Flare

Black.

That's all she could see. She turned her head in several directions to try and determine where she was. At least, she thought she did. She may very well have accomplished nothing. She couldn't honestly tell. She couldn't determine what was up or down, left of right, forward or back. She was just there, in the darkness.

And then she wasn't. She was standing on a snowy cliff overlooking a forest of black, twisting trees. The sky was pitch black, but no stars shone from within its depths. In front of her lay a slab of rose marble.

Yang fell to her knees before her sister's gravestone.

"I'm so sorry, Ruby. I couldn't do anything for you." She choked back a sob. "It's all my fault."

"Yes, it is," a familiar voice said from behind her, and Yang whirled around to find Blake standing there, staring at her impassively.

"B-Blake?" she stuttered. The faunus woman was beaten to hell, cuts and gashes littering her body, leaking fresh blood. The worst injury by far, though, was the bullet wound marring the right side of her stomach. "Blake, you're hurt."

The raven-haired huntress glanced down to examine her own body, poking at the hole in her abdomen. When her eyes once again met Yang's, the blonde shivered. There was no emotion in those golden irises, no pain. There was nothing there. They were empty. "I'm dead," she said in a hollow voice. That simple statement slammed into Yang so hard that she was left struggling to breathe.

"N-No," she finally choked out. "No-how-"

Another person cut her off. "It was your fault. You killed her as much as you did me." From the void behind Blake stepped another figure, this one in a tattered red dress. She dragged herself forward on broken legs, and her arms hung limply at her sides, the left one ending in a stump. Any visible inch of skin was charred and seared beyond recognition. The worst thing was her eyes though. Two blackened holes where once the woman's gilded irises had resided.

Death did not look good on Cinder Fall.

Yang scrambled backward, trying to get as far away from the ghosts as possible. "Get away from me!"

"What's wrong, can't you live with what you've done?" Yang didn't recognize the new person, but that wasn't saying much, as her face was a bloody mess of flesh and bone. The dogs ears sitting atop her head quickly identified her as one of the faunus that had attacked her during her fight with Roman. She felt sick to her stomach, and her limbs started trembling.

"S-Stay away. All of you," she whispered weakly as more and more appeared, all of them beaten, bloody, and broken. They all wore different outfits, black suits with red ties, white armor, civilian clothing, but all of them shared the same blank stare. They pushed in on her, and Yang backed up, pressing herself against Ruby's headstone. "I didn't-it wasn't me-"

"Oh, but it was you, Yang." Someone cooed gently in her ear, and Yang's blood froze at the same time she realized that although her back was against something cold, it was not her sister's grave. It wasn't hard enough to be marble. It was soft, like a body. "We're all dead, thanks to you." Violent shudders wracked her muscles as she slowly turned around, lilac eyes open wide and dread gripping her heart.

And there she was. Her signature cloak was shredded, reaching only to the base of her spine instead of to her feet. Wounds covered every inch of her skin, the blood soaking into her combat uniform almost invisible against the black material. That giant, gaping hole that Yang remembered so vividly was still there in her abdomen. Crimson dribbled from the corner of her mouth as she smiled at Yang, silver eyes showing no joy. Panic tore at Yang's chest, and she dropped to the snowy ground, curling up in a ball as all of the ghosts swirled around her.

"It's all your fault, Yang. You've killed us all," Ruby said, leaning over her sister.

"No," she gasped weakly. "No, I-"

"You left me to die, Yang." The blonde wished Ruby had just kicked her instead, it would've hurt far less. "You promised you'd protect me, that you'd never let anything hurt me." Yang let out a small whimper as she squeezed her eyes shut and folded tighter on herself. "So where were you?" Blood began to run down her cheeks from her eyes. Yang opened her mouth to scream, but the sound got caught in her throat.

"Why did you just stand there and watch them kill me?"

Yang sat straight up, taking a deep, gasping breath as her eyes flew wide. Her heart thudded in her ears, and her breath came in short gasps. Her body trembled, and cold sweat plastered her hair to her forehead. It took her a minute to realize that she was no longer in that horrifying place, that she was back in the land of the living. Her eyes darted around, taking in the sterile white walls and ceiling, lit by bright overhead lights. Silver instruments lay stacked on an impeccably clean countertop. White cabinets lined the wall across the square room, and a large machine stood in the corner. She relaxed a little bit, laying back down on the soft bed as it registered that she must be in an infirmary; the place stank of antiseptics. Just a nightmare, she told herself. Just a nightmare.

"Well, good evening."

The blonde jumped in surprise, snapping her attention to the chair beside her bed. The one she somehow hadn't noticed was occupied. Blake was sat there, observing her with completely not vacant eyes, and Yang felt such a rush of emotion that she just stared dumbly at the brunette for a few moments. Blake was alive, Yang hadn't gotten her killed.

"Yang?" Blake's brow furrowed in concern.

The blonde snapped out of her mini-trance, and tried to fight down the warmth spreading through her chest. "Your wounds…" she trailed off unsuredly.

"Healed, for the most part. Unlike certain people, my Aura's functioning fine. I'll be stiff for a while yet, but all in all, I'm fine." Yang shifted, pulling herself once more into a sitting position. She winced as pain lanced up her spine this time, the adrenaline from her nightmare no longer in effect. "You, on the other hand, probably haven't healed quite so well. I asked them to let me take care of your wounds, so they only did basic first aid."

Yang blinked away the stars swimming across her vision, focusing on Blake once more. Seeing her sitting there in her ragged combat outfit, dried blood crusted all over, brought feelings Yang was no longer familiar with screaming to the front of her mind. Joy, relief, happiness. Those moments when she thought she had lost Blake too had been the worst since her sister's death. She shuddered as her nightmare resurfaced, the image of Blake's dead eyes haunting her.

"Blake," Yang whispered, voice cracking with emotion. She didn't know how to express to her what she was feeling. Hell, she didn't even know what she was feeling. It was a weird, convoluted ball of emotions wound tightly in her chest, and she couldn't make heads or tails of it. The faunus leaned forward a little, and Yang saw something flash through her eyes. What, she didn't know. She was too busy trying to decipher her own thoughts, let alone someone else's. She did know one thing though, and she figured that was probably a good place to start.

When she opened her mouth to speak, though, she found the words wouldn't come out. They just got caught in her throat. She tried again.

"I'm glad you're not dead."

What came out instead was, "What happened?"

Blake frowned almost imperceptibly before leaning back with a sigh. "Captain Reynolds showed up in the Shadowswift and saved us at the last minute. Said the Beowolves were about to tear us to pieces."

"I thought you asked him to hang back to avoid spooking Roman?"

The brunette gave her a measured look before calmly stating, "Well, once someone shot the whole 'don't spook Roman' plan to hell, I called for a pickup. We should be thankful that they managed to get there when they did."

Yang flinched slightly at the thinly veiled accusation, but didn't address it. "What were you saying before you passed out? Something about a tracker?"

"That last shot I fired wasn't a bullet. It was a locator bug. I had one ready in case something like this happened. So long as he doesn't notice and remove it, we can follow him to the ends of the map."

Yang nodded and turned herself around with another wince, hanging her legs off the side of the bed. She spotted her jacket lying draped over the foot of the bedframe, and reached for it, asking, "So how long before we catch up to him?" She could feel the red hot rage seething beneath her skin at the mere thought of catching Roman again.

"We're not going after him. We're heading to Beacon."

She froze, arm still outstretched to snatch her jacket. She turned her head slowly to Blake. "What?" she hissed quietly.

"We're going to Beacon, Yang."

Her temper flared, and Yang felt all of the emotions drain from her chest to be replaced by pure, raw anger. "Why the fuck-"

"Because we're outclassed, Yang!" Blake talked over her, voice as cold and unrelenting as steel. "We need to recover, and we need reinforcements!"

"That's total bullshit! We should be going after him now, we don't need anybody else-"

Amazingly enough, despite her companion's fury, it was Blake who shouted first, drowning out Yang's words with a voice full of pent-up frustration and anger. "Yes we do!" She narrowed her eyes at Yang, whose own lilac glare seemed perfectly endearing next to the sheer force swirling in those golden irises. "We need help! We can't do this on our own! Especially since you ruined the entire mission and fucked up our best chance to capture him because you couldn't control your temper!"

Yang's eyes glazed crimson. "Don't you dare-" she started, but once more, Blake interrupted her, voice hot and quiet.

"I'll dare to do any damn thing I please!" She spit. "Do you have any idea what you did to me, to us, when you disappeared?" Blake couldn't control herself. She hadn't intended to have this conversation here and now, but now that it was started, she found that she couldn't even think of stopping herself. She was through with watching on the sideline as her partner self-destructed. "Do you have any idea the kind of panic we suffered? How many times I saw you dead or dying when I closed my eyes, heard your screams for help? You vanished without a word, and then magically reappeared the same way. But instead of coming back to us and trying to live with what had happened, you isolated yourself. You destroyed yourself. Do you really, honestly think that's what Ruby would have wanted? For you to kill yourself in mourning for her?" Yang's eyes, now back to their natural color, were wide, her mouth hanging open in shocked surprise.

"You left us." Blake's voice cracked. "Ruby died, and you left." She took a deep, stuttering breath, desperately trying to reign in her emotions. "Weiss and I…we were hurting too. Ruby was our leader, our friend. She was Weiss' partner. Did you ever even think about how that must have felt for her? What that did to her? Do you have any idea how many times she woke up screaming your sister's name?" Yang's mouth moved wordlessly, but Blake hadn't really been expecting an answer. "Two hundred and seventy-eight, the first year. Every single night. Those she didn't were the nights she didn't sleep. She blamed herself every day. We both did. We tore ourselves to shreds. We needed you there. She needed her friend and I needed my partner. But you vanished, and left us more alone than before, half of our team, our family, gone. We just woke up one day and you weren't there. Off to be some sort of great avenger. You abandoned your friends. You abandoned me, Yang." Hot tears streaked down her face now, but she didn't take notice. "I needed you, and you weren't there." Her voice was quiet, all her energy spent.

Blake's eyes dropped to her lap as tears fell from them freely. Yang just sat there, staring at the faunus. She could think of nothing to say. Not a single thought came to mind. Blake's words had cut deep and hard, striking something deep within her, buried under years of pain. She hadn't thought about her teammates when she had set out for revenge all the years ago. Finding and killing Cinder and Roman had been the only things on her mind at the time, and now she could see exactly what sort of impact her single-mindedness had had. She had never wanted that. She had never wanted to hurt them. She had just wanted to get back at the people who had killed her sister. But in the end, it seemed she had managed to hurt them, hurt Blake, as badly as those who had taken her sister from them all. She felt her stomach roil nauseously at that thought. Just what exactly had she done?

She opened her mouth to say something, anything, but Blake once more beat her to the chase.

"Take your shirt off," she demanded in a voice that brooked no argument. Yang just looked at her in confusion, reeling from the emotional whiplash and put off by the sudden change in her companion's demeanor. Blake's gaze hardened slightly whenever the blonde didn't react, all traces of tears already gone. "You're wounded, and since your Aura doesn't seem to be working correctly at the moment, we'll have to clean out your wounds and treat them normally. Now are you going to take off your damn shirt, or am I going to have to tear it off?"

Something in Yang growled at those words, but not in anger.

She grasped the hem of the skin-tight grey fabric, pulling it over her head in a disjointed motion as her body screamed in agony. It was then that Yang truly realized just how beaten she was. The gashes on her back throbbed with each heartbeat, and her muscles ached so deeply she could feel it in her bones. She could tell without even checking that the place where Roman had struck her temple was swollen and discolored. Honestly, it was amazing she could move at all, given her condition. Adrenaline was a hell of a thing.

Blake bit back a small gasp as Yang removed her shirt, but felt her heart speed up all the same. She was just as stunning as she had always been. Sculpted muscle and tantalizing curves. The faunus fought to keep a flush from creeping up her face as heat welled in her stomach. Now was not the time for that. It was a testament to her willpower that Blake managed to divert her eyes from Yang's exposed chest, instead letting them flit from one injury to the next, making a quick mental list of what she'd need. She slid from her chair and moved to the cabinets, gathering herself a fair number of bandages, gauze, and antibiotic ointment. She pulled a small end table from the corner to the bedside, and laid the supplies down there, before retrieving a small basin of water and a sterile cloth. Yang was silent, watching her go about her task with unreadable eyes. Words were still a bit out of reach for her at the moment.

"Turn around," Blake commanded gently as she soaked the rag and rung the excess water from it. Yang obediently rotated herself toward the wall, crossing her legs. Blake inhaled sharply through her teeth as she got a good look at the claw marks marring Yang's back. There were four of them, and they were deep. Dried blood and dirt crusted the edges of the wounds, and the skin around them was an agitated red. Her fingers lightly traced the longest one until it ran into the gauze wrapped around Yang's shoulder and down her arm. The edge was loose, yet the bandage still held close to her skin. Blake gently toyed with the end, asking a silent question. Yang tensed, but made no move to stop her, and Blake took that as permission.

She carefully unwound the white cloth, letting it slide off the blonde's arm to the bed. What awaited her made her gasp. From her shoulder, all the way down to her forearm, the top of Yang's arm was covered in an uneven, raw red scar. The flesh was horribly disfigured, puckered and pocked as if it had melted.

"Yang," she breathed, unable to even imagine the kind of agony a fire that would inflict a burn this bad would cause.

"You should see the other girl," Yang commented with a humorless smile.

"I have," Blake said quietly, suppressing a shudder as she gently pressed the cloth to the first of the cuts, earning a hiss from her partner. She had read the reports on Cinder's death, seen the pictures of the beaten, broken, burnt husk that had once been the fire sorceress. Surprisingly, it hadn't been the shattered bones that had gotten her. Nor had it been the multiple ruptured organs. No, in the end, what had killed Cinder Fall was, ironically, fire. Fire that had burned her alive, from the inside out.

Blake continued cleaning Yang's wounds in silence. She wanted to know what Yang was thinking, but she had talked enough tonight. Her partner needed time to think for now.

After a time in which the water in the basin became muddied by blood and grime, Blake placed one last adhesive bandage over the smallest of the gashes in Yang's back.

She gathered up the supplies and put them away, dumping out the dirty water into the sink. She turned to find Yang still facing the opposite direction. Blake grabbed a blanket from another cabinet and walked up behind her. She slid the cloth around her, and realized that the brawler wasn't even awake anymore. Her head hung and hands folded in her lap, her breaths came slow and steady. She looked so small, so lost without that anger etched into the lines on her face. Blake wrapped her arms around her shoulders and pulled her head against her chest, burying her face in her partner's blond locks.

It killed her, seeing Yang like this, a shell of what she used to be, isolated from everyone she loved. She felt the blonde shiver, and a small whimper escaped her lips, causing Blake to hold her tighter. She swore right there that she would never again leave Yang's side. Not until she was through this, and back to who she was. She would do whatever it took.

Weiss, at one point, had asked Blake why she went so far for Yang. Why would she give so much to someone who would return none of it?

Her answer had left the heiress speechless. If Blake had known that three little words could have that effect, she may have told her sooner. There were the same three words that Blake had realized years ago, even before the Siege.

"I love her."

Blake Belladonna was hopelessly, helplessly in love with Yang Xiao Long. Even after Ruby's death and Yang's subsequent disappearance and isolation, those feelings had never flagged. If anything, they had grown stronger. She had wanted to tell her partner that night four years ago, before the final battle, but Yang hadn't let her, telling her to "tell me after this is all said and done." She had been content to wait, because at the time, a situation like the current one had never even factored in as a possibility. Back then, they had all thought they would either live or die together. None of them had honestly believed any just one of them wouldn't make it, let alone Ruby.

Blake gently pressed a kiss to the top of Yang's head. But it had happened, and here they were. She would do the best for the woman she loved, no matter how much it cost her. She shifted, hooking her one arm underneath the brawler's knees, and lifted her up bridal style. Carrying her partner as lightly as she could to avoid waking her, Blake departed for the blonde's room.

As she walked the Shadowswift's narrow corridors, her mind returned to Yang's scar, and the events that had occurred that had led up to where they were now.

Things had been a mess after the Siege ended. Ozpin had done his best to maintain some semblance of order, and with the Beacon staff at his back, it hadn't taken long to reclaim the city from Junior's men. The survivors had their injuries tended to, and were returned to their dorms while their professors dealt with the aftermath of the battle. The dead were gathered and accounted for, a list compiled of families that needed contacting. Ozpin sent out a hunting party to find Ruby's remains, if there were any. They came back empty-handed, having found no trace of either the young huntress or the Deathstalker's corpse; Cinder had incinerated them entirely.

A week blurred by for the remnants of Team RWBY. They barely ate, barely slept, barely spoke, huddling together in the same bunk during the nights. The shock was still too great. It had been the day before Ruby's funeral that things had taken a turn for the absolute worst. Blake and Weiss had woken to find Yang missing from their shared bed. They weren't particularly worried at first. The blonde slept even less than them, so her being awake sooner was no surprise. The worry began when they couldn't find her when it came time to depart for Vacuo for Ruby's funeral the next day. They convinced themselves that she had left ahead of them, wanting to arrive for her sister's funeral as early as possible.

Of course, Yang wasn't there.

That's when the panic set in. Both of them frantically tried reaching her scroll, but no messages got through, and the two of them began to assume the worst.

It was a few days more before the first reports of fires breaking out in Vale reached their ears via Ozpin. Blake remembered feeling relieved then. She knew without a doubt that it was Yang. All of the torched places were well-known gang hideouts, owned and operated by the Xiong family. She was just blowing off steam, Blake figured. Venting her anger and pain through violence the way she had the first day after Ruby's death. She had been so wrong. She realized as such whenever both Junior and Senior Xiong ended up in the hospital with multiple broken bones, severe burns, and, in Junior's case, a crushed testicle.

It had taken only a small amount of persuasion for the two men to reveal that Yang had confronted them, demanding to know where Cinder and Roman were. They told them how, when they refused to answer, Yang had beaten the information out of them, not stopping even after they had given up Cinder's location. Roman's whereabouts were a mystery even to them.

Another month and a half of anxious waiting had followed that. Blake knew that Yang was going after Cinder by herself, and she was petrified that everyday Ozpin was going to call her to his office to let her known they had found Yang's charred corpse. Whenever he did finally call her and Weiss, it was for an entirely different yet similar reason. He started by telling them that Yang had returned to Vale, alive. Blake had been so unbelievably relieved that she almost didn't hear the next piece of news.

"We've also found Cinder Fall," Ozpin's voice was grave, his mood not at all befitting the news he had just delivered. Blake opened her mouth to say something, but Ozpin continued before she could, "However," amber eyes boring into her own to drive home the next statement, "Yang found her first." He laid a folder open in front of them, and the pictures it contained made Blake's head spin.

They had known about the existence of the organization behind the attack on Beacon by that point, so Blake fully understand that they had lost one of the only two solid connections they knew of. They had to find Roman before Yang did. She determined that she would talk to her partner about it, and she patiently awaited Yang's arrival back to Beacon. After two weeks, though, she decided to go see her instead, figuring that perhaps she wasn't quite ready for a return to the school. After what happened, Blake would understand.

The truth she found, though, shattered her heart. Yang was not Yang anymore. She was wholly changed into a cold, rage-driven beast who drank away her frustrations and pain nightly. She wasn't even a shadow of who she used to be, and despite everything Blake tried, she never acknowledged her, never reacted. It had been after that first encounter that she had first picked up her habit of smoking to calm her nerves. She had refused to give up, though, continuing to visit at least once a week, even managing to bring along members of Team JNPR once or twice. Weiss had adamantly refused, but Blake still remained undiscouraged. As her time remaining at Beacon grew shorter, the time in between her visits grew longer. When she graduated and became an operative, the number dropped to three or four times a year.

Every time, she tried to bring back her Yang. Every time, she failed.

But she had never given up.

Blake glanced down at the sleeping woman in her arms.

She still hadn't.

And she'd be damned if she did now.

A/N: Look who's on time this week! Woohoo!

So, what'd you guys think? The alternate title for this chapter is just "EMOTIONS"

I did warn you that it was gonna be heavy, and I certainly hope everything carried over well. We got to see what impact Yang's actions have had outside of the immediate issues, primarily in terms of Blake. I had a lot of Blake's dialogue in this chapter planned out since before I started writing Ruin, if you can believe that, hahah. Anyway, yes, a little bit of exposition detailing exactly what happened with Yang, and the gruesome details of Cinder's death!



We're gonna be seeing a few old faces next chapter, so look forward to it!

Please review, my friends! I love all of you :D

Until next chapter!

EDIT: Because I entirely forgot to mention it before. I've finished Weiss' character design, for those of you who aren't on the subreddit. It's up over on my deviantart page, so check it out if/when you get the chance and let me know what you think