In court, child custody visits were hashed out as thoroughly as possible to avoid ambiguity and future fights. Major holidays could be spent with either parent on alternate years, or only given to whoever asked for the time. School breaks were also included in the finely detailed contract, going so far as to give curfews for pick up and drop off.
Lumi's parents, in their custody contract thing (she was sure there was a name for it but she didn't care enough to look it up) decided the children would spend Friday from six pm to Wednesday at six pm with their mother during one week school vacations or spend a full week with her and a full week with Delphinus (their dad) for two week vacations.
Which wasn't to say they couldn't spend more time with their mother if they wanted to, but that was the caveat- if they wanted to. For the most part, the Hazelwood siblings were happy enough with the time they had and asking for more wasn't something they'd ever done unless their mother wanted to treat them to a movie or some other activity.
So Lumi, Ash and Nocte were unsurprised to be told that they'd be spending their first week of break at their mother's, and the second week with their dad. They were, however, surprised to find out that their mother was taking them camping. Well, more accurately, they'd be staying in a cabin owned by a colleague of her's and patrolling for Grimm, but aside from short patrols it was basically camping.
Early Saturday morning saw the three of them trudging out of bed and into their mother's waiting car, bags in hand and less than excited to be up before the sun. Even Lumi, used to waking at ridiculous hours for school, couldn't be cajoled into anything resembling an actual conversation until they'd stopped at a Stirbuck's for coffee.
Midway through her drink, the slow moving cogs of Lumi's mind finally clicked into place and started working. Something was… different about her mother. She wasn't as- intense? sharp?- as she usually was. There was something softer, less on-edge about the way her eyes scanned the road, something gentler in her tone.
Lumi glanced at the older woman out of the corner of her eye as she sipped her strong, sweet coffee. Shoulder length black hair, violet eyes (no make-up given the hour), thick scarf, long sleeved t-shirt (no stains- new?), worn but not threadbare jeans tucked into equally well-worn boots, no jewelry aside from her bracelet and-
Huh, that was new. She was wearing a new, bright red one made of some type of string in addition to her normal silver one. There was an ornamental knot at the center of the new bracelet, shaped like a four leaf clover which she vaguely remembered stand for good luck or banishing Grimm or maybe inviting wealth?
Like most kids her age, Lumi had gotten into making friendship bracelets in elementary school. The hobby hadn't carried into her teen years, but she could just barely recall an online infograph explaining what different color threads meant. Black, white and red represented Grimm so putting those colors into a bracelet was the equivalent of saying "I hope Grimm eat you" but she couldn't recall what each color meant individually.
She pulled out her Scroll and Ping'ed the question. They weren't far enough away to be out of range of the CCT, which she was thankful for, because she felt like she should know what it meant but her mind was chugging along to no avail and it was driving her a little bit crazy.
The top result on Ping led her to an article on how to make a friendship, which would have been useful if she had string to play around with but didn't exactly help her now. She hit the "back" button and typed "red string clover knot bracelet mean" into the search bar. It wasn't, technically speaking, a real question or even a sentence, but it wasn't like Ping was going to judge her half-awake ramble-typing.
Four links down, she found the answer; that color thread woven in a bracelet with that specific knot meant "good luck." More specifically, the design came from northern Mistral before the kingdom unified and became popular roughly ten years ago in other kingdoms with the resurgence of friendship bracelets.
Lumi closed out the web browser and went back to staring at the scenery and drinking her coffee. Finding an answer lead to a handful more popping up- did she make the bracelet? Buy it? Find it in her closet, sitting in a box? Her mother's family was from Mistral, which made her decision to wear it make sense, but why now of all times?
They pulled into the airfield in the middle of Lumi's mental ramblings. Ash and Nocte were asleep in the backseat so it fell to her and her mother to load all the bags into the plane then wake the sleeping pair and herd them onto the aircraft. Once in the air, the youngest two quickly fell back asleep while Lumi resumed her train of thought.
Try as she might, she couldn't pin down the change in her mother aside from a new piece of jewelry. No job promotion, or new significant other, or sudden win in the lottery (not that a no-nonsense woman like Verbena Hazelwood would play the lottery, but still).
An hour into their flight, her mother leaned over the aisle and asked how her finals went (okay, was her response, not sure about her lit exam but she felt she did well on math). After that, she asked if Lumi had made any new friends (kind of, she and Yang and Yang's sister Ruby had plans to catch a movie next week) and if she still talked to Calypso (yes, and the tall girl somehow got even taller).
It hit Lumi a couple questions in that her mother was being nice and was making conversation with her. It's a rare enough event that her stomach flipped with nerves, but not so rare that she started pinching herself to see if she was awake (and she was- she only needed one pinch to remind herself of that). They talked a little while longer before Verbena settled back into her seat and closed her eyes for a quick nap.
Some hours north, they pulled into a walled airfield and the passengers unloaded. Maybe this week wouldn't be complete and utter hell, Lumi thought as she wrapped an infinity scarf around her neck to ward off the cold. She was willing to play nice if her mother was too. More than that, there was no need to antagonize the older woman all the way out in the middle of nowhere- she'd have to fight off Grimm that showed up and minimizing all chances of that was a no-brainer.
Mind made up to not look a gift horse in the mouth, Lumi nodded and helped move all their bags to the waiting rental car.
Their first day in the cabin was nothing spectacular- cleaning and supply checks mostly, with a little bit of patrolling thrown in for good measure. The second day, however, was much less boring. It started with a hearty breakfast of potatoes, sausage, and eggs with toast followed by a quick patrol. Following that, they all marched out of the warm, cozy cabin for a hike to a nearby waterfall that hadn't frozen over.
Patches of snow (which were more like slush than anything) dotted the landscape, and icicles hung from the branches of tall, spindly evergreens. If her memory was right, certain trees had needles that could be boiled for tea- others, however might poison her so she decided to avoid making tea from random plants altogether.
They explored the area around the waterfall until lunchtime, then trudged back to the cabin to warm up and eat. Despite how little she wanted to move after lunch, Lumi faithfully followed her mother's footsteps and patrolled the area. They ran into a pair of Hunters from the nearby town, a pair of Huntresses (?) who were decked out in bright orange and yellow (for visibility, she guessed).
Some chit chat later, the Huntress dressed in orange commented, "-she's so young! Is she training to be a Huntress?"
Her mother smiled and gestured for Lumi to step closer. "Yes, it's been her dream since she was a little girl. I trained her myself with our family's style so I'm sure she'll get into Beacon next year when she graduates from Signal."
"Oh, how nice," the one in yellow exclaimed. "I remember my own years at Beacon- they were between libraries and the construction was so loud, even during exams-" off she went.
Lumi tried to feign interest by nodding along and adding small comments, but she didn't exactly know these women and the pile of books by her bed were calling her name. Twenty minutes of polite conversation later, her mother confessed to having two other children waiting for them to be done with their patrol. The older Huntresses waved them off with promises to see each other in town and maybe spar if they had time.
They didn't run into any Grimm on the way back though Lumi couldn't brush aside how different her mother seemed, which brought its own sort of anxiety despite her resolution to not think about it anymore. First new jewelry, then an overall thawing of her personality, and now she'd subtly bragged about Lumi (and herself by extension, but that was to be expected)? What was next, a campfire where they all held hands and sang?
It wasn't until they walked back to the cabin and she had a chance to rummage around the pantry that she realized that there was no alcohol in the place. She blinked and searched through the cabinets more carefully. Nothing, not even a shot sized bottle. That was… new? When her mother went to bathroom, she rifled through her bag and found it clean too, aside from a keychain that had a triangle inside a circle emblazoned on one side and the phrase "Welcome!" on the other.
Oh, her mother was back in AA, she thought and put everything back where she found it. Her mother was in AA again and wanted to spend a week in the forest with them- without alcohol. Her sober mother took them on a week-long trip to the north to bond.
Lumi didn't know how to feel about it.
Excitement and hope welled up in chest (maybe she'd actually changed, actually wanted to get help, wanted to stay clean and make up for all the trouble she'd caused) but it clashed horribly with the dread in her gut and the gnawing thoughts of "this is only a phase- when she falls off the wagon (like she always does, you're always hoping and it's never a real change) it's going to be ugly and you're miles from home; what will you do?"
She rose on unsteady feet (when did she sit down?) and made her way to her room just past the stairs. She flopped onto bed and curled up, dragged a folded quilt over her head and tried to breathe steadily. The last thing she needed were Grimm scratching at the door.
In, hold, out. In, hold, out. In, hold, not so long Lumi, out; good. Again; again; again…
Her warm, humid breath settled into a slow, steady pattern. At one point, someone poked their head into her room then backed out quietly. They must have thought she was asleep, some distant part of her brain reasoned. The reality was that she was freaking out and trying to be polite about it.
Melt down mostly over, she threw off the too warm quilt and stumbled her way to the bathroom to splash water on her face. Her hands shook and her face was frozen into a half-awake expression, but that was easy enough to pass off as her having "just woken up." She grinned at Nocte and waved off Ash's questions- no, she wasn't sick; yes, she'd play Kingdoms of Remnant with them after dinner.
Lumi grabbed a granola bar from the cabinet and hoped on all hope that her mother really had changed- that they wouldn't be stuck hours from Vale with her sharp tongue and violent temper. (Wanted to believe but couldn't bring herself to.)
Despite her pessimistic outlook, camping was not as terrible as she worried it might be. There were a couple Grimm the next day, but nothing that she couldn't handle (and despite her mother's change in attitude, Lumi still had to fight them off herself). On Tuesday, they ended up in town to spar the Huntresses they ran across on Sunday.
Thankfully, the two went easy on Lumi; not that it meant she claimed a victory against either of them or her mother. The three were retired Huntresses, sure, but they had earned the title on their own merits and a half-trained sixteen year old like her couldn't hope to compare.
Against a few of the other teenagers in town, however… Well, she was lucky that the spars took place in the forest, which had plenty to tall trees and long shadows for her to hide in. With luck, her trusty baton and her knowledge of the fact that people tended to drop their weapons when you smashed their wrists, she was undefeated in one on one fights in her age range.
She tried not to feel too proud about her wins because she had years of formal and at-home schooling whereas they didn't, but a little bit of the emotion stayed curled around her heart. Unfair match-up or not, she'd earned every win.
To try and appear as not-a-terrible-person, she offered Aura healing to opponents afterwards, and was thankful that no one seemed to hold any ill will when it was all said and done (she'd had enough of Grimm, thank you very much).
Her Wednesday and Thursday were dedicated to experimenting with the small gravity-type Dust crystals in the heel of a pair of boots she bought especially for the occasion while her siblings sat on the small porch to watch her. By altering the amount of Aura she channeled to the crystals, she could control how light she was and as a result, jump higher than she ever had before- higher than the tree-line even! Granted, after a few years at Beacon she'd be able to do the same without Dust, but it was cool to experience now.
Nocte, self-proclaimed master of video games, pulled up a list of things she could try doing which included but wasn't limited to: a double-jump; a 720 degree shot; upside down target practice; mid-air target practice, and a few other things she pulled up on her Scroll. After a little coaxing that no one could see her if she embarrassed herself doing all the moves, Lumi let loose and started hopping like a rabbit.
The jumps themselves were fun, but being able to mimic all the fancy slow motion action shots from movies and unrealistic poses from games was icing on the cake. She spun around mid-air like a figure skater and shot a target with barely a glance. Nocte clapped and played another video she could copy. At one point, Lumi even managed a double-jump by solidifying the shadows beneath her feet right as she was coming out of the arc of her first jump (though she wasn't able to recreate the move more than the one time).
Fun as it all was, they did uncover a couple issues with using the gravity dust. If she powered the crystal enough to let her float like feather, she couldn't quickly fire her bow multiple times in a row because the recoil knocked her back and off-set her aim. Also, if she was mid-air when she fired (i.e. not touching anything but the air), the recoil stopped or reversed her momentum so she was left floating aimlessly until she was close enough to the ground/a tree to land and/or push away from.
She could cut off the stream of Aura powering the Dust to regain her weightedness (was that a word?), but then she'd be falling and it was difficult to change directions or defend herself while doing so. If she was going to use the Dust in battle or in a spar, she needed a way to minimize the vulnerable moments.
But discussing the potential problems of gravity dust was boring, so she kept her thoughts to herself and kept flipping about to entertain herself and her siblings. She bent low, muscles coiled, and leapt high in the air while pushing enough aura into the crystals that she was practically weightless. At the top of the jump, she curled into a ball and flipped once, twice, then significantly reduced the amount of aura she was channeling and fell hard and fast towards the ground. Knees bent, she hit the dirt with enough force that the trees shook around her, their branches and leaves rustled like applause.
Lumi stood with an exhilarated smile aimed at her awestruck siblings, took one step forward and promptly crumbled to the ground when her leg gave out on her. It took her a half second to realize that she was staring at the sky, but by the time she remembered what she was doing, Nocte and Ash were already at her side trying to pull her up.
She got to her knees and funneled more aura to the gravity-dust to make it easier for them to help her stand. Adrenaline was still strong in her system, but she could tell from the hot throbbing of her ankle that she had bruised or twisted the joint when she landed and even if she couldn't feel it, her body was protecting itself by refusing to take weight.
They dragged her inside, watched her unlace her boots and hovered at her side while she lit her hand with Aura. Her control was shaky from her excitement and the thrill of touching the sky, but a few gentle pulses later she was good as new.
"See? I'm fine, you two," she stood and balanced on one foot to demonstrate.
Nocte rolled her eyes while Ash exhaled heavily.
"You're always getting hurt, Lumi," Ash crossed his arms. "Course we were worried."
"I can heal myself," she shot back and padded over to the kitchen. "You guys would know how to heal too, if you ever decided to learn."
"Yeah, yeah," Nocte waved her off.
Both her siblings had their Aura unlocked, so they really could learn if they took her up on her offer to teach them, but that was an old conversation that Lumi let drop. "Who wants hot chocolate? We were outside for a while, so you're probably cold, huh?"
At this, the younger two eagerly agreed and shouted their orders at her. By the time their mother came back from her trip to town, the three were tucked under a thick blanket with cups of cocoa in the hands and snacks littered about the table and folds of the blanket.
Friday was another hike in the woods after a quick patrol by Lumi and their mother to make sure there were no unpleasant surprises. Ash took more pictures than Lumi think he knew what to do with, but they raced on the way back to the cabin and she let him win. Nocte, with much shorter legs than them, stomped up the path with a scowl and their mother sometime later. She turned her face away with a "humpf!" at the older two's cajoling and threw herself onto the couch to play MisHonored 3.5.
It didn't last long, because after lunch they had to clean the cabin from top to bottom in anticipation of leaving early the next morning. The misery of cleaning (and folding and packing and repacking) united them all so after dinner they sat down to watch a movie.
Their mother, still miraculously sober, reminded them not to stay up all night and swept up the stairs around ten. The Hazelwood siblings followed a movie later, and dragging them out of bed the next morning was a chore unto itself. Still, the trip had been pleasant and they were sorry to leave the cabin behind. Like before, Ash and Nocte slept on the way home so Lumi chatted quietly with her mother.
Not as bad as she thought it'd be, despite how her heart sometimes leapt into her throat at the sight of her mother drinking anything before her logic caught up with her. Maybe she could get used to this new way.
After sleeping away Saturday, and spending a lazy Sunday at home in pajamas, Lumi woke up not-quite-early Monday morning and went to the gym. Then she went home, bullied her lazy siblings into getting dressed and bullied her overworked father into driving them all to the grocery store. He had taken the day off work to spend some time with his kids, but somehow Lumi imagined he didn't expect to spend it like this.
He pushed the basket and let the three of them swarm to and fro, grabbing things and chucking them in (or taking things out and replacing them with what was on the grocery list, Ash [no, we're not getting Fruit Explosion Rolls, you have some at home!]).
It was at the baking aisle where as she reached for something off an upper shelf that a five pound bag of flour fell and exploded in a clingy white cloud that covered her legs, her shoes, the floor, and anything else in a three foot radius.
"Really?" she groaned and looked the ceiling with a sigh. The clunk-clunk-clunk of a cart with a messed up wheel met her ears and she wondered if running away from witnesses would save her from having to pay for the ruined flour.
Probably not, because she was wearing it, but a girl could dreams. She turned to who she assumed was a worker putting things back on the shelf and saw Branwen lazily pushing a cart, Ruby and Yang at his heels. She blinked, ignored the half-bitten back grin on her teacher's face and the girls' questions, and grabbed the ten pound bag she had been aiming for.
"I thought you lived on Patch?" she said in lieu of a real greeting.
"We do," Ruby piped up.
"Dad had business in town so he sent us grocery shopping to keep us busy," Yang shrugged and threw a box of cake mix into the cart.
Branwen was probably supposed to be the "adult supervision" to make sure they didn't go crazy buying snacks, but judging from how many bags of chips and boxes of crackers she saw in the cart, he wasn't doing too good a job at that.
"Ah," she said and looked at the other end of the aisle, away from them. "Well, I'll let you get back to it." Lumi waved at the three and slipped past her snickering teacher.
Her father took one look at her, raised a brow, but said nothing and instead held up the car keys.
"Thanks, dad," she went for a hug, thought better of it (flour got everywhere) and walked to the car to sit and stew. Just when she thought her life was changing for the better, too.
Well, bad things always seemed to happen around Branwen, so it made sense that she'd randomly get attacking by baking supplies the one time she saw him.
Lumi got home after the Flour Incident (as she was now calling it) and realized that she had promised Yang and Ruby that they'd hang out. She wrote a reminder on a bright blue sticky note and set the thought aside- groceries wouldn't sort themselves after all. And she hadn't seen in her dad in over a week so of course they all had to marathon Daring Devil and catch him up on what they'd done up north.
Then on Tuesday she got sucked into a playthrough of a game she was interested in but didn't have the system for- and there went ten hours of her day. On Wednesday she worked on integrating her Semblance and gravity dust in preparation for her weekly Grimm hunt/training session with her mother, and that took up nearly half the day- then she had to do laundry and unpack her things which she had pushed to the side because she didn't feel up to it at first but that was spread over two days and wow, it was already Thursday and wasn't she supposed to have done something?
The answer hit her when she saw a blond boy in a red sweater and she nearly dropped her Scroll in shock. Ruby! Yang! She was supposed to watch a movie or something with them and she had completely forgotten- except, she hadn't because the obnoxiously bright reminder she'd written herself mocked her when she unearthed it from pile of junk on her desk some time later- but Oum they were going to think she was a flake or hated them or something for waiting so long to get in touch.
Lumi texted the sisters and following a rapid fire chain of messages, the three of them had settled on watching the superhero movie that'd come out last week around three or four, then grabbing an early dinner from one of the little restaurants near the movie theater complex.
Guilt assuaged, Lumi slept easily that night and didn't complain as much the next morning when she trudged into the cold forest to fight Grimm. The monsters seemed easier to beat this time around and her mother's attacks were easier to rebuff, though she wasn't sure exactly why, so she decided it was the perfect environment to field-test her Dust boots.
She used her Semblance to flicker between ground level and tree cover when the amount of Grimm grew to be too much or when she needed a breather from the quick bouts of hand to hand, but used the boots to kick off from enemy to enemy on the ground and lessen the impact of her jump from the crown of a particularly tall trees in an homage to Mercenary's Oath.
When she tried the iconic leap of faith for the second time, her dust crystal gave out and she found herself desperately clutching at branches to slow her fall. Her nails clawed uselessly at twigs and her palms scrapped roughly against the deep, furrowed bark as the ground and the Grimm below hurtled towards her.
Her body slammed against a thick branch and her ribs screamed as she curled around the support, fifteen feet from the ground. She coughed heavily and slipped a few heart stopping few inches before she curled her right arm over the branch and yanked herself back up.
Her shoulder screeched in agony but she managed to shoot the snarling pair of Grimm dead and get from the high ground to where her mother was sitting by using her Semblance. A quick examination later, she was herded back into Vale and told to rest. Too much of her aura had been spent between augmenting the level of Dust use and protecting herself from attacks, so while she could heal a good chunk of her injuries, her shoulder would have to be kept in a sling and her ribs would be tender until she could rest up properly.
Despite her injuries, she kept the appointment she'd set with Yang and Ruby, who naturally freaked out until Lumi explained that she'd been sparring with her mother- loudly enough in her haste to reassure them that her voice bounced off the open air dome and met the ears of a certain group of resting birds.
The other two jumped in with stories of when they'd trained too hard too, and in-between popcorn and city crushing superpowers, they'd managed to have a nice time out. Yang eagerly recounted the fight scenes while Ruby theorized how the main villain's ray gun would actually work and Lumi chimed in with trivia she'd "picked up" (coughcoughspecifically looked upcoughcough).
She went home with a full belly and fell asleep with a content smile. She woke up slowly the next morning, with a text from her mother that because of yesterday (and the week they'd spent up north) Lumi was free from her weekend spars until next week.
Her good mood continued from yesterday as healed more of her shoulder and whipped up a hearty breakfast of pancakes, eggs, sausage and potatoes to round off her surprisingly not-terrible winter break. Midway through her batch of pancakes, she heard a firm set of three knocks from the front door and a muffled voice call out.
Lumi opened the door to a set of sharp eyed police officers and stared unblinkingly at them as they explained that someone had called Child Protective Services and could she please get her parents or other adult on the premises?
A/N: Oh no, whatever will she do? :)
See you next week!