A Different Direction

There was a pregnant silence after Yang's departure, one that no one seemed willing to break. Blake continued to stare off after her partner, worry etched in every line on her face.

"Okay," someone finally said, and the faunus turned to find Jaune staring at her intently, "so what the hell was that about?"

Blake looked around at her friends, each of whom was watching her with varying levels of curiosity and concern. It had been a long, long time since they had seen Weiss so explosively angry. Ren's gaze was just a bit more intense; there was a glimmer of knowing in those magenta eyes. She sighed. "Our part of the mission failed. The hard drives we were going to steal got fried by a bullet intended for Weiss."

Pyrrha's brow scrunched. "That happens. Why did Weiss think it was Yang's fault?"

Blake tiredly ran a hand through her hair. "Because Yang let go of a captured enemy to take down one who almost shot her, and the one she had been restraining took the shot."

"Ah…" Jaune took a seat, and Pyrrha perched herself on the arm of the same chair.

Ren uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. "There's more, isn't there?" he asked quietly.

Blake bit her lip, not entirely sure she should reveal Weiss' fit. But these were her friends, and they deserved to know so they could be careful for the duration of this mission in case it happened again. Not to mention that there was no one better than Ren to talk to about this. He looked like he already knew what she was about to say, anyway. She took a deep breath before speaking in a soft voice, "Weiss went into Aura Rage." Jaune lurched upward abruptly, almost unseating Pyrrha, who placed a firm hand on his shoulder to keep him from doing just that. Her face was hard, emerald eyes searching Blake's face for any trace of uncertainty. Nora had stopped fidgeting, and her partner's eyes were narrowed.

I knew it, Ren thought to himself. He had known the abnormality of Weiss' Aura wasn't natural, wasn't some sort of strange and random flair. He had known it felt familiar. It was Rage. Of course it was Rage. Sun was already across the lobby, heading after where Weiss had vanished down the hallway.

"Sun," Ren called after him.

The monkey faunus didn't slow or even turn as he replied, "I know, Ren." Then he was gone.

Ren turned his attention back to Blake. "What did she do?"

Blake shook her head. "Nothing. I managed to reach her before she-" she broke off, eyes shifting involuntarily towards the same place Ren's did.

Nora.

The ginger was uncharacteristically quiet, her eyes glued to her fidgeting hands in her lap. Ren felt his chest constrict painfully as memories flashed through his mind. Power coursing through his body. A burning, all-consuming anger. Blood, so much blood. Nora's right hand reached across her chest and rested on the left crook of her neck, and Ren felt like he was going to be sick. He knew what she was touching, the thoughts that must have been plaguing her mind. He knew about the long, mangled line of flesh that stretched from her ribs up her entire torso.

And he knew who had put it there.

He didn't make a noise as he trailed behind her on her storm path through the hotel hallways. It was one thing about him that always amazed her. How someone normally so loud and boisterous could become so quiet when he willed it. It was almost unsettling, at times. Of course, she didn't need to hear him to know he was there. She could feel him, her senses attuned to his presence in a way they were with a very select few. He was staying a dozen or so paces behind her.

She knew he wouldn't say a word, or even approach her, unless she gave him some indication that she wished him to. He knew her on a very deep level, deeper than anyone else in her life. Even her other teammates. He understood she needed time to herself to process everything and cool off. And she understood that there was no way in hell he would be leaving her alone until they had talked. It wasn't in his nature. Until he was sure she'd be okay, he'd be her shadow. She stopped for a moment in the middle of the hallway.

"Sun," Weiss said softly, and almost immediately a pair of arms wrapped themselves around her waist. The warmth pulsing through her back spread swiftly through her body, soothing still-frayed nerves. This heat was different than the fiery fury that had triggered the Rage. This was calming, gentle, comforting. Sun sent small waves of his own Aura washing over her, suppressing the sharp energy that still prickled beneath her skin. Slowly but surely, he helped her bring the erratic spiking of her Aura under control. Weiss turned in his arms, burying her face in his shoulder and wrapping her arms about his neck. He pressed a gentle kiss to her temple.

They stood there in silence for a few minutes before he finally spoke, "What happened, Weiss?"

She sighed and closed her eyes, trying to fight off the headache she could feel beginning to grow behind her eyes. "I-" her voice faltered, and she swallowed. "I went into Aura Rage."

"I know."

"I didn't…I mean, I couldn't…" her voice was shaking, and Sun tightened his hold around her as a tremble traveled up her body. "I was just so angry. I couldn't control it," she whispered in a horrified voice. "I wanted to hurt her, Sun. I wanted to hurt her so badly."

"But you didn't."

"That's not the point," her voice regained a bit of its strength and she pushed herself away from his chest to look up at him. "I lost control, and in doing so jeopardized the mission and endangered the lives of my teammates. I yelled at Yang for her failures, but I'm no better than she is."

Sun gently grasped her chin and lightly placed his lips on hers. "You always act like everything is some sort of competition, Snowflake, when it's not. This isn't a matter of who was right or wrong, who was perfect or who fucked up the most. Everyone came back safe and sound, and quite frankly, that's all that matters." He slid his hands along her arms until he grasped her fingers. "Weiss, you are the single most incredible person I've ever met. You are intelligence, beauty, grace, and strength all rolled into one." Ice blue eyes narrowed at him, but she held her tongue. She knew that Sun was aware she hated pointless flattery. "Honestly, though, sometimes you are also the biggest idiot I've ever met."

Weiss glared at him and tried to jerk away, but he held her firmly by her hands. "You aren't perfect, Weiss," he continued, grey eyes boring into hers. "And you nobody expects you to be. Except for you. You don't have to be such a shining pinnacle of humanity all the time. You're a person, the same as me or anybody else, and people get angry. They lose control. It's alright. You didn't hurt anyone, you didn't destroy anything."

She was still as his words processed in her mind. "But what if it happens again?" she asked in a small voice. "What if next time I do hurt someone?"

"You won't," he replied confidently.

"You can't-"

"I can. We won't let you. I won't let you." He leaned forward, resting their foreheads together. "You don't have to try so hard all by yourself, Weiss. We've told you this before. You aren't alone anymore. You have us to rely on. We've got your back, no matter what. Even if you do go into Rage again, we'll bring you back, just like Blake did before."

She pulled back to look at him, giving her that stupid smile he always did that somehow made her heart stutter, even now. Her hands moved up his neck and began to toy with the bottom fringes of his hair. "You're an idiot, you know that?"

"Yes," he said with a grin before capturing her lips briefly. "But I'm your idiot." She rolled her eyes, but Weiss found that some of her tension and anxiety had subsided. Sun somehow tended to have that effect. Maybe it was his earnestness, or his blatant and simple honesty, but somehow he always managed to calm her down, to ground her back in normalcy. She could still feel the anger simmering in the back of her mind, and her Aura was still bursting to be released, but she had it under control, for the most part.

In order to cover that last little distance back to calm and collected, she needed some peace, quiet, and mindlessness. What she needed now was-

"A nice, repetitive task that you can do by yourself," Sun hummed into her temple. "Right?" At one point in time, Weiss may have been amazed and worried that he could tell exactly what she was thinking like that, but she was no longer even surprised by it. The faunus pulled away from her and dug around in his pouch, producing three metallic boxes. "These are the drives the other two teams managed to recover from our missions. They're heavily encrypted though, so I think they'll probably take awhile to crack. I'd do it, but, you know, it sounds really boring." He shot her a cheeky grin as his tail flicked behind him.

Forget faithful bodyguard and phenomenal friend, Sun Wukong was a godsend, and as Weiss took the offered devices, she kissed him firmly, trying to communicate her appreciation through the action. When they broke apart, he chuckled. "You're welcome." He dropped his arms from around her. "You'd better get started. The sooner we found out what's on those things, the better." He began walking the opposite direction. "If you need anything, just give me a holler." He froze and turned to her. "Oh, and be sure to go see Ren at some point tonight or tomorrow, okay?"

Weiss nodded. She didn't need to ask why. Ren was the only one who could understand exactly what she had gone through, and as such was the only one who could offer her any sort of viable advice on dealing with the aftereffects. "I will," she promised.

"I'll see you later, Snowflake. Don't be too late," he said with a wink, before wandering off down the hallway.

Weiss knew that he probably wasn't comfortable leaving her by herself like this, and that if they were anywhere but an official SDC building he would have adamantly refused to leave her be. She also knew that he was going to go straight to the security room and watch her every move on the cameras. He may play himself off of as cool, but Sun was a giant ball of anxiety and worry when it came to her. And she would never tell him, but she secretly loved it.

For now, she had a job to do, and if she was very, very lucky, it was a job that would help remove her mind from the hurricane of emotions that were plaguing it. With that thought, she set off towards the hotel's belowground levels.

Blind fury guided Yang's feet. She didn't know where she was nor where she was going. Even if she had been aware of her surroundings, it would not have made a single bit of difference, as she didn't know anything about the SDC guest hotel's floor plan. She slinked through hallways, up and down stairs, through lobbies and conference rooms. She passed people, but she acknowledged no one, no matter what words of greeting or cries to be careful were flung at her.

Her brain was a maelstrom of various feelings. The two ones that stuck out were anger and guilt, however. Hot, molten anger at Weiss for her words, for her implications that Yang's actions had meant nothing. That she had spit in the face of Ruby's memory by doing what she had done to Cinder. Her little sister was dead. Murdered by a heinous criminal. Yang had merely seen to it the perpetrator suffered a just punishment. She had been assuring herself for years with those thoughts, those words. That what she had done had been for Ruby. Her actions had been justified in her belief that she was the only one who had been willing to do anything.

But Weiss' tirade had cut her already teetering confidence in that sentiment even deeper. If what the heiress had said was true, and Yang had truly disgraced her sister's memory, then what did that make her? The guilt poured over her in waves. She had abandoned her teammates, her friends and family, when they needed her the most. It had never affected her because she assured herself it was the right thing, that putting down Cinder was the proper way to honor her fallen sibling. But, Yang found an uncomfortable truth in Weiss' words that brutally crashed across her psyche.

What Yang had done, and how she had done it, was not something Ruby would have wanted. It was never something Ruby would have wanted. She had been kindness and purity incarnate, a simple, honest soul who strove to bear the burdens of everyone around her, and somehow still always managed a smile. She wouldn't have wished for an enemy's death, let alone in such a gruesome sense, and especially not if it meant leaving those who needed her. Ruby would he been ashamed of her.

A set of doors in front of her slid open at her approach, and she stumbled slightly as a bright light lanced into her eyes. Yang held up a hand to block the offending ball of orange in the distance, realizing that it was the sun, beginning to set on the horizon. She looked about, taking note of where she was for the first time since she had left the others. Behind her, towering upward for another ten floors, stood the VIP section of the SDC guest hotel. She knew that the top floor, glimmering brightly in the fading light, was where they were currently rooming. That wasn't what caught her attention though.

In front of her stretched a rooftop garden. Green grass covered almost the entire surface, and empty flower beds lined the pathways, paved with smooth, curving stones. A small grove of adolescent trees stood near the center, trunks gnarled and twisting, their leaves already long since fallen in preparation for Winter. There was a hedge of chest-high bushes that ran the perimeter of the roof. Wooden benches were strewn in various places throughout the entire feature, and a large fountain babbled quietly in the center of the grove.

Yang looked about in pure wonder as she continued forward. She couldn't believe that here, in the heart of a metropolis like Atlas, there was a place like this. An oasis, a little isolated world all its own, surrounded on all sides by massive monuments of concrete and steel. The noises of the city far below sounded muffled here, and an air of tranquility coated the entire space like a blanket. What exactly was this place?

"It's amazing, isn't it?"

Yang jumped in surprise at the quiet voice. She whipped to her left to find Ren sitting on a bench there. His hands were folded in his lap, magenta eyes focused on a break in the hedge, where the sun was currently painting the clouds a brilliant mix of orange, gold and red.

The blonde narrowed her eyes suspiciously at the Huntsmen. "Why are you here?"

"This place is calming," was his simple reply. He motioned subtly to the empty spot on the bench beside him, and Yang hesitated before slowly lowering herself into it.

She was on edge around him. They had been friends in the past, true, but never very good ones. During their time together at Beacon, they had barely ever had a conversation between the two of them. Yang had always found it too difficult to communicate with the ever-stoic young man; she could never understand exactly what was going on behind his mask of neutrality. She had still enjoyed his company. Now, though, she was even less sure of how to handle him. It wasn't bad enough that she had been separated out of his and everyone else's life for four years, he had also changed immensely in the interim. Ren had always been quiet, but he had never been brooding, as he was now.

They sat there in awkward silence while Yang struggled to find something to say. Ren continued staring straight ahead, seeming unperturbed by his companion's fidgeting. Eventually, when she could stand the oppressing silence no longer, Yang asked the only thing she could think of.

"What's Aura Rage?" she blurted.

Ren didn't even glance toward her as he answered. "A rare event that occurs whenever a person is overcome with emotion, and their Aura rampages out of control. It is very powerful, and very dangerous."

Overcome with emotion? "So Weiss…" she felt her voice peter off as she struggled to finish the statement.

"Was very angry." She hated the way he said things like that. No emotion. Just facts. Yang had always been a very emotion-driven person. There was another stretch of silence.

"Do you think she was right?" Yang asked suddenly, her voice fragile and small. "That I'm a coward who ran?" She didn't know what compelled her to say something. Maybe it was just an emotional overflow, or maybe it was the fact that this was the most words that Yang had heard out of Ren since her return. Or she needed the opinion of someone on the outside, someone with whom she wasn't emotionally tangled up. Or perhaps it was because the young man seemed an impregnable fortress of serenity and calm. Some sort of great emotional bastion where maybe she could find reprieve.

Ren interlaced his fingers in front of his face. When he spoke, it was with a firm, neutral tone. "I think you ran, yes. But I do not believe that makes you a coward. Sometimes it's the only option there is. I'm sure Weiss knows that, and I'm sure she understands why you did it." He shifted, and for the first time since she had arrived, his eyes locked with hers. "That being said, Yang, what you did was wrong. Running when you need to is fine. Isolating yourself from reality is not. Becoming some lone, rage-driven avenger is not."

Yang hung her head in response. Ren gave voice to the thoughts that had been growing ever more persistent since her return to the world. It was not a voice rooted in desperation, like Blake's. Nor despair, like her own, or even anger, like Weiss'. It was sound, collected, and firmly grounded on logic, reasoning, and thought. His words weighed much more, and struck that much harder for it.

"She hates me," Yang whispered quietly. Blake had tried to assuage her fears on the matter before, but that was before Weiss' explosion. Before it was clear she was so angry at Yang to be driven to uncontrollable rage and destruction. She was sure not even her partner could argue the contrary now.

"Weiss doesn't hate you." Yang's lilac irises snapped to his face, going wide in surprise.

"Wha-"

Ren's voice grew heavy and his shoulders slumped. Yang had never seen the Huntsman look so defeated. "Ruby's death affected everyone greatly," he intoned as his gaze fell to the ground. "Weiss, though…" a sigh escaped his lips. "She took it perhaps the hardest of all of us. I only saw glimpses of it and heard the rest from Blake, but she threw herself into her work. She ran herself so ragged that she ended up in the hospital. Only Sun, Velvet and Blake together convinced her to stop." He looked back out at the sunset. "Weiss was running just the same as you. Just in a different direction."

Yang clenched her fists. This was new information. She hadn't known that Weiss had neglected her own health. Blake hadn't mentioned anything like that. Now that she thought about it, though, somehow it seemed exactly something her old teammate would do. Ren once more pulled her from her thoughts.

"She couldn't hate you anymore than she could hate herself, Yang. The words she spat at you earlier are the ones I'm sure she's told herself every day for the last four years."

Silence followed those words. Yang was unsure what to say. So she said nothing, instead pulling herself to her feet and heading back toward the entrance as the last sliver of the sun disappeared beneath the skyline. A soft voice sounded after her.

"Letting go can be the most difficult thing, Yang."

There was a slight pause in her step, and a faint whisper floated back to where Ren sat.

"Thank you."

And then silence encompassed the garden once more as the second sun, the living, breathing one, vanished as well, once more returning Ren to the darkness of more than just the night.

A/N: Okay, so I think you guys know what's coming, but I'm gonna say it anyway. I am SO sorry that there was no new chapter last week and that I didn't get to give you guys a heads up. I had been hoping to get it up on time, but it did not pan out that way. My life has been insanely busy lately, and I've been hoping that that was going to change in the near future, but that does not appear to be the case. As such, i'm going to change up the updating schedule again, and set it back to my original goal of a chapter every 1-1.5 weeks. I hope you guys understand, and with any luck this won't persist for very long, but I can make no promises

Now, onto the chapter!

What did you guys think? I'm not sure how I feel about this one, but I hope it turned out alright in your opinion. For those of you who figured it was Ren who Aura Raged...yeeeeeeeah, it was, hahah. That will be covered in a Reminiscence chapter at some point, so look forward to that! Anyway, please, review and stuff and let me know what you guys felt about this chapter

Love you all!