"You know, you two are really the only people who can actually make that old joke," Taiyang mused aloud, as they stared at the double-doors to baggage claim, through which Summer Rose would eventually emerge. He scratched the stubble at his chin, a nervous habit, a hint to his impatience. Summer had been away on assignment for over a month, but these last few minutes of their separation were easily the longest.

Raven shook her head. "What joke?" she replied, rising to the bait. She should have known better, of course, but Summer's airship had landed over an hour ago, and there was still no sign of the errant Huntress. Boredom got the best of her.

Tai grinned, like a fisherman whose line had just gone taut. He pivoted around so that he was facing Raven, miming a heavy duffel bag slung over his shoulder. "So, I just flew in from Atlas," he began, layering his voice with melodramatic fatigue, “and boy are my arms tired.”

Qrow and Raven stared mutely back at him.

"Fuck, you guys, it's a classic joke," Tai griped, suddenly way more exhausted than the persona he'd just play-acted. 'Y'know, I say 'flew in' and you think I mean 'on an airship' but it's actually me flapping my wings." Tai fluttered his fingers, for emphasis.

"We got the joke, Tai," Qrow replied.

Raven snorted at her brother's appropriately underwhelmed response. "Yeah. Our family just doesn't do wordplay."

Tai smiled to himself.

Raven had had no idea why.

It was going to be a long flight back.

She'd flown those distances a handful of times before, always forgetting just how much it sucked. She could travel faster and farther than a common corvid - she suspected she had her extraordinary Aura to thank for that - but even still that meant days, possibly even weeks, of solitary, cross-continental travel. It was physically taxing, far more so than a day of marching through the woods. And, worst of all, remaining as a bird for that long took a clear toll on her psyche. She was a hundredfold more in control of her avian form now than she had been when she'd first transformed - first been transformed - but there were limits to the willpower a human mind could impose on a bird's brain. After a couple of hours flying, Raven would begin literally losing her mind. Eventually she'd revert into her human form, but the process was anything but pleasant. It almost guaranteed some rather fucked-up dreams, at the very least.

Right now, though, she had to get away from here. Away from him. Off of Patch, out of Vale. The thought of dissolving her consciousness had never been more appealing, as she soared across the waters separating Patch from Vale.

But as tempting as it was to utterly abandon the burden of cognition, of consciousness, Raven actively maintained her human mind, as she flew over a quiet residential street not a few blocks from where STRQ had found their first off-campus housing. She'd known the roads well, and they hadn't changed much. Well, not too much, she amended, gliding over tree-lined paths. Development and gentrification were ever-present, as unstoppable as the forces of Salem. Most of the houses looked like they'd been renovated, and a few glassy condominiums had sprouted up out of empty lots and corner shops.

She found what she was looking for after a few minutes. A tidy two-story home with a privacy wall and no lights on. After a few more minutes' surveillance, perched in a nearby tree, Raven was convinced that the property was empty, and she swooped down the chimney.

A moment later, the full faculties of her human mind reasserted themselves, and mammalian eyes took in the living room she'd transitioned in. Nobody looking terrified at her arrival. No home alarms going off. A plush couch and a couple of bean bags. Kitschy decorations and a plethora of family photos. Summer would've loved-

Raven shook her head, and returned to the task at hand.

She washed up in the bathroom, cleaning her wounds and wiping the worst of the dirt and the blood from her skin. The porcelain white sink was soon stained with grime, blood both hers and others. The room would probably reek for a week. Raven brushed her teeth, appropriating at random one of the four toothbrushes from a cup on the counter top. There was blood in her spit, mixed with the minty-green paste from her mouth. She found some mouthwash, and the ethanol helpfully pointed out just where exactly she had cut the inside of her cheek. It stung, but the cleansing process still felt good.

She debated taking a shower, but decided against it. Her nerves were still frayed from Haven, and Tai had shown her too many trashy horror movies with scenes of lavatorial assault…

Raven wandered around the house for another twenty minutes, strumming the hilt of her sword all the while. The family had a son and a daughter, she'd deduced, both teenagers, and at least two dogs. She idly wondered where they were. Vacation, perhaps? Or had they fled Vale when Beacon fell, abandoning their worldly possessions in a hopeless quest for safety?

She opened the fridge. No, they were probably just on vacation. There was barely anything worth eating in there, and nothing rotten or spoiled. That suggested careful planning rather than terrified flight.

Raven scrounged up a meal comprised entirely of imperishable foods from the fridge and the pantry, but she still didn't much feel like eating. The emptiness of the house was beginning to gnaw at her, subconsciously. She wandered back upstairs, sating her paranoiac instincts to check every nook and cranny. There were, unsurprisingly, no monsters in any of them, no Grimm or assassins or Huntsmen. Just the ordinary possessions of ordinary people. She peered into the closets of every bedroom, counting the empty hangars within. Another point for the 'vacation' hypothesis. Beds neatly made...

And damn did the bed looked tempting. But she had miles to go before she slept.

Raven sat herself in front of the television, spent a minute fiddling with the remote, and began forcing herself to eat. Her stomach was still tight, clenched, and she could only swallow small mouthfuls. It was an unpleasant undertaking, but she needed the calories. It had been a long time since she'd had this much processed food, and her tongue was briefly over-saturated by the concentrated artificial flavors, so used as it was to berries and salted meats.

'Civilized' life did not become her. Nothing new there.

The television was pre-tuned to a juvenile animated show, which Raven watched disinterestedly for several minutes, chewing slowly all the while, before she mustered up the willpower to flip to the news. She breathed a small sigh of relief at the absence of any ashen anchormen or panic-stoking lower thirds. Because even VNN - once probably the greatest media organization on the planet - was hamstrung by the collapse of the Cross-Continental Transmission system. News could travel only as fast as airships could fly, and even the chartered flights VNN financed could only bring the news back so quickly. Indeed, the whole global information system had effectively collapsed, with cities reduced to running messengers between them like antebellum couriers.

Lisa Lavender was reporting on potholes. In the absence of the CCT, all news was local news. Raven muted the machine, eyes resting but not focusing on images of municipal workers repaving some downtown intersection.

The Relic was gone. Vernal was dead. The Tribe was in danger.

Oh, and her daughter hated her.

Raven tossed a throw pillow across the room. She knew that Yang had hardly ever been fond of her - for that she didn't blame the girl - but this was different. This wasn't just anger at being abandoned, the inevitable blowback from a botched mother-daughter relationship. This was hatred of Raven Branwen as a person. Hatred of her not as a failed mother, but as a failed human.

Her mind flashed back to Vernal, lying dead in the bowels of Haven Academy. Somehow, it was less shocking than it should have been. No, that wasn't true. On some subconscious level, Raven had been preparing for that moment ever since she'd selected Vernal to be her impostor, to be the Spring Maiden's body double. Neither her nor Vernal had ever planned for the young woman to be killed, but then again, that was kind of the whole point of the charade, wasn't it? The decoy might die, so that the Spring Maiden could live.

Raven left the TV running, but made her way back to the bathroom.

Her reflection - haggard and bloodshot - stared back at her from the mirror above the sink. It had been a long day. "What should I have done differently?" she asked the Raven Branwen in the mirror, as if expecting an answer.

Many corvids recognized their own reflections, though. She couldn't trick herself into thinking that there was anyone but her staring back.

Should she have kidnapped Yang, years ago? The thought had crossed her mind about once a year since she'd left Patch. Yang would make a fearsome Huntress one day, and there was something intrinsically appealing about having an apprentice. But she could never justify it, and she had justified a great many things in her life. For starters, it'd probably have traumatized the girl to no end, to say nothing of making a mortal enemy of Taiyang. She could live with Ozpin and Salem and every cop from here to Menagerie hunting her to the corners of Remnant, but not Tai. Not the one man on this godsforsaken planet who still understood her.

And Vernal?

Raven replayed the fight in her head. Adrenaline was the world's most potent memory aid, and she could remember every moment of the battle in visceral detail. Even the smells were still fresh in her mind, sweat and blood and the rotten scent of that arm. Should she have attacked Salem's minions the minute they entered her campsite? Fled with Vernal in the chaos at Haven? Could she have stopped that 'Fall' girl a minute earlier?

The Raven Branwen in the mirror shook her head. No, there fucking hadn't been another way. She'd played the hand she was dealt as best she could, with the knowledge she’d had, and with no small feat of bluffing. Ozpin had always preferred chess analogies, the prick, not that he'd ever truly understood the board he was playing on. No matter what information Raven relayed to him. He was busy maneuvering his rooks and knights about, ignoring the fact that Black was going to mate them in five moves no matter what White did. Raven had made no “blunders”, in the jargon of chess; she only made the best moves she could make. Draw the endgame out as long as possible. Protect the pieces she cared about.

She needed to get back to the Tribe.

That meant stealing away, probably on a train and then an airship. She briefly flirted with using her Semblance to travel back to Yang's location, but there were too many risks with that, what with Qrow and his posse around. Also, Raven wasn't entirely sure if she could create a portal to her daughter again.

She had no trouble coming up with reasons not to need to test a theory she suspected to be true...

And she couldn't go back to Vernal's position, either. Cinder was Vernal's killer, but Raven had no doubt that she was the one who had gotten Vernal killed. There had been no other way, no way she could have known the extent of Cinder's powers, to save the bait she’d dangled before Salem...

"...I'm sorry, Vernal," Raven apologized to her reflection.

She found was she was looking for beneath the sink. A pair of scissors sharp enough to cut her mane.

She needed to get back to the Tribe.

For a moment, Raven almost scoffed at her situation. At the ritualistic hair-cutting-as-life-changing cliché that predated the Great War by a millennium or two. But her needs were more pragmatic than symbolic. She needed to get back to the Tribe, and that meant spending time in train terminals and airship hangars. She wasn't planning on transforming, but she might well have to. And if she had to, then she damn well didn't want to be looking like the Bandit Queen of Anima when she did. She had no idea when or how the news from Haven Academy would break, but she wasn't going to be surprised when her mugshot started circulating at every post office and ticket kiosk.

Thick black locks fell to the floor, cut blindly, by an inexperienced hand. It was surprisingly easy, given that it had been over a decade since she'd done this last. She'd cut her own hair growing up, whenever she’d needed to, because Qrow couldn't be trusted and neither could any of her tribesmen. It wasn't until she'd arrived at Beacon that her hair had ever been really styled, since Summer had taken such an intense interest in the 'so-called untamable mess', in the little acts of domestication.

Snip, snip, snip.

Vernal had taken over those duties when she'd been recruited into the Tribe. She'd had an improbable knack for it, too, given how her own hair was shorn. She'd always loved Raven's hair, ever since Raven had ... adopted/rescued/kidnapped ... known her. After a long day in the woods she'd retreat to Raven's tent, combing out the tangles and plucking out the twigs. Months later (or had it been years?), she'd taken scissors to that mane, snipping and trimming, her handiwork so deft and subtle that it was almost invisible. Fingers and hands running through Raven's hair, over her head, the back of her neck. And Raven would let her eyes drift shut, lost in the feeling of those gentle touches...

...her eyes were still closed. She imagined a world where Vernal had been free to run her own little salon, coiffing and trimming and styling to her heart's content- no. Raven shook the fantasy from her head almost as soon as it was formed. It was absurd, bordering on grotesque. A disservice to the memory of the real woman.

She felt the cool porcelain of the sink under her palms.

Raven blinked her eyes open. She could see that the bowl of the sink was filled with her hair, and the floor was positively carpeted with it. She let the scissors fall from her hand, and they slid into the basin with a tinny clink. She'd slashed most of it off, with neither Summer nor Vernal's usual artistry. Her fingers ran through what was left. The sensation was... strange. She hadn't had this little hair since.... since well before Beacon. The absence of the familiar volume was unsettling, but there was something cathartic about the lightness.

Sucking a deep breath, Raven forced herself to look up, into the mirror above the sink.

For a moment, she didn't quite recognize the woman who stared back at her.