Yang groped for her scroll. Stupid thing, waking her up in the middle of the night. She'd just gotten to sleep. Nice, beautiful, dreamless sleep. Yang desperately wanted to shut her scroll off when she went to sleep now, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. What if she actually got something important? She opened her scroll. <Text message successfully sent!>



What? What message? She hadn't sent any messages lately. Just that response to Blake inviting everyone to the teashop, a few days back. Yang clicked on the notification.

<From - Yang Xiao Long>

<To - Blake Belladonna, Pyrrha Nikos, Nora Valkyrie, Lie Ren, Jaune Arc, Sun Wukong>

<Title - Poker Night 2>



<Yang (2:05am) - Anyone up for a second game? We could play to skin this time. Or forfeits. You can take a forfeit instead of losing a piece of clothing. Sun, we can start playing some of those variants you suggested last time. And Pyrrha, you could regain your honor by beating Blake.>



<Server (2:05am) - Unable to connect to Pyrrha Nikos.>

Yang started swearing. Her scroll must have glitched, or something. That had been sitting in her drafts for months, unsent. She hadn't wanted to push too much with Blake, and she kept chickening out about sending it. She had told herself that she'd send it after the Vytal Tournament - how had it moved from her drafts? Why now? The CCTS was down. What if her scroll had somehow moved it to her 'failed to send' folder, and connecting to Mistral's network had made it periodically try to resend it? And now that Blake and Sun were also in Mistral, it had actually delivered it? That was stupid enough for it to have happened.



She shook her head to clear the sleep out of it, started typing.

<Jaune has left the chat.>

Burying her head in her pillow, Yang screamed silently into it. She'd have to apologize to Jaune in person, later. Not something she was looking forward to. She kept typing.

<Yang (2:06am) - I am so sorry, everyone. I never meant to send that. My scroll must have glitched. I'll talk to Jaune in the morning.>



<Ren (2:07am) - It might be better if you didn't. He doesn't want to talk to anyone about it.>



<Blake (2:10am) - ...Can the rest of us, though?>



<Sun (2:10am) - What are you losers talking about this early?>



<Sun (2:10am) - Oh.>



<Yang (2:11am) - What do you mean, Blake?>



<Blake (2:11am) - Pyrrha. Can we actually talk about her? Face to face, not like this.>



<Ren (2:18am) - Okay.>



<Yang (2:19am) - Tomorrow evening? After dinner? Sun, do you know any quiet places we can meet?>



<Sun (2:21am) - Yeah, sure. Meet me at the front gate of Haven.>



<Sun (2:22am) - We can actually give her a proper send-off, and throw her a wake. Bring what you want.>



<Blake (2:23am) - What about Weiss? Ruby? Jaune? The rest of SSSN?>



<Yang (2:25am) - If we're giving Pyrrha a wake? Jaune already left. And Ruby and Weiss both hate the idea of drinking. And I don't even know if Neptune, etc met her.>



<Blake (2:26am) - Why does it have to be a wake?>



<Sun (2:28am) - Look, booze is social lubricant. And I don't think any of us really wants to talk about this.>



<Sun (2:29am) - But we should. It'll help.>



<Ren (2:35am) - I'll tell Nora when she wakes up. 9pm?>



<Several people are typing...>

Yang was the last one to arrive, bottles clinking in the brown paper bag she had stuffed into her jacket. She looked over at the faces of her friends. Even Nora was subdued. "Are we ready?"



Taking a deep breath, Blake nodded. "Sun, lead the way."



He nodded, leading the way to one of the student housing buildings. "They're all locked up, but they're pretty easy to climb. C'mon." He scampered up the five stories with no effort whatsoever. Blake and Ren followed him, springing up from window-sill to window-sill.

Looking down at Ember Celica, Yang sighed. That wouldn't be quiet. She turned to Nora, who was crouching, ready to leap. "Mind giving me a toss?"



Nora snorted. "Yeah. Ninjas, am I right?"



It wasn't much of a joke, but Nora was trying. "Yeah."



Nora held out her hand, and Yang jumped onto it, trying to think aerodynamic thoughts. Grabbed the edge of the roof as it came rushing up on her. Pulled herself onto it, braced herself, and held out her hand for Nora. Pulled her up when she leapt into reach.



On the roof, Sun pointed out a flat section, with a short wall running around it, and an access door. "There it is. Best place I could think of. Nice and quiet. Good view of the stars. You can see the Mistral arena down there." He started off for the area he'd pointed out, talking over his shoulder. "That's where Pyrrha kept winning Regionals. But the security there is a lot better, and the jerks took down her plaques."



Ren just shook his head. Sat down in one corner, back against the walls. Nora sat down next to him, her bag thunking on the roof.



Looking up at the night sky, Blake bit her lip. Sighed, and glanced at Yang. "Come on, let's get this started."



Yang nodded. Joined the circle that had formed, settling herself opposite Ren, between Sun and Blake.



"Sun?" Blake caught his attention. "This is a Vacuo custom, right? Do you want to start?"



"Yeah, I guess. What did everyone bring?" He set his bag in front of him, ripped it open, and stuffed the remnants in his pocket. "I got a bunch of those little wine boxes she drank back on our first poker night."



Ren pulled a wine bottle out of Nora's bag. "I got a nice wine. From Argus. I know she was from around there. White, light, not too sweet."



"And a bunch of Dragoboons." Nora dumped out the rest of her bag, the plastic bottles bouncing. "She'd want us to stay healthy. Not get dehydrated. She went through so many of these. I think she should have tried to be their mascot, and not Pumpkin Pete's. Don't tell Jaune, but she really hated that cereal."



Yang shrugged. "Well, they took her off their boxes. At least she won't be remembered as a cereal mascot." She sighed. "I miss her. I missed all of you, but I can't meet up with her again." Yang swallowed, forced herself to keep talking. "I knew the rest of you were lightweights, so I brought something that would actually get me smashed. Like me, when I tried to 1v1 Pyrrha in Glynda's class. That was an embarrassing fight." She pulled the bottles out of her bag. "Hard cider for all of you. Vodka for me. Blake?"



"I mentioned it to my mom. And she gave me this." Blake set down a jar, with what looked like a whole apricot floating in it. "Six year old, home-made, apricot brandy."



Sun looked at it suspiciously. "Is it safe?"



"To drink? Yes. It won't make you go blind, or anything. It's just... really strong." Blake pulled out a stack of disposable cups.



"Ren, you've got the fancy stuff. We should start with that." Sun grabbed the cups, and passed them out. He left one in the center. "One for Pyrrha, first."



Holding the wine bottle by the neck, Ren chopped at it with his other hand. His aura brightened, and he set the severed top of the bottle aside. Started pouring.



Sun waited for everyone to have a drink, and picked up Pyrrha's cup and his own. "Ren, do you have a memory to share? Anything. Could be funny, sad, thoughtful, first thing that comes to mind."



"She liked everyone. People she hadn't even met. The only people she didn't get along with was CRDL, and that was mostly just Cardin. And he did that to himself, by picking on Jaune." Ren shook his head. "And it didn't take any effort for her. She just... listened." He swallowed, blinked. Raised his cup.



Everyone took a drink. Sun poured out a measure of Pyrrha's, off onto the slope of the roof. "Nora?"



"Pyrrha kicked so much butt. Remember when she beat all of CRDL at once? They looked like idiots the whole time, and she just wrecked them. It was like they were training dummies." Nora snorted, toasted everyone, took a drink. "Ren had to cover my mouth, so I didn't laugh the entire fight. I wish I had video of it." She elbowed Sun. "What've you got?"



"I didn't know her as well as the rest of you. But do you remember the food fight, at the start of the second semester?"

It still hurt. Yang had finally managed to crawl out of the pit of her misery, at least high enough to see everything that had been pouring in. Drowning her. Her maiming, Blake leaving, Ruby leaving, Pyrrha's death, what had happened to Penny, the fall of Beacon itself... She had enough distance to be able to distinguish them, instead of all of them blurring together in a choking miasma. If she could just take them one at a time, it would be a lot easier. But it was all tangled together, a snarl of nuts and bolts and chain and hex keys, all rusting together into a mess. She had to take what she could, when she could.



Yang shook herself. Checked everyone else. After the first rush of stories, and the end of Ren's bottle, they'd lapsed back into silence. "Hey, Nora, pass me a Dragoboon."



"What color?"



"Got any purple?"



Nora nodded, tossed it across the circle to her.



Yang opened it and took a swig. "I hope this isn't supposed to be grape." She checked the label. "Nope, wild berry. It isn't 'berry' good." Took another swig, despite that.



Blake, at least, groaned. And when Yang opened her mouth to keep punning, started talking. "Sun, what next?"



"I mean, traditionally, you've got a lot more people, and the energy stays up, and you don't lapse into boozey silence." Sun looked around. "Yeah. We may not be very good at this."



Nora snorted. "I mean, it is very Pyrrha. I loved her, but she could do awkward silences like nobody else. Especially around Jaune."



"I don't know why she-" Ren stopped. Put a hand to his brow and sighed. Straightened back up. "I don't know why she fixated on Jaune. Why she couldn't say anything to him."



"Those are two very different questions." Yang said. "Look, starting a relationship is hard." She waved a hand around the group. "All of us are bad at it. You and Nora got past your block. The rest of us..." She kept her eyes on Ren. Didn't look at Blake. Couldn't. "We've all got our damages. I think I know mine. Knew mine, before all this. And now there are bunch more. I have no idea what Pyrrha's was."



"She was eclipsed." Blake blurted out. Hid her mouth, ears up in shock. Everyone turned to look at her.



Sun tilted his head at her. "Do you want to, uh, explain that? Because even for you, that's pretty impenetrable."



Pulling the bottlecaps off with her metal hand, Yang started passing out the ciders. Set one in the center, and handed the last one to Blake. Nodded at her, trying to get her to talk.



Blake took the bottle, sat hunched over it. "It's... hard to explain." She shook her head, took a long drink. "Okay, so - pretend there are two Pyrrhas. Pyrrha the heroine, cereal mascot, winner of the Mistral Regionals, completely invincible, infallible, all that. And then there's Pyrrha the girl. Who couldn't tell Jaune she liked him, who was a great listener, who was kind of a huge dork if you caught her at the right moment. We had a pun fight, once."



"And you didn't invite me?" That almost hurt. Yang said it with the biggest smile she could muster, though. Still not that big.



"It was spontaneous. I was... not in a good place, and I didn't want Pyrrha to think it was her fault." She sighed, took another drink. "But Pyrrha the idol and Pyrrha the girl - Almost no one saw Pyrrha the girl. They could only see the idol. Couldn't look past her reputation to see her. I'm not explaining this well at all. Just forget it."



Nora reached across the circle, put her hand on Blake's knee. "It's okay. I get it." Withdrew her hand, and opened a pink Dragoboon for herself. "Pyrrha wanted to help everyone, and that made everyone she helped just see her as a hero. Heroes aren't people, not really. They're just- an idea, I guess?" Nora thought for a moment, then went on. "A hero is like one of Ruby's cloaks. They say 'look at me, I'm important,' and hide the person in the cloak." She downed the sports drink in a long chug, and set it down. "And Pyrrha was really good at being a hero. I liked that Pyrrha a lot."



Sun nodded. "Me too."



"But Pyrrha the heroine only existed because Pyrrha the girl put on the cloak. Of Heroism. Whatever." Nora shook her head. "I liked what Pyrrha did, because of who Pyrrha was." She started drinking her cider.



Ren spoke up suddenly, sitting up straight. "Jaune wasn't in awe of her." Everyone looked at him. "All of us knew about Pyrrha before we met her. We watched her matches when we were in combat school."



Setting her empty cider bottle aside, Blake said, "Even I heard of her. The White Fang was petrified that she'd sign up with Atlas."



"But Jaune..." Ren shook his head. "Jaune hadn't. He didn't even know her as a cereal mascot. He treated her like she was just another girl."



Yang snorted. "Ineptly?" She remembered Jaune's musical invitation to Weiss.



Holding up a finger, Ren nodded. "But with honesty and respect."



Blake asked for a Dragoboon, and caught the one Nora threw at her. "Can we do anything for Jaune?" She looked between Ren and Nora.



Sighing, Ren slouched forward a bit. Nora wrapped an arm around his shoulder, and said, "I don't know. He won't talk to us. He has good days, when it doesn't seem to bother him. And days he just sleepwalks through."



Ren added, "He's more reckless. Doesn't think his plans all the way through."



Blake opened her mouth a few times in false starts before saying, "That second part... doesn't seem new."



"It's different. I... can't describe it." Ren started looking for answers on the floor.



"He just..." Nora crushed her Dragoboon bottle in her hands. "He doesn't want to think. He wants to just charge ahead."



"Nora, that's what you do all the time." Sun said, snagging a wine box with his tail and passing it to himself.



"Yeah, but I'm me! I do that because I like it and I'm really, really good at it. So's Yang."



Yang nodded. "I expect to get hurt." She snorted, held up her new arm. "Sometimes it's worse than I expect." No one laughed. Tough crowd.



"So what, Jaune wants to get hurt?" Sun was trying to get the straw inserted, and it kept bending. "That doesn't make any sense."



Blake sighed. "Yes, it does." She did her breathing trick: in, hold, out. Blake always did that when her anxiety was flaring up. Usually because she was thinking about Adam. "I did the same thing in the White Fang. When I hated everything I was doing, but couldn't convince myself to run. Getting hurt - it gave me something else to worry about."



She stopped talking, and silence took over. Yang knew what she hadn't said. Throwing yourself into the fray like that could get you hurt - or killed. And Yang knew the appeal of that thought. If you were dead, it might not fix anything, but it wasn't your problem anymore. And everyone else would get along better without you, even after cleaning up your last mess. ...Yang had not had a good winter. She didn't think Jaune had, either. "We keep an eye on him, then." Yang poured herself a measure of vodka. "Pyrrha would appreciate it." She raised her eyes to Ren and Nora. "We're here to help, if you need us." She downed her drink, shivering as the alcohol hit.



"Well, Yang and I are." Blake reached across the circle to grab a Dragoboon. "Sun, aren't you headed off to Shade?"



"Yeah, me and the rest of SSSN. Haven's a mess. Lionheart's gone, most of the instructors are too busy fighting Grimm to teach... And I need to remind my team that I exist. But if you're ever in Vacuo, I'm your man!"



Nora snorted. "We'll turn up when you least expect it, Sun. You'll just be sitting in the shade, sipping one of your weird teas, and bam! Excitement!"



"It's like Ruby is a magnet for trouble. And it's rubbed off on the rest of you." Sun leaned back on his hands.



"What makes you say it's Ruby?" Yang wasn't sure she really wanted to know, but too late now.



"I've heard the stories. She broke up a Dust store robbery, and Ozpin recruited her, two years early. Who skips two years of combat school on merit?" Sun gestured at the arena. "Pyrrha didn't do that, and she crushed her competition."



"Yeah, but-" Nora jumped in. "Did you see her non-combat grades? I mean, better than mine, but-"



"Nora, you know the material." Ren said. "You just don't test well."



"But they grade on tests! Why can't they just grade on practicals?" Nora mimed putting on a pair of glasses, and started talking even faster, imitating Oobleck. "'Miss Valkyrie, I see you can wrestle an Ursa. You clearly know all the history you will ever need, A+.'"



"Not how that works."



"Well, obviously, or I would have gotten better grades!"

Blake carefully poured a bit of the apricot brandy into Pyrrha's cup. She sat up and screwed the lid back on, moving with the deliberate care of someone who knew they were drunk. Yang wasn't sure if this was a first for her, actually seeing Blake drunk. This drunk, yeah. But she'd been at least a little tipsy by the end of strip poker night. Yang really wasn't sure how tipsy, since she'd been a few steps past tipsy herself. But she did have a reason! Was it a good reason? Yang pondered. Yeah, probably. She liked Blake, and that, for some absurd reason, made flirting with her harder. Nora, Yang could just flirt with and not care, since both of them knew that it wasn't serious. She'd checked. Not that Nora wasn't really, really impressive. Just not someone Yang actually got weird, squishy feelings over. But Blake - Yang barely begun to catalog the weird, squishy feelings Blake gave her.



Yang shook her head. Drunk Yang wasn't the best at focusing, so she needed to keep herself in line. Not go inside her own head. She raised her cup, Blake having already poured brandy for her. "Okay, everyone. This is as far as the drinking goes, so this last toast has to count."



"Why?" Nora started out of her half-doze, leaning against Ren. "I'm fiiiiiine."



Smiling, Ren patted her hair.



"Suuuuure you are, Nora." Sun was probably the best off of them, since he'd been sticking with wine and cider. More of a party drinker, then. Hit a buzz and ride it.



"Because Ruby has team exercises scheduled for 8am. And she roped Jaune into it, so it's all of us. And I don't want to try Checkmate with a hangover." Blake paused. "I mean, I guess you can drink as much as you want, Sun."



"Naaah, I'm good. I might bring everyone over to spar. We're out of practice on teamwork."



Yang snorted. "I saw your team match against NDGO."



"What's that supposed to mean? "



"What teamwork?"



Sun laughed. "Okay, we've got a lot of catching up to do. But while we're giving advice, have you considered not trying to punch the dodgy ones? Neon made you look like an idiot."



Blake looked into her cup, ears half-lowered. "She was pretty rude."



"Rude." Rolling his eyes, Sun asked, "Come on, Yang, didn't you get teased as a kid?"



"Once." Yang put her hand behind her head, looked up at the stars. "I kind of... broke his leg."



Nora leaned forward. "You what."



"By accident! I was six, I didn't really know what I was doing. I grabbed his arm and threw him. And his foot got caught on the swing and... Yeah."



"So what I'm hearing," Sun said, a wide grin on his face, "Is that you are completely defenseless against playground taunts."



"I was the nice one! Everyone liked me!"



Nora quirked her face. "What about the boy whose leg you broke?"



"He was really polite after that!"



"I knew it." She looked ready to continue, but Ren put his arm around her and pulled her back.



"Before we get completely sidetracked: the toast?"



Yang nodded. "Right." She resisted the urge to apologize. Yang didn't know why being drunk made her self-conscious and apologetic about everything. It was supposed to work the other way. And it did for her, up to a point. After which she would go all weepy and inadequate. Yang hated it. Probably too many memories of Qrow making a scene, and having to clean up while he sauntered off. So her drunk self over-compensated. And it seemed like she was just hovering on the edge of depressing drunk Yang. She'd have to be careful.



Raising her cup, Yang said, "To Pyrrha." She meant to say more. Couldn't go further down the path of her memories without her throat closing.



Everyone else raised their cups. They seemed to be having similar struggles as Yang. Trying to find something uplifting through the pain of loss.



Sun glanced over to the arena, shook his head.



Holding Nora closely, Ren just closed his eyes and took slow, even breaths.



Blake bit her lip, looked at Yang. Shifted over a bit, so their knees were touching.



Breaking the silence, Nora said, "Let's make her proud."



They drank.



Blake hadn't been kidding about how strong it was. Yang shook herself, blew out a breath. It wasn't good, exactly, but it was memorable. And strong. She'd probably taste apricots for a week. It may have been a mistake, ending with the strongest drink. Especially since...



Looking at the ground, fifty feet below, Nora asked, "Soooooo, how are we getting down?"