aiko's otter den

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

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3. Coming Home

Blake meets Hikari one day, seemingly out of nowhere.

There’s a boisterous girl wreathed in yellow and an entire body of scrappiness and fire that makes her want to retch and hug her tight all at once, followed by a girl much smaller who curls close around her weapon and for all the smiles on her face it only touches the eyes, but never greets them.

They are standing at the edge of a cliff that smells like wrongness, smells like a test of some sort, and tests are tricks. She knows this. She knows this well.

She’d met a girl who smelled like… something. Something cold, locked away in a box somewhere. Blake thinks of home in her Hikari’s arms, home in her siblings’ chatter over a bread crust with fruit, home over her father’s rumbling sounds.

Her voice had snapped her out of the reverie, and Blake had remembered in an instant.

Weiss Schnee, supposed heir to the Schnee Dust Corporation. The Schnee. Those the White Fang fled from. Those Adam despised and hungered to eat. Like he should get to eat them instead. The white to her black.

She looked Weiss in the eyes and scoffed and saw herself mirrored in those hard eyes. Her before Wizarmon, her before Hikari. The one that had given up yearning for anything of her own will.

Blake alternates between pity and anger, because what good had the pity been? It had been the anger that pushed the world into action. That had started her frozen time?

Besides, the fire was more interesting to her, more exciting, more lived.

Yang, her name was. She was not the Hikari of old, the little innocent, trusting girl. She was fire and recklessness and Taichi’s will with Hikari’s power and Blake yearned.

And then she flew.

Without wings, it was much harder than she’d imagined it would be.

But Yang was with her, and it felt good. Right. Present.

Her weapon, her clones, her life, was in her own hands and the world, it—

Buzzed.

Grimm. She was used to Grimm; she was used to despair and rough things. She was not used to the heat of the roaring fire and her being welcome to it.

Still, as they soared and landed, it was easy to land beside her and feel right.

Hikari, she thought, righteous and free.

Only to watch as Ruby Rose danced and killed with the monsters with the smile of someone full of love for something ephemeral.

No, she thought, simply. Proud, loving, hopeful. Light. That is Hikari.

Or it was. Yagami Hikari was gone now, and would never return. But something she could hurt was still here, and so she did so, taking out her claws and burying them in throats that wouldn’t bleed.

(What Blake, and consecutively Tailmon, wouldn’t understand, is that someone could be everything and nothing someone wanted at once. So both of them could be the girl they had yearned for and loved, but in the end, one of them would be the Hikari she loathed.)

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Ruby Rose had always had dreams.

Dreams of a world where there were no Grimm. Dreams of a world where no one had to fight, but chose to. Dreams of an older brother who makes her think of Yang, with lots of smiles to hide the hurt underneath. They have monsters and dragons and they’re heroes, but no matter what she does or how she tries, everything ends with people leaving. Everything ends with someone dying or going wherever they came from and never returning.

Until one of those things is the brother who had burned and shone with the light. She’d always wanted–that he’d stolen–and he had fallen into the darkness and never come back.

Or… she thought he hadn’t. Sometimes, in Yang’s arms, in Dad’s smile, there he was, fond and proud and–it’s okay, it’s really okay, you don’t have to be strong, this wasn’t just your fault–ringing through her body and mind and into her Aura.

(Besides, her brother and his friend are two peas in a pod. A brother and a friend and people who love and their best friend is someone who died again this time, and it hurts. So much.)

She breathed in and out and remembered that just because people said things didn’t make them true. They’d said her mother was lost like they could find her, instead of saying that lost meant dead and dead meant never coming back, like the old world she had ripped apart in how, just how tired she was of being good.

Ruby loved being able to fight, though. She loved being able to breathe and bleed and hold Crescent Rose and be—

On her own.

Still, having Yang with her was better. She was strong, not stupid. She understood her own limitations. And she was lonely. It was better when Yang was there to be the buffer.

(Also they share dreams, they have the dreams together and the nightmares together even when they’re apart and it feels like home every. Single. Time.)

Until, of course, she meets Weiss.

Weiss is prickly, rude, proud, mean, but her pride is something Ruby hungers for .She wishes she could have that level of poise when she wasn’t shooting something or jumping trees or just plain alone.

She admires this woman who is barely taller than her but walks like a queen.

But it’s Blake who takes her breath from her body and nearly kills her because her entire soul quakes and says.

Tailmon.

And that first night, when they’re a ruby red stone and a team under her name, something falls down from the sky of the balcony and into her hand and Yagami Hikari awakens in a body that is not useless, in a body that is not pinned down by the world but is still less than human and she—

Breathes again.

Hikari, without thought, knows what she must do, what she will do. What must be done, what will be done.

And her friends sleep soundly on. These new friends, parts of herself who she will give everything for. For Blake, who she broke and hurt.

She doesn’t touch her; she doesn’t deserve to, but she smiles and tucks the blanket in tighter.

But Blake notices. She always does.

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