aiko's otter den

black cat's curses - Blake Belladonna is not a faunus.

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2. Departures

Surely, surely, Yagami Hikari doesn’t exist in this world.

Why would she exist? Why wouldn’t she, if Tailmon was here, just in a different form?

Does she want Yagami Hikari, her Yagami Hikari, in this world with her to hurt her again? Or to be sorry and to make things right? Does she want the risk of either of these things and what they’ll bring her?

The answer is obvious: of course she does. Of course she wants this, her, all of it. She misses that life; she misses everything about that, even the pain because the pain had been something that she knew, something that she had born. Of course she wants it.

And it’s not coming from Adam, nor the White Fang.

Sienna is tired of kindness, of trying to do good, and Blake cannot blame her for it. But Hikari would not trust a man with a fast sword and a false contriteness. She would only trust what he actually did, and what Adam does is kill and hurt for power and not change.

And she hopes Sienna knows that. Hikari would know, but then, the closer he got, the more likely she would destroy him without hesitation. She had with Vamdemon, and she hadn’t even known all of Vamdemon’s horrors, and it hadn’t mattered.

So it wouldn’t matter now if Yagami Hikari existed here. Which she might?

But Tailmon -Blake— doesn’t know what good that will bring. Will it bring bad? Is she looking for her?

Is anyone looking for her?

Adam assures her no one is because no one but he was looking out for her at all. Not even her parents were looking out for her.

Blake accepts these words because, really, if anyone deserves to be abandoned, it’s her. But Adam won’t abandon her. He’ll throw her away, and that’s different from leaving a person behind. Like she left her family behind. But it was for their own safety, and she promises to return. She promises to finish her work with Sienna and return as quickly as she can. It’s only fair and right, after all.

Sienna nods at her as she passes and as always, Blake follows Adam, because for all his wrongs he has taught her things. Her semblance would be meek, ordinary, untested, without him.

But the others too. They are close to her, piling in tattered blankets to keep warm, throwing old coats and human made good stolen goods together. Communal showers, sacred rites, happy moments with children, White Fang shares them all. And there are many.

He does not.

If there is any proof that Adam is not White Fang, it is this: Adam does not share. He does not commune. He possesses.

He is not of us, Sienna tells her. Use him, nothing more.

Blake thinks of using, thinks of a monster, but nods anyway. How can you use something that isn’t a weapon? She wants to ask, but she doesn’t. She chooses not to and continues to use.

Or it is her little brother and sister who will be. And she cannot allow that, not with how hard her father has worked to keep them free. Not with how small and frozen they are. Not with that distinct sinking feeling that she had separated them before, and that it had been wrong of her, even if it hadn’t been her choice.

But how much more can she take, really? Tailmon had much more endurance because she had forgotten, pushed away the idea of anything else, anything better.

Blake has both and so she can’t.

---

One day, enough is enough.

One day, she reaches that tipping point.

She leaves him on the train. She leaves Adam, breathing in smoke and Dust and pain. Leaves behind his shouts and curses, his vows to make her pay, to find her and watch her burn, to rip off her siblings’ skin and bones and more, so much more, so many more.

She leaves his torn apart eyes behind and is glad, so glad for a breath. The rest are heavy with fear, the what-ifs crumbling in her stomach and taking up space.

But he nurses in her. His hatred, the SDC buried into his skin, into her comrade’s backs and stomach alike, burns in her. She thinks of the rope and the blade and her hatred burns.

But she draws her robe, finds a bow, and blends into the world of humans, where Grimm breathe despair into fairy tales, turning them black and white and cold.

(She screams her pain, her hope, her love against the world. Something screams back.)

And that is how she reaches Beacon, clothes almost destroyed underneath the remains of the robe, fangs sharp and mouth dry. She doesn’t go to them for school. She goes to them for food, for water, for a green anything.

“Please,” she begs Glynda Goodwitch.

It’s not like begging to Vamdemon at all. He was smug. She is… pitying.

In no lifetime could Blake remember loving pity, wanting pity, but not being able to use it. She uses it.

“Please,” she begs the human. “Help me.”

Glynda does, pulls her inside like she doesn’t have fleas or death or baby Grimm in her broken shoes.

If she’s honest, she doesn’t even remember how she got up here. Later she’ll remember that people have to take the same air ship to reach it.

But she is not Faunus. She is Other. She can perform miracles that no one else can do anything but dream of.

Within days, curled up in an empty dorm, a man with white hair and a cane approaches her. Tailmon fills Blake’s thoughts with a single aim, a single notion buried deep in her guts.

Kill him, Blake’s very being whispers. This is all because of him. Kill him.

She’s too weak to try, of course. But she buries it, she waits.

She will, she promises herself. Absolutely. Someday.

Just not today.

“I would like you to join us here at Beacon,” he says. She nods, and it feels like Vamdemon all over again, leaving her family all over again, but she nods. Killing Grimm is easy. Killing Grimm is power. And the power she will use to destroy everything he is and was.

Just like Vamdemon, Ozpin has made a grave error.

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