistral started to feel almost welcoming.
Blake got complacent. She didn't notice someone was following her until she and Sun were cornered in a dead-end street. A masked woman stared them down, holding a whip with a wicked blade at its tip.
"I'm not part of that anymore," she said. As if it mattered.
They fought. Sun knocked the woman's mask off. Blake froze, staring at her face. The face that always used to turn stoplight red whenever she was flustered. Or fluorescent pink, or lime green, or magenta, flashing like a strobe light as a small crowd of children shouted requests.
In the end, Ilia didn't have the heart to do what she was sent to do. Blake escaped with a few broken ribs. Sun didn't. She met his friend Neptune for the first and last time at the funeral, and within a week she was back in Patch.
Yang didn't comment on the long absence, but that time when Blake left and said she wasn't coming back, she didn't laugh.
"Uh, Blake?"
She jumped. "What?"
"You spaced out a little, there."
Blake noticed her grip on one of the mistletoe vines had left a red line across her palm. She relaxed by degrees, then ran a hand through the moss that had been painstakingly woven into the hammock.
"I was just... trying to figure out how to thank you. This is incredible."
Yang shrugged and melted halfway into a tree. Blake knew by now that... unique bit of body language meant she was embarrassed. "Glad you like it."
"Isn't it hurting the trees?"
"Nah." She pointed at a maple tree a few yards beyond the edge of the grove. Four separate vines were draped across its branches. "See that? That hurts the tree. One or two isn't bad as long as I keep 'em from spreading."
Blake placed a hand on the lower branches of one of Yang's trees. "Do you mind if I climb up?"
"Nope."
Once in the upper branches, she grabbed hold of a vine she'd spotted from the ground and tore it away. By the time she'd finished, she was sweating and covered up to the elbows in dirt and bits of bark and tiny scratches from the tree's thorns. She also had a handful of nuts in each pocket. Yang offered her more when she got back to the ground.
As the evening wore on, the sweat evaporated and she started to shiver. Yang sat next to her, though she didn't have any body heat to share. There was no fire in the grove, so Blake curled in on herself and bore it. She'd been colder. Then the fireflies and bats came out, and she sat with her back against one of the trees and watched them.
Stars multiplied into vast, scattered nebulae, like someone had tossed a cup of glowing sand into the sky. The moon rose. Yang retreated back into her trees, and Blake curled up in the hammock. It was a more comfortable bed than she'd had in months. Maybe longer. The trees stood like silent sentinels, keeping watch. And finally, finally, she was safe enough to let sleep take her.
The heat woke her up.
Blake opened her eyes groggily. The air smelled like smoke. She jerked upright and tried to leap out of the hammock, but her ankle got tangled in the vines and she landed face-first in the dirt. The night sounds had been replaced with a low, omnipresent roar. She scrambled to her feet and whirled around. No matter where she looked, she could see the same ruddy glow on the horizon. She stared, paralyzed.
But she wasn't the one in the most danger, here. "Yang!"
"Busy." She couldn't tell where the voice had come from. Then one of the trees near the edge of the grove let out a low groan. It cracked and bent. Its limbs went dry and dead and bony, its leaves shriveled and fell to the ground. It trembled, shuddered, and went down. Dark earth was ripped up by its roots.
Yang stumbled out of the fallen tree and collapsed to one knee, gasping. She stood up and shoved at it, forcing it away from the rest of the grove inch by painful inch.
"What are you doing?!"
"I have to make a buffer. Can't let it spread." The reply was little more than a grunt, with all her focus on moving the tree. Not knowing what else to do, Blake sprinted over and helped. They toppled four trees. Yang put a hand on each one before she killed it, murmuring something in a language Blake didn't understand.
It didn't matter anyway. A hickory tree on the other end of the grove caught fire and Yang crumpled. Fire leaped from branch to branch. Blake was sweating through her clothes, choking on the smoke. She fumbled for something, anything that could stop it, but there was nothing. The creek was far away, and there was no way she could carry enough water to make a difference. Her head spun. She stumbled through the trees.
About fifteen feet away stood a woman in a mask, carrying a torch in one hand. Blake ducked down behind the trunk of a fallen tree and watched as she touched the fire to the undergrowth she was standing in. Then she vanished into the woods, running to keep ahead of the flames.
It's him.
Blake pushed herself upright. The heat hit her like a physical force. She moved on instinct, sprinting always towards the coolest, darkest place she could see. Over the roar of the wildfire she could hear barking and howling.
She remembered the Rabbit's Foot, a group of poachers in Mistral who were infamous for hunting faunus. Fire to flush them out. They'd published a guide, for amateurs following in their footsteps. Then they'll run right into the dogs.
A fit of coughing sent her reeling, bent double. There was a downed tree right in front of her. She crawled under a tangle of damp roots, catching a hint of its rich forest smell under the smoke and ash. That got her past the worst of the fire. The dogs were still barking. She kept running.