Blake returns to her room, to her bed, to the off-white color of her hospital room walls. She doesn't say anything to Weiss at all, and Weiss doesn't ask.
--
Being away from Blake in the state she's currently in apparently gives Sun anxiety, because only twenty more minutes pass before he returns, unpeeled banana in his hand. He meets Weiss's stare as if to say, yeah, can't stomach anything else with the guilt keeping me full, and she understands.
It's not that they're never going to tell her; it's that Weiss wishes they could plan when. When's the moment to tell someone you knew they were in danger and you didn't do enough - is it when they're away from the beeping machines and syringes, when the pain's no longer dulled and they're experiencing everything at once? Is it when they're drugged and tired and shot, and the one they love is down the hallway, breathing alone? Is it--
"Blake," Sun starts suddenly, in a panicked tone that almost makes her twitch, too reminiscent of the previous night. He licks his lips, but his tongue's so dry it doesn't seem to help. "We knew."
Blake barely reacts; she blinks once, slowly, her stare never wavering from the back of her own hand. "Knew?" she repeats, flat and dismissive.
"We knew that Adam was there last night," he continues nervously, all of his muscles tense and held. "We didn't tell you because - we were keeping an eye on him, and we didn't - we didn't want you to panic, and we were afraid he'd confront you in public, but we should've--"
"It doesn't matter," Blake interrupts, lifeless like it takes all of her strength to even utter the words. He falters, pattering off, clearly not expecting the response. "It wouldn't have made a difference."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Weiss asks, a little more sharply than she intends. Her guilt belongs to her, and she's been possessive of the things that are hers since she was disowned by her family. Now that it's out there, she deserves to carry it. "We knew he was angry, Blake. We could've--"
"I knew he was angry, too," Blake says bitterly, cutting off her explanations. She leaves her fingers spread, her shoulders too heavy for her neck and sinking. It's unmistakable, unrelenting defeat. "I knew what he'd be like when he found out. I was with him for years, and I - it just - doesn't matter." She doesn't even allow them room for blame. "It wouldn't have made a difference."
Weiss bites the inside of her lip, pain taking the place of defiance. She wants to believe in a kinder world. Wants to believe that if only a mistake weren't made, they'd have spent the night in their hotel room together, unscarred and in love. "You're wrong," she says quietly, and even that is a lie. "You're - you're wrong."
Blake smiles humorlessly, and it's just one more thing that makes Weiss sick to her stomach. "I'm not," she says. "If it hadn't been last night, it would've been eventually."
Hot tears sting in Weiss's eyes, sharp like needlepoint. She's being sewn into misery, into acceptance. Because it isn't an argument. They'd all talked to the police, given statements, heard the night laid out from Adam's perspective like he'd been on a schedule.
And It's a truth.
Adam never would've been stopped. Not for long, and never for good. Not until his body bled itself dry into the earth.
--
She asks to be left alone, and it's only a request at all because she can't muster up the strength for a demand.
Neptune and Ilia rejoin them in the floor's lobby, chairs squeaking under their weight. Ruby's probably back at Yang's bedside, sleeping with her head in her arms, folded against the mattress. It's a waiting game. None of them are people who are used to long periods of stagnancy.
Finally, Weiss drops back into her instincts. "We should talk about the tour."
"The tour," Ilia repeats, her gaze far-off. It sounds like another world, another time. "What about it?"
"We'll have to push the dates," Weiss says.
"Whatever." It's the most Neptune's spoken all day. He's crushing an empty styrofoam cup in his hand, seeing how much pressure he can put on it before it breaks into pieces.
None of them are really listening to her, but she can't stop. "I'll get in touch with the road manager. It'll be fine."
There's no silence in a hospital, so the tension can't stretch like it needs to, can't create its own flatline. There's constant movement, murmuring, beeping. She feels it anyway, like rubber bands on a watermelon.
And then Ilia says, "I can't decide if you're optimistic for thinking so, or just plain stupid."
--
She's still dreaming when she wakes up.
It's a hazy, heavy kind of awakening: her brain swims under the pressure of restoring reality when it can't, when it lacks the context between a bullet and a blackout and everything after. She moves her eyelids, but it's like sifting sand under ocean, slipping away too fast to prove that it was ever even there - she's in a room with water running down the walls, light glinting over the current - maybe she's in a boat, drifting. Maybe she's simply been carried away.
"The water," she tries to say, but the words release mumbled, gossamer-like.
Someone's head shoots up. "Yang?"
Oh, that's her. She blinks again, tries to open her eyes a little wider; her throat feels torn and burned-out, the way bulbs break underneath their shades. She manages to grunt, and the person immediately reaches for a cup, holds the straw to her lips.
"Drink," the person says, focuses into view.
"Ruby," she says, surprised, sound scratching every syllable.
Ruby nudges the cup more impatiently. "Drink," she repeats, and Yang parts her lips, swallows room-temperature water until it doesn't hurt going down.
"What happened?" she asks, still quiet and strained, but it's hard for the realization and recognition to dawn any faster. Her mind's rebelling, wants to put it away, wants to bring that river back. She can still barely think, barely feel, barely breathe. Her ears are ringing. "Where - Ruby, where's--"
"Blake's okay," she intercepts the question carefully. "She's - she's down the hall, in her own room. She's okay. And that - the man who - he's dead."
"Dead," Yang echoes vaguely, mouth full of wool. Everything about her body is too heavy for her to lift. "Blake's okay."
"Yeah." Ruby's nervousness is too subtle for Yang's drugged brain to discern, and the knowledge that she sits with is enough for now. "I'm going to get the nurse."
Yang doesn't stay awake long enough to see her return.
--
Sun's the one who stays overnight. He doesn't talk to her, just flips the TV to Nick at Nite and watches old episodes of Friends. The studio audience laughter registers as just another piece of hospital equipment, but she thinks it makes him feel less alone. She allows that.
Ruby sneaks in long after he's fallen asleep. She hovers in the doorway, chewing on her lip.
"I love you," she finally says, almost terrified to admit it, as if she knows Blake's about to break her heart. Break her sister's.
The studio audience laughs in the pause between them.
"I'm sorry," Blake manages, throat locking around the words. They're not enough and they never will be. She thinks of others, thinks of saying give this heart back to her, tell her I lost my way. Thinks of her bloody and bleeding and beautiful, not even the star of her own murder.
She doesn't say any of it, and Ruby slips back into the hall, the door shutting behind her. Blake wishes she could've slammed it.
A nurse checks on her every few hours; her stomach stings, burns brilliantly like the bullet's still there, tearing through her skin. She tightens her jaw and doesn't complain, like she deserves it.
She thinks the nurse picks up on it - maybe a lot of patients feel the need to bear the weight of their pain as if guilt can be made tangible - because her two a.m. round ends with an I.V. drip check and Blake's eyes suddenly too heavy to keep open, her stomach numbing until she feels nothing at all.
--
Weiss returns in the morning, and this time she's made plans.
She hasn't slept, but it'd be hard for anyone who didn't know her to tell - her hair's in a careful ponytail, brushed away from her face, and she's wearing a blouse so wrinkle-free Blake wouldn't be surprised if she'd ironed it first.
She isn't chipper, isn't cheerful, but she's persistent. She has a job to do. She starts off, "Now, the tour--" and this is one of those conversations she expects to be agreed to without further discussion. Blake's just staring out the window, as if she can't believe the rest of the world is still out there, thriving.
So it's shocking when she interrupts Weiss, barely three words in. "Don't cancel it," she says emotionlessly, voice hollow and eerie; she's turned the now-empty space inside of herself into a cave. "We'll do it."
That's a silence that rings out, the length of its own song. Even Sun snaps his gaze to her, baffled by the response. "We - uh, what?"
"Excuse me?" Weiss says, incredulously polite, blinking as if she'd merely mishead.
"Blake," Sun starts uncomfortably, "we can't go on tour now--"
"Why can't we?" Blake says, still gazing vacantly out the window. "I'm fine."
"We're supposed to leave in a few days," Sun points out, aghast and slightly disturbed. He'd known she wasn't okay, but he hadn't known it'd gone so far past the point of okay that she'd come full circle and convinced herself she was. "There's no way we can go on tour with you like this - with Yang--"
She visibly flinches at the name, and it's the most reaction they've seen since she'd woken up the day previously, bandage over her stomach and her eye sockets like bruises. "I said, I'm fine," she repeats, harder. "The doctor said I'm fine. So, I'm fine."
"This is ridiculous," Weiss hisses, who isn't the type to put up with unwarranted irrationality. "I've already been in contact with the road manager; we can work out a shift in dates, and then--"
"Weiss," Blake starts lowly, finally meeting her stare, and the blankness of her eyes leaves a sinister chill crawling its way up Weiss's spine, "if you cancel this tour - if you reschedule any part of it - I swear to God I'll fire you."
Weiss only stands there, unnerved and unmoving; they've challenged each other before, but never over something so obviously black and white, so based in irrefutable logic and reason. Not over something like you've been shot and what's your point.
To Weiss, it's almost scarier than when she'd seen that flash of red hair, Adam walking into the hotel.
"Blake," she says, fingers curling into her palms, manicured nails creating crescent moons. Blake, she says, but that's never a name that meant much coming from her.
Blake, Yang could've said, and Weiss knows that'd be the end.
But Yang can't even speak at the moment, let alone allow Blake to crawl into her lap and cry, and that's the problem summed up in a single, devastating sentence.
"I'm checking out," Blake says, not like her mind's made up, just like it's long gone. "I don't need to be here anymore."
The double meaning isn't lost on anyone in the room, and she's never been more wrong. Sun still hasn't spoken, observing her like something swept through and replaced her when he wasn't looking. Something cold and barren and brutally unfeeling.
"She woke up last night, you know," Weiss says carefully, and for once, she doesn't even know her own angle. Maybe she's testing the waters, searching for cracks just to prove they're there, and can be accessed. "Briefly, Ruby said, but she was awake. She asked about you."
Her lower lip quivers, and for a single blink Sun swears he sees her eyes shine in the morning sunlight.
"Can you close the blinds?" is all she whispers, like she hadn't heard Weiss at all.
--
There are last-ditch efforts made, full-hearted attempts. She checks out of the hospital the second the doctor gives her the okay after writing her a prescription for antibiotics and a heavier painkiller she barely remembers the name of, and then she's changing into clothes Ilia'd picked up from her apartment, spare shirts and shorts that hadn't migrated to Yang's house.
Someone knocks on the door; the wound on her stomach pulls with every movement. She says, "Fine," because she forgets what she's supposed to say.
She thinks it's Weiss, or Sun, or Ilia, or a nurse; the same people who've been hovering every minute since the incident. She thinks it's somebody who can help her leave.
Until it isn't. "Blake," Ruby says, the only person in the world beside her sister who stands a chance against the walls Blake's built overnight. She's quiet in her plea, in her posture. "Please don't do this."
She holds onto her words like they're anchors. She holds onto that hotel room like a gravesite. She's been selfish enough. Blake says, "She doesn't deserve this," and Ruby opens her mouth to interrupt but she isn't fast enough. "She never did. She was fine before me. She was fine."
"She was better with you," Ruby argues, weak to her own ears, and Blake's mirthless smile is both eerie and empty. "You know she was--"
"Key word," Blake says, and she never even turns around. "'Was.'"
--
When Yang wakes up again, she isn't alone. Not even close. But she might as well be, when it becomes obvious who's missing.
She's still groggy, but she's alert, aware. She recognizes the walls for what they are, knows she's in a hospital bed, but the memories hit in odd lurches, as if they're the waves hitting the boat of her drug-induced haze. She'd been drunk when she'd opened that door, when she'd looked down the barrel of a gun. It's all flashes from far away, like it isn't even happening to her: she sees herself standing still, Adam between them. Sees Blake shaking her head no. Hears the shot, tearing through flesh and muscle and bone - hears it over and over and over and over and overandoverandover--
"Yang," Ruby breathes out, relief creating her a focal point, and she blinks herself out of a pool of her own blood. Tai sits up immediately, elbow slipping off the arm of the chair.
"Ruby," she says, throat still raw, and the water's immediately lifted to her lips again. She drinks until it reminds her too much of drowning. "Dad."
"How are you feeling?" Ruby squeaks out anxiously. She has marks on her cheeks like she's been clutching her face in her hands. "Are you - are you in a lot of pain, or--"
"Blake," Yang says, because Ruby should know better, should know that whatever she's feeling and whatever damage she's done is meaningless as long as Blake's alive. Should know that nothing else compares in its importance. "Is she okay?"
"She's okay," Ruby says, and pauses, parting her lips again as if to continue but can't. Nothing else passes between them before the nurse comes in, whom Tai had buzzed in.
It's a simple way to avoid the unavoidable: the nurse has a job to do, asks Yang some arbitrary questions; name, age, birthday - do you know who this is? Do you know where you are? Do you--
"Yes," Yang finally interrupts before the interrogation can be finished. "I know everything. I'm actually clairvoyant." The joke's weak, mirroring the state her body's in, but it drags a reluctant smile out of the nurse regardless until the doctor strolls in.
"Ms. Xiao Long." The woman doesn't extend an arm, but keeps her grin wide. She takes a moment to look over a clipboard in her hands. "It's a pleasure to see you awake." She doesn't wait for a response, steps up to Yang's bedside, eyes on her damaged arm. "How are you feeling?"
"Like someone shot me," she says bluntly, partly before she realizes it even comes out of her own mouth. There's a low-hanging haze to her brain, like coating every thought in a fog. The doctor presses on without hesitation, as if she's used to that kind of brusque, rude response.
She probably is, Yang thinks. People in pain probably find it harder to be polite.
"Well, someone did," the doctor says, and at once she's shifted herself to calm in the face of seriousness, and sets down Yang's chart to reach for her hand. "The bullet tore your brachial artery, which we successfully repaired with a saphenous vein graft - you lost a lot of blood, and it required quite a few blood transfusions. Now that you're awake, I'd like to do a movement and sensation test to rule out any paralysis or sensory loss. Tell me if you can feel the pressure of my fingers, okay?"
It doesn't take too long - she touches various parts of Yang's hand, her wrist, up the inside of her arm; Yang fortunately feels it all, every light brush and pathway - and then she tests the strength of Yang's grip, asks her to squeeze her hand just to make sure the muscles work, to bend and straighten. She seems pleased by the end of it, and Ruby's beaming; Tai looks like he'd spent the entire exam ready to faint.
"You suffered a very severe injury," the doctor says, and now there's compassion in her victory. She's done her job, and done it well. "It's going to require a lot of time and therapy to recover from, but you are ultimately very lucky that, at this time, there does not appear to be any long-term deficits. Can you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten for me, with ten being the worst?"
Her arm burns, throbs, aches. She's exhausted and she can feel blood pooling in her body, can feel it choking itself in the creases of her wrists, the pale lines of her throat. Can feel her pulse swallowing itself alive. "Seven," she says, but she's not sure of her own metric.
"How long does she have to stay?" Tai asks. "When can we take her home?"
"Not long," the doctor says, picking Yang's chart back up. "She'll be on long-term antibiotic therapy, and her wound requires packing that will be need to be regularly changed - no stitches; the wound will heal from the inside out. We'll teach you how to dress it, unless you'd prefer to hire a home health nurse. If you'd like to talk in the hallway, Mr. Xiao Long, we can leave your daughter to rest…"
He nods, following her out the door; it's less than a second later that a knock comes and Weiss's eyes peek through the window at them. She's not wearing heels, and Yang can only see half her face; Sun appears behind her, mouth moving. Ruby jumps to her feet like she's been waiting for something to do, her energy palpable in her steps to let them in.
Don't, Yang almost whispers, demands, screams. Dread gnaws on the inside of her stomach, cuts right through the muscle, dissolves her in acid. Don't let them in.
She's in a hospital room and so is Blake; that's what she wants to believe. That Blake's down the hall, or a wing over, or separated by a wall. That she's been waiting, asking every minute to visit. That she'd tried to get them to share a room, share a bed, share blood and skin and bone. That she's okay in the most important sense of the phrase, and the rest can come with time.
Yang almost expects it, that's the thing - she thinks it so hard that for a split, horrible second, she convinces herself that Blake is just behind them, that she'll shove her way in and bury her face in Yang's hair and murmur apologies that Yang can brush away, can say it's okay, I'm okay and you're okay, and we're okay together.
Ruby steps back to let Weiss in, Sun following, and line ends there. Yang's pain jumps to a ten.
--
He's never seen her look so human, that's the first thing he thinks upon walking through the door.
Yang's always been so untouchable to him, so powerful and prestigious - glamorous on a red carpet, unearthly in a movie - that to see her here, lying in a bed with her skin pale and her hair in knots...it's like making an example of a god. Her arm is heavily bandaged, and there's an IV taped to the back of her hand. Lips cracked. Eyes sunken in. Begging him no.
She knows. Sun doesn't know how, or why, or what happened in that hotel room, but she knows what they're about to tell her.
He doesn't draw it out like the revelation at the end of a reality show, doesn't make her wait for it. Ripping off the bandaid over a bullet hole.
"Blake's okay," Sun says gently, finding no humane, painless way to explain it, "but she isn't coming."
Once faced with the information, she seems to process it slowly, staring at him with an intensity struggling just beneath the surface - like she isn't yet awake enough, alive enough to comprehend it and she's fighting for clarity anyway. She doesn't speak, but her eyes flicker, up and to the left and down again, focusing on her own arm, on the drip of the IV. Her fingers on her good hand curl against the sheets. It feels like hours Sun stands there waiting for acknowledgement over something she doesn't want to accept until she's forced to.
At last, she says quietly, "Okay," and Weiss shifts forward like she wants to scream, like she wants to grab Yang's shoulders and shake her; no, Sun can feel from her, no, it's not okay. He shoots her a glance; her lips are thin, eyes hard and narrow. She's trying to find her place in the aftermath, where to lie her loyalty like flowers at a gravestone.
"Okay?" she asks instead, tone one of polite incredulity rather than outrage.
Yang finally meets her eyes, and she doesn't breathe, doesn't blink, doesn't cry. "Okay," she repeats. "I understand."
Weiss visibly tenses, and Sun actually puts a hand on her shoulder, stopping her from stepping forward. He can feel the hum of her skin, the way she seethes and broils inside of the anger and regret and resentment.
She can't blame herself. And she can't blame Yang. But she needs to blame somebody. "What?" she says lowly. "What do you understand?"
Yang turns, gaze falling out the window, and doesn't respond at all.
--
Sun is the one who visits her; like a representative, he jokes, but Yang reconciles the underlying meaning. He doesn't agree with Blake, and he's Yang's friend, too. He's not like Weiss that way: it's about loyalty without sides.
She doesn't talk to him much, but that's the nice thing about him; it doesn't deter him or bother him at all. He'll sit beside her and watch shitty TV and eat hospital pudding. He'll talk about his childhood and his family and his friends, share anecdotes of all the crazy antics he used to get up to and sometimes still does. He'll read her tweets he deems funny enough, article headlines filled with the fakest rumors he can find. He does this for hours, most of the time staying until visiting hours are over - they'd practiced for the tour long before this, and they're taking the time until they leave to recover. He has nowhere else to be.
Yang reconciles the underlying meaning of that, too. Blake's hiding herself away from him. From all of them.
Ruby pulls Sun aside in the hallway and says softly, "Thanks."
He blinks. "For what?"
"For being here for her when Blake can't be," Ruby says, and to Sun's surprise, she doesn't seem upset, only remorseful and disappointed. "I don't really know what happened or what she's thinking, but if Yang isn't angry at her, I'm not gonna be, either. It's not my place. But - I can tell that she's...grateful, that you've been here."
Sun rubs the back of his head. "It's...nothing," he says with difficulty, because it's not a compliment he wants to receive. "I - I love Yang. And I don't know what's going on in Blake's head either, but - I wanna be there for both of them, you know?"
"Yeah," Ruby says morosely, throwing another look towards Yang's room, and then she's gone, following Tai down the hallway to the cafeteria.
Sun takes a moment to collect himself, glancing through the window of her door, and she's sitting up, staring at her phone, and for once she isn't acting: her expression is open, and the grief written across it is almost debilitating in its itself, aching like the pain in her arm is in her heart - yet somehow she's still terribly, overwhelmingly soft.
She's staring at Blake, he knows. He takes his hand off the doorknob and looks away. Her sunflowers are dying.
--
She's released from the hospital. She doesn't remember it at all, doesn't remember getting in the car or the drive home or pulling into her driveway. Ruby and Tai both know how to pack her wound, prepared for the long and grueling recovery. She has a preliminary meeting with a physical therapist scheduled. All things taken care of for her.
"We had to...block you from having visitors," Ruby confesses, helping her unlock the door of their house. "Too many people wanted to see you - Pyrrha, Nora, Ren, Nebula, Coco, Velvet, fans who knew your location…"
It's not a revelation that requires a response, and so she stays silent. Ruby helps her up the stairs, but there's a line she's afraid of crossing as they draw closer to Yang's bedroom - Blake's bedroom, too, it may as well have been - as if she's afraid of what she'll find when they get there. Will it be ripped apart and empty, will it be pristine and perfect like Blake's never even touched it, will it--
Yang opens the door, and she doesn't take another step.
It's both.
Some of her drawers are open and obviously rummaged through, but parts of the room are visions of exactly how they'd left it before leaving for the party - there's a couple discarded dresses strewn across the unmade bed, and her curling iron's still sitting on the sink. One of Blake's makeup bags is still resting on top of the dresser. Half her clothes are still hanging in the closet.
It's like she'd ghosted through the room, grabbing whatever randomly caught her eye. Like she'd packed for a long, long vacation. Yang doesn't know what's worse.
To anyone else, it'd look as if Blake planned on coming back.
To Yang, it looks more like Blake's just given up.
--
She's not her movies. She sleeps on Blake's side of the bed and drowns in it.
--
Her days pass by in long periods of blackout - almost like she's drunk. She can't retain time, can't discern between yesterday and today and tomorrow. All her texts go unanswered. Pyrrha and Nora stop by at some point, bringing ten cartons of ice-cream between them and chatting purposefully while stacking them in her freezer. She thinks they throw their arms around her, thinks Pyrrha might've shed a tear. She can't remember. She hopes she'd said something nice, comforting, but with Blake as the elephant in the room - no, no, something bigger, something wide and made of shadow, something without a body that shivers in the corners and takes up space - she doubts it'd have meant much anyway. They'd have been able to see through her, straight to the truth.
Sun stops by the day they're due to leave for the tour, and pulls her into a hug, his arms gentle and encompassing. "I'll take care of her," he murmurs into her ear, and they're out of time for dancing around the subject. "I don't know what happened that night, but I know this isn't what she wants. I'll take care of her, okay?"
"Okay," Yang says, her eyes heavy and damp, and suddenly all she remembers is the ocean pouring down the walls of her hospital room. "I'm not giving up on her."
He leans back, brushes her hair away from her cheeks. "You love her," he says, smiling sadly.
"More than you know," she whispers, clutching at his wrists. The power of her left arm is weak, and her fingers tremble. "More than anybody does."
--
Sun meets them at the bus with his bags. He can't stop thinking about her voice, so raw he swore it'd bled on him, and the glaring unsteadiness of her hand. The bandages covering her upper arm, the crease of her elbow. The deep circles underneath her eyes, hair in a messy bun.
She'd looked awful, but she's nothing in comparison to Blake.
He almost can't tear his gaze away from her, horrified, revolted - there's a violent recollection here, her bones sharp underneath her skin, hunched into herself, arms constantly crossed, eyes always hollow and empty in their sockets. A skeleton fighting for a life outside of a body, wanting to be visible. A woman at war with herself and losing.
"What?" she asks, but she's monotonous and blank.
"You look like you used to," Sun says flatly, stare falling to the pavement. He'd rather trace the edges of her shadow than her skin. "After Adam."
"What?" she says again, too taken aback to mute her reaction. The name alone forces a flinch, like the echo of him alone has become the gun, become the bullet.
It doesn't affect him in the slightest. "You used to walk around like that, holding yourself together," he says, dully reciting the memories coming to mind. "Like a ghost. You were so thin. Some days I was afraid you weren't gonna wake up, because I didn't think you wanted to." His voice drops, hanging on a cliff's edge by the tips of its fingers. "Some days you looked like you hurt, just being alive."
"Stop," she says, so quiet it's almost a whisper. Her bottom lip trembles. "Please. Stop."
They get on without another word, and she curls up into her bunk, drawing the curtain. Ilia cracks open a beer at the kitchen table and sits in silence, Neptune joining her after a moment of consideration.
Sun spreads out on the couch, closes his eyes, imagines none of them are here at all. Imagines they're a week and a half ago, arguing playfully about songs for the showcase, Yang's arm wrapped around Blake's waist, listening with a smile.
--
Yang's preliminary PT appointment goes as well as it possibly can.
There's a lot left to work with, the trainer says. Her surgeons had done an excellent job, and barring any radically unexpected complications, there's no reason she shouldn't make nearly a full recovery, or get at least so close nobody'd ever be able to tell otherwise. Her muscles are weak, but they'll heal. Her range of motion ultimately won't be impacted. He teaches her basic stretches to do every day, gives her a simple schedule to work with until she's ready for more strenuous activity.
It's a great diagnosis. She just has to put in the work, he says purposefully, holding direct eye contact as he straightens and bends her arm. She has to find the will for it, he says, like he knows that'll be the hardest part. Like he knows she wakes up alone in the morning after a night of Adam's gun pressed against Blake's forehead, sinking into her skin, hands covered in blood that isn't hers.
She stares at his own scar, raised and jagged at the edges.
Maybe he does.
--
Backstage, Blake and Ilia share a dressing room, just like they always do. Normally it's filled with idle conversation, dry remarks, laughter. Not tonight. Tonight it's Blake hunched over on the couch, staring at her phone with her heart breaking in her veins. With her face so exposed she might as well put herself on display at an art museum, inviting critics and interpretations. Icarus, one calls her. Self-fulfilling prophecy, says another.
Ilia doesn't know what to do with it, doesn't know how to say talk to me, please, talk to me.
"Blake," she says instead.
"I'm coming," Blake responds, far off and distant.
"Are you?" Ilia asks quietly. "Or are you running away?"
There's only silence left between them, and never any answers. Ilia leaves her there, closes the door gently, just as Blake expects her to. They're long past the fear of pushing her, but they're deadly terrified of the shatter if she falls too far.
She swipes her thumb up the screen.
i miss you
i know why you left but you're wrong
this house is too big without you and too empty and i sleep where you slept and i wish you were here
you should have let me say goodbye
it wasn't your fault
blake it wasn't your fault
She's read every message a hundred times. And a hundred times she's come within an inch of breaking.
Paragraphs typed out and deleted, poetry spilling from her fingers like wine. Lyrics and lyrics and lyrics and lyrics. Apologies that never make it into waterfalls. I love you, she swears she writes by the thousands. I love you even though I don't deserve to. I love you. I love you. I love you i love you i love youiloveyouiloveyou--
She repeats it over and over. Some nights it's the only thing that keeps her alive.
She makes it to the stage just before lights; they all look at her, her poise, her composure, her desperation. And maybe - just maybe - they realize how badly she needs this.
--
The first night of Blake's tour, Yang watches the videos. She follows the Instagram and Twitter tags, searches YouTube, and she isn't at all prepared for what she sees, what she hears.
It's unbelievably incredible.
Yang's enraptured, glued to her screen, earphones in and the volume blasting. She's never heard Blake sound so good - each note is rough and poignant and beautiful, filled with emotion so intense it's like she's singing because it's her only choice - as if without it, it'd have nowhere else to go and overflow. She puts on the act well enough, asks the city how they're doing, tells them she's okay, thanks them for their support. But Yang finds every crack, and picks it apart.
I'm okay, her voice stumbles over, becoming flatter and forced. Not a single smile is real. And in every high-definition photo that gets uploaded, the more ghost-like she appears, as if she's attempting to will herself away. Off of the stage, out of reality. Into another existence.
Blake still loves her. Blake loves her more than she's ever loved anything. And it makes her that much more stubborn in her belief that what she's doing is right.
--
Until Blake spirals further. Until she winds her way into habits only meant to harm.
It starts because they're at a bar after the show; she's three drinks in and all she can see in her glass is blood instead of whiskey. Adam pointing the gun at Yang and firing. His words, crafted carefully cruel and bitter-sharp. Shooting with his mouth like its own weapon.
"Can I buy you a drink?" a man asks, sliding up to her side, and he is nothing like either of them. Handsome, brunette. Green eyes. Away, away, away. As far away as she can get. Out of Los Angeles and its glittering skyline, out of its traffic-jammed highways and neon-struck streets, out of its burning hot sand and boundless frothing ocean. Past the palm trees and the palisades, the boardwalks and the billboards, the crescendo of the Hills and the collapse of the Valley.
And Yang. Yang, who inhabits every inch of that city like it was built for her.
"Sure," she says, before she even realizes she says it.
She doesn't do anything. Lets him talk at her while she sips her whiskey, her mind idling like a car about to race. Waiting for a flag. A green light. A flash of blonde hair and a smile that takes over movie theatres. She doesn't notice the movement of his hand until it's too late, when it presses against her lower back.
"Do you want to get out of here?" he asks, and she freezes, goes wide-eyed and blank.
There's a pause - he waits for her answer like he thinks there's a possibility of a yes - and then she's stumbling away from him, back of her hand pressed to her mouth.
"I think I'm going to be sick," she gasps out, before she leaves him at the bar. She passes straight by Sun, who only stares and doesn't follow. Like he'd wanted to see how far she'd go.
--
Back in her hotel room, she throws up in the shower and then scrubs her body raw. She leaves only the skin underneath, skin Yang has touched and nobody else. Ilia finds her curled up on the floor in a robe, sighs and carries her into bed.
"Blake," she murmurs in the quiet dark, "I love you, but sometimes all you do is make the wrong choices."
--
Sarah @whenigetbackhome · 1h
I'm pretty sure Blake Belladonna is chatting some guy up in this bar…
jenna @a1onetogeth3r · 1h
Replying to @whenigetbackhome
uh what? like she's actively hitting on some guy, or-?
Sarah @whenigetbackhome · 1h
Replying to @a1onetogeth3r
No, I guess not….he's kind of talking a lot at her and she's just drinking.
Sarah @whenigetbackhome · 1h
Replying to @a1onetogeth3r
Nvm. He put his hand on her back and she like, ran away from him.
jenna @a1onetogeth3r · 1h
Replying to @whenigetbackhome
weird. maybe she was just getting hit on and didn't know how to get away
Sarah @whenigetbackhome · 1h
Replying to @a1onetogeth3r
Yeah, guess so.
--
Yang's management can't control the outpouring of support. "They're trying to send you all kind of gifts - stuffed animals, balloons, letters, money--"
"I don't need money," Yang says lifelessly, staring down at the tendons in her wrist, flexing against the pain in her arm. She's two PT sessions in, and she's working hard despite the simplicity of the basics. It's the pain that stands in the way, the stress. It's the gun. It's the shaking, like she's still standing in that doorway, too terrified to move.
"I'm aware," Glynda says over the phone. "But they're going to do whatever they think is best."
"Redirect them," Yang says, traces the lines of her palm. They're suddenly unfamiliar to her. Maybe it's just been a long time since she's seen her own hand without Blake's covering it. Even thinking her name hurts; with it comes the flashbacks, the blood, the screaming--
"To where?"
"I want," Yang says, and outside of her kitchen window, the sun shines too brightly for a day that has no business being anywhere close to it, "I want them to donate. To a charity. For victims of domestic violence."
There's a long, prolonged silence, but not a hint of argument. "I'll do some research," Glynda says softly, "and I'll compose a statement."
"Great." Yang doesn't bother with another word. The beeping signaling end of call reminds her of the ambulance, and for the rest of the day she lays in bed with her eyes shut, curtains blocking out the light.
--
Hours pass; she can't tell if it's dawn or dusk. Ruby knocks on her door at some point, turns the handle, doesn't let herself further past the doorway. Like she's afraid she isn't allowed.
"Yang," she murmurs, full of ache and heartbreak.
"Just leave me alone," Yang says lifelessly in response, muffled into her pillow. She doesn't have the strength for tact, for compassion, for care.
Maybe Ruby understands that, and lets her be. Maybe Ruby's just as lost as she is. The door closes, and she's left again to silence.
Alone, alone - it isn't what she wants, but for once, she doesn't know how to get what she does.
--
After a few weeks, people really start to wonder.
They aren't seen together; they don't interact. Isn't it weird, Twitter puts together, that Blake would go on tour after this? That she'd never mention Yang at all?
Maybe they want their privacy, one side argues. Maybe it's just something they don't want to talk about - why would they - but they're handling it.
Or maybe Blake's a stupid bitch who shouldn't have dragged her past into her relationship with Yang, the other side replies. Maybe Blake's a slut and she paid for it, and she made Yang pay for it, too.
They're a little strong, and she can't pretend it doesn't sting. But she doesn't think they're completely wrong, either.
She scrolls down the thread, the bus rolling along the road. Her phone says three a.m.; it's one back home. She can't stop calculating, can't stop picturing Yang like a star chart - here's where she burns between seven and nine at night; here's the hour she's at her brightest; here's where she sets, stretches out in darkness.
Austin @AustinNotTexas · 30m
Replying to @mrmaxxx @stevenslater11 @b1tt3rl3ss
Well Yang blocked me so I guess they're still together or something. She clearly doesn't like people speaking their opinions about her girlfriend, even if they're valid. Like the fact that she's a slut for hitting on people in bars after her shows.
max @mrmaxxx · 24m
Replying to @AustinNotTexas @stevenslater11 @b1tt3rl3ss
she blocked me too. damn bro. bitch
Blake hovers, pauses, and does the exact same thing. Wonders why it feels like a cop-out, a betrayal to herself. She deserves to read every word - deserves the anger, the insults, the beratement. She knows she does.
So she isn't sure why she gives up, why she lets that hurt be enough, why she lets her own torture take the easy way out.
Maybe that's a piece of Yang she hasn't managed to let go of: her kindness and its influence.
--
Weiss barely speaks to her, save for directions and information regarding the shows they're performing. It actually takes her a long time to notice, and she only notices at all because there's a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday without a show, and Weiss is gone.
"She went back to L.A.," Sun says neutrally. "She's visiting Yang."
"Oh," Blake says, and she falls carefully blank again. "Good."
"She's not the one who should be going back," Sun says.
"I know," she replies. She's nearly drowning in a yellow hoodie Sun knows is Yang's, curled with her knees pressed to her chest. It doesn't change anything.
"That's the problem," Sun says after a moment of silence, like he physically can't restrain himself. "You know. So what is it, Blake? What aren't you telling us? What aren't you telling anybody?"
She looks at him, but he swears she stares straight through. Her lips crack as if forming around words - ones she's hearing inside of her head, rather than attempting to speak aloud. Her fingers tighten, dig into the fabric.
Adam was right, she almost says, on the tip of her tongue and poison, fire, ash. He was right about me, about everything. And I knew. I knew. I--
"I knew," she echoes vaguely, though without the context it's almost meaningless. "That's the problem. I knew."
--
The last people Yang expects to find at her door on a Monday morning are Weiss and Pyrrha together, wearing matching sunglasses and looking like somebody's died. Maybe they have; maybe it's her. Or maybe she's projecting. Blake's been gone for three weeks and it's felt like every second of an eternity she didn't ask for.
(Her necklace presses warm against her skin, underneath her shirt and hidden. That's the eternity she'd asked for, the immortality. Not this.)
Weiss maneuvers around her arm perfectly as if she's somehow had practice; it isn't awkward to embrace her, like it has been for most other people. She won't treat Yang like something breakable: not a glass, not a vase, not the stems of the roses resting in it.
"Yang," she says, and she starts on curt and ends in resignation - as if she'd realized halfway through her name that not everything needs to begin with a firm hand. Her arms are gentle, one hand woven into the hair at the nape of Yang's neck, loose from her bun.
"Weiss," Yang breathes out, shocked to find her eyes filling with tears. "Weiss, what - what're you--"
"I heard you weren't doing well," she says, and doesn't make a move to peel herself away. Yang's entire body tremors in her arms, a hundred little earthquakes of her walls cracking, everything she's held in tumbling out. "I thought it'd be for the best."
She isn't Blake, but she's close - like proof that she exists. That they both do, that they all used to, together.
She buries her face in the crook of Weiss's neck, feels hot tears on her cheeks, pooling against Weiss's skin. Feels her lungs like treading water. Everything burrowed inside of her starts leaking out, hits the air and hardens.
But then Weiss sighs, tenderly kisses Yang on the side of the head; it's such a soft gesture from such an unexpected person that she feels her heart splitting itself open on her doorstep, feels blood in her body like it's all actually still there. Feels herself heavy and alive. "I love you, Yang. You can talk to me. To us."
And Yang breaks, like that's all it takes. Like Ruby hasn't spent the better part of three weeks trying to get her to do the same thing. Like Pyrrha hasn't sat with her in silence for hours, hoping for something, anything. Like Nora's never talked incessantly just to fill the void of her voice.
Talk to us, Weiss says, like she even remembers how.
"It doesn't feel real," Yang weeps into her shoulder, nails digging in, one markedly less strong than the other. "None of it. Like she was never here, even though I know she was." She takes long pauses between her sentences, crushing Weiss even tighter against her, body wracked with sobs. "But sometimes I - I expect her to be here, or - or I wake up, and I reach for her on the other side of the bed, and - and then I remember she's gone, and it's like I - like I have to lose her all over again. It never - it never stops. It never stops."
"I know," Weiss murmurs, rubbing her hand carefully up and down Yang's back. "I know, Yang."
"I miss her." She disintegrates, her head aching and overflowing. "I miss her." The sun melts like wax and drips from the sky, so bright it's blinding. Heat and sweat and dust. Salt of the earth and running river water. She cries herself into nothingness, into shapes and senses, and there's that rocking boat, there's that ocean inhabiting her walls, there's the drifting away, away, away.
--
She wakes up on the couch, her wound freshly packed and voices low beside her. They're hushed, but they aren't talking about Blake; clearly they'd just been worried of disturbing her.
"...Lucky you don't start for another few weeks," Weiss is saying.
"Do you think you'll come back?" Pyrrha asks quietly. "Whenever you've got time?"
"I'm going to try," she says, and repeats her earlier sentiment, "I think it's for the best."
Yang turns her head, groggy and disoriented. The room comes into focus, the television, the sound system, the walls, the brilliant white of Weiss's hair and the stunning red of Pyrrha's. The large bag of packing material and gloves and tape and bandages. Their eyes, centered on her, their frowns in matching worry.
"Oh, Yang," Pyrrha murmurs, settling on her knees beside the couch, stroking Yang's bangs away from her forehead. "Honey. How do you feel?"
"What happened?" she manages, all of her words thick.
"You passed out," Weiss says. "You were...overwhelmed, I think. And in pain."
She sits up carefully, her arm shaking underneath her weight. Pyrrha helps steady her until she can support herself. "I'm sorry," she whispers miserably, ashamed and embarrassed. "I'm sorry, I--"
"It's okay," Pyrrha soothes, cuts off any further apology. "You're allowed to have a hard time, Yang. You're allowed."
"Yeah," Yang says, blinking away fresh tears, and finally professes the one truth she hasn't been able to face in the light. "I - I am. I'm - I'm having a hard time."
There's a contemplative, gentle sort of quiet that dawns over the room. A relief rises with the confession. Sometimes, Yang realizes right then, it's enough to have people who care about you, even if they aren't the exact people you need.
"Well," Weiss says after, "at least you're admitting it, and that's more than I can say for her."
Her, Weiss says, making Blake real again, making her tangible and present. Her. "Tell me about her," Yang implores, too soft and sincere to refuse. "Please. I need to know."
"She's a fucking mess," Weiss says bluntly, without hesitation. "It's like she's...going through the motions. She barely speaks to anyone. She goes to bars with the band after, and sometimes lets people buy her drinks, but she - it's like she panics when she realizes they aren't you." She pauses, tilts her head as if coming to an understanding. "If she couldn't sing about you, I think she'd fall apart completely."
It hurts - worse than her arm, worse than being left. She thinks of Blake burying herself alive in guilt, slowly waiting to suffocate. "Yeah," Yang says, and for the first time, she doesn't look away. "Yeah, that's kind of what I thought."
--
Blake won't respond to her texts, won't pick up her calls - fine.
The night Weiss is due to fly back, Yang's outside by the pool, phone in her hand and hovering over the call button. It's her best bet. She'd never pick up from Ruby, Tai, anyone linked to Yang or any unrecognizable number - but Weiss. Weiss is her manager. She doesn't have a choice.
It rings once - the air's cool, dusting goosebumps across her legs - twice - the moon's glowing beneath its blanket of stars - three times - all of space is spinning out of position, wildly careening--
"Hello?" Blake answers, dull and expectant.
"Blake," Yang says immediately, unable to stop the rush from the sound of her voice alone. "Please, don't - don't hang up. Please. Please."
There's only the choking of breath - a sharp inhale, as if she's been struck, and then--
"Yang?" she whispers, heartbreak evident in every letter. Ignoring calls is one thing. Outright disconnecting from them - that's something else entirely. She couldn't even if she'd wanted to, and Yang knows she doesn't.
"Blake," she repeats, clinging to that same desperate intensity. She has so much to say, and now that she has the opportunity, she doesn't know how to say any of it - she presses the heel of her palm against her forehead, hunched over, trying to keep herself grounded. Shuts her eyes. "I - I miss you. I miss you so much." It's the first instinct, the easiest, the barest truth. "More than I thought it was possible to miss anything."
"You should hate me," Blake says, as if the words have to fight to escape the tightness of her chest. Shaking, shattering in her mouth. She sounds off, somehow. Like she is a thing, is a vase, cracked and broken. "I want you to hate me."
"I'll never hate you," Yang says vehemently, the first flicker of passion she's felt since that night. The first fire, the first fight. "Nothing you've done - nothing you'll do - will ever make me hate you."
"Don't say that." The remorse releases so strongly it comes out as anger. Like if she isn't hated, she won't know what she is. "Not after what I did to you."
"Not you," Yang says. "It wasn't you."
"It may as well have been."
"It's not the same."
"You're right," Blake agrees, and for a split second, Yang thinks they're getting somewhere. "It's worse. Because I knew. I knew what he'd do to you."
"It doesn't mean you made him do it!"
"Doesn't it?" she asks quietly. "If I knew we'd end up here eventually? If I knew what lengths he'd go to?"
"Did you pull the trigger?" Yang counters back. "Did you invite him into the room with a gun? Did you want to die? Did you want him to kill me?"
"No!" she responds, frantic and fraying at the edges. Yang only needs to wrap her fingers around the threads and pull. "No, but--"
"No," Yang interrupts. "It wasn't you."
She doesn't seem to have a response, but it's devastatingly apparent in her silence - she hasn't changed her mind. And she won't.
It's a stalemate. A phone call isn't enough to undo years and years of manipulation, of gaslighting, of bruises. She can't give up, and Blake can't give in - she doesn't even know how to.
That's what abuse did to her, Yang thinks dully. Make her forget she was ever a victim. Exactly what it was supposed to.
"Why?" Yang murmurs into the phone, forehead still pressed against her palm, eyes shut tight against a truth she used to face wide open; she can't stop her trembling, her whimper, her break. The way ice cracks in a pond. "Why wouldn't you - at least say goodbye?"
"Because," Blake says, throat full of tears, "you would've told me it wasn't my fault, and I would - I would have believed you."
This is it, the end; their brief respite coming to a close.
"I love you," Yang says, and she lets her own tears fall. "I'm not letting you go. Not like this."
"I love you," Blake murmurs back, and she doesn't. "You should."
--
It's a form of torture, Sun recognizes early on. She's torturing herself. She's doing it on purpose.
Every song on their album is about Yang - and if it's not about her, she plays a role in it, holds an influence. Blake might've left her but her music didn't. It's her outlet. It's her way of singing all the things she can't say anymore. It's her way of hurting.
She plays incredibly every night, every show, breaks her voice raw, fingers digging chords down to the bone, pours her soul into her melody like it has nothing else to inhabit, recently without a home. It's like she's memorializing Yang, mythologizing her.
But something's changed the night after Weiss returns. She's losing herself further into the music, forgetting where she is in the world. Or maybe she's finally remembering, and she doesn't like what she sees. Either way, it's the first time she slips, cracks herself wide open.
"Oh," she says into the microphone before she plays the opening to Alone Together, "you all know who this is for."
Yang's fine in Blake's music. Both of them are. Maybe that's the worst pain of all.
--
It's the only time she ever mentions it at a show, and it's picked apart immediately.
Someone's shaky iPhone recording gets shared across every celebrity site, somehow makes it into a feature on E!, both their news and some gossip show. The hosts look devastated when it ends; two of them exchange a broken-hearted glance, hands over their hearts and murmuring sympathies.
"This isn't even one of those I wanna, like, talk about," one of the women says, shifting uncomfortably. "I'm really rooting for them. What happened to them was terrible, and it's not--"
"It's not like they just broke up," the other woman chimes in. "Like, nothing went wrong personally, and that's usually what's fun to talk about. The drama. This isn't drama."
"Exactly," the first woman says. "It's not fun. Nothing about this situation is fun. It's just sad. You can tell they're still in love. I can't even - like, I can't even imagine what they're going through."
"Who put this clip in here?" the man half-jokes, supposed to move on for the audience, keep the segment light - except that it's painfully obvious how serious he is. "Come on! Leave them alone! They've been through enough!"
Yang shuts the television off, buries her face in her hands, rubs desperately as if trying to tear herself away from her skin, from her house, from the earth. She's seen the clip a thousand times - she's pieced together the entire show through various YouTube videos - it's not healthy, but ignoring it would be even worse - she hates that these people get it, hates that she and Blake are so tragic of a story they have an audience like a play, have a commentary, have a narrative.
Hates that there's nothing she can do. Not now, with her arm half-functioning and unsteady in the face of loud noises, shaking her awake from nightmares. PTSD, her doctor had said. There are options for treatment. Therapy, medication--
It's Ruby who finds her overcome by mountains, by the seemingly unconquerable. Finds her split between two paths and sinking into the dirt.
"I don't know where to start," Yang confesses before Ruby can ask, because she's trying to be better. Trying to accept help from the people who love her. She isn't the only one who lost Blake, she's realizing - they all did. The minute Adam showed up in their hotel room with a gun, they'd all lost her. "Blake, my arm - I don't know what to fix first."
Ruby sits contemplatively for a moment - traces Yang openly, the bags under her eyes, her bandaged arm, the touristy D.C. sweater that fits too snugly to be hers - and then says, "You know how on airplanes, they're always telling you to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others?" It's rhetorical, but she waits for the sentiment to sink in. "I think you need to put on your own mask first. You can't help Blake if you can't even breathe, Yang."
She thinks back to her trainer's earliest words - the will, he'd said, you need to find the will to work - and thinks to her progress now, steady but slow. Thinks to how easily exhaustible she is, how prone she's become to giving up on herself. Like subconsciously, she doesn't think it's worth it.
"You're right," she says, and Ruby's expression transitions into surprise - she hadn't expected the agreement. Yang can't really blame her. "It's just - I don't know how. I was fine. I was fine. It was always her that I was trying to - to protect."
"That's what she thinks she's doing, Yang," Ruby says, eyes downcast. Bottom lip caught between her teeth. "She thinks she's protecting you."
"From what?"
"From herself."
--
It's an "inside source" - it always is.
So in reality, it's probably a roadie; someone who sees Blake close enough on occasion to know she's a wreck, and puts the rest together.
Some gossip site publishes the first of what becomes an explosion of articles on their breakup - though Blake isn't sure that's even what to call it. They didn't break up. To her, that'd include some form of conversation, a mutual understanding and parting. Whatever this is, whatever she'd done - breakup isn't a term that even comes close.
What she's done, she wants to believe, is unforgivable.
"They're no longer together," a source close to the couple claims. "They're trying to recover on their own, though they're still very much in love. What they went through was traumatic, and ultimately drove a wedge between them they weren't able to overcome."
Good, she thinks, and that night on stage, she sings like it's her last.
--
Blake goes out to bars. Lets someone buy her a drink. Lets people look at her and talk, hiding their mouths behind their hands, their eyes slanted. Too many people recognize her now. She hopes they all hate her, too.
She still times out Yang's evenings, likes to pretend she remembers routine. Brushing her teeth, washing her face, falling into bed with her phone and whatever new mobile game she's addicted to. She removes things that included her. The time Yang used to spend with her mouth covering Blake's skin. Their laughter on the nights they weren't in the mood for it. Sometimes Blake'd read to her until she fell asleep, if the set left her too wound up rather than exhausted.
Sing to me, she'd say every once in awhile. and that's the hardest to remember of all. So she downs another shot of whiskey and doesn't.
--
But she doesn't sleep anymore. No amount of alcohol helps what she dreams of when she does.
The movies all have it wrong, she recognizes early on. Their realistic flashbacks in the form of night terrors, pinpointed perfectly to every recreated detail. That's not what it's like at all.
When she dreams, they're in the hotel, and nothing about it is realistic, only horrifying. Once, Sun's there, having a seance with Adam's ghost over Yang's body, and he spends what feels like hours with his wretched, gaping mouth stretching wider and wider as he hisses blame at her, all the horrible things he'd grown to make her believe about herself. His skin snaps and tears, His bones crack and disintegrate. His eyes are only knotholes, dark and carnivorous. She can never move, in that one, only sit and listen and sob.
In another, she's the one who points the gun at Yang, and pulls the trigger herself. It's never at her arm. It's straight into her heart.
So she doesn't sleep anymore.
She's started going through podcasts. Started making playlists. in another life i wrote this about you, that's what she calls the first one - all the lyrics say "I love you," say "I'm sorry," say "I never meant to hurt you." i told this city your name and it already knew, she drunkenly labels the second, and it's nothing but mistakes and regret, love that shouldn't have been lost and was anyway.
you and every dark pretty thing, that's the latest, born of Yang in her black sheer dress and her lips redder than her blood - it's all music she imagines devils request at funerals, low basslines and wanting someone so badly you'd die for them, or kill them yourself.
She's past waist-deep in this pool of thought - not a pool, an ocean, and she's sunk up to her shoulders, water sinking into her lungs - when she full-screens the app by accident, and her Friend Activity becomes visible.
YXL 8m
Your Biggest Mistake
Ellie Goulding
Lights
Her heart throbs like it's pressed against her bones, like she's shrunk so small there's nowhere else for it to go. Compressed in time, space, skin. She doesn't know the song but she knows it's a message for her - like Yang's telling her to press play. To listen.
What, Blake imagines her saying, just because I don't sing means I don't get a say?
Her earphones are already shoved in her ears - cheaper ones, noise-cancelling, unobtrusive. Social media terrifies her, again and again and again; she can't escape Yang, she's everywhere, she's in every app, every newsfeed, every timeline - and now - now she's where she's always been, where she was born to be: Blake's music.
She presses play, shuts her eyes, and absorbs the words like Yang's the one speaking them to her.
It's a shame you don't know what you're running from.
At the end of it, she creates a new playlist. Puts the song on repeat until she falls asleep.
This time, all she dreams about is coming home, falling into Yang's arms and crying.
--
Yang sees Blake's activity switch. Watches her play the song. Watches her play it again, and again, and again. And for a single, devastating moment, it's almost like they're together.
--
In June, they're a month and a half into the tour; Yang's a month and a half into her physical therapy. She's making progress - real, tangible progress. She can lift more weight every session; she can unfold her arm without wincing. Blake, on the other hand, is deteriorating.
Not that anyone else would know - she's keeping up appearances, doing interviews, playing her perfect shows; their fans are all still torn, supporting them and wanting to believe in a future for them. Wanting to believe they'll be what Blake's songs all say they are.
She doesn't look any different, night to night, but she holds herself differently, struggles a little more with her mouth. It takes her a split second longer to fake a smile. Without her boots, she'd crumble under the towering world, too small to pretend she can hold it up alone. There are lines she can't sing anymore without them turning raw at the corners.
Yang's muscle damage is mostly healed; she's had regular check-ins with her doctor, and her physical therapist is pleased with the renewed dedication she's developed. Slowly, the wound is healing, pink skin puffy and sensitive - it's jagged at the incision site, obtrusive and ugly. But she's alive, and her arm works, and any pain is temporary. That's what she tells herself until she stretches her arm overhead without thinking, and it doesn't sting the way she's used to. And then it becomes true.
What happened to her is temporary. What's happening to Blake probably looks a lot like a tunnel without a light. Every step deeper and darker and never-ending.
That's what Yang's working so hard to be: the gentle end of a long, long journey.
--
YXL 2m
The Chain
Ingrid Michaelson
Everybody
--
Nearing the middle of June, they've decided they can't allow it any longer, but they don't know how to stop it, either. Blake literally doesn't have time to see a therapist with their current schedule, which is what they all know she needs, and they're too close to the end to change course now. Sun tries to talk to her - not about Yang, not about Adam - anything. Anything, just to hear her voice. Just to pull it out of her.
But it doesn't work. It's like reaching out a hand to save someone who's determined to make themselves dead weight. She's given interviews to magazines, talks every night to fans - part of Sun wonders if they'd all died to her that night. If they'd all become ghosts.
Weiss is the one who snaps. They're on the bus to Philadelphia, and Blake's been sitting on the couch for hours, staring out the window with eyes so lifeless it's becoming their own personal brand of Lovecraftian horror - what can she possibly be seeing out there, in the blank nothingness of fields at midnight - nothing alive, nothing real, nothing tangible and in front of her. And worse, what's happening where they can't see it, inside of her - that unknowable, chaotic force.
"Blake," Weiss says and has to say her name twice more before she finally looks over. "If you don't talk to us, I'm cancelling the rest of the tour."
She blinks in slow comprehension. "What? Why?"
"Because you're a fucking wreck," Ilia says bluntly. "This was a stupid idea from the beginning. We never should've gone on tour."
It's hard for her to place herself in the world, in the present, in the conversation. "We--" she says, starts, stops. "Am I ruining it?"
Sun shifts uncomfortably; the truth is that she's at her absolute best on stage, better than she's ever been, but it isn't worth her destruction off of it. "No," he says. "But that's not the point."
"What is this," she says flatly, "my intervention?"
"If that's what it takes," Weiss says, drawing herself up. "Blake, what Adam did to you--"
"Don't say his name to me," she interrupts, suddenly deadly quiet and serious. It's the most coherent they've seen her in weeks. "I don't want to talk about it."
"Yeah, that's the entire problem," Neptune finally chimes in, looking decently ashamed of himself. He's always had a harder time with confrontation. "You - you don't want to talk about anything. You're like - it's like you're not even here."
She stares at him; stares at each of them in turn. Somewhere, Sun swears he hears the sound of breaking. "I don't know what you want from me," she whispers, and they're all unnerved to see her eyes so dry with her throat so tight. "I'm doing the best I can, okay?"
No, Sun wants to say, no, it's not okay - none of this is okay, Yang's not okay, I'm not okay - but whatever's left of his heart is already shattering in his chest, pieces pooled in blood - blood - Yang's soaked arm, Blake's hands covered in red - her wild eyes, her scream, her ruined dress, Adam's body--
And he realizes this is what Blake sees all the time. Every day. Every minute.
So he shuts his mouth, watches Weiss's face instead - watches her shift from frustration to heartbreak to defeat, watches her come no closer to answers than they've been. Watches her give up.
"Can't we just - can't we just make it through this?" Blake begs, shivering with her arms wrapped around her body. "Please?"
The fight fades from Neptune entirely, and he slumps back into his seat. Ilia's hands are curled into fists, but she's biting her bottom lip between her teeth. It's all too familiar - years ago, Blake burrowing into herself, so thin and small; bones and bruises making homes of her skin. Speaking with a waver in her voice and terrified of touch.
And the thing is, she's right; there's nothing any of them can do now, except hope and wait and work towards a better place. Sometimes, in the moment, the only decisions you can make are bad ones, but they're all you have.
--
But it's the final straw for Weiss.
She can't support Blake - can't support her talking to strangers in bars, can't support her hollow and empty and dragging her heart across the stage, can't support her hurting all the people who've only ever tried to help.
She flies back again. Back to Yang, to Ruby, to Pyrrha. Back to who still consider her family and treat her like it.
She only ever has a few days at a time, but she uses them well; sometimes she takes Yang to her PT or doctor's appointments. She stays over at Pyrrha's, practices vulnerability, learns how to admit how painful it is to do nothing. That's what she can't say to Yang, can't say to Blake: Adam took something from them all.
They're having a cider at Yang's kitchen counter to celebrate the end of her antibiotics; she's been in the clear for a little while now, but it's felt like too big a step to take without the one person she wishes were there to take it with her. She's on her phone, Weiss on her laptop; there's still plenty to manage and keep track of.
"When does your next project start?" she's asking idly, scrolling with her fingers on the trackpad.
"In two months," Yang says. "They pushed the dates for me, but they had the room to."
"That's good," Weiss says. "It's fortunate that you were in-between projects."
Yang almost laughs - it's so like her to find some terrible, tactless silver lining - but doesn't at the last second, too surprised by the urge to actually follow through with it. "Yeah," she says, going as far as a smile. "It's good I wasn't actively filming something."
"Exactly." She pauses, opens her mouth to continue, and snaps it just as quickly; a moment later and her laptop follows, slammed shut. She pushes the device away from her, seething.
It'd be slightly frightening, if Yang hadn't already seen on her own phone exactly what Weiss just had.
"What now?" Yang asks, bringing the bottle to her lips.
Weiss hesitates, as if only just realizing Yang's still sitting there. She presses her lips together. "Nothing," she says, lying badly.
"Blake, right?" Yang pegs, and now her smile takes bitter roots; it's not as tonight's the only night. She's seen every picture in every city, read all the fan sightings, accounts of Blake taking a drink from any random person showing interest in her. "At a club or something, talking up some guy at the bar. Like I don't even exist."
The recount only seems to make Weiss angrier; Yang can sense the turmoil inside of her, like she's waiting to blow up, waiting to get Blake in front of her and scream like it's her that's been betrayed. Maybe she has, in a way.
"I don't understand why," Weiss says after a pause, disheartened. "That's it, I suppose. I've always understood Blake perfectly, but now, I just - I can't. I won't." She enunciates the word with a sense of pride, and Yang recognizes the meaning behind it: she's on Yang's side, she's trying to convey. She won't compromise her loyalty, her taste for the black-and-white.
Yang allows her mouth to fall back to stoicism, averts her eyes to the countertop, digs her thumb into the ridges of the bottle-cap.
"I do," she says quietly, looking at the jagged imprint it leaves against her skin. She can still hear Adam's words to Blake like he's standing there, shouting them at her. "I know exactly why."
Everything that happens now…
Weiss looks at her but remains silent, and doesn't even think of prying. It's not hers to ask for. Maybe, she's realizing, it isn't hers to even remotely understand at all.
...is entirely your fault.
"I hate this house," Yang says vaguely, staring at her own reflection in the window.
--
YXL 5m
I Miss You (feat. Julia Michaels)
Clean Bandit, Julia Michaels
What Is Love? (Deluxe Edition)
--
They're playing in New York. She's as far away from Yang as she's going to get, and she finally feels it, that distance stretching like a string pulled too taut. Maybe that's what makes it worse.
She goes a little too far. Has one too many drinks. Lets a woman touch her arm, lets a man take the seat next to her and grin with all his teeth. She barely notices. All the voices blend together in a blur; the room's close, lights dull. She's so drunk she can't even stop herself from thinking about Yang; thinks about being in her arms, in her bed; thinks of Yang smiling against her mouth and her blonde hair in a messy bun. Thinks of all the time they used to spend pressed together, so close there were no beginnings and no ends, only forever.
The man wraps his fingers around her wrist lightly. She can't even comprehend the pressure, and wonders if this is what it feels like after being shot in the arm.
Sun's through with standing by, though; Sun, who can't stop replaying his promise to Yang the day he'd left. I'll take care of her, he'd said, and he's doing a shit job of it.
The man's good-looking - they always are - arrogant without the charm, lips pulled tight at the edges, like he's getting lucky. Sun doesn't mind ruining that for him. He leans between them both, tugs the man's hand away from Blake. Protects her, like he should've been doing all along.
"Hey," Sun says dangerously, eyes flashing. "Don't try it. I'm serious."
He sneers. "What the fuck do you care for?" he spits. "You want her or something?"
"I'm right here," Blake says, no heat behind the statement. She's not, Sun realizes. She's not here at all. She's somewhere far, far away. On a different coast. In a different life.
"She's drunk," Sun says firmly. "She doesn't want you. Fuck off."
Maybe it's Sun's height, maybe it's the obvious muscle protruding from underneath his shirt - whatever it is, the man curls his upper lip, glances between the two, and stalks off back into the crowd. Blake watches with a mildly bored look her face, an expression he knows she's spent years perfecting; it doesn't mean anything. Her stare is vacant, off.
"What are you doing, Blake," he says, not like a question. He takes the stool vacated by the sleazy man, rests his elbows on the bar. He doesn't look at her.
"What I want," she says. "Is that a problem for you?"
"Yeah," he says, lifting his head and meeting her eyes. Her eyebrows raise in surprise, in anger. "You're not doing 'what you want'. That's bullshit. You don't want this."
"Oh, and you somehow know what I want?" she snaps rudely, unsteadily. "Just because we're friends doesn't mean--"
"Stop," he says lowly, exhausted. She'd been so happy. She'd been so close to it. She shuts her mouth, almost for reasons she can't comprehend, only recognizing how serious he's being. "I know I do dumb shit, but I'm not stupid. We both know what you really want." Her grip around her glass tightens, lips pressing into a thin line. He catches both reactions. "Or I guess I should say who."
"Don't," she says quietly, and her face cracks for a split second, heartbreak evident underneath before it smoothes itself over again. "Please don't."
He knows he shouldn't say it even before the words leave his mouth but he can't stop them, like an accident, like a crashing car, like another bullet. He's tired of watching her destroy herself, her happiness, everything she's ever worked for; she'd been so close. He thinks of Yang waking up in the hospital, the way she didn't breath, didn't blink, didn't cry when he'd told her Blake's okay, but she isn't coming. Thinks of how she stared out the window for days and let her sunflowers die. He knows he shouldn't say it but he does anyway. "Haven't you hurt her enough?"
He winces internally, wants to take it back, but it doesn't compare to the way Blake flinches at the words like he's balled them up in his fist and struck her with them; her expression shatters entirely apart - like broken glass, like the sky when it rains - and focuses on him, true clarity coming to her for the first time in what feels like hours, days, weeks. She's staring at him like he's the stranger instead of her, and for a split second he sees what she's hiding from him, sees the weight and intensity of it, sees it in its raw, crippling entirety.
He thought he'd known before, on the bus. Thought he'd understood the depth of every scar, even the ones she'd tried to keep hidden.
"Fuck you, Sun," she whispers shakingly, slips off her stool and disappears into the crowd.
He'd been wrong.
--
She isn't running anymore. She can't run in a city that doesn't care where she is in the first place.
All the lights are too bright, the crowds too big - she stumbles down the sidewalk, stares only at the ground - too many people have faces like his, and Yang could be anywhere - posters, billboards - Blake's positive she's flashing through Times Square - she needs the lonely quiet, needs to go dark and disappear.
The city's tall, towering and engulfing her. The streets move as if conveyor belts, cars shooting past and honking. Her head aches and every noise sounds like the knocking on her hotel room door. The heat is damp and settles into her blood, a thin layer over the alcohol. Skin too warm and clammy. She can't even see the moon, no matter which direction she turns.
It's nothing like Los Angeles at all.
--
It's midnight when Yang gets the call, phone vibrating underneath her pillow. She'd had a grueling day, and passed out early after a rough session with her trainer - someone had dropped a weight, missing the mat, and the horrible grating, clanking sound had left her hand paralyzed, shaking violently.
She reaches for it groggily, squinting at the brightness of the screen; the caller I.D. has no name, only says Private Number. She stares blankly, and without knowledge, without reason, answers.
"Hello?" she says, closing her eyes.
It's only silence on the other end, but a vague, detached kind of silence; not muted, simply empty. She waits for a response and doesn't get one.
"Hello?" she tries again, and hears nothing. One, two, three... "Okay. I'm hanging up."
She threatens it, but she doesn't actually do it. Maybe she knows, on some level. Maybe she just hopes. She lies there with her phone pressed against her ear and she swears she can hear the choke of breath, the sound of a faint, muffled crying; she bites down on the inside of her lip harshly, heart twisting so hard it aches in her throat.
"Blake?" she asks softly, and the line goes dead.
She doesn't sleep much after that.
--
YXL 12m
Home
The New Coast
Home
--
Sun looks for her for half an hour before finally deciding to check their empty bus, parked securely at the hotel. It's unlocked, and all the lights are off, but the parking structure itself seeps dim, yellowing light across the floor, across the walls. Across Blake, sitting at the small kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey in her hand.
She doesn't seem to remember how angry she'd been at him only an hour previously; she gazes at him and her focus slips. Pupils contracting, expanding again. The recognition is there, but it's far beyond mattering, anyway.
"D'you know what he said to me?" she slurs, knees pulled up to her chest, bottle held tight in her other hand. "What Adam - what Adam said to me?"
"No," Sun says cautiously, approaching slowly, attempting not to startle her as if her flight instinct will kick it at any moment and send her running. "I don't."
"He said," Blake starts, and he can hear the way her throat closes over her tears, how her muscles constrict, how her voice catches like she's still in that room with a gun pointed at her, pointed at Yang. "He said that everything that happened - that it was all my fault. He said it was my fault, and then he shot her."
Sun feels himself freeze at the admission, dread dawning over him, like the flash of a camera illuminating a dark room. His tongue lolls in his throat, disconnected; his brain's cut off from its stem - like his body's doing everything it can to protect him from the knowledge that she's acting how she is because Adam made her think she deserves it.
"Blake," he says incredulously, "you don't - you don't believe that, do you?" Please, he thinks. Please, no.
But he already knows the answer.
Guilt - he'd expected that. It's what people do in these situations; the one you love hurts, and you blame yourself for not hurting in place of them. But to find out it's purposeful - an act of abuse so intricately crafted, so evil, a single sentence followed by an action so devastating she'd have no choice but to watch, to listen, to absorb every detail--
Manipulation had always been Adam's strongest suit, and if he couldn't have Blake, nobody could. Not Yang. Not her friends. Not even Blake herself. He'd wanted her to internalize it until it killed her, too, and none of them had thought about that at all.
Why? he thinks desperately. Why had none of them thought about his last words to her? How they could've cut like knives? How they could've been more fatal than bullets?
"It's true," she says, and in the flickering light he expects to see damp tracks forming down her cheeks - he finds none, and his stomach drops violently. She can't even bring herself to cry. "It was my fault."
"No," Sun says softly, horrified. He takes a step closer, kneeling in front of her. "Blake, it wasn't your fault--"
"It was," she repeats, and the words that follow seem to blend together in a single distorted, mangled line of thought, but she's not talking to him, she's making the argument to herself, and he's right - she wants blame, wants the responsibility to fall on her because she thinks it's justified. "I knew that he - I knew what he wanted, what he felt, the - the things he would do, and I didn't do anything." She inhales, or tries to, but gets caught in her own lungs, dry sobbing. "I thought about it, so many times, but by then it'd been so long that I stopped. I thought that we could be happy, that's why it's my fault. I thought I could have that. I thought I was finally allowed."
"Jesus Christ, Blake," Sun breathes out blankly, buzzing with shock, like his skin is trying to pull away from everything underneath. "This isn't - you're wrong. You're wrong. You can have that, you did have it, I saw it--"
"Sometimes it's better to be alone," she says, uncomprehending.
He rests his hands on her shoulders, forcing her to look at him; she pauses strangely, meeting his eyes as if she hadn't even known he was there. He says slowly, pointedly, "Blake," and she doesn't even blink. "This was Adam's fault. He was crazy, he was - he was abusive, and he did this to you, to Yang. Not you!"
Blake is silent for a second, and the way she stares through him leaves him shivering, unsettled. "Adam's dead," she finally says sluggishly, but the intent behind it is lacquered in self-loathing. "He's dead, so there's only me."
Sun takes the bottle from her loose grip and sets it on the table, and then he carefully wraps her up in his arms, biting his own lip to stop himself from crying and fails. She lets herself be cradled against him, breath stumbling over itself in a way too muted, too desolate, too empty. Like she hurts so much she can't move, can't fight, can't do anything but let it dig its claws into her and tear.
She eventually passes out and Sun sits awake thinks about spirits, thinks about how they used to argue over graveyards, paranormal activity, ouija boards. He thinks about the hotel, how he challenged her to a haunting. It's all bullshit, Blake used to say. Just people making noise who want a paycheck.
Ghosts are real, he thinks; ghosts are real, and every single one of them has come to claim her.
--
weiss, Sun texts, we r so fucking stupid.
Excuse me?
u need to tell yang how bad it is
we need to do something
i know its selfish of us and blake hurt her but
lets face it. who else is she gonna listen to
Sun, she types, did something happen?
yeah, he says. something happened.
--
Boston's next, and there are four whole days between shows, meaning Weiss is gone.
Sun hasn't talked to Blake about it, but he knows she remembers. She'd woken up in her bunk and he'd handed her an aspirin. She'd held his eyes, and the regret painted in his had been enough.
It'd signaled an understanding, and an end.
He isn't going to let her destroy herself, no matter how badly she wants to. Now he knows what she's operating off of, and he'll do everything in his power to fight it for her until she finds the strength to do it herself.
--
"Check this out," Yang says seriously, and reaches to her top cabinet with her right arm. The still-healing skin stretches grotesquely, pink and raised - it's almost hard for Weiss to watch, and she resists the urge to rub at her own arm - but it doesn't seem to hurt her as she opens the cabinet door, and that's the little victory. "I'm like, almost self-sufficient now."
"I'm so proud," Weiss says, too dry for total sincerity, and Yang laughs. "Though personally, I think everyone's best day was when you could finally wash your hair without help."
"You all did it wrong."
"Well, at least we tried," she says, rolling her eyes. Blake could've done it perfectly goes unsaid. "It isn't our fault your regiment is stricter than the military."
"Yeah, yeah." Yang waves it away and redirects the conversation. "How long are you here for, anyway?"
She already knows the answer; she's had Blake's tour dates memorized from the moment they'd been nailed down. But neither of them mention that, either. "Three days," Weiss responds neutrally. "I'm flying into Boston on Thursday."
"I like Boston," Yang says, spacing out a little. "It's like - if New York City and L.A. melted together, or something."
Weiss's phone vibrates. did u show her, he says.
She doesn't reply. It vibrates again.
show her u moron
She tuts under her breath, an uncontrollable expression of defiance.
"What, hot date?" Yang says, and pulls a face immediately after. "Oh, wait, nevermind. You're dating Pyrrha."
She's in much better spirits than Weiss has seen her previously, and it makes it that much harder to do what she's supposed to. It'll bring Yang straight back down, but maybe she's high enough now that she's remembered how to land on her feet.
"No," she says, and that's it. She reaches into her bag, fingers wrapping around the curled pages. Pauses.
Yang only watches curiously. "So?"
They're out of time, she tells herself. She doesn't have a choice. Sometimes all your options are bad, but maybe - just maybe - this one isn't.
"I wasn't planning on showing this to you," she starts reluctantly, "but Sun pointed out that it'd only be a matter of time until a fan tweeted you about it, or some reporter overstepped his boundaries, so--"
"Out with it, Weiss," Yang says; it's always the same with Hollywood. "What kind of shit are people spreading about me now?"
Weiss bites her lip, but tosses the magazine down onto the table; it skids slightly, stopping at an angle in front of Yang, who glosses over it the briefest of seconds, and freezes entirely.
"It's not about you," Weiss says softly. "Or, it is, but…"
It's a piece on Menagerie, but focuses specifically on Blake, her songwriting process, her relationship with the rest of the band. Yang stares at Blake's picture taking up the left page, emotion building too quickly for her to mask, and Weiss catches the underlying heartbreak; it's always there, but rarely evident. Her eyes dart to the article portion, and she reads slowly, shaking her head at a point when Blake's voice transitions from words on a page into a memory, like she's speaking inside of Yang's skull.
"Why didn't you want to show this to me?" Yang asks, holding her tone steady.
Weiss's gaze falls to the end paragraph; even without being able to read it from where she stands, she remembers it, remembers the flush of guilt, the shame of her own obliviousness, stubbornness. Remembers realizing more than one person was irrevocably hurt that night.
"Because I thought it'd send you over the edge," Weiss admits. "I thought you'd see it and you'd...crack, and do something stupid."
Yang doesn't answer her for a moment, still staring blankly down at the article. She runs a finger over Blake's picture, the line of her mouth, like she's never smiled at all.
"You're only half-wrong," Yang tells her quietly. "I've already been planning on doing something stupid."
--
Blake shakes her hair out from underneath her jacket, and stands up to leave.
"How are you still functioning after all of this?" I blurt out, unable to resist asking her; it isn't my proudest moment, nor even close to a professional one, but I've spent the better part of an hour with her and seen nothing but a steadiness and collection I barely possess on my best days, and she's just been through a highly traumatic, highly publicized event. "How are you managing, moving on?"
She stops by the doorway, and her expression is no more undecipherable than it's been, almost unnerving in its carefully-concentrated construction.
"Someone once told me I wasn't a very good actor," she tells me vaguely. "I guess they were wrong."
--
I'm not. Yang knows what she really says, can see her mouth moving, hears the buzzing in her mind. I'm not managing at all.
--
We're working on it, Weiss finally texts him back.
--
YXL 3m
Alone Together
Menagerie
Until You
--
Sun barely lets her out of his sight for the next few days.
They make it to the city a little earlier than expected; normally Weiss handles their hotel check-ins, but she's still a few hours out from landing. Sun takes over for her after she gives him explicit instructions over her in-flight WiFi.
How hard can it be to check in, Blake scoffs internally, but decides to keep it to herself.
"We're in separate rooms for once," Sun says, passing out their keys. "Blake and I are on the eighteenth floor - Neptune, you're the twelfth, and Ilia, you're the tenth."
"Great," Blake says. "Can we go to them, or does Weiss need to send you directions?"
They all look at her strangely. Nobody laughs. She shuts her mouth, feels the blush snaking around her neck.
It's only when they're on their own floor that Sun says, "That's the first joke you've made in two months."
He's stuck on the joke part of that sentence. She can't believe it's only been two months when it's felt like an eternity. She's heard that time passes slower in hell; maybe that has something to do with it.
--
Weiss arrives a few hours later, stops by each other their rooms to go over the itinerary; they have a soundcheck and a technical run-through of the show the next day, and they play the following two nights after that. The rest of the time is theirs to do what they want with.
So, naturally, Sun lives in her room.
She only has a king bed, but he doesn't care - he stays with her until two a.m., watching movies, playing games on his phone, talking to her randomly when the mood strikes. She realizes he doesn't expect her to answer. She realizes how much time she's been spending drunk.
Adam is still there. So is Yang. They're clearer in the light, and just as hard to deal with, but there's more nuance, too - she understands abuse, understands how it warps and withers. And she also understands that abuse doesn't make her blameless. In the end, she's still the common link; without her, there'd be no Adam; without her carelessness, there'd be no gunshot. It's her. It's her. It's her--
Sun says something, but she doesn't catch it, and he cups her face in his hands.
"Blake," he says, steady and firm, forcing her to meet his eyes.
She blinks once, twice. "What?"
"I was reading all these articles," he says, and removes his hands now that he has her attention, "about trauma, and PTSD, and all that shit. I think you're dissociating. It's when--"
"I know what it is," she interrupts, abruptly irritated with him. He's always so close to understanding her until he isn't. "And I think you're wrong."
She doesn't tell him anything more, doesn't tell him it's the opposite: that she feels everything so intensely she swears it's happening to her all over again.
--
The technical run-through goes fine. It's not excellent, or anything, but it isn't supposed to be - it'd be ridiculous of them to expend the same energy for a practice as they would for the show itself.
They don't go to a bar afterwards; Sun makes sure of it, though everyone else seems to be in on his plan as well. Neptune says he's going to take a nap, since it's only the early evening, and Ilia wants to shower before dinner.
"I'll text you in like an hour," Sun says as they part ways on their floor. "If you're hungry, we'll grab something to eat. Okay?"
"Okay," she says dully, and there's no use in arguing. There's only so much she can fight at once.
--
She's lying on her back on the hotel bed, still in her clothes from after the sound test. There's a shirt of Yang's sitting on the dresser and it's one of the few that still smell like her. She doesn't have the energy to move.
im coming to ur room, Sun texts, and she raises the phone above her face to read. let me in in a min.
Ok, she answers. She knows that this, too, is her own fault - she barely remembers her drunken breakdown on the bus, only bits and pieces coated in a hazy glow, like the moon shattered over the floor. She knows she must've told him, must've let it spill out of her, must've become water.
She wonders if he counts on her breaking, thinks she'll sneak out of the hotel and to a club like a teenager in rebellion. He'd never apologized for what he'd said to her at the bar. She's never asked him to.
The knock at her door comes, and all she can think of is throwing it open and screaming at him. Thinks about telling him this kind of control is just as bad as Adam's. She should be allowed, she wants to say. She should be allowed.
Except it wouldn't be true; it'd just be cruel.
She forces herself up and just sits on the edge of the bed, exhausted, overwhelmed, brain like foam and receding. She can't retain thought for long, can't retain feeling - it all rushes in and out like the back of the tide, hanging onto the moon. She wanes with the details. Sometimes it's the gun; sometimes it's the smell of blood. Sometimes it's Yang in her dress, moments before the shot.
Sun knocks again, louder. "I'm coming," she calls, and finally walks over, her feet like concrete. The carpet is a swirling shade of blue-white, and reminds her of the ocean. Sink, she thinks. Sink me.
She throws it open carelessly, and the second she does, her weariness transitions instantly into pure shock - she'd settled on blood, but now it drains from her body, leaves her weightless and detached; she doesn't sink, she solidifies in place, stunned. There's no ocean underfoot. She's surrounded by walls and a ceiling and the only door is blocked.
"Hi," Yang murmurs, voice catching on an inhale.
Yang is here, standing in front of her, and that's all Blake has time to process before she steps forward and into the room - Blake automatically jerks away, takes several unsteady steps back as if afraid of getting too close, of how it'll feel when she does - her instinct says she's hallucinating, and her logic says she's done too much of that the past two months and Yang's never looked anything like this - her hands are clean - there isn't enough screaming--
And then Yang closes the door gently behind her. The click of the lock sliding into place sounds like a hammer to a coffin.
Blake can only stare, eyes wide and disbelieving, lips parted without words. Yang doesn't make a move any closer, just waits for the black and white to rise on instinct because it's easiest, waits for the default of emotion; is it love, is it anger, is it fear.
She looks incredible, she looks terrible: her hair is tucked into a messy bun, random strands curling around her face in a frame; her eyeliner is probably a day or two old, the rest of her face bare. She's wearing a slightly-oversized knitted black sweater, ripped jeans, and her favorite pair of scuffed brown boots. She's never really been the type to develop bags under her eyes when she's tired, but her exhaustion reveals itself in other ways: her mouth is soft instead of firm, her jaw lacking tightness, her arms loose at her sides. There's an edge she's on; Blake's been there before, and it's dull. Sometimes that hurts worse.
"Hi," Yang says again, quietly.
"What are you doing here?" is the only thing Blake manages to reply, weak and insecure to her own ears.
"I want to talk," Yang says, bottom lip sliding into her mouth. Eyes like falling stars, trailing Blake's skin with the memory of what's underneath, what's changed about it.
"I don't," Blake replies instantly. She knows exactly what Yang'll say, and she knows how it'll break her. How it'll make her feel better, make her think guilt never should've belonged to her at all. "Please. Please don't do this."
"You owe me this," Yang says, and she's debilitating in her vulnerability. She needs this. Maybe it's all she's ever needed. "You owe me this one thing, Blake."
Her name in Yang's mouth - already it's enough to crumble the tallest castles. She thinks of withstanding time - thinks of canyons and mountains and caves, ancient ruins and walls - Blake, Yang says, and it all flattens itself back into the earth. "No," she whispers, shaking. She's backed up to the bed. "No."
For a moment, all they can do is stare at each other; Blake's heart is slicing through her skin in the silence. She can't hear anything but a roaring in her ears, like she's on stage facing a crowd. Yang's too blinding, too overpowering, too beautiful--
"Fine," Yang says suddenly, and her eyes darken, voice dropping dangerously. Blake swallows, fights the urge to run again, like her flight or fight instinct is tailored to Yang's expression. "You don't wanna talk about this, we won't. Show me instead."
"Show you what?" Blake breathes out, trapped between the boundaries of wanting: wanting to kiss her, wanting to push her away. Wanting to pull her close and say, I wish I'd been born as the color of your eyes, the lines of your palm. Something that never had the ability to hurt you.
"You think I don't follow the gossip?" Yang asks, pitch still dark. "You think I haven't see you out at clubs in every city you've played in, buying some different girl a drink? Talking a guy up at a bar?"
"So?" Blake challenges, reacting viscerally. She'll follow any emotion that keeps her mouth moving. "I can do whatever I want."
"I didn't say you couldn't," Yang bites back. "You wanna act like I'm nothing to you except someone you used to fuck, fine. Do it again. I'm here. Let's see this wild side of yours, Blake."
For one split, terrible second, Blake almost doesn't give in.
She's almost able to lie to herself, say no, you've done enough, don't let me come any closer - but it's in that same second that she looks at Yang, really looks at her, and that's her first, second, third mistake.
Because underneath the anger and betrayal and frustration - underneath the beauty of her, the danger, the ruin - she's home. She's trembling, and she's an inch away from fracturing at the edges, her skin in a state of unravel, veins like cracks in glass - but she's home.
And Blake may have left her once, but she'll never have the strength to do it again.
So she steps forward, heart too high in her chest, lungs too short for breath; takes Yang's face in her hands, and kisses her.
It isn't like time stops; that's never been the case for the two of them. It's like time doesn't exist at all. It's too rigid and inflexible, and it doesn't explain why two months feels simultaneously like a lifetime and the blink of an eye. It doesn't explain why she suddenly swears she kissed Yang only this morning over the page of a new song, or why the last time she held Yang's hand was so long ago all her songs were poems, published in books. She thinks of stars and civilizations; thinks of revolutions and renaissances.
Yang parts her lips, sucks Blake's bottom lip into her mouth, hands knotting in her hair. Her cheeks are damp, salt dripping over Blake's fingers. In spite of everything, all she finally feels is right.
Oh, from that first minute, Blake thinks, kissing her as if it's all she can ever remember. From that first second. From forever.
--
Yang's sweater finds its way to the floor. Kicks her boots off haphazardly. Her jeans, unbuttoned and tugged down her legs. Blake can't keep her mouth to herself; Yang doesn't want her to. She strips Blake's own shirt overhead, does it slowly, watches every centimeter of skin she reveals. Unhooks her bra. Slips her underwear off. Stares at her unblinkingly, lips red and parted in awe, and Blake understands.
She nudges Yang onto her back, lips slanting together again and tongues brushing, there's something burning inside of her but it's killing her, too, like clearing brush before a wildfire, and Yang's hair spreads against her pillow, throat bare and arched, arms above her head--
It's the scar that does it, the sight of the jagged line of tissue standing out against her skin that forces Blake to pause, confront a memory she'd buried moments after living it, dirt shifting around a freshly-dug grave.
She stares down, unblinking, her ribcage vibrating around her lungs, and she can taste the air of the hospital room, see the unsettling off-white color of the walls, the hum of machines. She smells the blood, remembers the screaming, remembers realizing it was coming from her own mouth.
"I didn't," she says blankly, staring. Her voice sounds hollow, empty.
"What?" Yang asks, sensing the shift. She lifts herself onto her elbows, the motion stretching at the skin; it pulls taut, red and raw. Blake can't feel herself breathing.
"I didn't," she repeats again, still in that same vacant tone, and she finally hears the void she's become. Her vision blurs, tears welling in her eyes. "I didn't kiss any of them. I didn't even touch them." She can't look away from Yang's arm. "Like I could. Like I could stop thinking about you long enough to do any of that."
The scar burns itself into her retinas, the vivid outline like a rupture across her own eyelids. She inhales once, chokes, and Yang's skin underneath her fingers is suddenly wet, and Blake can't see, can barely hear, her heart in her throat like she's going to throw it up; vaguely, Yang's voices hums in the background, but understanding it is like trying to pull words from white noise - her teeth dig into her bottom lip, throat closing around every mistake she's ever made - Yang's hands are against her face, in her hair, and then she's gathering Blake up in her arms, scooting back against the headboard, Blake's face buried in her shoulder.
Distantly, Blake realizes she's sobbing, violent with her chest heaving, breath punctuated and forced; Yang pulls the sheet up over her shoulders, rocks her. "I'm sorry," she says again and again like it's the only phrase she's ever learned to speak. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry--"
"Shh," Yang comforts quietly, smoothing her hair away from her cheeks. "You don't have to say anything."
"I love you," Blake weeps instead, fingers clutching at Yang so tightly she's sure it's hurting her, but Yang doesn't complain, doesn't move her away, just sits and holds her like it's her own life at stake. "I - I love you more than I've ever - loved anyone."
Yang remains silent for a moment. Blake tucks her face against the crook of Yang's neck, waits for the echo back, waits for anything through her tears.
"I wish you'd done this in the first place," Yang finally murmurs, her lips against the shell of Blake's ear, one hand cradling the back of her head. "Just come to me and cry."
--
So? Weiss texts him. Have you heard anything?
no, he answers. n i dont know if thats a good thing or not.
--
"Baby," Yang whispers to her, over and over and over again, Blake still held tightly in her arms. Her sobbing has quieted to the kind of crying that turns brutal and silent in its intensity, the salt on Yang's skin purely from her tears and not the sweat of sex. "I'm here."
"I'm sorry," Blake says again, choking on the words, gagging on her heart in her mouth - she heaves violently against it, but all it does it spur a rush of new tears, muscles locking around regret. Yang rubs a hand up and down her spine, fingers of her other hand buried in Blake's hair; it's how she used to hold Blake to calm her down, comfort her. It would've worked the night of the party, even the morning after. Now, it reminds her of everything she'd thrown away.
"Blake," Yang says gently, "look at me."
Her eyes are red, tired, bloodshot. She hasn't slept properly in weeks. She looks about as terrible as she feels, but Yang only smiles - soft like the color of her eyes, soft like skin - and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, palm coming to rest against her cheek.
"What?" Blake asks, voice hoarse.
"I don't blame you." Yang says the words so slowly, so matter-of-fact, she leaves almost no room for denial. "I know that you blame you. And I know why. But I'm here and I'm telling you that I don't, and I never did."
"How?" Blake whispers miserably. "He even - he told me it was my fault. He was my - part of my past. He was--"
"--Abusive," Yang finishes, her fingers trailing down Blake's cheek to her jaw. She takes Blake's chin between her thumb and the side of her index finger, tilting her head up. "He abused you for years and made you believe things that weren't true. What he did - everything he did - is all on him, not you, no matter what he told you."
"I want to believe you," she says, still in that bare, aching voice. "But I - I don't know how. Yang, he - he said that to me, and then he shot you." The panic rises, a trigger to a flood. "I stood there and watched him shoot you--"
"Shh," Yang says instantly again, pressing a kiss to her mouth - it's one of the few things to quell the unrelenting spiral of her thoughts; a brief moment of peace in between every version of reality. Yang kisses her, and her mind is blissfully blank. "Baby."
It's that, more than anything, that keeps her hanging on. She feels the tears slipping out of her eyes, dripping from her chin to her chest, but she focuses on Yang's forgiving hands, her tender gaze, her yielding, gentle tone.
"I'm right here," Yang says, thumbs stroking Blake's high cheekbones. They're still pressed together, bare in every sense of the phrase. "I'm not in that hotel room anymore. And neither are you. And Adam - he can't ever touch either of us again."
Adam, buried somewhere under cold, hard earth. Adam, who nobody mourned. Dead. Maybe he isn't gone - maybe he never will be - but he's exactly where he belongs.
"Oh, God, you're alive," Blake whispers, drops her forehead to Yang's and inhales unsteadily, fingers spreading against her cheeks. The sheet slips down to her hips, but Yang's arms wrap back around her, tug her close. She can count each rib, but that's fixable. That's what's to come. "You're here."
"I'm alive," Yang murmurs, meeting her gaze, so magnified her tears look like beadwork to her eyelashes, framing the gold of her irises. "I'm okay, and you'll be okay, too. I promise. I promise."
It's all too good to be true, but that's been Yang from the very beginning; the closer she is, the harder and harder it is to hear the haunting of him: his bitter, biting words and his fists closing around blame, striking with it as a weapon. The closer she is, the easier it is to forget. It's why Blake'd ran in the first place. Some things, she'd thought then, should never be forgotten.
"And together." Blake doesn't have a right to ask and she's asking anyway. "Will we be okay together?"
Yang sighs, but she's smiling. "Belladonna," she says, and now there's a lightness to her tone, a sweet impatience, "I didn't fly six hours across the country to dump you officially."
"Shut up," Blake manages, her own smile watery and thick. "You flew first class."
"Yeah, but it was so last minute I was on like, United. Seats didn't even recline all the way."
"Oh, how terrible." She can feel it growing, something close to laughter. Her arms still curled around Yang's neck, cradled in her lap. "You must've suffered."
"I did." Yang utters it softly, more seriously than Blake expects. She tilts her head, bumps their noses together, finds Blake's mouth again with a kiss. "And you were worth every second."
Night has fallen outside their window; they're too high up to hear the busy noises of the street below. She traces the outline of Yang's scar, the raised skin that'll fade to an indent, the jagged edges that'll disappear to smaller lines. "Don't say that," she says, but it's resigned more than argumentative. "I don't want to be."
Yang adjusts her on her lap - stretches out a leg, settles Blake even closer against her. She looks content in spite of it all, and maybe that's what speaks the loudest of all. The absolute certainty of her. "You remember when we went to Aroma like, two days after we met?"
"Yeah."
"Do you remember what I told you?"
Yes, she almost says. It's you. I'll never forget a single thing about you. It's you. You. You.
"You're not a burden," Yang says without waiting for an answer, and a sunny morning in the back of a cafe sifts through the ashes to the forefront of Blake's mind. She remembers the garden, remembers their number, remembers their order. Remembers Yang's sunglasses and sneakers, how she'd pressed against Blake's side to read the menu. How she'd looked across the table and said what she's saying now. "Okay? You're not a burden."
So long ago, so far away, and miraculously still true. Maybe everything else is, too.
--
They spend the rest of the night in bed, tangled together and fingers moving patiently between each other's thighs. Mouths in the crooks of necks and dipping low to collarbones, hipbones. I missed you, Yang says from between her legs, tongue slipping smoothly against her. God, I missed you. Blake doesn't throw her head back; she watches Yang's head bob, watches her eyelashes flutter as her eyes shut, watches her lick her lips and revel in the taste.
She doesn't comment on the weight Blake's lost, and Blake doesn't comment on the spasm of her hand - just wraps it between her own, and presses a gentle kiss to the scarred flesh of Yang's upper arm.
This time, Yang's the one who cries.
--
"What time do you have to be at the theatre?"
"Seven," Blake answers idly, running a brush through her wet hair at the foot of the bed. She's wrapped only in a towel, tucked around her chest. "We go on at--"
"--Nine." Yang smiles sweetly, and Blake's heart flutters around the room. "I remember."
She bites her lip, lets the brush drop to the bed. "You'll come, right?" she asks, and hates the uncertainty in her voice. It's her way of saying stay. She still doesn't feel like she's in a place to make demands.
But Yang only tosses her head back lightly and laughs - that's the view, Blake's hit instantly with a thousand similar recollections, like a scrapbook titled things I've missed about you most of all - the arch of her throat, her jawline, her teeth glinting through her smile. "Well, considering the album's about me," she says playfully, "I think it's about time I got to see the show in person, don't you?"
Yes. She can't say it aloud, afraid the weight of relief will drown her. She curls her fingers around the back of Yang's neck, and pulls her in for a kiss. Yes.
--
Nobody sees them leave the hotel, and nobody sees them enter the theatre.
Her hand's tucked into Yang's; she's not sure how she'll ever let go of her again. Not sure how she ever managed to in the first place. Yang's wearing a maroon pullover hoodie, her blonde hair hidden underneath the hood; Blake's in a black zip-up one, hanging open and not hiding much of anything. They've both got their sunglasses on. Blake's combat boots have her back at five-eight, and her crop top reveals her scar.
I'm done, she'd said to Yang, working her ripped black jeans up her legs. I'm done with treating myself exactly like Adam wanted me to.
She doesn't feel completely like herself again, but it's the closest she's come in long, long time.
--
"Have you heard anything?" Weiss asks Sun under her breath, the same question she's asked him every three minutes since they'd arrived at the theatre. They're backstage in the wings; Ilia's sitting on a portable amp, tapping her drumsticks repeatedly against her knee. Neptune's just staring at the stage, where the opening act is setting up.
"No," Sun says tiredly. He'd barely slept, waiting for his phone to vibrate. "I'll tell you if I do."
"What if we ruined it?" Weiss asks, pacing with her nails digging into her palms. She nearly runs headfirst into a man carrying a guitar and barely even notices. "What if Blake saw her and lost it? What if we triggered some horrible PTSD episode by sending Yang to her hotel room? What if--"
"Oh my God," Sun breathes out suddenly, his eyes locked over Weiss's shoulder.
"I know!" she exclaims, throwing up her hands. "We didn't even think of the possible trauma we'd be incurring - the torment - what if she doesn't show up at all? What if--"
"Weiss," Neptune says, wide-eyed gaze trained on the exact same spot, "turn around."
Everything about Hollywood is fake; she's aware of this. She's spent enough time watching Yang remove twenty layers of makeup and helped Pyrrha memorize enough lines to get a pretty good grasp of the truth. But there's no other way to describe what she experiences upon doing what she's told - the sudden hush of the world, how her vision tunnels in and everything else dulls to grey. It's exactly like a scene straight out of a movie.
It takes her five, ten, twenty seconds to comprehend what she's seeing, and then even her tears feel scripted, choreographed.
Standing by the door, flashing their I.D.'s to security, are Blake and Yang. Together. They way they're supposed to be.
BlakeandYang, with their fingers intertwined, with their bodies in orbit, with their movements so in tune it's their own kind of music. BlakeandYang, wearing their own clothes, wearing their own skin, wearing their own mistakes and triumphs and evolutions. Blake lifts her sunglasses off her face, tucks them into the collar of her shirt. Yang keeps hers on, but she murmurs something too low for anyone else to hear, and Blake smiles.
Smiles. Actually smiles. Sun bites his own lip, runs his palm back and forth across Weiss's shoulder blades. He can't tell her not to cry when he's on the verge of doing the same thing.
And then Yang tugs gently on Blake's hand, leans into her ear, whispers softly - Weiss swears she's intruding on something intensely personal and private, that's how they've always felt to her, something so great they almost ache to look at - a moment later and Blake's head turns to them, her expression unreadable from a distance.
They move closer, in sync and step. Yang doesn't say anything to them; she doesn't need to. Blake's the one who makes the first move - shifts away from Yang's side, their fingers parting at the last possible second - her other hand finds the damp curve of Weiss's cheek, brushes a thumb beneath her eye, and in the dull light it comes away wet.
Somehow, Weiss's arms end up around her, and then Sun's follow, enveloping them both, and then they're all tangled together and half-laughing, half-crying, burying Blake between them like a barrier against everything she's been carrying alone. She smells like hotel shampoo and the bags under her eyes have faded, a testament to how drastically one night and the right person can change everything. Just the way one night and the wrong person did to begin with.
When she looks at each of them in turn, it's like she's finally seeing them again.
"I'm sorry," she murmurs, and the rest of the world disappears around them. The stagehands, the sound technicians, the lighting assistants. The crowds and the music and the laughter. "I'm so, so sorry."
"I'm sorry, too," Sun says, eyes downcast. "I'm sorry for - for a lot of things."
"I'm so sorry," Weiss echoes, grasping at the fabric of her hoodie. "I'm sorry I didn't understand. I'm sorry I thought about giving up."
"Shh," Blake says, hand gentle at the back of Weiss's head. From behind them, Yang only watches on, smiling. "You don't have to apologize. It wasn't your fault, okay?" She glances between them. "It wasn't - it wasn't your fault."
It wasn't your fault, she says, but her voice flutters in her throat, a flicker of wings and a shaking branch. It wasn't your fault, she says, and she's talking to herself just as much as she's talking to them.
--
Yang watches the show from backstage, sings every word to every song. Blake can't stop herself from meeting her eyes every time she turns to face the wings, quick fleeting glances, mouth curling at the corners. Her voice comes back to her without its sharp edges, no longer sounds like it's tearing at her throat just to be sung.
It's not about the long and winding road, comes the bridge in Alone Together, and the entire audience screams the lyrics along. It's all about my bed and the imprint of your soul.
In her opinion, it's the best show they've ever played, period.
--
becca @musicalmenagerie · 10m
YANG
becca @musicalmenagerie · 10m
YANG XIAO LONG IS HERE TONIGHT AT THE SHOW
becca @musicalmenagerie · 10m
IM FUCKING LOSINGMY MIND SHE S BACKSTAGE I SAW HER I COULD SEE HER IM SITTING IN THE FAR.MEZZANINE
IT'S RAE @ringsoversaturn · 9m
Replying to @musicalmenagerie
BITCH EXCUSE ME
Georgia @ohjustsayit · 9m
Replying to @musicalmenagerie
WHAT WAITHWAT WHATWHAT
leave blake belladonna alone @1800thatbitch · 8m
Replying to @musicalmenagerie
NO
becca @musicalmenagerie · 7m
Replying to @1800thatbitch
YES IM FUCKIGN LOOKING AT HER ITS HER I SWEAR ITS HER
leave blake belladonna alone @1800thatbitch · 6m
Replying to @musicalmenagerie
OH YM GFUKIGN GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YANG AND BLAKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
--
After the show, she runs straight into Yang's arms, exactly where she belongs. Legs wrapped around her waist, helping carry her own weight. Yang's hands around her thighs, lips on hers, and not a single thing about either of them is unsteady.
Nobody wants to interrupt them, but--
"We aren't going to be able to get you both out unseen," Weiss says, checking her phone worryingly. "Yang, they know you're here - apparently you were noticed from the far mezzanine. It's out of control."
"Fine," Yang says, drops her lips to Blake's hair, lets her forehead follow. "Then let them see us."
Weiss stares up at them, and she's struck almost by a sense of deja-vu; they're towering over her, but most people do. They're effortlessly gorgeous, dangerous, models for a fashion campaign in complementary colors; Blake's high cheekbones and Yang's full mouth. All the curves between them, all the edges.
"Okay," Weiss agrees.
They make their exit through the stage door; the hallway is dark, and the alley it leads to is only well-lit closer to the barricades, where it looks like half the theatre has chosen to stand and wait. Sun, Ilia, and Neptune walk out first - there's applause, a mild screaming, but other than that, the crowd seems to be holding its breath. Wistful and waiting and wanting.
Blake comes next, takes a step on the pavement, and turns around with a hand extended into the shadows; Yang's fingers settle comfortably through hers, following. They're both smiling as she steps into the light, immediately recognizable, and every single person there erupts.
They aren't permitted to sign autographs that night, but Blake doubts their fans are disappointed.
--
(She'll replay that video for years to come - someone's shaky, unfocused phone camera capturing Yang's hand slipping into hers as they slip out of the building, the delight and embarrassment on both of their faces, and the love - evident in each perfectly timed step, every brush of their shoulders, and the kiss Yang presses to her head as they're heading to the car.)
--
Yang stays the entire weekend. They curl up in each other's arms and spill whatever threatens to pour; sometimes it's Adam, things he used to whisper to Blake that haunt her now. Sometimes it's Yang, all the nights she spent alone and watching Blake's activity on Spotify. Sometimes it's regret. A lot of it is regret.
I won't leave again, Blake repeats over and over, into the early hours of the morning.
I know you won't, Yang says back, meeting Blake's eyes so she knows she means it.
-
It's hard to say goodbye to her at the airport, but it's only for a short time - "I can't miss my physical therapy appointment," she admits, grimacing. "My trainer'll beat my ass."
"Teach me how to help you," Blake says softly. "I want to help you, too."
"You're already doing it."
She wraps her arms around Yang's waist, tilts her head up and waits to be kissed. She doesn't care who sees. Their lips meet, a sigh of summer in the air.
Yang buys a flight to D.C. the minute she gets through security, and two days later they're together again. She shows Blake stretches to help work her arm, rebuild her muscles. Rests her palm over Blake's heart and feels it beat.
Anything can be rebuilt, she murmurs, as long as you know how.
--
It's a pattern that develops. Yang flies home for her necessary appointments, but otherwise follows Blake on tour, just as she'd always meant to. Watches her perform night after night, watches her work the crowd like her guitar.
And when it's over, Yang waits for her to press too close and too hot and slip into her mouth like the devil.
They're careful not to cross any lines. They pretend they'll move slowly. Won't push each other how they used to until they're ready. They're be soft and smooth and pliable, instead of snapping tension like a whip. They'll kiss without too many teeth and won't leave marks. They'll get there. It's okay if it's not now, not tonight.
But Blake's lips are a dark, wicked red in Chicago, and her hair's curled delicately over her shoulder, eyeliner blending into smoke. She's irresistible on purpose. She's Yang's and Yang's only, and oh, it's been too long since Yang's been allowed to prove that.
"Slow," Blake manages a laugh, her palms flat against the dressing-room sink as she watches herself grind down onto Yang's fingers in the mirror. "So that was a fucking a lie."
"Like you weren't begging me for it," Yang murmurs against the shell of her ear, and drops her mouth to the crook of her neck. Blake reaches up, twines her hand through Yang's hair and tightens it. Teeth nip at her skin in warning.
"Oh, no," Blake says breathlessly. "I absolutely was."
--
She ends up with a hickey she doesn't have time to cover. The fans go wild with that one.
--
The tour ends in a blur - Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Yang's at every show, and now she's expected to be. People look for a glance of her backstage, shyly ask her for autographs if they're lucky enough to share the VIP area. Buzzfeed creates a column dedicated to sightings for fun, and it becomes so popular that Nora starts sending her screenshots for every new entry and typing SPOTTED!!! or XOXO GOSSIP GIRL. Once, she makes a video zooming in on a fan's photo of them out at a bar with the X-Files theme music playing.
They're home, but it's a different venue. They're a bigger name, fitting thousands instead of hundreds. But the crowd, she realizes, staring out at the sea of lights during Burning the Candle, is the same.
"Neptune," she says. They're waiting in the wings to return for the encore.
"Yeah?"
"You know how you always said L.A. shows were the best?"
"Yeah," he says, winking. "Home crowd, baby."
She thinks of Yang in the audience a year and a half ago, leaning against a balcony railing and throwing her heart onstage instead of applause. Standing in the doorway with an adorably flustered look on her face, lips with an invitation. Touching Blake and finding the rest of her life.
"You were right," Blake says, and she's smiling.
--
They fall into old habits, but they make entirely new ones, too. She officially moves in one week before Ruby moves out, and the days in between are a mess of packing, unpacking, and packing again when they accidentally confuse their boxes. Weiss and Pyrrha come over with a label-maker. Yang thinks they have a little too much fun with it, but lets them be.
They redecorate; purples and golds start to find their way into the color scheme. Blake switches out lampshades and rugs. Yang wants more colorful bowls. They mutually decide to Marie Kondo the closet, but they let Coco come over and take the reigns on that. Pictures change their positions on the walls and additions find their place. Sometimes, they'd noticed, fans caught some great photos - Blake locking eyes with her in the wings during their show in Boston, her silhouette framed in blue light from a balcony as Blake sings on stage.
Ruby's moved to Beverly Flats with her best friend Penny; a journalist jokingly asks her if it's nice finally having privacy and she says, "For them, yeah. But I'm asexual, so I'm probably just gonna get a dog." He doesn't seem to know what to do with that.
Yang's scar fades; turns white and indented and round, the incision site smoother than the rest of her skin. It's still noticeable - she won't be able to wear anything without longer sleeves without it being visible, but she never thinks about alternatives. Doesn't think about cosmetics or cover-ups. Some things, she says, we need to learn to accept as part of us, rather than pretend they aren't there. Even if they're bad things. Even if they hurt.
"Nice line," Blake says, grinning, "but my therapist told me something similar, too. If we don't accept them, we can't move on from them."
"Shit," Yang says. "I totally could've come up with that, though. I'm deep."
"Totally," Blake agrees.
"You're making fun of me."
"Never," she says stoically. "You're the deepest bitch I know, baby."
Yang snorts into laughter. "I hate you."
"Now who's the liar?"
--
Exactly one month after Blake starts regular therapy, she thinks about getting a haircut. It's the end of August and it's insanely hot - climate change, Yang says, her own hair up in a bun - and she thinks she might be ready for a change.
And two months after that, she actually follows through with it.
Her curls fall just past her chin, and the minute Yang sees her, she's struck like stone, struck like a car wrapping around a telephone pole. She stands in their entryway and stares, stares, stares; it'd almost make Blake self-conscious if she weren't already familiar with the forms of Yang's reverence, the expressions she takes moments before worship.
And then Blake's slammed against the back of the door with her newly-short hair scrunched up in Yang's fists, Yang's lips on hers and kissing her earnestly until Blake has no choice but to laugh into her mouth.
"So you like it?"
"No."
"No?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah?"
"No." She kisses Blake again, and her smile shines strongly enough to rival the sun itself. "Before you keep this going, no, I don't like it. I love it. It's you. Of course I love it."
--
Out of Fire gets a premiere date for the fall - they'd opted against competing with Yang's own summer blockbuster, and the end of October finds the cast reunited for a screening. Blake's on her arm, drop-dead gorgeous in a strapless dress with a deep purple bodice that fades into a long, white skirt. Nebula's still dating Dew, and nothing about her has changed despite the success she's come to the past year. Well, Yang'd always had a good feeling about her.
Yang holds her hand throughout the film, and as expected, Blake cries when her character and Nebula's character kiss. To her surprise, Weiss cries, too.
"You?" Yang says, blinking perplexedly at her.
"It's touching!" she defends, taking the tissue Pyrrha hands her and dabbing at her eyes. "They were meant for each other! I'm not heartless, Yang!"
"I know!" Blake wails, clutching Weiss's free hand. "You should read the book!"
"I love my fans," Yang says, straight-faced, and everyone sighs in exasperation - though it at least distracts from the crying.
"Shut up, asshole," Nebula says. "Blake, you really let her fuck you with that ego?"
"Not anymore," Blake replies, her smile sinister and sweet.
(That's a threat that doesn't turn out to be even remotely true.)
--
It's strange, how easily time passes with routine. With trauma. With healing.
Another year, another movie, another song - Menagerie's debuting their third studio album, titled take it from your grave, and Yang's on final callbacks for a period piece that would shoot in Scotland, were she to get the part. It'd be months on location, but it'd coincide with the band's tour. She sees it as a sign, an opportunity. Success belongs to both of them.
They've both worked harder than ever before to get where they are. Blake still has nights where his voice is louder than her own, and she breathes steadily in and out while reminding herself of the good things she's allowed to have. Sudden, unexpected noises still steel into the tremors of Yang's hand, but no longer drag her back into the night that caused them.
And when they do, they're still together, and they don't mind reminding each other what's real. Blake doesn't mind straddling her, sinking down onto her fingers, rocking her hips. Yang doesn't mind opening her thighs tasting her after, stroking her tongue slowly, patiently. Until it's the only thing either of them can think about.
It hasn't been easy. But it's theirs.
--
Yang gets the role, and Menagerie's tour dates are cemented down. They overlap almost entirely, save for a few shows at the very beginning of the tour - aside from that, any visits are going to be few and far between.
They're trying to be okay with that. Trying not to think of Blake's last tour, where Yang was in none of the places she should've been, and nowhere felt like home.
Menagerie's first shows are in Los Angeles this time, rather than ending there. SOMEONE LIKE YOU, the title of both their first single off the album and their tour, is splashed in neon light against the stage wall. Yang's sitting in the VIP area; she wants the full view, she'd said, see it how it's supposed to be seen. After that, backstage is fair game.
They have a few tables to themselves - Pyrrha's there with Weiss, whispering soothing things into her ear as she attempts to drown what looks like a glass of straight vodka; Nora and Ren are at another, and Yang's pretty sure he keeps secretly vaping like a few others in the crowd. Ruby's explaining something about the set design to Penny, gesturing at the lights, which suddenly dim.
The silhouettes of four people take to the stage. Ilia, in the back on the drums; Sun with his guitar, and Neptune with his bass; and then - finally - with her own guitar--
After all this time, she never gets over the rush of the first note, the lights blinding as they reignite the stage. Never gets over Blake's mouth against the microphone and her breath between words, singing everything she used to think she'd never say. Never gets over the otherworldliness of her, playing in front of a crowd and belonging.
Her soul is on that stage, in that music. And so is Yang's.
--
"Good one tonight," Ilia says backstage, tightening her ponytail. "Really good. Damn."
"Yeah," Blake agrees, wired and strung-out the way she normally is after a show. "Are you showering?"
"Nah," Ilia says, and grins. "I'm gonna use my own shower while I have the chance."
"Fair."
"See you tomorrow."
Blake packs her bag, slings it over her shoulder, and heads back out of her dressing room. The crowd's still piling out in the theatre itself; she can hear their footfalls, their shouting, their laughter. Neptune's walking around with Sun latched onto his back, legs wrapped around his waist in some pseudo-piggyback ride. He's talking to Ilia over Neptune's shoulder; Weiss is standing by, on the phone and discussing something about dinner reservations.
And there's Yang, standing by the exit with her phone in her hands, shooting out a quick text. As stunning as she always is, as she's always been. "Hey," Blake says, beaming automatically.
"Hey, baby," Yang says, leaning in for a kiss and smiling against her mouth. "You were incredible. I'm obsessed. D'you - okay, this is like, really awkward, but do you maybe wanna go out sometime?"
"Oh, I don't know," Blake plays along. "I have a girlfriend. You're hotter, though, so if you can keep a secret…"
"I think I can."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, pretty sure."
Weiss snaps her head over, and catches Blake's eye. Mimes murder with a finger across her throat. Blake shuts her mouth. "I think Weiss is about to kill us."
"In that case," Yang says, "ready to go home? We can continue this stimulating conversation in the comfort of our own bedroom."
Home. For some reason, now of all moments, it hits her - she takes a moment to dissect the concept, strip it down to its bare essentials - walls, a roof, a floor. A door that locked and a frame that wasn't cracked. Curtains that let in light. That was all after Adam.
Further, on her own: furniture, photographs. Food in the refrigerator, the pantry. Dishes and silverware. Notebooks and a calendar. A jar of pens. A vase of flowers. Silence that didn't have to be empty to be safe.
And finally, with Yang came friends, and family, and freedom. A bed she owned a side of; a closet with her clothes. A morning routine and a workout regimen. Side streets faster than the freeways. A favorite coffee shop and a favorite bookstore. A car, a passport. Birthday party invitations and Christmas cards.
Someone to pick her up at the airport; someone to hold her when it rained. Someone who'd stay awake until she fell asleep. Someone her heart would always, always return to.
"Yeah," she says, and threads their fingers together. "Let's go home."
--
A month and a half into the tour; they're just passed their three-year anniversary. Yang can't get away from work, and Blake's in Boston, prepping for another show. They talk on the phone for as long as they possibly can - Yang says I miss you, says I wish you were here, says when the fuck are you having an international tour. Blake can only laugh, because if she doesn't, she'll cry.
In a surprise twist of events, Blake's parents make it to the concert; they're in town for work, they tell her, and they didn't want to pass up the opportunity. She gets them in without an issue, tries to get them a table upstairs. It's tricky; most of them are reserved already.
"Don't worry about it," Kali says, and shoos her off. "We'll have a talk with this nice young man here and work it out while you go get ready."
Blake only shrugs and thinks nothing of it; her parents are stubborn that way, and she lets them be. She doesn't notice the two red-heads hiding out at the bar, smiles ducking behind their menus.
--
They're halfway through the show when the inexplicable occurs. She's counting down to an intro when Sun glances to the left and hurriedly grabs his mic, accidentally smashing his palm against it and cutting her off. Neptune, strangely, seems relieved, tension in his neck and shoulders dropping; Ilia lowers her drumsticks and spins them.
"Sorry," Sun says, waving a hand to the audience, "sorry, everyone - I have a short interruption. There's actually someone here I'd like to bring out on stage, if that's okay."
Blake quirks her head, stares at him with her smile tilting quizzical. The crowd roars; she doesn't have time to ask who over the noise, and it doesn't matter, anyway - because he turns, gestures at someone waiting in the wings, and Yang walks out into the light.
Blake's heart springs into her lungs, becomes something she breathes. Jumps into her head, becomes all she can think. Her heart in her mouth and her eyes and her blood, uncontainable and overflowing.
Last time she'd talked to Yang was just before the show, and it'd been nearly one in the morning in Edinburgh. Or so Yang'd said, punctuating her sentences with yawns, sleep gripping the edges of her voice.
But then, Blake thinks in the back of her mind, she's an actress.
"What are you doing here?" she exhales into the mic, too consumed by the sight of the woman in front of her, drowning out the screaming theatre of thousands. God, she looks good, Blake can't stop herself from noticing - it's only been a little over a month since they've seen each other and it feels like it's been twenty - Yang's in tight, ripped black jeans tucked into black combat boots, but she's wearing a red-and-yellow striped sweater underneath a washed-out red zip-up hoodie, light denim jacket over that; her hair's loose and wild over her shoulders, her smile nearly dazzling.
"I came to see Sun," she says, and everyone in the crowd laughs. "I really missed him."
"Cheers," he calls from behind, water bottle raised to his lips.
"Seriously," Blake says, too winded to phrase it like a question. Her own smile's so wide she can feel the pressure of it in her cheeks. "What are you - what are you doing here?"
"Seriously?" Yang repeats, laughter on the underside of her tone, stepping even closer until she's able to share the mic. She digs a hand into her pocket, pulls out a guitar pick. "I brought you this. I want you to use it for the rest of the show tonight."
"The show we're currently in the middle of?" Blake jokes, but takes the pick from her easily. She can't take her eyes off Yang, waiting for more - there's some catch, there must be.
"My flight was late," Yang says, shrugs in lieu of an apology, and now there's a tangible energy to her - ricocheting off her skin, the walls, the floor, the crowd, the music. "What d'you think?" She nods to the pick.
And Blake finally glances down. It's a purple fender, gemstone-patterned, just like the one she'd given Yang all those years ago, only one side is engraved with a single, simple statement. Not even a question, not even a request. There's no doubt to it, not that there should be; they'd talked about it so often it'd almost been a given.
But now. But now.
Blake's smile freezes on her mouth, jaw falling slack. Lips parted over the words she's reading. Eyes wide and watering, darting to Yang's eyes and back. The audience starts to whisper, to point, to swell.
Yang's grin doesn't shift at all. She's entirely casual and at ease; she isn't nervous for Blake's response, only excited for it. She doesn't get down on one knee, and she doesn't pull out a velvet box - she merely lifts a hand to the microphone and says, "Marry me."
They don't need rings and grandeur. They don't need speeches and sentiments. They only need the same thing they've always needed: each other.
"Yes," Blake replies instantly, because it isn't something that even requires consideration. Yang could've asked her the day they'd met, and her answer wouldn't have been any different. "Oh my God. Yes."
Someone woops from the stage - she thinks it's Sun - before the crowd erupts and overpowers them, screaming themselves hoarse, chanting and cheering and their phones all out and on record. Yang cups her cheeks in her hands, brings her forward, meets her lips halfway in a kiss - there's home again, somewhere she hasn't been since Yang had left, even without their own familiar walls, their floors, their bed. Yang kisses her and she's coming home.
She thinks the entire venue must be on their feet, because it's the only way she can explain her heart in her chest, thundering around like an earthquake.
--
It's a coincidence they even have it on.
It's some dumb news show on E! that Yang'd caught once before by accident - the three hosts are presented with clips, or gossip, or articles, and they then proceed to discuss them together. The primary goal of it must be entertainment, since half the shit they find isn't even remotely true.
Blake's about to change the channel when their names come up, and a pretty decent video of Yang's proposal from someone who'd been very close to the stage pops on screen. Blake lowers the remote, smile already unfurling at a corner of her mouth. They both watch Yang traipse onstage, watch Blake's delighted expression of surprise, watch Yang hand her the pick and Blake read it. Watch her say yes. Watch them both agree to be together for the rest of their lives, as if they hadn't planned on doing that already.
Two of the hosts are actually tearing up by the time the camera cuts back to them; it's almost comical, the way they're passing around the tissue box and patting each other's backs. And then one of the women says, "It's so funny. I feel like you rarely ever see a real-life Hollywood ending, but like, I feel like they're it, you know?"
"I was thinking that!" the man exclaims. "I'm not even joking. Like, remember that clip of Blake Belladonna from her last tour that we commented on? And it was so - it was like, devastating. And now it's almost two years later and here they are."
"Stop," the other woman says thickly. "Seriously, you're gonna make me cry again."
"I was rooting for them," the first woman says. "Always. I just always felt like if anyone in this industry deserved to make it, it was them."
"Absolutely," the man says.
"Their story, up to that proposal, was honestly better than like, ninety percent of movies released this year," the second woman says, and the other two snicker. "Someone should start writing the screenplay. The work's basically done for you."
"Oh, wait, I love this," the man says. "What's your dream cast?"
Blake shuts it off, and it flashes to a black screen. They catch each other's expressions in the reflection, and promptly burst into laughter.
"Pyrrha should play you," Blake says, turning around and crawling up the bed to her, straddling her lap. She's bright and uncontainable, that sky outside their window. Those city lights pouring into space. "You're very interchangeable."
"I've heard that before," Yang agrees, brushing Blake's curls out of the way and cupping her face. "Wanna know my dream casting?"
"Yes."
"You play you," she says, and punctuates the sentence with a kiss, gentle and genuine, "and I play me. And we stay together for the rest of our lives."
Blake's smile is too big to contain, her cheeks pressing against Yang's palms. "I think you mean 'and we live happily ever after.'"
"No," Yang says, and twists into a frown, brow furrowed. "That's cheesy. Stick to songs, baby. Don't quit your day job."
"I'm going to sell your Oscar on eBay when we get home if you don't shut the fuck up."
"I'm going to call E! and tell them the engagement's off."
--
Happily ever after is far too cliched of a phrase to describe anything, Yang thinks. It's unrealistic, illogical, and inflexible. It's for children and fairytales, not adults who know the truth of love and its capacity for suffering. For pain. For heartbreak.
"How optimistic," Blake says dryly. "Just what I like to hear on our wedding day."
Their guests laugh. Yang grins, pressing a finger to her lips. "These are my vows or whatever," she says. "Wait your turn."
"Sure."
"Anyway," Yang says, and she can still hear people giggling in their seats. The wind pulls playfully at Blake's curls, the airy material of her dress billowing with it. "People say that about us all the time - that we're Hollywood's 'happily ever after.' But I think that's doing a disservice to us. I think we worked for this, and we made choices, and they weren't always good ones." Blake's riveted to her now, stuck on every word. "So I don't want us to have to be 'happily ever after.' I just want us to be - be the last half of that sentence. 'Happily,' I think, is the goal. But we're allowed to be other things, too. We're allowed to have bad days, and bad nights, and be in bad moods. We're allowed to be upset, and cry, and disagree. We aren't failures for that." She smiles - a specific turn of her mouth, a secret between them, and tucks Blake's hair away from her cheekbone. "We're failures if we don't try to understand each other. If we give up."
"If we run away," Blake adds on softly. She needs it said, so the both of them know. "If we let go."
"Exactly," Yang murmurs, and now it's a conversation between the two of them alone, and all of their friends and family may as well not even be in attendance. "So that's my vow, Blake Belladonna. I'm gonna spend ever after with you, and it's going to be so much fucking better than anything Hollywood could ever have come up with."
Blake doesn't cry, though several people in the audience do; she can hear their sniffling over the wind, the roar of the sea. Her eyes are glassy and reflect the ocean below them - Yang finds all those skyline sunsets, all those nights glittering in gold. She takes a breath, her lips parting the barest amount.
"Then that's my vow," she says, and the wavering note in her voice isn't due to uncertainty, only an intensity so great it's nearly impossible to place a name to. Her stare drops to Yang's gold dress, the sheer long sleeves, the flowing material. Back to her jawline, the bridge of her nose, the lilac of her eyes; the unruly and unrelenting beauty of her. "We won't live happily ever after, but God, damn - I'm going to make sure we come close."
That's a promise they both keep.
