Yang's fourteenth birthday had been a curious one. Her father, sister and uncle had all been there, and she'd been happy with the way it all turned out, but each event that day had been interrupted by the feeling of someone watching her from some hidden place nearby the family. She'd gotten that feeling every now and then before—but for some reason, this time felt different. Like it was someone else.
So as she lay in her bed late that night, however gradually she was dozing off, she wondered who it could have been.
Eventually, warmth and darkness took hold of her. She stirred for a moment at one point, rubbing her face against her pillow as she tried to sink deeper into her mattress. Her golden locks started to sway a bit in the summery night air, even as she felt a hand gently run its fingers through them.
It reminded her of the way her stepmom used to do it: warm, soft, and mindfully tender. Her half-asleep mind simply accepted this for a moment as a contented smile came upon her features, and her eyes started to slowly open to greet what little light was shining through upon the wall from the window across the room.
Until she remembered Summer had been missing and presumed dead for years.
Her eyes snapped wide open in alarm as she quickly shot up and spun around to see who'd dared to touch one of her most precious possessions—but there was no-one there at her bedside. She stared at the empty space before her in bewilderment, before her eyes started darting round to look for the culprit. After a split second of consideration, her gaze fell upon Ruby in her own bed.
Fast asleep. She knew her little sister too well to think for a moment she would be able to convincingly fake that.
Her eyes left the dark-haired girl, and she got out of bed as quietly as she could in order to not disturb her or drown out the noise of the intruder leaving the room — if they hadn't already.
For a moment, she wondered if it had been her birth mother at her bedside just then; she turned to the door as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, searching for a head of long, feathery black hair and the pair of crimson eyes that accompanied it in old photos she'd seen of the woman—but all she saw there was the dark and empty hallway.
Then she noticed the telltale feeling of eyes on her back—and just, just heard the window closing. She narrowed her eyes as they started to glow red, and spun around with her fists raised in a guarded position.
Two eyes, glowing a soft and ethereal cyan, looked back in from outside.
She stared at them for a moment in complete surprise, her body loosening and lips lightly parting in tandem with her mind as she processed this. Red and cyan motionlessly watched each other for a moment longer; and as alarm slowly, steadily shifted towards curiosity, she unclenched and lowered her fists, and stood upright.
Normally, she would have just called for her father—or more likely, have tried to take matters into her own hands, and teach whoever those eyes belonged to a thing or two about breaking into a girl's room at night to play with her hair—but there was something about them she couldn't put her finger on. Something that caused her to pause, if only for a moment.
She slowly started to walk towards the window in curious wonder as her eyes returned to their natural lilac.
As she approached, she started to make out a few more features of the intruder. Short, wispy hair—of a strangely familiar sort, she realised—adorned the head the eyes belonged to, and though it was too dark to make out any particular features of their face, she recognised the outline of their body as belonging to a boy her own age.
How he was keeping aloft two storeys up, she did not know.
As she walked closer, she found she could just about make out the way he was looking at her.
The way his eyes shone with tears despite the darkness, the slight and barely discernible tightening of his lips, the tenseness of his posture…
Is he… ashamed of something? Her head tilted to the side a bit as she considered that thought. Did someone put him up to this?
From what she could make out of him, he didn't look like anyone she knew from Signal. Her eyes went back to his hair.
Why do I feel like I've seen that hair before?
After a moment, she looked back into his eyes as reopened the window and leaned out to get a better look at him.
It was then that she saw he was floating in the air, right in front of her — and that the shadows concealing his features were a lot darker than they should have been that time of the year.
Some kind of flight Semblance? She wondered.
"…Hello," she whispered gently. "What's your name? What are you doing out so late?"
He said nothing in return, but from the way his gaze faltered against hers for a moment, it seemed like there was something he wanted to say. For a moment, she thought it might just have been shyness—until she saw the way his eyes shone despite the darkness.
He was sad. He was sad, lonely and scared.
Her gaze softened as she leaned a little further out, empathetic concern seeping into her voice.
"… Are you okay?"
After a moment, he raised his eyes back back up to meet hers again. He slowly floated down to her eye level as she let herself stand back on her feet in her own room, half-expecting him to climb back in. She was not quite sure why.
The two stared at each other wordlessly once more, and this time they were just close enough that she could reach out and touch him—and so, she did: she raised her hand to cup his cheek, feeling his jaw slacken a little in her palm out of surprise at the unexpected display of affection. She didn't know why she did it. She just knew it felt… completely normal to do, for some reason she couldn't explain.
"… Who are you?" she whispered again. "Where did you come from?"
He looked into her eyes for a moment longer, then raised his own hand to hold hers there on his face for a moment. His eyes closed as he let out a small exhale, one she felt more than she heard. As if he was cherishing this moment for as long as he could.
A secret suitor? she mused; for a moment, she felt some sense of endeared mirth at the thought.
To her surprise, he gently removed her hand from his face even as he held it in his own; and for another moment which she couldn't measure the length of, the two hands remained joined right in the space of the open window.
Just as he let go of hers, seemingly out of nowhere, she felt his sadness spill out into her own heart—his soul-crushing despair and pain and grief, staggering her like it were a dagger plunged into her chest. It was as though they'd known each other their whole lives, and they had to say goodbye.
She didn't know why. It didn't make any sense—she'd only just met him!
… Right?
She didn't understand why she suddenly started feeling this way. All she knew was she wanted him to stay, to come back into her room and say "hello". Somehow, she knew he did too; but he simply closed the window again as she was in the middle of processing this new emotion.
She stared at him in complete surprise as he placed his hand over the window sill, sprawled out like a still of him waving goodbye.
She was dumbstruck, even as her breath started to shake.
Her hand found its way onto the window where his was. For a moment, she felt that mysterious soul-bond make itself known once more; she sensed what felt like a cosmic nebula of swirling, multi-colored emotions as his heart opened up to hers.
There was a bitter-sweetness to it that, in that moment, she could neither understand or describe.
Somehow, this moment—sudden and out of place as it was—felt unbelievably profound. It was like she and this mysterious, heartbroken boy at her window had just shared some rite of passage together.
But the moment finally ended when he forced himself to turn away without a word, squeezing his eyes shut as tears—barely illuminated by the pale moonlight—fell down his cheeks. He pulled his trembling hand from the window pane as he slowly, fluidly lowered back down into the shadows from whence he came, his arms hugging against his body as his slowly-shrinking silhouette convulsed every so often, ever so slightly.
She reopened the window as she called out to him in a raised, strained whisper that shook the more she spoke: calling to him to wait, demanding him to tell her who he was, begging him to come back…
Her eyes snapped open with a soft, shaky gasp as thin streams of tears ran down the sides of her face.
After a moment, her breathing started to even out.
… That dream again?
She blinked the tears away, an exhale of surprise escaping her lips as she slowly sat up—having gotten used to the close ceiling directly above her bunk.
The first night she'd had it, she vaguely recalled having gone outside to find the boy. Of course, her father had been more than a little concerned once he heard the commotion in the middle of the night—but once she told him what had happened, after a moment of consideration, he had chalked it up to sleepwalking, and ushered her back to bed with a glass of warm milk.
The only reason she had eventually decided to accept her father's theory was because of the same thing recurring again the next night, and for a few nights after that, as well as the fact that she couldn't find any boys on Patch whose outline had matched the one she'd seen at her window. Even now, though, it still felt so real that she wondered if it might have actually been a memory after all—but she'd long since put those events away at the back of her mind.
Or so she'd thought.
After three whole years… Why now? What was that dream even about? What's it trying to tell me?
Now that it was back again, she found herself filled to the brim with questions—and the fact that each one lead to another didn't help.
Who was that boy? Why do I feel like I know him—or at least, like I should?
"Yang?" Ruby's voice snapped her out of her thoughts, causing her to tense up slightly. "Are you okay?"
She turned her head to look at the bunk on the other side of the room, where her younger sister stared at her with a concerned look in her shining silver eyes.
Her heart lept into her mouth.
…
She rubbed the back of her hand across her face with a sigh, wiping away the tears.
"… I'm fine, Ruby," she lied. "Just a bad dream, that's all."
The younger girl's look did not change much, but she seemed somewhat less distressed at least.
"Do you… wanna talk about it?"
Yang's heart did not settle back down in her chest as she shook her head with a forced smile.
"I said I'm fine, Ruby," she repeated with some unintentional sharpness to her tone. "It's nothing to worry about."
She couldn't help feeling even worse, given the tone she'd used; clearly, she'd not done a good job of hiding it if Ruby's concerned frown was anything to go by.
But, thankfully, she did not pry further.
Why did that dream feel so real? Why did I only start having it on my—?
"Yang?" Blake addressed her team partner from across the table. "Are you feeling okay? You've barely touched your food."
"… Huh?" She turned her head to her partner, betraying the distracted look on her face for a brief moment until she met the feline Faunus girl's golden gaze. She blinked after a moment as she realised what she must have looked like staring so intensely at her plate.
"Oh—! Yeah, sure! Sorry!" she picked up her utensils and started digging in as casually as she could. "Just been… thinking about something."
Blake's eyes did not waver away from her friend.
"About… what?"
"Just…" she hesitated for a moment. "Something personal, that's all. No biggie."
Blake frowned at her uncertainly as Ruby had done earlier—and was doing again, as it happened, as was Weiss—but did not pry further.
"Miss Xiao Long?" Professor—or rather, Doctor—Oobleck called out to her as he zoomed to the side of the classroom where she was sat. "You are paying attention to the lecture, I hope?"
She was not. As before, Yang was staring down at the paper in front of her with an intensity that drew the discomfort of everyone who caught sight of it.
The green-haired historian stared at her for a moment, surprised at this uncharacteristic intensity from the usually bombastic girl.
"… Miss Xiao Long?" he repeated, much more slowly than he usually spoke. His tone did not belie his concern for his student.
She still barely registered her name being called.
Weiss, who was sitting next to her, nudged her slightly with a slight whisper of her name and a stern look.
That snapped her out of her brooding. She blinked with a slight but sudden intake of air as her head darted towards the blanchette, meeting her gaze.
"You've been out of it the whole day," she hissed. "What's going on with you?!"
She pursed her lips with an uncharacteristic hesitance as she tried to think of an answer.
Weiss' stare softened somewhat, and the rest of her team shared in it.
"Yang… Are you really okay?"
…
She looked back down at her feet, her golden bangs falling over her eyes.
… No.
She stood up from her seat, her bangs concealing her eyes beneath an uncanny shadow.
No, I'm not okay.
She turned around and ran, against the protests of her team—curiously, the good doctor did not try to stop her.
I haven't been okay for years.
How long she ran for, she didn't know.
I can't stop thinking about that boy in my dreams.
She rushed into her team dorm.
Why does it hurt so much to remember him?
She slammed the door behind her, leaning against it as her chest shakily heaved.
Who even is he?
She started sobbing quietly as she curled up on the floor.
Why… Why do I miss him so much…?