Hey there! Sorry to interrupt you before you get into the meat of things - but there's a couple things I want you to know before, well, reading this.

Before you begin reading this monstrosity, I feel you should know that it is written in a very experimental writing style. Specifically, it's one best described as "all of the metaphors." I understand if this is not to your taste. It might not even be to my taste; I dunno because I've spent the last four and a half months writing and editing this thing and am frankly done with it for the immediate moment.

The only other thing you need to know is that, doesn't allow explict sex scenes. Which is fair. So if you want full, uncensored, Blake on Yang and Yang on Blake action, if you'll pardon my crassness, you'll want to check out the Archive of Our Own link in my profile (or, if you're one of the very first people reading this, soon to be in my profile).

Anyway, go ahead, I hope you enjoy.

Some days, Blake Belladonna just didn't feel like going out on a day-long shopping spree. Some days, she felt like being alone.

Today was actually neither of those days.

Though, to be fair, it had started as the second one, despite the entreaties of her teammates. No matter how many sales Weiss insisted would be going on this weekend or how (genuinely) tempting Ruby's offer to buy them all milkshakes might have been, Blake had turned them both down. She was certain the team could find some way to have fun without her. In fact, she theorized they'd find more.

But then Yang looked at her funny for a few moments, like she was inspecting some system of scales – Blake and her dreary school uniform and equally dreary outlook on one side, everyone else she might run into that day on the other – and announced that she was going to stay home and keep Blake company.

That was about the point that the flapping butterflies in Blake's stomach had started making hurricanes in her head.

She'd read books that started just like this. She'd had dreams that started just like this. They were good dreams. They were mediocre books.

But her reality was like this, too lately – her days were full of Yang like holes were full of saplings, and every day seemed like something new was . . . growing, to put a shear to it. Blake was self-aware enough to liken it to the way she acted whenever she became engrossed by a novel, hiding away to turn another page, discover another secret, fill up her heart with literature and emotion.

It was an interesting feeling, reading herself. Having someone read her, sometimes. Especially since Yang didn't seem like the academic type. Or the type to slow down, for that matter. Or the type to let Blake lie in her lap while playing with her hair. Or the type to have long, drawn-out, heartfelt conversations, either, but that was reading ahead in the story.

Despite Ruby's insistence that today was a beautiful day, warm and sunny and perfect for getting milkshakes, the girl who might have been nicknamed The Charge of the Light Brigade instead retreated, and the team split up into partners to attack the day. Yang took off the gauntlets she'd planned on wearing out, Blake let loose the ribbon hiding her ears and retied it around her arm, and both of them might as well have stripped down naked for each other.

Dust, if only.

But this was fine, too. There may have been a world of milkshakes and handbags and other peoples' money outside the door, but there was so much more here, where the sun didn't reach. There was a good book, and warm hands, and a state like being in a dream, which seemed more and more like reality each day at any rate. A reality like dreams, like books, like her thoughts – it was a private reality, one Blake might as well have built for herself, one hidden away within the darkness. Just her and Yang Xiao Long. Maybe just a glimmer of light, then.

Let others enjoy the sunshine – Blake would always, save certain special exceptions, prefer the night's shade.

. . . possibly, with the way that pun walked into her head like it owned the place, she'd been spending too much time around Yang as it was. Ah, well. Better company than the White Fang. Certainly better than being all alone.

0-0-0-0

"Hm hm hm hm, hmmm, hm hm hm hm, hmmm . . ."

The literary concept of irony was familiar to Blake – most literary concepts were, if only through osmosis and repetition. The Fang had been more interested in teaching codebreaking than cliffhangers, though they did show a certain expertise in poetic justice.

"Hm hm hm hm hmmm, hm hm hm hm hmmm . . ."

Blake was, in fact, familiar with irony in the same way most people are familiar with airplanes and lawnmowers, in that the familiarity did not stop irony from being an incredibly distracting noise to her literary mind.

"Hm hm hm hm, hmmm, hm hm hm hm, hmmm . . ."

And ironically, of all the songs in the great wide world of Remnant that Yang could have chosen at that moment in time, lying in bed, gentle coaxing fingers running like calligraphy brushes through the inky locks of Blake's hair, she chose to gently hum You are My Sunshine.

"Hm hm hmmmm, hm hm hmmm, hm hm."

"Yang," Blake's tone was gentle, but insistent, a practiced pitch that could throw anyone and anything off-balance. "You know that's really distracting, right?"

Almost anyone and anything, really – Yang seemed to be specifically immune. In fact, judging from the (gorgeous, gorgeous) grin plastered across her face, it seemed that the first time Blake had tried that tone on her had been a vaccination of sorts. "Sorry, Blakey." She couldn't sound less sorry if she were writing the apology on a ransom note. "But I just can't help myself! You're like . . . oh, you're like my own little pocketful of sunshine! That's it!"

Yang's hugs could outperform an Ursa - possibly even kill one - probably had in the past – but Blake was much more durable and also maybe secretly enjoying the sudden sensation. "Well, first of all." Blake spoke through half a breath and half a smile, which somehow made a whole. "I'm anything but sunny. Second of all, you never call me 'Blakey' for no reason, and you're being awfully affectionate." Yang's arms loosened, and Blake attempted to pass off her diamond disappointment as a cubic zirconium sigh. "What do you want?"

Please say me please say me please say me please say me chanted a particularly obstinate voice in the back of her mind and the forefront of her thoughts. And upon further reflection, perhaps "obstinate" wasn't the word for it. "Persistent", perhaps, or "driven".

. . . she'd done too much lying to herself as it was. "Horny". The word was "Horny".

Yang interrupted her train of thought just before it crashed into the city and exploded. "Heh. Wow." All of Yang was bulletproof, including the smile. No way a bout with embarrassment was going to keep it down, for Long. "You're really good at seeing right through me."

"Sunshine does tend to illuminate things," Blake's head dipped, avoiding an embarrassing situation by the space of about one yellow top. She really needed to remove herself from Yang's lap one of these days.

"Alright, alright!" Yang laughed – more like lit – in reponse before letting go of Blake completely, at least with her arms. Her gemstone gaze still held Blake captivated. "I wanna see what you're reading. I see you reading it all the time, so it's gotta be really good."

Blake, master of avoiding suspicion as she was, shifted away from the lap of luxury slowly enough to avoid taxing herself unnecessarily."And you thought you could accomplish that by annoying me until I . . . ?"

"Hey, I caught glances!" Yang's smile turned before Blake's very eyes – not her smile. Her eyebrows moved subtly, and the entire character of her smile changed from silly to seductive. Magic tricks, then. "Not like you were reading it all that closely anyway."

That right there was a feeling. A familiar one. Like a stack of blocks falling to the ground, and the cheering of onlookers. Blake always lost when team RWBY played Jenga at game night. "Pardon?"

Yang and whispering were like milk and honey, and tonight was apparently like a very vigorous spoon. "You liiiiiked being pet, didn't you? When was the last time you turned the page? Ten minutes ago?"

Blake shrugged. Sometimes, there was no stopping the sun, only rocking the tan. "Your hands are surprisingly soft, and pretty gentle too. Celica's doing a good job."

"That and the healing factor," Yang returned the shrug, as was only polite. And then her grin multiplied in magnitude, spreading a shockwave over her face that lifted her eyebrows a, relatively speaking, good few hundred feet on her face. "Which means it's not just my hands that are soft; it's all of me."

"All of you, huh? I dunno." Yang's defined-like-the-word-"the"-in-the-dictionary abs, fully on display since the day Blake met her, had been begging to be touched for quite some time now. Blake, at that moment, decided to finally have mercy, though she made sure to make contact fingernail-first to remind them who was in charge around here. "You feel pretty . . . firm . . . here."

There was a game they played, Blake and Yang, and not one fit for RWBY's game night, either. It was probably dangerous. It was certainly sexy. It wasn't Twister, even if that game did fill all the qualifications.

Calling the game "sexual chicken" might have been crass, but there wasn't actually a better term for it. The future was as obvious as an oncoming diesel engine, even if Blake had her afterimages and Yang could probably suplex a train given the proper motivation. It was as inevitable as a glass of wine in an alcoholic's hand. It was as bright and stunning as a firework, and right now the only thing to do was watch the trail of green streak through the air and wait for the right moment to see the burst and hear the cry of freedom.

Blake wasn't oblivious. She couldn't be, with a nose sensitive enough to identify pheromones, ears trained enough to hear a rapidly accelerating heartbeat, eyes designed to see in the dark, and most elusive of all, basic common sense. She reveled in the little intake of air she was sure Yang thought she didn't notice. She drank in the amethyst lakes of her eyes swallowing up the pebble of her pupils. She memorized the shape of Yang's worried lip, and imagined that she might do a much better job of biting it. It was absolutely common sense; if it were any more obvious that Yang wanted Blake like Blake wanted her, there would be a sign around her neck that read, "Broody feline Faunus with self-esteem issues get in free." Flashing lights and everything.

So sexual chicken, it was.

But the problem was, and the reason for it was, the bars shut down in the morning. At some point or another, usually around two AM and when people were the drunkest, if the stories were at all correct, the barman would say, "Aright, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

Yang would say, "That was a lot of fun. Uh, it's not gonna change anything between us, right?"

And Blake wouldn't have a home to return to.

But on a lighter and a darker note, it was also something more elemental, more physical than that. Fun. Desire. Masochism and sadism, girl who absorbed kinetic energy and girl who wore ribbons as a fashion accessory, probably. That old joke, "Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer, because it feels so good when I stop," right? Except, not exactly that. Something close, but not like it at all. Something like . . .

"He paused at her catch of breath," Yang's voice was a breathy whisper, and hello, "Choosing instead to stare into her eyes. She trembled beneath him, but made no move to continue. This was the part that would make or break the evening. They always said, it wasn't the act, but the . . ." That smile could seduce a bride on her wedding night and leave the groom appreciative. "Anticipation."

Ah, yes, that was the word Blake was looking for. Anticipation. Six months of tasting Yang on her tongue and refusing to swallow. "You caught a little more than a glance, then." Was that as husky a voice as Yang's could be? Blake sure hoped so.

"Steamy stuff, Blakey," Yang was uncomfortably – too comfortably, really – close, now. "Didn't know you liked that kind of thing."

"It's funny," Blake pretended she hadn't noticed. A little bit like standing in front of an explosion and acting like the back of her clothing wasn't on fire. "And the rest of the plot isn't half bad, really."

Yang's smile dropped off completely, and her eyes were suddenly someplace so far away it looped all the way around the globe to sneak up behind Blake and steal her wallet. Maybe even her heart. "That why you're still running your hand over my abs?"

Blake blinked. Well, cats always found a way to land on their feet – even she couldn't avoid all the stereotypes. "You were petting my hair for a while, there. I figured it was only fair."

"Ah, makes sense. And it rhymes!" Yang tilted her head, but the way she smiled it was Blake who felt off-balance. "And all's fair in love and war, right?"

Love and war. Yang's eyes were artillery shells, her smile a minefield, her soul the whistling fall and consuming blast of an airstrike, and her curves nothing less than global thermonuclear annihilation. So Blake wasn't entirely sure she could tell the difference between the two right at that moment. Between all that and the petting, because who said war was hell, Blake was just about ready to surrender.

But she'd never admit that, of course. Yang might surrender soon, too.

Besides, even if Blake had wanted to, there was quite suddenly a feeling like being on a deserted island coursing through Blake, and there was no way she was going to be contacting the world from here.

Not a deserted island from the real world, all mosquitos and rugged life, but someplace warm and sunny, the ocean lapping up on the beach and with coconut milk readily on hand. Someplace away from the rest of the world, with a sea breeze sinking into the skin. Someplace no one would bother her.

No one but Yang, who was humming something just as tropical, something that deserved steel drums in the background, as her fingers pressed between Blake's ears and the most sensitive part of her scalp, rubbing intently. Suddenly, taking off her bow in the privacy of her own room seemed like the biggest mistake Blake had made that didn't have the White Fang's logo emblazoned on it.

Dust, those digits of hers were dexterous . . .

A little too dexterous, as suddenly the pressure on her head ceased and Blake felt her book slip out of her hands. "Yoink!"

Blake brought herself back to reality one focused blink at a time. She'd had years of training, sometimes in the field, to resist torture, emotional manipulation, and rhetoric techniques. All of it was apparently wasted against a good petting. She was surprisingly okay with that. "Yang." The "authoritative voice" was usually about as effective as her "gentle, insistent voice" but she had to try something. "Give that back."

Yang snickered, a noise like stirring cake batter. Not in the literal sound, but in the feeling. A bit of effort, applied in a surprisingly sweet direction, given the raw materials to work with. "Turnabout's fair play, Blake. That's the most basic rule of friendship with Yang Xiao Long!"

Ah. If that was how the rules went, Blake could get involved in a philosophy like that. Especially if it involved rubbing Yang's . . . ears . . . in return. "Well, at least tell me which one this is, then."

"Que?" Yang asked, not quite flippant, but flipping. "Ooh, hoo, hoo, what have we here?"

Blake could go for the feelings of sounds, too. Here was a gun cocking. "Love or war, Yang. Which one is it?"

For the second time in as many minutes, Blake wished she was still wearing her ribbon. Not out of vulnerability, or embarrassment, but because it had a hidden camera tucked into its folds and the look on Yang's face was priceless perfection. It was also somewhat short-lived, as the book slipped from Yang's fingers, bounced off her grasp once, then twice, and finally righted itself in an exaggerated hug that Blake was sure the novels appreciated deep in their kerning.

"Uh, wh, what are you . . . thh." Yang's fingers turned pages with more speed than her sister's usual sprint, and now who was it that wasn't actually doing any reading? "That's not what I meant! It's just, you know, one of those – ow!"

"Papercut?" Blake raised an eyebrow, more a signal than an actual expression. A "Beware of the Cat" sign on the fence of her face. "The pen really is mightier than the sword, I see."

Yang paused in sucking on the offense against her person, and Blake tried not to be too disappointed about it. "Heh. Don't you mean the pun is mightier than the sword?"

"That's all my mind has been fingering upon." Blake regretted it as soon as she said it.

Well, no, not really, not when Yang blushed like that, like a libidinous cocktail of hormones and excitement injected directly into Blake's racing heart. "Ah. Huh. Quick on the draw today, heh. Or, I guess I should say quick on the claw?" The smile dropped from her face like a hot pan sans an oven mitt. "Oh, wow, that was totally a Faunus joke, wasn't it? Oh, geeze, I would never – I mean, if you said it was okay, I guess, but uh, you didn't say it was okay - oh man, Blake, I am so -"

"Yang," Blake stopped her before she reached Remnant's mantle. "It's okay if you're just . . ." Wait for it. "Kitten around."

The effect was so immediate as to make quantum entanglement look snailish.

Yang's laughter rose in pitch and descended in placement, ending up somewhere inside the mattress (sorry thing that it was) Yang lay herself on. Blake wanted to imagine she was prostrating herself before a superior punsmith. "You win," she gasped out, muffled as it was, and well, now it was Blake who was blushing. "You're the punniest person in the room." She spun over, landing on her back, and it was the first time in her life Blake had ever considered something both exactly like a puppy and also cute. "Congratulations, Blake – you've beaten the master."

"Thank you." Blake would accept her award with every ounce of magnanimity and humility she felt it deserved. "It was extremely easy."

Yang sat up under cover of another chuckle like a miniature symphony. "Someone's sassy today."

"You take my book, you reap the consequences." Blake tapped her fingers on her thigh, a miniature drumroll to build up to the bad idea that was forming in her head. Perhaps the book was not yet out of reach, even if Yang was leagues above her in just about every aspect (besides, of course, puns). "The papercut hasn't healed, I notice."

"Yeah, never could quite get the hang of fixing up these things. The one kind of injury too insidious for my glory to overcome!" Blake hadn't realized, until that voice, that Yang was a comic fan, but it made enough sense. "Wanna kiss it and make it better?"

Well, at this rate, Yang was going to end up one step ahead of her. "I've got a better idea," Blake said, carefully leveraging her words to move herself forwards. "But . . . close."

"Uh . . ." Yang swallowed thickly, acclimating to the sudden change in air pressures as Blake leaned in towards her. Or, possibly, just nervous, but Blake honestly had a harder time believing that could be the case. Either way, her hand moved of her own volition, taking Yang's wrist in her palm and warming at her pulse. "What are you doing?"

What was she doing, now that Blake thought of it? Scratching, she supposed. Not Yang's arm, though that had a certain dark thrill to it on its own, but scratching the surface of something. Something new, old, borrowed, tinged with a sad blue. There was an itch at the back of Blake's mind; had been for a while now. Maybe, six months of time. Scratching it. Scratching it just once couldn't hurt, right?

Possibly, she was being too quick on the claw.

But the look on Yang's face as she leaned in told her she was far too late to be doing anything as sensible as stopping herself, so she leaned forwards, thought of a million things she'd like to say, resolved to say none of them, and let her smile cheat for her. "I'm giving you your consolation prize."

She refused to break eye contact, and it might have destroyed them both.

Her taste buds made contact with a warm copper candle, and Yang's breath caught like a hook in Blake's brain, tugging, painful, a release from the ordinary and entirely too dangerous to fathom. Fathoming was for suckers anyway, because there was something life-changing just on the tip of her tongue, a vision of the future with blood as the medium, and Yang's eyes were wide enough to see, maybe, into Blake's very soul, and she felt every glance and searing stare as she drew her tongue, slowly, carefully, certainly, around Yang's fingertip . . .

"Oh, sweet High Auras, yes." Yang wasn't precisely known to be spiritual. The thought that Blake might be considered a religious experience nearly brought her to her knees.

"Mmmm," Blake wished she could truthfully say the groan was affected, but she could literally feel Yang's pulse pounding beneath the her skin of her palm, and there hadn't been much she could do to stop herself. "What's the matter, Yang?" She poured, lemons and sugar, and received a pucker of lips as her reward. "Afraid of getting your fingers a little wet?"

"Fuck," Yang articulated, and Blake very nearly did.

Instead, she dipped her head, taking Yang's entire length into her mouth – probably not a good time for Ninjas of Love to be sneaking into her thoughts – and then slooooooowly dragged her lips back up, keeping a careful eye on Yang's own wandering orbs all the while. A slight pop, another go-round of her tongue, and a smile she justly classified as clever. "What was that?"

Yang was never "controlled", but she never needed to be. She was always so certain of herself, the ultimate argument both for and against the concept of free will, an immovable object in motion, which Blake had come to learn was slightly different than an unstoppable force. But here and now, Yang was stammering, tripping over herself, giving herself papercuts, and now . . . completely uncertain of what to say. "B – B – Blake, I . . . I. Oh."

Blake let her eyelashes flutter like butterflies in flight as she pressed Yang's wrist to her cheek. Maybe it was a tad too much, but in for a penny, in for a pounding. "You're clutching my book pretty hard, there." Her observation only made things worse, precisely as planned. "Isn't there something . . . else . . you'd rather be doing with your fingers?"

If anything could be too steamy for Ninjas of Love, maybe that was it, judging by the way the book went flying away from Yang to land on the middle of their dorm room floor. Twitchy fingers, a bit lip, and a mess of hesitation and anxious energy would have revealed her heartrate even if the pulse next to Blake's ear (such sweet music) wouldn't have. "You have no idea -"

Later on, Blake would look back at this moment, wonder at what precisely was running through her head, and then decide that the kiss to the wrist had been too much.

But embrasser it was, followed swiftly by partir as Blake stood, hoping Yang wouldn't notice the quarter-second of a lingering trace her fingers left behind. "Very kind of you, Yang."

"I, uh, s-sure? What is . . ." Yang was gaping, behind her. Blake was too practiced in The Art of Xiao Long to think that she was doing anything but. " . . . what?"

Blake bent to the book like molasses, slow, sweet, dark, and (quite unlike molasses) presenting herself in the best light she knew how. "Well, not as kind as you could have been." She sighed, navigating her way to the passage she'd left off at, or at least a reasonable enough facsimilie that Yang wouldn't be able to tell the difference from the outside. Like Blake intended on reading, anyway. "You could have bent the spine, treating it like that."

Three. Two. One.

And speaking of bending spines and being treated certain ways, Blake found herself being grabbed roughly and thrown wholesale against the dorm room's wall, formerly gentle hands now pinning her arms above her head in a grip gravity would envy. The book dropped to the floor like it didn't matter – it never had, of course – and Yang growled.

No metaphor could match the reality of Yang growling, and if there was a simile, Blake would like to see it. No words could match the way her fingers pressed, vengeance, into Blake's wrists, or the way her face came inches from Blake's own like she'd imagined in her head a million times but much more threatening and about seven million times hotter. Yang's eyes slowly drained of the blue half of their tint into a volcanic fury that, if looks could kill, might classify as both the last thing Blake would ever see and certainly the way she wanted to go.

Well.

Well.

Well, the slight and welcome pain in her back meant this probably wasn't one of Blake's more lurid dreams, though it might still possibly have been one of her most lurid dreams. Perhaps, possibly, she had pushed Yang a tad too far. And maybe, just maybe, it would be fun to push her just a little bit further. "Is something the matter, Yang?" Keeping up that controlled tone of voice was like steering a lifeboat in the middle of a hurricane, her heart was beating so fast.

Fingers tightened in a grip that was likely the talk of all the titanium girders in town, and Yang leaned in a little further (and here was Blake, thinking she didn't have any room left to move in). "You're going to pay for that one."

"Is that so?" Blake totally-on-purpose allowed her eyes to trail a path over Yang's blazing brilliance of a body, basking in the summer sun. "What exactly do you plan to do to me?"

The way Yang looked at her was evil, and probably very illegal, too. It should have been illegal, at the very least. "What do you think I'm going to do, Blake?"

Yes, make me, take me, do horrible, awful things to me, I shan't tell a soul, what the hell am I thinking?

What was Blake thinking, precisely? She had given Yang an inch and was now staring down such a long and winding road that it was becoming harder and harder to think straight. In fact, it was growing progressively easier to think very, very gay. "I don't have the foggiest idea." She had several crystal clear ideas to match Yang's eyes and succubus smirk, but not a single foggy one, no.

Yang stepped, rather than leaned, utilizing a slightly-too-warm knee to nudge apart Blake's thighs and begin making very new and exciting memories for the young Faunus. The rest of her traveled upwards, pulling her mouth and its warm, damp air next to Blake's ear, pausing to make certain she was paying attention. If she, either she, moved even a nanometer, everything was going to change between them, and quite possibly the dorm room wasn't going to survive the transition. Certainly the bed and/or this wall wouldn't.

"I'm going to leave you alone."

Her presence evaporated like all those lurid dreams at the first sign of sunrise, leaving Blake just about as awkward, confused, and wet. Yang was back across the room, a spring in her step (and her backside, noted that same treacherous, libidinous portion of herself from earlier) and humming that same old tune. For the rest of her life, Blake would remain unable to think of You are My Sunshine without the weather getting slightly damp, so to speak.

Apparently, this wasn't just a one-player game Blake had been playing. An odd thing to be smiling at, given the circumstances, but two heads – four hands – two tongues – were always better than one. Yang was probably worth about three times as much as any of those things

Of course, it would help in their game if the next move to make was more apparent than progressiveness in faunus-human relations. It was relatively simple to catch Yang off-guard, but that was only because she specced for offense, to use a term from that odd game the boys played sometimes.

Benders and Brawlers, she thought it was called? Yang played too, occasionally, had this character who could control all four . . .

At any rate.

Blake took a small step forwards, testing the waters with her big toe. Pleasantly warm, sure, but she could see the approaching waves just fine from here. "So, were you still wanting this book then, or . . . ?"

Yang laughed, and her heart was in it, and that almost ended the game in her favor right then and there. "Oh, no way you're playing this one off!" She stuck her leg out, the same one that had been between Blake's legs only moments before, and the only thing that could possibly distract her from that fact was what Yang said next. "I could bare my thigh in a thunderstorm and it wouldn't be as wet as it is right now!"

. . . alright. Yang had been bluffing, from the look of things. But the fact that Blake had to actually consider the possibility was a practical pair of Aces. Perhaps this one was just out of her depth, then, but Blake believed it could yet be salvaged. "I hear water on the knee is a serious medical condition. You might want to make a doctor's appointment."

"You gonna be my nurse?" Yang waggled her eyebrows, and Blake swore if it was anyone else . . .

"Down, girl." The eyebrow thing was symbolic; Yang's enthusiastic ones were matched by a single subtle movement of one of her own. "I'll have to be your anesthesiologist if you keep that up."

"You're gonna have to try a lot harder than that to top me." Yang's demeanor could only be described with the phrase "she fell into sin". "Or to get on top of me, for that matter."

"Seemed remarkably easy before," Blake tossed the book in one hand – being truthful, she wasn't even sure which one it was. "Just had to start reading and you practically offered me your lap, not to mention musical accompaniment." Keeping at it was the key; and there, at last, was the lock. "You never really did answer why you were humming that song in particular, you know."

"Well, duh." Bluntness was so integrally a part of Yang that Blake had come to associate it with the color yellow. "It's because you're my sunshine, Blake!"

Well, now that was worth a raised eyebrow. Blake would have to start being more conservative with them in the future if Yang was going to be saying things like that. "Alright, I'll bite. What do you mean by that?"

"It means you light up my life!" Yang enthused, as if her own goldy locks weren't substituting for the setting sun outside the window.

"Obtuse metaphors are Professor Ozpin's shtick, Yang." And hers, even if they stayed locked up safe and sound from the vicious beasts known as literary critics, generally. "Try again?"

" . . . you're hot?"

"Yang."

Yang groaned like the teenager she technically was, but it caught halfway through and turned into the laugh that Blake had missed dearly for all this time it hadn't been around – dozens of seconds' worth of the utmost anxiety and agony. Truly tragic. "It's not that hard to figure out, is it?"

Blake noted the blush, shrugged casual, like she was a world-famous actor and the whole world was watching her being interviewed. "Maybe I just want to hear you say it out loud."

. . . maybe that was actually true, come to think of it.

Yang scoffed, and even that had a certain cheery quality to it, like a counter-rhythmic pulse of EDM in a classical music hall. "Or you're just a sadist."

"That too." Some things darkness would only exacerbate, rather than hide. Some things were black enough to stand out against the night sky. "But either way . . ."

Her sighs sounded happy, too – was Yang actually real, or was she some sort of Jungian shadow of Blake's made manifest? "Alright, fine. Blake Belladonna, you make me the happiest person on Remnant, and I dearly wish to spend the rest of my life with you. Marry me."

"Oh, this is so sudden." Blake's monochrome monotone, though untested since her pre-Beacon days, was still running like a dream. "Whatever will your family say?"

"'Get it, Yang'," Yang's grin could have stopped a tank. Well, the fists attached to the grin, but Blake would bet on the grin itself holding its own too.

Blake's scoffs were more like gunshots than music: more precise and deadly, but maybe not as much fun to listen to, barring special occasions. "Are you allergic to being serious?"

"You know how I'm going to answer that," Yang's hands met her hips like the way that Blake's lips wished for, and they tilted in a way that made her think maybe she just wasn't worthy of such lofty aspirations.

"With a smile on your face." And your hooks in my heart. "Unless you can think of something else your mouth would be doing?"

"Hmmmmmm," Yang's was too heartfelt a person to really be having trouble with the thinking process. "Nope. Nothing." There was a trick to Yang's eyes, Blake was sure; how else could they still look so appetizing half-hidden like that? Must be the same spell that was layered over the rest of her salacious silhouette. "Unless your book wants to give me some ideas?"

"After the way you threw us around?" Blake still had her sense of impropriety, after all. She'd chosen to ignore it for the duration of this conversation, but in all technicality. "I'd be surprised if it bothered to give you a second papercut."

"Fair enough," Yang's shoulders shifted; she didn't precisely "shrug." That would imply she didn't care. "How about you?"

"Oh, I'll give you a 'papercut', alright . . ." Blake's anger was a painting, exquisite, evocative, but not actually anything real beyond paint and canvas. Nor, really, was it intended to be seen as such.

Yang, meanwhile, was the dream-crafted critic every artist painted in hopes of finding and perhaps, on lonely nights, imagined inviting up to their personal gallery for a "private viewing." "Looking for an excuse to suck on my finger, huh? Man, Blake, didn't peg you for having a blood fetish. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight, though." In other words, she took what Blake offered and inspired her, against what meager better nature she might have possessed, to soar to ever-greater heights. Closer to the sun.

"Mm hmm." Which brought Blake's thought processes full circle. "Meanwhile, you seem to make a habit of yanking people around. Why exactly am I your sunshine, Yang?" She brought her hands together, book in between, as if by channeling the power of Ninjas in Love she might up her Charisma stat enough to convince Yang to answer her. "Seriously. I want to know."

Yang was quiet for several moments, which Blake supposed was a period of time she should cherish for its rarity, if not its taste in music. Finally, she sighed. "I sort of already told you." She shuffled a tad, rolled her shoulders, let her hair catch and refract the setting sun – maybe that last one wasn't on purpose, but by all the stars in the sky did it look like it was. "You . . . make me happy, Blake."

Oh.

Oh, my.

Hearts skipped beats and skin tingled with sudden bursts of flame and the world seemed to shift on its axis, and still Blake stood there, absolutely certain of what she had heard, and overjoyed. The only mysteries left were why, precisely, and a gentle wandering wondering of exactly where they were supposed to go from there. So, when Blake said, "Pardon?" it was less a question and more a stalling tactic, please ignore the growing smile on her face.

Yang laughed, rich and a little dirty, like someplace Blake could grow crops in. "Man, you're really gonna drag this one out of me, aren't you? I don't think I'm getting a choice in the matter."

"You don't have to say anything you don't want to. Ever." Secrets were things of broken glass and diamond, rare, beautiful, valuable, and dangerous – and you couldn't always tell where one quality began and another ended. Some secrets, released, were just like a poisonous gas: a slow death sentence. "I wouldn't dream of it."

Yang genuinely considered this, if her face was any indication. It usually was. "Nah," she finally said amidst an air of resignation that hopefully wouldn't be polluted with metaphorical hydrogen cyanide at any moment. "This one's been coming down the pipeline for a long time now." She sat down on the bed, looked up with a smile, and motioned for Blake to come over.

This wasn't at all the situation Blake had hoped for those things to occur in.

But Blake made her way over nevertheless, silly sayings about cats and what curiosity did to them setting up shop at the tentpoles of her mind. "You really don't have to -"

Yang silenced her with a look, and now that she knew she had that power, she'd probably use it a lot more often in the future, shoot. ". . . do you honestly not want me to?"

Yes, yes, curiosity kills them. It would kill her to find out. "If I'm being honest?" She heard satisfaction brought cats back. "Yes. I do."

Yang nodded, slow, beginning the clockwork process of whatever this conversation was slowly becoming. "Okay," she said at last, shifting gears and position and possibly the universe, for all Blake knew. Sometimes it felt like Yang was at the center of everything; heliocentric. "I've . . . been trying to figure out how to say this for a long time, now." Like a flower growing from snow, Yang's smile was lovely and inexorable, despite attempts otherwise. "Let me tell you, it isn't easy figuring out the right words to say to a person with two sets of ears."

"So I've heard." Blake realized only after she'd said it precisely what she said, and improvised a quick twitch of her more cattish features.

"You know, when I say things like that, people get mad at me, but when you say things like that they think you're adorable." The flower bloomed. "How is that supposed to be fair?"

"I don't make the rules; I just break them." Blake wasn't sure where these little quips were coming from; maybe from the intense desire to avoid thinking about exactly what was going on here.

It was so easy to make Yang laugh, and yet every time it happened, Blake felt so accomplished. "Oh, wow. That right there is why I adore you."

Blake didn't, wouldn't ever, pressure Yang on the precise phrasing she'd just used. People weren't coal, and diamonds were far less valuable than souls. "It's a gift." She eyed the bed like it was a trap she planned on springing, making note of the precise position of knives and slings. "May I sit down?"

"Plop your head into my lap, for all I care." Yang's good cheer could signal a ship over a thousand miles of water. Blake heeded, docked properly, but chose not to rest her weary head quite yet. Instead, she simply sat down next to Yang, feeling for all the world like she was embarking on a journey – by bus – to a destination – who knew where – that was going to be thrilling, terrifying, and other near-synonymous adjectives. "Okay, so, like, don't clog up the pipes while I'm saying all this, alright?"

Blake had heard, someplace, that if at any point you ever felt like you were dreaming, to check the locations of nearby objects and see if any of them have disappeared or moved inexplicably. This sentence was so very strange that she at this point checked her alarm clock for object permanence. As a side note, it was apparently 7:43 in the evening. "Huh?"

Confusion was contagious, if a doctor's only evidence to suggest anything about the condition was Yang's face. "Because of the pipeline thing?" The sickness cleared up as if by divine intervention. Sheer nepotism, as far as Blake was concerned. "Right. Sorry. Not my best shot at being poetic!"

"Ninjas of Love you aren't," Blake confirmed, as if Yang wasn't her own unique novella of blazing imagery and persistent passion.

"That cuts me deep." Yang looked so serious as she said this that, just for a second, Blake believed it. Then she broke into a grin, and all possible worries were melted like so much snow with the gentle heat of it. "What I mean is, I'm about to take you for a long, wild ride on Bumbebee. Metaphorically speaking. So buckle up and no backseat driving."

"Much improved." Blake took a moment to deconstruct the symbolism. The girl was a workout, both literary and libidinous. "So what you have to say is important and a little strange, so I shouldn't interrupt?"

Yang's face twisted like it was tasting lemons and deciding the best way to describe them in her food blog. "Basically. It's like . . . I dunno. It's this whole huge thing, you know?" Genuine uncertainty didn't suit Yang, and that somehow seemed to extend into a slightly more befuddled world around her, as though she were casting off the offending outfit. "I don't have a clue where I should even begin."

"I hear beginnings are good." The words came out before Blake could stop them, change them into more matching clothing, or at least something suitable for the season, and send them on their way.

Yang snorted, Blake resisted the urge to giggle at it, and the world kept turning on its new off-skew axis. "If you want my biography, you'll have to wait in line like everyone else." She laid her face in her palm, and Blake had never seen Yang actually look tired before, come to think of it. "Sort of a . . . lifelong thing."

"Lifelong?" Blake considered this, except not really. One must keep up one's appearances. "I think I can stick with you long enough."

"Blake Belladonna, mistress of the smoothest moves." Yang Xiao Long, mistress of the sideways coup d'oeil. "You realize you're not exactly making this easier on me, right?"

"I guess I just can't help myself around you," Eventually, she supposed, Blake was going to run out of feet to place forcefully into her mouth. "Sorry. I'm interrupting. I'll be quiet, now."

"Nah, I'm just pulling your leg." Well, Blake had to get the foot back out somehow, and who better than Yang to help her out with that? "Being honest, I don't think I could go through with this if you were just sitting there all shhhhhh."

Blake let herself giggle at that one – of all the witticisms, the physical comedy, the genuine moments and cheesiest jokes, and she chose to reward Yang making funny noises? Matched the rest of their relationship, at least. "Glad I could help, then."

Yang hummed, and privately Blake imagined that Yang was turning the key to her motorcycle's engine, and the only thing Blake as a passenger could do for support was wrap her arms around her stomach – woah. Thoughts. Not appropriate for the situation. "What I have to say is very important, and I don't want to lose track of it or . . ." She sighed, sinking just a bit deeper into her bedsheets, and Blake wondered if maybe there were exercises one could do to make their bodies that expressive. "Or chicken out. So I don't mind if you want to say something, but let me say my whole piece before you start really talking about what's on your mind, okay?" She laughed, coughed, something between the two, and Blake marveled at how even that could sound attractive coming from the right chest. "Man, I sound like a jerk, don't I? You're always a really good listener; I shouldn't be telling you to clam up or whatever."

"It's absolutely fine," Blake responded in a voice like falling leaves, slow and predictable, a gentle breeze with a crunch at the end. "You deserve to say what's on your mind. I'm listening. I promise."

Yang stilled like the words were an incantation. It might have been, because if previous data was any predictor for the future, there was no way Yang would ever go still on her own. Either way, the spell broke into tiny little pieces with only the smallest breath, in and out, twice over. "You remember I told you about my mother disappearing, right?"

Blake nodded. Then, realizing Yang wasn't actually looking at her at the moment, she said: "Absolutely. I wasn't quite so sleep-deprived to forget something that important."

Instead of something like 'coulda fooled me, Ms. Laser-Dot', as Blake had been expecting, Yang simply waited a few moments before continuing, her voice closer in tone to crystal than her usual volcanic roar. "Part of me wondered if it was my fault she left, maybe. I know, that sounds ridiculous; it is ridiculous, I mean, I was like, what, six at the time? Nothing I could have done." She shook her head, like a summer breeze under a cloudy sky. "That was what I figured, and that kind of, sort of, hurt the most. I didn't even matter, when it came down to it."

Yang was clutching her own arms as if they'd keep her anchored to the world, and Blake wondered when she had come under the impression that Yang was invincible. "Helpless," she mirrored, in word and in memory.

"It was the worst thing I'd ever felt." Yang's voice shouldn't ever shake like that. "I wanted to do anything I could to make sure I never felt like that again. So at first I tried throwing myself into looking for her, and you know how that turned out. After that, I realized that . . . as much as I loved my mom? As much as I wanted to see her again? What I really wanted was to hold on to what I had left. And it sort of just hit me that if I didn't want to be helpless, I had to be the opposite." That everlasting smile couldn't be held down for long, it seemed, though it was a bit unsteady on its feet standing up again. "That's when 'anything I could' became 'everything I had.'" She paused, and so did Blake's thoughts. "That isn't, like . . . weird, is it?"

It wasn't a particularly difficult question, but Blake considered it carefully nonetheless. She'd had enough of the taste of her own feet for one evening. "People react to loss in different ways. Some cling more closely to those around them, some dwell on the memory, and some . . . " Have cat ears. " . . . some draw into themselves and shut out the world. I'm about as far as you can get from an expert on what's 'healthy'. But." A million smiles, a million pieces of joy – surely Blake could return the favor just this once. "I've never met someone as kind or as caring as you are. I hear that, generally, that's supposed to be a good thing."

Yang's head ducked away not quite quickly enough for Blake to miss the cherrybomb glow of her cheeks. An evening's worth of carefully careless words, lingering touches, and death-defying stunts of seduction hadn't given her nearly as strong a sense of the word "explosive" as that simple stated fact. "Heh. Might wanna try looking in a mirror sometime."

"What do you mean by that?" Blake's face scrunched up like a failed exam between confused and angry fingers.

"Hey, you're smart, too. You'll figure it out." Yang tilted her head into her hand, and Blake recognized the need for a resting place. "But, yeah, I just try my best to make people happy, you know? Every day's a battle and every smile's a victory; that's my motto. Only . . ."

Blake tried to stay silent, let Yang come to her own conclusions. But the noiseless air she'd always found peace in now seemed stagnant and heavy in her lungs, and she'd never had quite the fortitude to hold her breath. "Giving all of yourself means leaving none for yourself."

Yang seemed to be having trouble breathing, too, judging by the shaky breath. "Some days, I don't feel like I'm even there. Those days, I don't know where I'm going in life or why I'm going there, or even where I don't want to go. I like stuff fine, I like not doing stuff fine, I dislike doing some things, but I don't really . . . know. Not a thing." A hand through her hair, and Blake noticed by the lack of light languishing in those locks the sun had finished setting. "Like, honestly, yesterday, my brain just stayed in bed all day."

Blake remembered the slight slump of Yang's spine, the tired droop at the corners of her eyes, the listless energy that ran like she was a leaky faucet to to nowhere in particular, and worst of all, the artificial way she seemed to snap back to normal whenever she thought someone was looking. "I noticed. I didn't want to pressure you about it, but I noticed." Actually, that was the worst part: Blake was the only one who seemed to.

"You looked concerned," Yang murmured, and the small smile on her face shaped the words into something spellbinding. "Your ears kept twitching whenever you looked at me. I was kind of worried you were gonna blow your cover."

The idea of accidentally ruining everything she'd been striving towards her entire stay at Beacon didn't seem all that important to Blake at the moment. "Even then, huh?"

Yang didn't answer her question. Well, not immediately, at least. Blake was an expert foot at that particular song, dance, and hesitant two-step. "I always notice. It's kind of my thing, you know? We . . . sort of established that." She looked at her, and suddenly Blake was nothing but a speedy-beating heart. "But you're the first person to notice when it's me."

There were, of course, advantages to not wearing the ribbon. For instance, it wasn't infrequently that Blake's ears – the upper ones – got hot, burning even, and the black silk covering them didn't exactly allow for breathing room. It could happen when the weather was hot, when Blake ate too much, when she was stressed, or (most relevantly), when she came within a whisker of blushing. "I'm trained to look for weaknesses." A quick smile and a hand to her cheek should hide her own strawberry sunrise, right? "I figure I should use that sort of power for good."

The sudden, soft pressure on Blake's shoulder let her know that Yang had chosen to rest her head there. It was a gentle, soft notice, the kind that came up slow and reasonably, so as to not incite panic. It was still incredibly frightening, given the context. "Mmm." Blake had often thought she could feel Yang's smile before, but now it was a literal statement, and now it was a spike of adrenaline and errant daydreams of the future. "This isn't crossing a line or anything, is it?"

It took Blake a moment to register the sentence, and when she did, there weren't enough hands in the world to hide the glow on her face. "After lying my head in your lap and feeling your knee between my legs?" She paused, less for purposes of consideration and more for dramatic effect. "Possibly, but I think it's a bit late for protests on my part."

Yang snorted, and the brief puff of air on her skin affirmed she might as well have been back at the wall, waiting for a culmination of . . . some sort or another. "I don't know how I'd keep going without you, sometimes."

That was a cold bucket of water of a statement. "What?"

"Not literally. Probably. But it feels like it." A turn of the head and a brief sensation of eyelashes fluttering, and the world may have stopped spinning after all. "Like I'm a stranger in my own head. Sometimes. I just get so wrapped up in people's problems, and what they think of me, and what I'm supposed to be doing, that I get . . . buried in it. 'Here lies Yang's sense of self; we barely knew her.'" A shrug, like a pebble, and Blake felt the ripples wash over her. "I dunno. I guess that's why I've always kind of been an attention hog. I just wanted someone to tell me who I am."

"Yang." There wasn't much more to be said than that.

"I never really stopped looking for . . . for anything, I guess. Not for myself, or for my mom, or for . . . anyone to understand me. A place, a reason to be, another person to keep fighting for." A warm finger traced a path up and down Blake's arm, and Blake followed it as though it might lead home. "You know, it's sort of funny." As Yang spoke, Blake idly noticed the synchronicity of their breathing. How couldn't she have? "All these years searching, and it's you who ends up finding me. Through the back of an Ursa."

Yang's head lifted, and the loss of the weight on her shoulders left Blake feeling more burdened than ever. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" Her face have must been worthy of a snapshot.

Yang looked her straight in the eyes, and the stars out their window could not possibly have made more beautiful constellations. "I don't need anyone to tell me who I am when I'm around you." She beamed less like sunlight, and more like the ideal of sunlight, perfect, golden, brighter even than her eyes. "When you're there, Blake, I . . . I remember. I find parts of myself that I never, never knew I had. Strength, bravery, joy. Everything that had been hidden in the shadows for . . . as long as I've known myself. That's what you light up, that's why you're my sunshine. I remember who I am, and I know who I want to be. I might not know exactly where I'm going, but I do know who I want with me on the journey." The hand on Blake's arm drew into itself across her skin, and as Yang gulped, Blake truly understood for the first time what the process behind drawing up one's courage felt like. "I'm in love with you, Blake . . . and I don't think I'm ever gonna stop feeling that way."

There were a good chunk of sentences that had been circulating in the back of Blake's head for many years now. "She's actually a faunus", "it's all your fault", "I always knew you were a monster", etc., etc. There was a list of phrases, more a list of charges, that went on and on and on and on and on, and any single one of them, spoken aloud, would utterly and completely destroy her entire world.

But suddenly, like a breath of air and a sky of light at the end of a drowning man's long and painful swim, the impossible happened.

Blake found a sentence that could save it.

And for every snippet of snark and sarcastic remark uttered that evening, she didn't have a clue what exactly she was supposed to say now.

Yang coughed in a way that made Blake retroactively expect a tumbleweed. "Well. That's out in the open."

"How long?" There was something, possibly a dissertation on why the phrase "something was better than nothing" was only an old wives' tale.

"Uh . . . forever?" Yang ventured, after looking around for, presumably, hidden cameras. "I uh, thought I already said that, bu-"

"No, no, I mean . . ." Blake mapped the logic's route in her mind, just to make sure it was even within a reasonable distance of this conversation, before she let herself speak again. "How long have you felt this way?"

"Oh!" Blake had met lamb faunus that looked less sheepish than Yang did at that moment. "Wow, completely misunderstood that one. Uh . . . would you believe me if I said 'no clue'?"

Blake let her head tilt, because, who knew, maybe that would make everything else look level for once. "Huh?"

"There was never a moment where I thought about it and said, 'holy cow, I'm head-over-heels for that super-cute kitty I hang out with all the time.'" Yang's mouth turned upwards as she scratched her cheek, possibly trying to scrape off their red with nonexistent fingernails. Maybe she could do the same for Blake later, if she was going to keep handing out compliments like that. "Actually, there totally was. There were kind of a lot of moments like that. But none of them were the moment I realized it for the first time, you dig? Heh. I don't think there was a single time where my heart suddenly screamed in my ear about it or anything, so much as . . . so much as . . ."

"A process." Blake supplied, in return for one of the many favors Yang had done her in the short time they'd known each other. "Like growing a garden. Nothing is ever really 'grown'. Just growing."

And as if that sentence had completed some impossible task, instead of being a mild observation about the effects of sunlight on petunias and daffodils, Yang flopped back onto the bed with a wintry sigh and an evergreen smile. "You know what?" She asked, in the tone of Archimedes having just stepped from the shower, "I think maybe I always knew. Right from when I met you. It was like you were a part of me, you know? But you were another part I kept forgetting, and I only remembered how to get back when you lit the way for me." A chuckle like nectar from the sister of a rose. A sunflower smile, Blake might say. "I guess, when it comes down to it, that's what I mean to say by humming in your ears all the time. You're my sunshine, Blake. You light my way."

The static cleared away, the melodies revealed the elegant underlying structure, and it was Blake's world that lit up with light and shook with sound. "No one's ever told me I'm 'sunny' before."

Yang sat back up, realizing, perhaps, the task hadn't been nearly as complete as she'd thought it had. "You've got this sort of sexy brooding loner thing going on, buuuuuut you're lacking in the actual 'gloom' department."

Blake barked a laugh, and immediately recognized the irony. "Imagine the world's biggest storm, swelling with its own self-importance." She looked to Yang, and hoped something in her own gaze might communicate a picture through the distance between them. Like the stars in Yang's twilit eyes. "Then you might have something approaching what I was like before coming to Beacon."

Yang was silent for a time. Then a time-and-a-half. Blake tried not to worry about it, and let her work at her own pace. "I adore every moment I spend with you."

Blake had learned a long time ago to make certain she listened carefully to statements with no discernible cause. It was the only way to discern. "I can tell." She almost said 'me too', but this was Yang's time to shine, not hers. Sunny day similes or otherwise. Blake would get her turn at the confessional. "I'm honored."

"I mean it. When we hunt together, it's like nothing can stop us, but when you look at me, it's like I stop in my tracks. Except my heart, which goes all pitta-patta-pitta-patta, but you probably already guessed that." In turn, Yang had a certain narration to her that was all her own, and Blake could read it for hours. Utterly fascinating. "Every move you make, you make like you meant to do exactly that, like you've already got everything figured out and the rest of us are all just trying to catch up with you before you ascend completely into the heavens. I mean, I've never met someone who can say stuff when they're quiet before, but you do it all the time." She paused, and Blake wondered if Yang recognized the volumes that span of breath wrote out plain as day. "Not to mention, you're way funnier than I am."

Blake blinked, as she stumbled upon the sheer disparity between that thought and reality, leaping the gap just a quarter-second too late. Then she blinked again, further falling with the realization that Yang was expecting her to say something observant about this strange pathway she found herself on. "Although I've given up on my days of blowing up railways, for the most part, I'm going to have to cut your train of thought there. I'm wittier than you?"

"I've been keeping track of our little tit-for-cat tonight. The score is 5 to 4, your favor." Then, before Blake could gather her thoughts, Yang gently took them – and the conversation – back out of her hands. "I'm good with puns, but you're good with them too – you're good with everything. I mean everything. You're smart . . ."

"You make the highest grades out of the four of us," Blake said. It was maybe not the best time for it, but she recognized a contest when she saw one.

Yang raised one brow as she turned to look at Blake, and the battle was on. "You kick butt . . ."

"Who was principle in knocking Roman and his mech down about six pegs?"

"You're calm, cool, and collected . . ."

"You're passionate, powerful, and put-together."

"You're sexy as hell."

"Says the gorgeous girl with the body of the goddess of athleticism."

"No no no no, I gotta stop you there," Ah, this was certain to be good. "Look, if Ember Celica and Bumblebee were to have a June wedding and produce a super-sexy-robo-lovechild, you'd be, like, twice that child's hotness on the hot-o-meter."

"A lovechild of Ember Celica and Bumblebee," Blake repeated, if only to give her brain time to reclassify Yang from "sunflower" to "celica"; obvious, in retrospect. "Are we talking about you, here?"

"Well, duh," Yang's voice matched the flex of her upturned arms: toned to perfection. "Have you seen these guns?"

Do not, under any circumstances, touch the bicep, Blake. Don't do it. "Frequently."

"Sun's out, guns out," Yang recited with all the solemnity, rhyme, and sheer, unbridled joy of a young child's poetry recital.

"Okay, but technically the sun went down a while ago." The metaphor sideswiped Blake, and her Mercedes of thought was forced to take an early exit. "Wait. If I'm the sun . . . are you trying to say you show off for me?"

"You know it." Yang could easily have been mistaken for a childhood daydream with that kind of mischief written on her countenance. "What, like you don't, bend-over-and-pick-up-my-book-real-quick?"

Breathe in, breathe out. If with proper meditation one could control one's body temperature, surely Blake's practiced mind could imagine the heat wave rising in her cheeks was only a passing summer breeze. In some respects, it was. "That was a special occasion. You stole my book. Desperate times . . ."

"Call for disparate measurements?" Perhaps it was Yang who was really the more catlike between the two of them. At this moment, she certainly looked like the cat who'd gotten into an entire lake of cream, somewhere off in Candy Land.

And, possibly, for that pun, she deserved it. " . . . a masterstroke." Understatement, along with sneaking, poetry, and gloom and doom, was one of Blake's many finely-honed talents. "Did you come up with that off the top of your head?"

"More like the top of the bed," Two knuckles' raps against the headboard gave rhythm to Yang's statement. "But yeah."

"Well, either way, that was actually pretty impressive. 5 to 6. Bonus point. You're in the lead." But there were more important things to consider than who was winning at the moment. Game called on account of . . . explain. "And leading us away from our prior conversation, I notice. I believe you'd been trying to say, perhaps, one last thing to me?"

Yang's laughs were so vibrant, so colorful, so real, like a aurora borealis, that any attempts by her to fake a laugh were immediately spotted by their similarity to Blake's choices in fashion. "Ha ha ha ha!" Like that one, for example. "No, that was, like leading up to stuff, not away from . . ." She stopped on a luen, face stooping to pick up a smile she'd lost somewhere back along the way. "Yeah, okay. I'm still terrified."

"I've been listening, and I've understood every word you've said. But I have to confess, it's still a little difficult to imagine you being scared of anything." It was what terrified Blake more than anything else: ghosts. Not the spirits of the dead, but the living without spirit. The idea of Yang terrified was so antithetical to everything she was that a thousand horrors – some perpetrated by her own quick claws – were far easier to imagine than her retreating from anything. "What's got you so worried?"

Yang was quiet as a grave, and Blake prayed that there wouldn't soon be raindrops on her tombstone. This was probably counterproductive, considering that statement was entirely "self-important storm levels of gloom" worthy. "The thing I like best of all," Yang briefly resurrected, then sank back into the cold, hard ground. Then, like some mild manner disappearing into a superheroic countenance, she turned her usual radiance up to full blast, rising fully from her earthen bed in accordance, Blake was certain, with some prophecy or another. "I'm getting there, trust me. Just getting a running start!"

Blake felt like the world's biggest fool for having worried. "Take your time. I'm not going anywhere." Yang's huff and puff signaled that she was getting ready for a homewrecker. "Lifelong, remember?"

Yang's laugh shook the scene, and she needn't have bothered with blowing the house down. "That's kind of the point." She barreled onwards before Blake could get a leg up, and tripping was, perhaps, inevitable. "The thing I like best about being with you, Blake, is the challenge of it."

At some point when Blake wasn't looking, Yang had apparently ceased to be straightforward. Something quantum, perhaps, and gosh darn it Schrodinger and his pet of all things had to both pop and not pop into her head. "You think it might be a good idea to rephrase that?"

"Hmmm . . ." Yang drew her mouth into a pout and Blake couldn't help but keep coming back to lemonade, for some reason. "Nope."

"Figured." Sad news, Schrodinger: your cat was dead.

But Yang could bring life anywhere. "There's a thrill to being challenged that's better than riding the fastest motorcycle in the world. Trust me, I would know. And it is knowing, you know? Knowing how much you have to improve in order to call yourself 'better'. You and me get in little contests all the time, like who can think of more puns, or who can kill the most Grimm, or who has the best comeback, or . . ."

"Who can play utter havoc with the other person's sexuality the most effectively?" Blake was justifiably proud of her innocent eyelash flutter: she'd been born with it, lost it at an early age, and practiced for years to get it back.

"Wasn't gonna bring it up unless you did, but yeah, that's probably my favorite game we play." Yang looked over Blake's form like she was eyeing a new dress, and Blake quite suddenly felt very in fashion that season. Frill her up as much as necessary, so long as Yang's body touched her silken skin. "You're really good at it." Look who was talking.

"Oh, and here I was thinking your favorite was chess." Yang's concentration and desire to win focused like laser sights over a tableau of black and white waiting for her to make a move? Perhaps it was Blake whose favorite game was chess, come to think of it.

"We did get to be partners because of that pony piece, so maybe." There were moments in Blake's life that made her days worth going through, such as every time Yang opened her mouth.

But that was enough horsing around. "It comes down to sparring." Blake understood. She wanted to believe she always did, if Yang would only open her mouth. "The games we play aren't just games, are they?"

"Yeah. The games themselves aren't really important. It's just that you keep giving me opportunities to play." She moved her hands like she was building something up, either in her head or clockwork, fragile, in front of her. "It's like this: normally, when I lose a race on Bumblebee or a spar or whatever, I'm pretty sore a loser about it. Stuff goes 'boom'. But every time you pass me you look back like you're expecting me to be right behind you, and all of a sudden, that's where I'm going with my life. Right behind you. Blake, you don't just make me want to live up to you." Another look, like a world where honey might be made from amethyst gemstones. "You make me believe I can actually do it. I love you, Blake. Really. I've thought about this for a long time, now." Stars fell. "I've just been so scared of losing what makes our time together special that it stopped me from telling you sooner."

And there was the point Yang had been getting at for – understandably – too long. "I meant what I said, I promise you that." Blake tried for one of Yang's smiles, something comforting, kind, careless of one's self. "Life. Long."

Yang showed her how it was done. "I know. But you have enough masks to keep track of, and plus, I'm sort of selfish." The smell of warm chocolate chip cookies transplanted into a touch might match the way Yang's fingers, gentle, felt upon her cheek. "I want you to show me how you're really feeling, even if that hurts me, and this isn't the kind of thing you hear without changing how you treat someone, you know? I really wanted to hope that maybe we could keep . . . playing around like we do. Making each other better. Even if you don't like me like that."

The needle of Blake's thought process slid across the record of this conversation, and with a sound like a horrifying realization, Blake noticed that these cookies were, in fact, oatmeal raisin. "At the risk of sounding redundant: huh?"

Yang's hand, regrettably, withdrew, leaving Blake to focus fully on the miscommunicated map of her heart that was unfolding before her. "It's sort of obvious, you know?" Her voice, tinged with that sadness, was reminiscent of a cloudy day after the snow had fallen and the sun was just starting to break through. "You wear your heart like a ribbon in your hair. Trying to hide things with it."

A small black cat of a faunus writing lovelorn words three years ago would have killed for a simile like that. Had killed for less than that, if indirectly. "I . . . have to admit. This isn't quite where I saw this conversation heading."

"I get called a lot of things, but predictable isn't one of them," Yang said, while somewhere in the background, Blake was now wondering how many other of Yang's smiles to her this evening had been so hollow, so false, so leaden with well-meaning false cheer. So painful. "Really, I just wanted to clear the air. Say my piece; I've . . . made my peace. It's hard to turn someone down, especially someone you turn up with. I understand, really."

Blake wasn't sure she understood anything about Yang nearly as well as she thought she had. "I don't recall us ever 'turning up'." There was a distinct lack of anything more intelligent to say than that at that point in time.

"Work with me. Work with the puns." There would someday be a moment unruined by odd sentences and too-quickly turned phrases, Blake was certain. But it didn't look as though it was going to be today.

"I thought there were puns everywhere if you knew how to look?" Like quicksand, Blake's now-sluggish thoughts hardened when struck – though she wasn't quite used to having to strike them herself. "No. Wait. Hold on. That's entirely off-topic, I . . ." This was probably not the reason that Hunters and Huntresses were taught deep-breathing exercises, but this conversation suddenly felt as impossible as beating back the darkness that threatened her entire world. In some symbolic senses, it was exactly the same thing. "What makes you think I don't like you like that?"

". . . ah, I gotcha. Wanna know where you slipped up. I can dig that." She was digging something, alright – possibly Blake's grave, the way this conversation was threatening to kill her. "Knowing I was in love was a movement, and so was realizing you didn't like me like that. You never seemed like you didn't like me as a person – I know you do – and I never heard you talking about anyone else or anything like that. Saw you looking at Sun a couple times, though. Plus, I also never heard you talking about me, or saw you looking at me, or . . ." She laughed, and it was real, despite everything, and Blake wasn't sure she could have managed. "Gosh, Blake, we've tried to seduce each other so often, and you're unflappable. I can't even get you to blush."

All at once, their games didn't seem nearly as fun anymore. "Well, I mean, I was trying not to blush, and there . . . was the scratchy thing," she attempted, in the same way a man at the bottom of a canyon "attempts" climbing.

"Eh, that doesn't really count, though, does it? It'd be like you licking my clit and calling that a victory." A breath of silence was just enough time for this to sink in, and then Yang opened her mouth and destroyed Blake's entire sense of balance once again. "Heck, I pretty much tried that! You didn't even stutter!"

Blake debated with herself how wise it would have been to say that rubbing her ears was nothing like that other thing, and also how truthful. In the end, all she could find to say was: "Was stuttering what you were going for?"

"Maybe call it a last ditch attempt to see if I was wrong. Maybe I finally wanted to win something, say I was doing better than you, show off. Little of column A, little of column B." This sense of resignation fit Yang like one of her little sister's sweaters. Too tight, too uncomfortable, far too revealing. "No, actually, the reason I did it was to bring you back to me. That's the real reason I know you're not into me, because you're not ever completely there. We hang out all the time, and we have fun, but you're always focused on something else besides me. Like studying, or training, or . . ."

The tumblers in Blake's head fell into place with a click, the lock on a heavy, solemn tome was unsealed, and the situation could be read plain as day. "Or a book. Something I find more engaging than massage or song or . . . or you." She could have phrased that better, she realized even as she said it.

"Yeah." There was density to her affirmation, like the entire force of the conversation had been compressed into that single word. Heavy. "I don't blame you, trust me – you've got your own thing you like doing. I'm not trying to guilt you or say you're doing wrong by me, but . . . I don't know. I just think . . ." She shut her eyes like a book that ended badly. "You probably deserve someone a lot better than me."

The silence enveloped them like a numb, frostbitten winter's day.

"I'm a big girl, you know." Yang spoke as if she feared one tone out of line might trigger an avalanche, an eternity of silence and cold. "I can take rejection."

"Is that why you sound like you're about to cry?" Blake asked, as gently as she could manage, and she suspected nowhere near gently enough.

Yang's breath came in shaky, as though she was uncertain there was really air there for her at all. "I promised myself, if I could ever just build up the strength to talk to you like this, then I wasn't going to make you feel guilty." She didn't realize the power she held: a solitary sniffle could shatter Blake's uncaring facade and too-caring heart alike. "Not the first promise I've broken, I guess."

A night of casual, intimate touches, and suddenly Blake didn't know what to do with her hands – but she settled for settling, a palm on Yang's (all too apparently) weary shoulder. "Don't cry just yet, okay? Not until I've had my chance to respond." She only hesitated for a moment before grabbing Yang's chin, turning her head with gentle insistence to let amber and amethyst alloy. It was somewhat selfish in and of itself; she wanted to look at Yang as much as she thought Yang needed to look at her. "Not until it's all over."

Yang didn't respond immediately, searching for something in Blake's face like a desert dweller searching a cave for water. "Sure." A swallow, an expression hollow as a crab's shell with something pinching living inside it. "Right on. Gotta keep fighting, right?"

"I've never known you to give up before," Blake said. Her lack of action had been the poison, so she swore she'd be the anti-venom. "Though apparently you've come into the practice of making assumptions. You might think we have this little game we're playing solved, but you only have half the pieces available to you. You've said your piece, now let me say mine, and we can puzzle out where we go from here some other day." She smiled, and hoped it reached Yang. "Do you think you can do that for me?"

A pause. Like the space between throwing the knockout punch and the ref confirming that you hadn't, in fact, just hit a little too hard. "I dunno, I . . ." Yang sagged to a stop. Blake, in turn wondered if she'd made the wrong move – wondered when she'd gotten so deep into this at-play mentality that she even thought of this as a series of moves. Then, at last, she closed her eyes, breathed in deeply, and held it, and finally, Yang smiled gamely. "Alright. Anything for you."

"Thank you. I hope I'm worthy of your faith." Blake leaned back into her memories, like a warm blanket in front of the roaring fire that was Yang Xiao Long. She'd beat this wintry weather yet. "I've never been much of a talker, so either this shouldn't take too awfully long, or else I've got way too much bottled up for either of us to be comfortable. Still, if you'll allow it, I'd like to sculpt a tale for you just as involved as the picture you've painted for me today. To mix my metaphors." She smirked, and leaned her head away as if the action shifted her entire balance. It was enough of a smirk to do that, if smirks could. "I apparently need to practice my authoring skills, anyway."

"Floor is yours." Yang could accomplish with the subtlest shift in facial expressions the same thing that one of Blake's smirks could, if smirks could. "Ceiling, too, if you want it."

For lack of a witty retort, Blake sat in thought for a few moments. "You know I was part of the White Fang. But I haven't been forthcoming with the details, so far. I think maybe it's time for that to change – just a little bit." Her heart in her chest felt like, of all things, a hot air balloon, weighty and ponderous but slowly lifting. Just how heavy was the load she'd been carrying?

"You sure?" Yang always promised she'd be the first to fall in battle – protecting someone, most likely. She'd never said as much, of course, but Blake could recognize the signs – the self-sacrificial attitude paired with the reckless personality.

"You deserve to know." Blake could make sacrifices too. She'd been born into it, as a matter of fact. And in point of that same fact: "My beginning . . . I never knew my birth parents. In all aspects that mattered, I was raised by the White Fang to punish the Schnee's sins. From the age I could lift a sword, I was trained to be, I suppose, an assassin."

People called Nora bouncy, but as energetic as she could be, "I know you're talking more like eleven or twelve, here, but I'm imagining a four year-old swinging around a black sword and talking about how they're gonna be the best ninja ever someday, and it's freaking adorable," There was no question in Blake's mind that it was Yang who was best able in their circle of friends to bounce back from anything.

"You're not as far off as you think. Make the sword a sign board, and you're right on the money." There seemed to be some sort of sale on sudden realizations, as well. "My formative years were spent staging peaceful, if angry, protest, which explains a lot about me in retrospect, I'm sure."

"Like the flag thing!" Yang had just seen a two-for-one sale, it sounded. "On our first day in class! I always wondered where you got it from."

If Yang really wanted to see what Blake looked like when she was off-balance, that would be the way to do it. Either that or something involving that wall and finishing what she started, but admitting that would have both set the blushbomb off early and put aside any possible chance of them finishing this conversation in a reasonable manner and amount of time. "I thought that was something everyone would do to support their teams. Cheer them on." Wicked words danced on her tongue, and she ejected them from the gathering hall before she quite realized what she was doing. "You were imagining something with pom poms, perhaps?"

"A cheerleading outfit?" Yang fidgeted beneath the idea, and the innuendo was almost too natural. "Actually, uh, I was sort of thinking a baseball uniform would suit you the best. Maybe some holes cut out in the helmet for the ears . . ."

And that was, to put not too fine a point on it, something of a curveball. It was also something entirely off-base from their current conversation, but Blake filed it away for future reference at any rate. "I see." Just in case. "I'll keep that in mind."

"Uh, thanks." Yang coughed into her fist with enough enthusiasm to make Blake reflexively check her other hand for memory-erasing devices. Which was silly. Because if Yang had any memory-erasing devices Blake wouldn't remember finding them after the fact. "Continue!"

Blake gathered her thoughts like seashells, ocean-carried memories of things long since dead. "I can fault the White Fang for a number of things, but child-rearing isn't actually one of them. They provided for me, kept me safe, taught me about the world, and even taught me valuable life skills. Besides the poisoning and jumping around fighting everyone things."

"Like how to seduce people?" Yang asked, very nearly on cue, all things considered. "Later on, I mean. Because there's no way you came up with some of that stuff you did on your own."

It was like a wave crashing over Blake's consciousness, washing away all of her hard-earned seashells. "You're not going to let that die, are you?"

"If by 'die' you mean . . ." Well, if Yang was going to be that effective at keeping things alive, the gentle art of assassination could go die in a ditch.

"Duly noted." Blake would pay a silver dollar not to let that happen again. "And, no. They didn't teach me about that at any point. That all was more . . . instinct than anything."

Yang's gaze was not withering. Heat was withering. Too much starch was withering. A poorly cooked fish was withering. This look was dead on arrival. "Instinct? Really?"

Blake scratched the back of her neck like it might agitate some different words into coming out. "And books. Lots of books."

"I figured." Blake would never have called Yang insufferably anything, but this was about a 9.5 on the smug-o-meter. And worse yet, she was cute when she was smug.

Not even remotely fair.

Still, life wasn't fair – the fact that someone like Yang seemed to be interested in someone like her was proof enough of that. Nothing really for it but to work with what you had. "The White Fang wears masks for a reason, as obvious as it might be to say. Anonymity has always been our greatest strength." Like Grimm.

"Like secret agents," Yang supplied, an invitation to a child's party, written in carefree handwriting. A surprise party, evidently.

" . . . exactly like that." While Blake had long been certain of her genre and embraced the conclusion that had been written,Yang was a fairy tale ending, and worse, she was contagious. Even the Big Bad Wolf ended up alright in the end, when she was around. "But it was more than just a matter of strength for us, which is quite possibly why the Fang is so good at it. Oftentimes, being able to keep your cards close to your chest was the only thing that kept the organization from folding."

"So they taught you how to keep secrets." Yang was going to steal her glory at this rate – there was a twinge, judging by the data between four different ears, that meant she was beginning to cotton on to the situation. Like when she started murmuring aloud at the numbers in their hyperkinetic physics homework started adding up, and Blake had never quite realized the extent of a mathematical curiosity she was. "Bluff."

"And go all in, if necessary." Blake could play the numbers game. She could play a lot of games. In fact, "It's more of an apt metaphor than you may already think it is. Not just poker, of course, but risk and sparring in general. I was too young to understand what was really at stake, in those early years, so they fell back on the oldest parenting trick in the book." Blake let her chin rest upon her hand, an acquiescence to the rising tension in her back as she approached her point. "Everything they taught me was framed like it was a game of some sort."

Yang's nose scrunched, and somewhere very deep down, Blake had a brief but definitive battle with the urge to take a picture. "Like hide and seek?"

"Keeping people from finding our meeting places." With her big toe, Blake traced the old, familiar hallways and secret passages – all different now, she was certain – in the carpeting. "Making and reading codes were puzzles, tactical simulations were brainteasers. Parades aren't really games, of course, but they were close enough for me to take part in the protests and sort of understand what I was supposed to do." This was like finding a forgotten box three years after the moving vans leave, and finding it full of old pictures of all your friends. "And I was good at most of those things. Not all of them, particularly not espionage or the use of, pardon the pun, catspaws. Well, of course you'll pardon the pun; what am I saying? But I was good at most of them. And I loved all of them with all my heart."

"It's how you grew up," Yang spoke like someone who had just discovered an underwater cave system while scuba-diving: with awe constrained until the surface could be reached. "Playing games was how you interacted with your family. The whole world!"

"Hidden sees hidden. It was one of our basic philosophies as an organization." There was a wist to the waste, a purpose in a time of chaos, and even now Blake had to smile at the idea that there was a treasure to be discovered in every word everyone said. "Ninjas of Love expresses the same philosophy as 'Looking underneath the underneath'. We all knew, as a general rule, that we meant more than just what we said or showed." Shame, ever the uninvited guest, crashed the party at this point. "That probably also explains a lot about me, in retrospect."

"Like why you're so quick to pick up on stuff," Yang said, as if she'd just said 'Faunus are equal to humans' or some other very basic and objective truth that Blake was entirely prepared to go to war over. "And so considerate."

If only Yang didn't make such a habit of striking her speechless, then Blake might be able to articulate precisely how amazing it was that she seemed to do so on a daily basis. The incongruity of what she knew to be true about herself and the amazing person Yang somehow believed her to be was such an odd mismatch, like when one set of her ears picked up on something at a pitch her other ears couldn't, that her heart was able to break in and start shooting off bottle rockets before her brain could even begin hiding the matches.

"Yang Xiao Long," Blake was sort of used to keeping her voice monotonic, until moments like these, when suddenly, she was anything but, all daring and chocolate. "You absolute flatterer, you."

The usual over-the-top attitude seemed to melt away from the heat in Yang's cheeks. "I guess I'm kind of making it hard for you to say what you need to say, huh? Sorry."

"It isn't as if I mind, you know." No, she didn't mind at all, as in, she didn't seem to be using her mind properly every time Yang did anything whatsoever. And even worse, somehow, she was beginning to like that. "You're basically the first person to ever say anything like that to me."

"Ah, heh heh . . . wait, hold on." Yang questioned things like stoplights questioned traffic, so Blake braced herself. "You said that the White Fang taught you all that stuff about secrets and games when you were a little kid. Weren't they all, like, hippies and stuff back then?"

Ah. Yes. Heavily revelatory conversation left unfinished. Yang really did have that kind of effect on people. "Well, no. Not really. They were far more peaceful than they are now, but to tell the truth, the difference between the White Fang of before and the White Fang now isn't as wide a gulf as everyone believes it to be." Blake had to be careful she didn't lose herself in her memories, which was odd considering how many times she'd revisited them. "The idea that humans will always believe we Faunus are inferior, the desire to take up arms and revolt, the hate and mistrust; they didn't spring up overnight. If anything, they were the seeds the White Fang sprung up from."

"It's kind of hard to sit back and say they're entirely wrong, huh?" Yang's voice rang like windchimes, pushed more than played, a little hesitant, somewhat quiet.

"Often, yes, it is." Blake tried, as a general rule, to keep movement to a minimum. It was a leftover of a childhood not wasted, but rejected: conserve your energy for when you need it and avoid drawing undue attention to oneself. Here and now, though, turning to Yang felt like something she needed to do with her whole body instead of just her head. "But sometimes, occasionally, you meet a human that makes you believe there might be something more to tomorrow after all. Someone with a good heart, a listening ear, a fantastic sense of humor, and strengths both loud and quiet. But that's getting a little ahead of myself, even if I've yet to get ahead of you."

"You mean all that?" Yang's eyes moved guiltily away from Blake's own, and Blake hadn't even realized she'd leaned forwards. It was an inane thought, and yet she couldn't help but feel in that moment as though magnets were entirely unaware of their movement towards each other. "I'm just . . . trying to be a good partner. Especially after that whole thing at the end of last semester . . ."

"Exactly." At least she was able to fight off the urge to pull a Nora on the end of Yang's nose, instead leaning back to a proper distance. This was supposed to be a serious talk, baseball aside. "I've spent my entire life rubbing elbows with professional killers and hired guns, trying to avoid causing too much friction, seeking to improve myself only so I could, maybe, catch up to them. I suppose on some level I expected the same thing from Beacon." She let a giggle free and, ok, maybe not entirely unlike Ms. Valkyrie. "Imagine my surprise to find out that the best partners don't just work with you, but alongside you. To make you better. On and off the battlefield."

Yang blinked beneath the alluring glow of moonlight, and Blake was struck by the urge to compose a haiku. "I . . . well, I wasn't . . ."

"A bombastic girl," Blake held up her fingers, counting off the syllables. It wasn't really necessary for her, but it would hopefully let Yang know what she was doing. "Beautiful inside and out. She shows me the way."

Yang was silent for a moment – presumably, stunned by Blake's mastery of wordplay and sophisticated choice of words – before bursting out into the kind of laughter that seems to shake the room it occupies. Well, not quite shake. Bouncy house laughter. "Blake, I'm sorry, I'm really touched you'd write a poem about me . . ." She coughed into her other fist with enough force to leave Blake safe from all potential memory alteration procedures, "But you're kind of a dork. You know that, right?"

Blake was surprised to find that hearing this pleased her. She was even more surprised to find that she wasn't at all angry with herself about that fact. "Says the girl who, I'm certain, reads X-Ray and Vav with an almost religious fervor."

"Holy scriptures, X-Ray!" Yang could narrate one of Professor Port's books and make it seem exciting. "You just can't appreciate the subtlety and nuance behind the last few issues. They are masterworks. Like Ninjas of Love!"

Laughter had always been a challenge for Blake, but as Yang had so elegantly articulated earlier, she longer saw challenges as things to be avoided around her. "I'm pretty sure this started out as a serious conversation."

Another laugh from Yang, another opportunity for Blake's heart to run away with her. "I guess I just have that kind of effect on people."

"I know you do. It's done wonders for me." And some things were just too difficult to resist. "A lifetime's worth of brainwashing, and you come along and dirty my mind back up again like you'd been doing it all your life."

If Yang turned any redder than she already was, she was going to have people mistaking her for her little sister. "Well, I can." Yang stopped cold like a frozen brake pedal, unable, apparently, to quite bring the current line of conversation to the halt it needed to come to. "I can definitely say I'm proud of that accomplishment. Happy to be of service."

Blake felt her thoughts align, like roadways and street corners, a map back someplace familiar. If not necessarily the nicest part of town. "I guess I wasn't ever really brainwashed, though. If I had been, I wouldn't have ever left."

"For what it's worth, I'm glad you did," Yang said, in the small, quiet voice of a fifty-foot giant who didn't want to hurt anybody. "I'm glad I met you. You and your unwashed, dirty mind."

Blake was glad Yang was there to ground her – even it was still having your head stuck up in the clouds, even if they were a stormy gray. Yang was a silver lining, perhaps. "I had to. I didn't belong in the White Fang any longer." What Blake said was at odds with the small smile on her face, but they presented the same politics to the rest of the world nonetheless. "The games stopped being fun, but I never stopped playing them. I had to. Instead of being for the survival of the White Fang as a whole, they were for my own." A mirthless chuckle, like an apple from an evil queen. "I got a lot better at I Spy subterfuge, let me tell you."

Her words reverberated like dropped pins in the ensuing silence.

"Uncle Qrow always used to tell me something whenever I got too angry, or too scared." Yang's voice rang like a walk on the beach, slow, contemplative, and careful of sudden jagged edges. "He said that it wasn't what we thought, but what we did that was important." She paused. Presumably, squinting at the sun was involved. "I don't think I really got what he was trying to tell me before now."

"He has a point." Blake was able to get half the sounds out, at least. "When it comes down to it, swords and signs really are all the difference between the two Fangs. Same secrets, same members, same revolutionary zeal." A sigh through the nose, because the mouth would be giving away too much, or something. "Same idealistic, naive self."

"Playing the same games." When Yang whispered, it was the same as when other people shouted, and the echo of it rang in Blake's head.

"You know, sometimes I feel like the least intelligent person on this planet." It was a bold statement to make with people like Cardin wandering the halls of Beacon, but then again Blake wouldn't have even known of Cardin's existence unless she had decided to hide from the rogue terrorist organization she used to be a part of in an academy for Hunters and Huntresses in the first place. "I honestly thought – if you can believe this, after the sleepless nights and threats to our lives – I honestly thought that maybe we were making a difference for a while, there."

"'That's why we're here, right?'" Yang coaxed the words out more than said them, a series of uncertain syllables hiding in caves made from pauses. "'To make things better.' 'This girl's a lost cause.' Basically Weiss's entire existence, too. Man. Right from the beginning." Her voice was a feather, light and airy, but drawn inexorably, nevertheless, to the ground. "Life at Beacon must have been like a million-mile guilt trip, huh?"

"I'm not opposed to the idea of penance." Blake spoke without venom, but she wasn't unaware of the bite. "All I wanted to know was what I was guilty of."

It was the kind of sentence that occurred to people when they were lying in bed with the covers over their head at 3 in the afternoon with all the lights off, and Yang was far too intelligent to do something like turning on the lights. "I wish things had gone differently for you."

"I've lost people, too. More than I can count." It was a stubborn, splintering thought, and a thought like a stubborn splinter. Ignoring it or, on occasion, forgetting about it, didn't change the fact that it was there, waiting to be hammered into the cerebellum like the tiny stake of wood it was. "I promise I'm not trying to make this yet another contest between us, but at the same time . . . it is the truth."

"Yeah, that's . . . that's one contest I'm pretty sure I can go without winning." At that moment, if the way Yang was speaking could be compared to anything, it would be a pebble. One already in flight, heading towards the water, and desperately trying to avoid ripples. "I don't think I want to be part of that contest at all."

"Me either." Blake bunched her fists into the fabric of her tights, wondering how exactly, or if exactly, that related to the ways cats tended to knead at things when they were happy. If only to keep from wondering about anything else. "They didn't die, or leave me, or the Fang, not usually. But every day, we were told, in one shape or another form, that if the humans wished to make monsters out of us, we would grant them their wish. Every peaceful demonstration, every cheek turned, every kind word spoken in place of an evil thought, and we threw it all away for the idea that if we acted like animals we'd be treated like people."

"And they changed." Yang filled in the answers Blake had kept skipping over. Just like when they were doing homework – only this time, the problem was that Blake knew the information all too well as it was. "Right before your eyes."

And always right at the forefront of Blake's thoughts. "It was like a parade in your head, celebrating exactly how terrifying we could make ourselves." The words spilled forth like vomit. Something posionous her body needed to get rid of, immediately. "Do you know what it is when the people you love – your family – begin to make monsters of themselves, and insist on taking you with them whatever dark paths they travel? What it means when images of protest become symbols of violence and anarchy? What thoughts you begin to think . . . when you become convinced that you, too, are nothing more than an instrument of hate?" She paused for the space of a breath, but held her own. The gentlest breeze could throw the entire delicate balance she'd built up for herself out of whack, send her careening over the edge, and destroy everything she was working towards. "Do you know what that all feels like?"

The words drained Blake like speaking a sacrificial spell, all the warmth and life within her disappearing into nothingness, because she remembered exactly what that felt like. It was the dawning realization of a lesson learned a thousand times before, that outside Blake's head there was a world that was cruel for cruelty's sake and uncaring of what smaller creatures it stepped on, and she was just as much a part of it as anything else. She'd never make it out there. She was too kind. For a moment she believed she hadn't prepared herself properly, that at any second she'd break down into nothing – and then.

And then.

And then there was Yang.

And then there was Yang, like a comic book hero, to catch her before she fell, to draw her in closer and whisper that the day was saved. There was Yang, to remind Blake that gentle smiles and optimism might yet win the day, and that kindness was not ever to be considered the same as weakness. Fingers atop Blake's head and gentle humming were what had started this whole mess, and they seemed to be what Yang intended to get her out of it with. Bless her. "I bet it feels like dying."

Blake leaned her head back into Yang's palm, if only to brace herself for the next sentence. "It feels worse. It feels like wanting to die."

Blake didn't truly notice the gentle pressure Yang put behind her fingers until it was gone, and she hesitated to think of an idiom to match the situation lest it hit altogether too close to home. "I'm sorry," she repeated the words, like once wasn't already too much.

The smile rose from something that had burned within Blake long ago. "You of all people have nothing to apologize for. I've made my own peace with that – I'm trying to move on. I want to live. And, Yang . . ." At last, she breathed in, and marveled at how her lungs and heart alike filled with the motion. "I never feel more alive than when you touch me."

Blake Belladonna was one of perhaps three people on the face of Remnant who could claim the dubious honor of having struck Yang Xiao Long speechless.

Blake would fill the gap, she swore, with every good thing Yang had ever done. "When everyone around you is telling you, day after day, that you're nothing more to people than a monster under the bed, you start to believe them. Especially when 'monstrous things' are practically the calling card of the organization you belong to." She shook with the effort of memory, and with the realization of where the future was going. "But you're, in some ways, my reassuran