Hey there! Sorry to interrupt you before you get into the meat of things - but there's a couple things I want you to know before, well, reading this.

Before you begin reading this monstrosity, I feel you should know that it is written in a very experimental writing style. Specifically, it's one best described as "all of the metaphors." I understand if this is not to your taste. It might not even be to my taste; I dunno because I've spent the last four and a half months writing and editing this thing and am frankly done with it for the immediate moment.

The only other thing you need to know is that, doesn't allow explict sex scenes. Which is fair. So if you want full, uncensored, Blake on Yang and Yang on Blake action, if you'll pardon my crassness, you'll want to check out the Archive of Our Own link in my profile (or, if you're one of the very first people reading this, soon to be in my profile).

Anyway, go ahead, I hope you enjoy.

Some days, Blake Belladonna just didn't feel like going out on a day-long shopping spree. Some days, she felt like being alone.

Today was actually neither of those days.

Though, to be fair, it had started as the second one, despite the entreaties of her teammates. No matter how many sales Weiss insisted would be going on this weekend or how (genuinely) tempting Ruby's offer to buy them all milkshakes might have been, Blake had turned them both down. She was certain the team could find some way to have fun without her. In fact, she theorized they'd find more.

But then Yang looked at her funny for a few moments, like she was inspecting some system of scales – Blake and her dreary school uniform and equally dreary outlook on one side, everyone else she might run into that day on the other – and announced that she was going to stay home and keep Blake company.

That was about the point that the flapping butterflies in Blake's stomach had started making hurricanes in her head.

She'd read books that started just like this. She'd had dreams that started just like this. They were good dreams. They were mediocre books.

But her reality was like this, too lately – her days were full of Yang like holes were full of saplings, and every day seemed like something new was . . . growing, to put a shear to it. Blake was self-aware enough to liken it to the way she acted whenever she became engrossed by a novel, hiding away to turn another page, discover another secret, fill up her heart with literature and emotion.

It was an interesting feeling, reading herself. Having someone read her, sometimes. Especially since Yang didn't seem like the academic type. Or the type to slow down, for that matter. Or the type to let Blake lie in her lap while playing with her hair. Or the type to have long, drawn-out, heartfelt conversations, either, but that was reading ahead in the story.

Despite Ruby's insistence that today was a beautiful day, warm and sunny and perfect for getting milkshakes, the girl who might have been nicknamed The Charge of the Light Brigade instead retreated, and the team split up into partners to attack the day. Yang took off the gauntlets she'd planned on wearing out, Blake let loose the ribbon hiding her ears and retied it around her arm, and both of them might as well have stripped down naked for each other.

Dust, if only.

But this was fine, too. There may have been a world of milkshakes and handbags and other peoples' money outside the door, but there was so much more here, where the sun didn't reach. There was a good book, and warm hands, and a state like being in a dream, which seemed more and more like reality each day at any rate. A reality like dreams, like books, like her thoughts – it was a private reality, one Blake might as well have built for herself, one hidden away within the darkness. Just her and Yang Xiao Long. Maybe just a glimmer of light, then.

Let others enjoy the sunshine – Blake would always, save certain special exceptions, prefer the night's shade.

. . . possibly, with the way that pun walked into her head like it owned the place, she'd been spending too much time around Yang as it was. Ah, well. Better company than the White Fang. Certainly better than being all alone.

0-0-0-0

"Hm hm hm hm, hmmm, hm hm hm hm, hmmm . . ."

The literary concept of irony was familiar to Blake – most literary concepts were, if only through osmosis and repetition. The Fang had been more interested in teaching codebreaking than cliffhangers, though they did show a certain expertise in poetic justice.

"Hm hm hm hm hmmm, hm hm hm hm hmmm . . ."

Blake was, in fact, familiar with irony in the same way most people are familiar with airplanes and lawnmowers, in that the familiarity did not stop irony from being an incredibly distracting noise to her literary mind.

"Hm hm hm hm, hmmm, hm hm hm hm, hmmm . . ."

And ironically, of all the songs in the great wide world of Remnant that Yang could have chosen at that moment in time, lying in bed, gentle coaxing fingers running like calligraphy brushes through the inky locks of Blake's hair, she chose to gently hum You are My Sunshine.

"Hm hm hmmmm, hm hm hmmm, hm hm."

"Yang," Blake's tone was gentle, but insistent, a practiced pitch that could throw anyone and anything off-balance. "You know that's really distracting, right?"

Almost anyone and anything, really – Yang seemed to be specifically immune. In fact, judging from the (gorgeous, gorgeous) grin plastered across her face, it seemed that the first time Blake had tried that tone on her had been a vaccination of sorts. "Sorry, Blakey." She couldn't sound less sorry if she were writing the apology on a ransom note. "But I just can't help myself! You're like . . . oh, you're like my own little pocketful of sunshine! That's it!"

Yang's hugs could outperform an Ursa - possibly even kill one - probably had in the past – but Blake was much more durable and also maybe secretly enjoying the sudden sensation. "Well, first of all." Blake spoke through half a breath and half a smile, which somehow made a whole. "I'm anything but sunny. Second of all, you never call me 'Blakey' for no reason, and you're being awfully affectionate." Yang's arms loosened, and Blake attempted to pass off her diamond disappointment as a cubic zirconium sigh. "What do you want?"

Please say me please say me please say me please say me chanted a particularly obstinate voice in the back of her mind and the forefront of her thoughts. And upon further reflection, perhaps "obstinate" wasn't the word for it. "Persistent", perhaps, or "driven".

. . . she'd done too much lying to herself as it was. "Horny". The word was "Horny".

Yang interrupted her train of thought just before it crashed into the city and exploded. "Heh. Wow." All of Yang was bulletproof, including the smile. No way a bout with embarrassment was going to keep it down, for Long. "You're really good at seeing right through me."

"Sunshine does tend to illuminate things," Blake's head dipped, avoiding an embarrassing situation by the space of about one yellow top. She really needed to remove herself from Yang's lap one of these days.

"Alright, alright!" Yang laughed – more like lit – in reponse before letting go of Blake completely, at least with her arms. Her gemstone gaze still held Blake captivated. "I wanna see what you're reading. I see you reading it all the time, so it's gotta be really good."

Blake, master of avoiding suspicion as she was, shifted away from the lap of luxury slowly enough to avoid taxing herself unnecessarily."And you thought you could accomplish that by annoying me until I . . . ?"

"Hey, I caught glances!" Yang's smile turned before Blake's very eyes – not her smile. Her eyebrows moved subtly, and the entire character of her smile changed from silly to seductive. Magic tricks, then. "Not like you were reading it all that closely anyway."

That right there was a feeling. A familiar one. Like a stack of blocks falling to the ground, and the cheering of onlookers. Blake always lost when team RWBY played Jenga at game night. "Pardon?"

Yang and whispering were like milk and honey, and tonight was apparently like a very vigorous spoon. "You liiiiiked being pet, didn't you? When was the last time you turned the page? Ten minutes ago?"

Blake shrugged. Sometimes, there was no stopping the sun, only rocking the tan. "Your hands are surprisingly soft, and pretty gentle too. Celica's doing a good job."

"That and the healing factor," Yang returned the shrug, as was only polite. And then her grin multiplied in magnitude, spreading a shockwave over her face that lifted her eyebrows a, relatively speaking, good few hundred feet on her face. "Which means it's not just my hands that are soft; it's all of me."

"All of you, huh? I dunno." Yang's defined-like-the-word-"the"-in-the-dictionary abs, fully on display since the day Blake met her, had been begging to be touched for quite some time now. Blake, at that moment, decided to finally have mercy, though she made sure to make contact fingernail-first to remind them who was in charge around here. "You feel pretty . . . firm . . . here."

There was a game they played, Blake and Yang, and not one fit for RWBY's game night, either. It was probably dangerous. It was certainly sexy. It wasn't Twister, even if that game did fill all the qualifications.

Calling the game "sexual chicken" might have been crass, but there wasn't actually a better term for it. The future was as obvious as an oncoming diesel engine, even if Blake had her afterimages and Yang could probably suplex a train given the proper motivation. It was as inevitable as a glass of wine in an alcoholic's hand. It was as bright and stunning as a firework, and right now the only thing to do was watch the trail of green streak through the air and wait for the right moment to see the burst and hear the cry of freedom.

Blake wasn't oblivious. She couldn't be, with a nose sensitive enough to identify pheromones, ears trained enough to hear a rapidly accelerating heartbeat, eyes designed to see in the dark, and most elusive of all, basic common sense. She reveled in the little intake of air she was sure Yang thought she didn't notice. She drank in the amethyst lakes of her eyes swallowing up the pebble of her pupils. She memorized the shape of Yang's worried lip, and imagined that she might do a much better job of biting it. It was absolutely common sense; if it were any more obvious that Yang wanted Blake like Blake wanted her, there would be a sign around her neck that read, "Broody feline Faunus with self-esteem issues get in free." Flashing lights and everything.

So sexual chicken, it was.

But the problem was, and the reason for it was, the bars shut down in the morning. At some point or another, usually around two AM and when people were the drunkest, if the stories were at all correct, the barman would say, "Aright, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

Yang would say, "That was a lot of fun. Uh, it's not gonna change anything between us, right?"

And Blake wouldn't have a home to return to.

But on a lighter and a darker note, it was also something more elemental, more physical than that. Fun. Desire. Masochism and sadism, girl who absorbed kinetic energy and girl who wore ribbons as a fashion accessory, probably. That old joke, "Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer, because it feels so good when I stop," right? Except, not exactly that. Something close, but not like it at all. Something like . . .

"He paused at her catch of breath," Yang's voice was a breathy whisper, and hello, "Choosing instead to stare into her eyes. She trembled beneath him, but made no move to continue. This was the part that would make or break the evening. They always said, it wasn't the act, but the . . ." That smile could seduce a bride on her wedding night and leave the groom appreciative. "Anticipation."
Ah, yes, that was the word Blake was looking for. Anticipation. Six months of tasting Yang on her tongue and refusing to swallow. "You caught a little more than a glance, then." Was that as husky a voice as Yang's could be? Blake sure hoped so.

"Steamy stuff, Blakey," Yang was uncomfortably – too comfortably, really – close, now. "Didn't know you liked that kind of thing."

"It's funny," Blake pretended she hadn't noticed. A little bit like standing in front of an explosion and acting like the back of her clothing wasn't on fire. "And the rest of the plot isn't half bad, really."

Yang's smile dropped off completely, and her eyes were suddenly someplace so far away it looped all the way around the globe to sneak up behind Blake and steal her wallet. Maybe even her heart. "That why you're still running your hand over my abs?"

Blake blinked. Well, cats always found a way to land on their feet – even she couldn't avoid all the stereotypes. "You were petting my hair for a while, there. I figured it was only fair."

"Ah, makes sense. And it rhymes!" Yang tilted her head, but the way she smiled it was Blake who felt off-balance. "And all's fair in love and war, right?"

Love and war. Yang's eyes were artillery shells, her smile a minefield, her soul the whistling fall and consuming blast of an airstrike, and her curves nothing less than global thermonuclear annihilation. So Blake wasn't entirely sure she could tell the difference between the two right at that moment. Between all that and the petting, because who said war was hell, Blake was just about ready to surrender.

But she'd never admit that, of course. Yang might surrender soon, too.

Besides, even if Blake had wanted to, there was quite suddenly a feeling like being on a deserted island coursing through Blake, and there was no way she was going to be contacting the world from here.

Not a deserted island from the real world, all mosquitos and rugged life, but someplace warm and sunny, the ocean lapping up on the beach and with coconut milk readily on hand. Someplace away from the rest of the world, with a sea breeze sinking into the skin. Someplace no one would bother her.

No one but Yang, who was humming something just as tropical, something that deserved steel drums in the background, as her fingers pressed between Blake's ears and the most sensitive part of her scalp, rubbing intently. Suddenly, taking off her bow in the privacy of her own room seemed like the biggest mistake Blake had made that didn't have the White Fang's logo emblazoned on it.

Dust, those digits of hers were dexterous . . .

A little too dexterous, as suddenly the pressure on her head ceased and Blake felt her book slip out of her hands. "Yoink!"

Blake brought herself back to reality one focused blink at a time. She'd had years of training, sometimes in the field, to resist torture, emotional manipulation, and rhetoric techniques. All of it was apparently wasted against a good petting. She was surprisingly okay with that. "Yang." The "authoritative voice" was usually about as effective as her "gentle, insistent voice" but she had to try something. "Give that back."

Yang snickered, a noise like stirring cake batter. Not in the literal sound, but in the feeling. A bit of effort, applied in a surprisingly sweet direction, given the raw materials to work with. "Turnabout's fair play, Blake. That's the most basic rule of friendship with Yang Xiao Long!"

Ah. If that was how the rules went, Blake could get involved in a philosophy like that. Especially if it involved rubbing Yang's . . . ears . . . in return. "Well, at least tell me which one this is, then."

"Que?" Yang asked, not quite flippant, but flipping. "Ooh, hoo, hoo, what have we here?"

Blake could go for the feelings of sounds, too. Here was a gun cocking. "Love or war, Yang. Which one is it?"

For the second time in as many minutes, Blake wished she was still wearing her ribbon. Not out of vulnerability, or embarrassment, but because it had a hidden camera tucked into its folds and the look on Yang's face was priceless perfection. It was also somewhat short-lived, as the book slipped from Yang's fingers, bounced off her grasp once, then twice, and finally righted itself in an exaggerated hug that Blake was sure the novels appreciated deep in their kerning.

"Uh, wh, what are you . . . thh." Yang's fingers turned pages with more speed than her sister's usual sprint, and now who was it that wasn't actually doing any reading? "That's not what I meant! It's just, you know, one of those – ow!"

"Papercut?" Blake raised an eyebrow, more a signal than an actual expression. A "Beware of the Cat" sign on the fence of her face. "The pen really is mightier than the sword, I see."

Yang paused in sucking on the offense against her person, and Blake tried not to be too disappointed about it. "Heh. Don't you mean the pun is mightier than the sword?"

"That's all my mind has been fingering upon." Blake regretted it as soon as she said it.

Well, no, not really, not when Yang blushed like that, like a libidinous cocktail of hormones and excitement injected directly into Blake's racing heart. "Ah. Huh. Quick on the draw today, heh. Or, I guess I should say quick on the claw?" The smile dropped from her face like a hot pan sans an oven mitt. "Oh, wow, that was totally a Faunus joke, wasn't it? Oh, geeze, I would never – I mean, if you said it was okay, I guess, but uh, you didn't say it was okay - oh man, Blake, I am so -"

"Yang," Blake stopped her before she reached Remnant's mantle. "It's okay if you're just . . ." Wait for it. "Kitten around."

The effect was so immediate as to make quantum entanglement look snailish.

Yang's laughter rose in pitch and descended in placement, ending up somewhere inside the mattress (sorry thing that it was) Yang lay herself on. Blake wanted to imagine she was prostrating herself before a superior punsmith. "You win," she gasped out, muffled as it was, and well, now it was Blake who was blushing. "You're the punniest person in the room." She spun over, landing on her back, and it was the first time in her life Blake had ever considered something both exactly like a puppy and also cute. "Congratulations, Blake – you've beaten the master."

"Thank you." Blake would accept her award with every ounce of magnanimity and humility she felt it deserved. "It was extremely easy."

Yang sat up under cover of another chuckle like a miniature symphony. "Someone's sassy today."

"You take my book, you reap the consequences." Blake tapped her fingers on her thigh, a miniature drumroll to build up to the bad idea that was forming in her head. Perhaps the book was not yet out of reach, even if Yang was leagues above her in just about every aspect (besides, of course, puns). "The papercut hasn't healed, I notice."

"Yeah, never could quite get the hang of fixing up these things. The one kind of injury too insidious for my glory to overcome!" Blake hadn't realized, until that voice, that Yang was a comic fan, but it made enough sense. "Wanna kiss it and make it better?"

Well, at this rate, Yang was going to end up one step ahead of her. "I've got a better idea," Blake said, carefully leveraging her words to move herself forwards. "But . . . close."

"Uh . . ." Yang swallowed thickly, acclimating to the sudden change in air pressures as Blake leaned in towards her. Or, possibly, just nervous, but Blake honestly had a harder time believing that could be the case. Either way, her hand moved of her own volition, taking Yang's wrist in her palm and warming at her pulse. "What are you doing?"

What was she doing, now that Blake thought of it? Scratching, she supposed. Not Yang's arm, though that had a certain dark thrill to it on its own, but scratching the surface of something. Something new, old, borrowed, tinged with a sad blue. There was an itch at the back of Blake's mind; had been for a while now. Maybe, six months of time. Scratching it. Scratching it just once couldn't hurt, right?

Possibly, she was being too quick on the claw.

But the look on Yang's face as she leaned in told her she was far too late to be doing anything as sensible as stopping herself, so she leaned forwards, thought of a million things she'd like to say, resolved to say none of them, and let her smile cheat for her. "I'm giving you your consolation prize."

She refused to break eye contact, and it might have destroyed them both.

Her taste buds made contact with a warm copper candle, and Yang's breath caught like a hook in Blake's brain, tugging, painful, a release from the ordinary and entirely too dangerous to fathom. Fathoming was for suckers anyway, because there was something life-changing just on the tip of her tongue, a vision of the future with blood as the medium, and Yang's eyes were wide enough to see, maybe, into Blake's very soul, and she felt every glance and searing stare as she drew her tongue, slowly, carefully, certainly, around Yang's fingertip . . .

"Oh, sweet High Auras, yes." Yang wasn't precisely known to be spiritual. The thought that Blake might be considered a religious experience nearly brought her to her knees.

"Mmmm," Blake wished she could truthfully say the groan was affected, but she could literally feel Yang's pulse pounding beneath the her skin of her palm, and there hadn't been much she could do to stop herself. "What's the matter, Yang?" She poured, lemons and sugar, and received a pucker of lips as her reward. "Afraid of getting your fingers a little wet?"

"Fuck," Yang articulated, and Blake very nearly did.

Instead, she dipped her head, taking Yang's entire length into her mouth – probably not a good time for Ninjas of Love to be sneaking into her thoughts – and then slooooooowly dragged her lips back up, keeping a careful eye on Yang's own wandering orbs all the while. A slight pop, another go-round of her tongue, and a smile she justly classified as clever. "What was that?"

Yang was never "controlled", but she never needed to be. She was always so certain of herself, the ultimate argument both for and against the concept of free will, an immovable object in motion, which Blake had come to learn was slightly different than an unstoppable force. But here and now, Yang was stammering, tripping over herself, giving herself papercuts, and now . . . completely uncertain of what to say. "B – B – Blake, I . . . I. Oh."

Blake let her eyelashes flutter like butterflies in flight as she pressed Yang's wrist to her cheek. Maybe it was a tad too much, but in for a penny, in for a pounding. "You're clutching my book pretty hard, there." Her observation only made things worse, precisely as planned. "Isn't there something . . . else . . you'd rather be doing with your fingers?"

If anything could be too steamy for Ninjas of Love, maybe that was it, judging by the way the book went flying away from Yang to land on the middle of their dorm room floor. Twitchy fingers, a bit lip, and a mess of hesitation and anxious energy would have revealed her heartrate even if the pulse next to Blake's ear (such sweet music) wouldn't have. "You have no idea -"

Later on, Blake would look back at this moment, wonder at what precisely was running through her head, and then decide that the kiss to the wrist had been too much.

But embrasser it was, followed swiftly by partir as Blake stood, hoping Yang wouldn't notice the quarter-second of a lingering trace her fingers left behind. "Very kind of you, Yang."

"I, uh, s-sure? What is . . ." Yang was gaping, behind her. Blake was too practiced in The Art of Xiao Long to think that she was doing anything but. " . . . what?"

Blake bent to the book like molasses, slow, sweet, dark, and (quite unlike molasses) presenting herself in the best light she knew how. "Well, not as kind as you could have been." She sighed, navigating her way to the passage she'd left off at, or at least a reasonable enough facsimilie that Yang wouldn't be able to tell the difference from the outside. Like Blake intended on reading, anyway. "You could have bent the spine, treating it like that."

Three. Two. One.

And speaking of bending spines and being treated certain ways, Blake found herself being grabbed roughly and thrown wholesale against the dorm room's wall, formerly gentle hands now pinning her arms above her head in a grip gravity would envy. The book dropped to the floor like it didn't matter – it never had, of course – and Yang growled.

No metaphor could match the reality of Yang growling, and if there was a simile, Blake would like to see it. No words could match the way her fingers pressed, vengeance, into Blake's wrists, or the way her face came inches from Blake's own like she'd imagined in her head a million times but much more threatening and about seven million times hotter. Yang's eyes slowly drained of the blue half of their tint into a volcanic fury that, if looks could kill, might classify as both the last thing Blake would ever see and certainly the way she wanted to go.

Well.

Well.

Well, the slight and welcome pain in her back meant this probably wasn't one of Blake's more lurid dreams, though it might still possibly have been one of her most lurid dreams. Perhaps, possibly, she had pushed Yang a tad too far. And maybe, just maybe, it would be fun to push her just a little bit further. "Is something the matter, Yang?" Keeping up that controlled tone of voice was like steering a lifeboat in the middle of a hurricane, her heart was beating so fast.

Fingers tightened in a grip that was likely the talk of all the titanium girders in town, and Yang leaned in a little further (and here was Blake, thinking she didn't have any room left to move in). "You're going to pay for that one."

"Is that so?" Blake totally-on-purpose allowed her eyes to trail a path over Yang's blazing brilliance of a body, basking in the summer sun. "What exactly do you plan to do to me?"

The way Yang looked at her was evil, and probably very illegal, too. It should have been illegal, at the very least. "What do you think I'm going to do, Blake?"

Yes, make me, take me, do horrible, awful things to me, I shan't tell a soul, what the hell am I thinking?

What was Blake thinking, precisely? She had given Yang an inch and was now staring down such a long and winding road that it was becoming harder and harder to think straight. In fact, it was growing progressively easier to think very, very gay. "I don't have the foggiest idea." She had several crystal clear ideas to match Yang's eyes and succubus smirk, but not a single foggy one, no.

Yang stepped, rather than leaned, utilizing a slightly-too-warm knee to nudge apart Blake's thighs and begin making very new and exciting memories for the young Faunus. The rest of her traveled upwards, pulling her mouth and its warm, damp air next to Blake's ear, pausing to make certain she was paying attention. If she, either she, moved even a nanometer, everything was going to change between them, and quite possibly the dorm room wasn't going to survive the transition. Certainly the bed and/or this wall wouldn't.

"I'm going to leave you alone."

Her presence evaporated like all those lurid dreams at the first sign of sunrise, leaving Blake just about as awkward, confused, and wet. Yang was back across the room, a spring in her step (and her backside, noted that same treacherous, libidinous portion of herself from earlier) and humming that same old tune. For the rest of her life, Blake would remain unable to think of You are My Sunshine without the weather getting slightly damp, so to speak.

Apparently, this wasn't just a one-player game Blake had been playing. An odd thing to be smiling at, given the circumstances, but two heads – four hands – two tongues – were always better than one. Yang was probably worth about three times as much as any of those things

Of course, it would help in their game if the next move to make was more apparent than progressiveness in faunus-human relations. It was relatively simple to catch Yang off-guard, but that was only because she specced for offense, to use a term from that odd game the boys played sometimes.

Benders and Brawlers, she thought it was called? Yang played too, occasionally, had this character who could control all four . . .

At any rate.

Blake took a small step forwards, testing the waters with her big toe. Pleasantly warm, sure, but she could see the approaching waves just fine from here. "So, were you still wanting this book then, or . . . ?"

Yang laughed, and her heart was in it, and that almost ended the game in her favor right then and there. "Oh, no way you're playing this one off!" She stuck her leg out, the same one that had been between Blake's legs only moments before, and the only thing that could possibly distract her from that fact was what Yang said next. "I could bare my thigh in a thunderstorm and it wouldn't be as wet as it is right now!"

. . . alright. Yang had been bluffing, from the look of things. But the fact that Blake had to actually consider the possibility was a practical pair of Aces. Perhaps this one was just out of her depth, then, but Blake believed it could yet be salvaged. "I hear water on the knee is a serious medical condition. You might want to make a doctor's appointment."

"You gonna be my nurse?" Yang waggled her eyebrows, and Blake swore if it was anyone else . . .

"Down, girl." The eyebrow thing was symbolic; Yang's enthusiastic ones were matched by a single subtle movement of one of her own. "I'll have to be your anesthesiologist if you keep that up."

"You're gonna have to try a lot harder than that to top me." Yang's demeanor could only be described with the phrase "she fell into sin". "Or to get on top of me, for that matter."

"Seemed remarkably easy before," Blake tossed the book in one hand – being truthful, she wasn't even sure which one it was. "Just had to start reading and you practically offered me your lap, not to mention musical accompaniment." Keeping at it was the key; and there, at last, was the lock. "You never really did answer why you were humming that song in particular, you know."

"Well, duh." Bluntness was so integrally a part of Yang that Blake had come to associate it with the color yellow. "It's because you're my sunshine, Blake!"

Well, now that was worth a raised eyebrow. Blake would have to start being more conservative with them in the future if Yang was going to be saying things like that. "Alright, I'll bite. What do you mean by that?"

"It means you light up my life!" Yang enthused, as if her own goldy locks weren't substituting for the setting sun outside the window.

"Obtuse metaphors are Professor Ozpin's shtick, Yang." And hers, even if they stayed locked up safe and sound from the vicious beasts known as literary critics, generally. "Try again?"

" . . . you're hot?"

"Yang."

Yang groaned like the teenager she technically was, but it caught halfway through and turned into the laugh that Blake had missed dearly for all this time it hadn't been around – dozens of seconds' worth of the utmost anxiety and agony. Truly tragic. "It's not that hard to figure out, is it?"

Blake noted the blush, shrugged casual, like she was a world-famous actor and the whole world was watching her being interviewed. "Maybe I just want to hear you say it out loud."

. . . maybe that was actually true, come to think of it.

Yang scoffed, and even that had a certain cheery quality to it, like a counter-rhythmic pulse of EDM in a classical music hall. "Or you're just a sadist."

"That too." Some things darkness would only exacerbate, rather than hide. Some things were black enough to stand out against the night sky. "But either way . . ."

Her sighs sounded happy, too – was Yang actually real, or was she some sort of Jungian shadow of Blake's made manifest? "Alright, fine. Blake Belladonna, you make me the happiest person on Remnant, and I dearly wish to spend the rest of my life with you. Marry me."

"Oh, this is so sudden." Blake's monochrome monotone, though untested since her pre-Beacon days, was still running like a dream. "Whatever will your family say?"

"'Get it, Yang'," Yang's grin could have stopped a tank. Well, the fists attached to the grin, but Blake would bet on the grin itself holding its own too.

Blake's scoffs were more like gunshots than music: more precise and deadly, but maybe not as much fun to listen to, barring special occasions. "Are you allergic to being serious?"

"You know how I'm going to answer that," Yang's hands met her hips like the way that Blake's lips wished for, and they tilted in a way that made her think maybe she just wasn't worthy of such lofty aspirations.

"With a smile on your face." And your hooks in my heart. "Unless you can think of something else your mouth would be doing?"

"Hmmmmmm," Yang's was too heartfelt a person to really be having trouble with the thinking process. "Nope. Nothing." There was a trick to Yang's eyes, Blake was sure; how else could they still look so appetizing half-hidden like that? Must be the same spell that was layered over the rest of her salacious silhouette. "Unless your book wants to give me some ideas?"

"After the way you threw us around?" Blake still had her sense of impropriety, after all. She'd chosen to ignore it for the duration of this conversation, but in all technicality. "I'd be surprised if it bothered to give you a second papercut."

"Fair enough," Yang's shoulders shifted; she didn't precisely "shrug." That would imply she didn't care. "How about you?"

"Oh, I'll give you a 'papercut', alright . . ." Blake's anger was a painting, exquisite, evocative, but not actually anything real beyond paint and canvas. Nor, really, was it intended to be seen as such.

Yang, meanwhile, was the dream-crafted critic every artist painted in hopes of finding and perhaps, on lonely nights, imagined inviting up to their personal gallery for a "private viewing." "Looking for an excuse to suck on my finger, huh? Man, Blake, didn't peg you for having a blood fetish. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight, though." In other words, she took what Blake offered and inspired her, against what meager better nature she might have possessed, to soar to ever-greater heights. Closer to the sun.

"Mm hmm." Which brought Blake's thought processes full circle. "Meanwhile, you seem to make a habit of yanking people around. Why exactly am I your sunshine, Yang?" She brought her hands together, book in between, as if by channeling the power of Ninjas in Love she might up her Charisma stat enough to convince Yang to answer her. "Seriously. I want to know."

Yang was quiet for several moments, which Blake supposed was a period of time she should cherish for its rarity, if not its taste in music. Finally, she sighed. "I sort of already told you." She shuffled a tad, rolled her shoulders, let her hair catch and refract the setting sun – maybe that last one wasn't on purpose, but by all the stars in the sky did it look like it was. "You . . . make me happy, Blake."

Oh.

Oh, my.

Hearts skipped beats and skin tingled with sudden bursts of flame and the world seemed to shift on its axis, and still Blake stood there, absolutely certain of what she had heard, and overjoyed. The only mysteries left were why, precisely, and a gentle wandering wondering of exactly where they were supposed to go from there. So, when Blake said, "Pardon?" it was less a question and more a stalling tactic, please ignore the growing smile on her face.

Yang laughed, rich and a little dirty, like someplace Blake could grow crops in. "Man, you're really gonna drag this one out of me, aren't you? I don't think I'm getting a choice in the matter."

"You don't have to say anything you don't want to. Ever." Secrets were things of broken glass and diamond, rare, beautiful, valuable, and dangerous – and you couldn't always tell where one quality began and another ended. Some secrets, released, were just like a poisonous gas: a slow death sentence. "I wouldn't dream of it."

Yang genuinely considered this, if her face was any indication. It usually was. "Nah," she finally said amidst an air of resignation that hopefully wouldn't be polluted with metaphorical hydrogen cyanide at any moment. "This one's been coming down the pipeline for a long time now." She sat down on the bed, looked up with a smile, and motioned for Blake to come over.

This wasn't at all the situation Blake had hoped for those things to occur in.

But Blake made her way over nevertheless, silly sayings about cats and what curiosity did to them setting up shop at the tentpoles of her mind. "You really don't have to -"

Yang silenced her with a look, and now that she knew she had that power, she'd probably use it a lot more often in the future, shoot. ". . . do you honestly not want me to?"

Yes, yes, curiosity kills them. It would kill her to find out. "If I'm being honest?" She heard satisfaction brought cats back. "Yes. I do."

Yang nodded, slow, beginning the clockwork process of whatever this conversation was slowly becoming. "Okay," she said at last, shifting gears and position and possibly the universe, for all Blake knew. Sometimes it felt like Yang was at the center of everything; heliocentric. "I've . . . been trying to figure out how to say this for a long time, now." Like a flower growing from snow, Yang's smile was lovely and inexorable, despite attempts otherwise. "Let me tell you, it isn't easy figuring out the right words to say to a person with two sets of ears."

"So I've heard." Blake realized only after she'd said it precisely what she said, and improvised a quick twitch of her more cattish features.

"You know, when I say things like that, people get mad at me, but when you say things like that they think you're adorable." The flower bloomed. "How is that supposed to be fair?"

"I don't make the rules; I just break them." Blake wasn't sure where these little quips were coming from; maybe from the intense desire to avoid thinking about exactly what was going on here.

It was so easy to make Yang laugh, and yet every time it happened, Blake felt so accomplished. "Oh, wow. That right there is why I adore you."

Blake didn't, wouldn't ever, pressure Yang on the precise phrasing she'd just used. People weren't coal, and diamonds were far less valuable than souls. "It's a gift." She eyed the bed like it was a trap she planned on springing, making note of the precise position of knives and slings. "May I sit down?"

"Plop your head into my lap, for all I care." Yang's good cheer could signal a ship over a thousand miles of water. Blake heeded, docked properly, but chose not to rest her weary head quite yet. Instead, she simply sat down next to Yang, feeling for all the world like she was embarking on a journey – by bus – to a destination – who knew where – that was going to be thrilling, terrifying, and other near-synonymous adjectives. "Okay, so, like, don't clog up the pipes while I'm saying all this, alright?"

Blake had heard, someplace, that if at any point you ever felt like you were dreaming, to check the locations of nearby objects and see if any of them have disappeared or moved inexplicably. This sentence was so very strange that she at this point checked her alarm clock for object permanence. As a side note, it was apparently 7:43 in the evening. "Huh?"

Confusion was contagious, if a doctor's only evidence to suggest anything about the condition was Yang's face. "Because of the pipeline thing?" The sickness cleared up as if by divine intervention. Sheer nepotism, as far as Blake was concerned. "Right. Sorry. Not my best shot at being poetic!"

"Ninjas of Love you aren't," Blake confirmed, as if Yang wasn't her own unique novella of blazing imagery and persistent passion.

"That cuts me deep." Yang looked so serious as she said this that, just for a second, Blake believed it. Then she broke into a grin, and all possible worries were melted like so much snow with the gentle heat of it. "What I mean is, I'm about to take you for a long, wild ride on Bumbebee. Metaphorically speaking. So buckle up and no backseat driving."

"Much improved." Blake took a moment to deconstruct the symbolism. The girl was a workout, both literary and libidinous. "So what you have to say is important and a little strange, so I shouldn't interrupt?"

Yang's face twisted like it was tasting lemons and deciding the best way to describe them in her food blog. "Basically. It's like . . . I dunno. It's this whole huge thing, you know?" Genuine uncertainty didn't suit Yang, and that somehow seemed to extend into a slightly more befuddled world around her, as though she were casting off the offending outfit. "I don't have a clue where I should even begin."

"I hear beginnings are good." The words came out before Blake could stop them, change them into more matching clothing, or at least something suitable for the season, and send them on their way.

Yang snorted, Blake resisted the urge to giggle at it, and the world kept turning on its new off-skew axis. "If you want my biography, you'll have to wait in line like everyone else." She laid her face in her palm, and Blake had never seen Yang actually look tired before, come to think of it. "Sort of a . . . lifelong thing."

"Lifelong?" Blake considered this, except not really. One must keep up one's appearances. "I think I can stick with you long enough."

"Blake Belladonna, mistress of the smoothest moves." Yang Xiao Long, mistress of the sideways coup d'oeil. "You realize you're not exactly making this easier on me, right?"

"I guess I just can't help myself around you," Eventually, she supposed, Blake was going to run out of feet to place forcefully into her mouth. "Sorry. I'm interrupting. I'll be quiet, now."

"Nah, I'm just pulling your leg." Well, Blake had to get the foot back out somehow, and who better than Yang to help her out with that? "Being honest, I don't think I could go through with this if you were just sitting there all shhhhhh."

Blake let herself giggle at that one – of all the witticisms, the physical comedy, the genuine moments and cheesiest jokes, and she chose to reward Yang making funny noises? Matched the rest of their relationship, at least. "Glad I could help, then."

Yang hummed, and privately Blake imagined that Yang was turning the key to her motorcycle's engine, and the only thing Blake as a passenger could do for support was wrap her arms around her stomach – woah. Thoughts. Not appropriate for the situation. "What I have to say is very important, and I don't want to lose track of it or . . ." She sighed, sinking just a bit deeper into her bedsheets, and Blake wondered if maybe there were exercises one could do to make their bodies that expressive. "Or chicken out. So I don't mind if you want to say something, but let me say my whole piece before you start really talking about what's on your mind, okay?" She laughed, coughed, something between the two, and Blake marveled at how even that could sound attractive coming from the right chest. "Man, I sound like a jerk, don't I? You're always a really good listener; I shouldn't be telling you to clam up or whatever."

"It's absolutely fine," Blake responded in a voice like falling leaves, slow and predictable, a gentle breeze with a crunch at the end. "You deserve to say what's on your mind. I'm listening. I promise."

Yang stilled like the words were an incantation. It might have been, because if previous data was any predictor for the future, there was no way Yang would ever go still on her own. Either way, the spell broke into tiny little pieces with only the smallest breath, in and out, twice over. "You remember I told you about my mother disappearing, right?"

Blake nodded. Then, realizing Yang wasn't actually looking at her at the moment, she said: "Absolutely. I wasn't quite so sleep-deprived to forget something that important."

Instead of something like 'coulda fooled me, Ms. Laser-Dot', as Blake had been expecting, Yang simply waited a few moments before continuing, her voice closer in tone to crystal than her usual volcanic roar. "Part of me wondered if it was my fault she left, maybe. I know, that sounds ridiculous; it is ridiculous, I mean, I was like, what, six at the time? Nothing I could have done." She shook her head, like a summer breeze under a cloudy sky. "That was what I figured, and that kind of, sort of, hurt the most. I didn't even matter, when it came down to it."

Yang was clutching her own arms as if they'd keep her anchored to the world, and Blake wondered when she had come under the impression that Yang was invincible. "Helpless," she mirrored, in word and in memory.

"It was the worst thing I'd ever felt." Yang's voice shouldn't ever shake like that. "I wanted to do anything I could to make sure I never felt like that again. So at first I tried throwing myself into looking for her, and you know how that turned out. After that, I realized that . . . as much as I loved my mom? As much as I wanted to see her again? What I really wanted was to hold on to what I had left. And it sort of just hit me that if I didn't want to be helpless, I had to be the opposite." That everlasting smile couldn't be held down for long, it seemed, though it was a bit unsteady on its feet standing up again. "That's when 'anything I could' became 'everything I had.'" She paused, and so did Blake's thoughts. "That isn't, like . . . weird, is it?"

It wasn't a particularly difficult question, but Blake considered it carefully nonetheless. She'd had enough of the taste of her own feet for one evening. "People react to loss in different ways. Some cling more closely to those around them, some dwell on the memory, and some . . . " Have cat ears. " . . . some draw into themselves and shut out the world. I'm about as far as you can get from an expert on what's 'healthy'. But." A million smiles, a million pieces of joy – surely Blake could return the favor just this once. "I've never met someone as kind or as caring as you are. I hear that, generally, that's supposed to be a good thing."

Yang's head ducked away not quite quickly enough for Blake to miss the cherrybomb glow of her cheeks. An evening's worth of carefully careless words, lingering touches, and death-defying stunts of seduction hadn't given her nearly as strong a sense of the word "explosive" as that simple stated fact. "Heh. Might wanna try looking in a mirror sometime."

"What do you mean by that?" Blake's face scrunched up like a failed exam between confused and angry fingers.

"Hey, you're smart, too. You'll figure it out." Yang tilted her head into her hand, and Blake recognized the need for a resting place. "But, yeah, I just try my best to make people happy, you know? Every day's a battle and every smile's a victory; that's my motto. Only . . ."

Blake tried to stay silent, let Yang come to her own conclusions. But the noiseless air she'd always found peace in now seemed stagnant and heavy in her lungs, and she'd never had quite the fortitude to hold her breath. "Giving all of yourself means leaving none for yourself."

Yang seemed to be having trouble breathing, too, judging by the shaky breath. "Some days, I don't feel like I'm even there. Those days, I don't know where I'm going in life or why I'm going there, or even where I don't want to go. I like stuff fine, I like not doing stuff fine, I dislike doing some things, but I don't really . . . know. Not a thing." A hand through her hair, and Blake noticed by the lack of light languishing in those locks the sun had finished setting. "Like, honestly, yesterday, my brain just stayed in bed all day."

Blake remembered the slight slump of Yang's spine, the tired droop at the corners of her eyes, the listless energy that ran like she was a leaky faucet to to nowhere in particular, and worst of all, the artificial way she seemed to snap back to normal whenever she thought someone was looking. "I noticed. I didn't want to pressure you about it, but I noticed." Actually, that was the worst part: Blake was the only one who seemed to.

"You looked concerned," Yang murmured, and the small smile on her face shaped the words into something spellbinding. "Your ears kept twitching whenever you looked at me. I was kind of worried you were gonna blow your cover."

The idea of accidentally ruining everything she'd been striving towards her entire stay at Beacon didn't seem all that important to Blake at the moment. "Even then, huh?"

Yang didn't answer her question. Well, not immediately, at least. Blake was an expert foot at that particular song, dance, and hesitant two-step. "I always notice. It's kind of my thing, you know? We . . . sort of established that." She looked at her, and suddenly Blake was nothing but a speedy-beating heart. "But you're the first person to notice when it's me."

There were, of course, advantages to not wearing the ribbon. For instance, it wasn't infrequently that Blake's ears – the upper ones – got hot, burning even, and the black silk covering them didn't exactly allow for breathing room. It could happen when the weather was hot, when Blake ate too much, when she was stressed, or (most relevantly), when she came within a whisker of blushing. "I'm trained to look for weaknesses." A quick smile and a hand to her cheek should hide her own strawberry sunrise, right? "I figure I should use that sort of power for good."

The sudden, soft pressure on Blake's shoulder let her know that Yang had chosen to rest her head there. It was a gentle, soft notice, the kind that came up slow and reasonably, so as to not incite panic. It was still incredibly frightening, given the context. "Mmm." Blake had often thought she could feel Yang's smile before, but now it was a literal statement, and now it was a spike of adrenaline and errant daydreams of the future. "This isn't crossing a line or anything, is it?"

It took Blake a moment to register the sentence, and when she did, there weren't enough hands in the world to hide the glow on her face. "After lying my head in your lap and feeling your knee between my legs?" She paused, less for purposes of consideration and more for dramatic effect. "Possibly, but I think it's a bit late for protests on my part."

Yang snorted, and the brief puff of air on her skin affirmed she might as well have been back at the wall, waiting for a culmination of . . . some sort or another. "I don't know how I'd keep going without you, sometimes."

That was a cold bucket of water of a statement. "What?"

"Not literally. Probably. But it feels like it." A turn of the head and a brief sensation of eyelashes fluttering, and the world may have stopped spinning after all. "Like I'm a stranger in my own head. Sometimes. I just get so wrapped up in people's problems, and what they think of me, and what I'm supposed to be doing, that I get . . . buried in it. 'Here lies Yang's sense of self; we barely knew her.'" A shrug, like a pebble, and Blake felt the ripples wash over her. "I dunno. I guess that's why I've always kind of been an attention hog. I just wanted someone to tell me who I am."

"Yang." There wasn't much more to be said than that.

"I never really stopped looking for . . . for anything, I guess. Not for myself, or for my mom, or for . . . anyone to understand me. A place, a reason to be, another person to keep fighting for." A warm finger traced a path up and down Blake's arm, and Blake followed it as though it might lead home. "You know, it's sort of funny." As Yang spoke, Blake idly noticed the synchronicity of their breathing. How couldn't she have? "All these years searching, and it's you who ends up finding me. Through the back of an Ursa."

Yang's head lifted, and the loss of the weight on her shoulders left Blake feeling more burdened than ever. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" Her face have must been worthy of a snapshot.

Yang looked her straight in the eyes, and the stars out their window could not possibly have made more beautiful constellations. "I don't need anyone to tell me who I am when I'm around you." She beamed less like sunlight, and more like the ideal of sunlight, perfect, golden, brighter even than her eyes. "When you're there, Blake, I . . . I remember. I find parts of myself that I never, never knew I had. Strength, bravery, joy. Everything that had been hidden in the shadows for . . . as long as I've known myself. That's what you light up, that's why you're my sunshine. I remember who I am, and I know who I want to be. I might not know exactly where I'm going, but I do know who I want with me on the journey." The hand on Blake's arm drew into itself across her skin, and as Yang gulped, Blake truly understood for the first time what the process behind drawing up one's courage felt like. "I'm in love with you, Blake . . . and I don't think I'm ever gonna stop feeling that way."

There were a good chunk of sentences that had been circulating in the back of Blake's head for many years now. "She's actually a faunus", "it's all your fault", "I always knew you were a monster", etc., etc. There was a list of phrases, more a list of charges, that went on and on and on and on and on, and any single one of them, spoken aloud, would utterly and completely destroy her entire world.

But suddenly, like a breath of air and a sky of light at the end of a drowning man's long and painful swim, the impossible happened.

Blake found a sentence that could save it.

And for every snippet of snark and sarcastic remark uttered that evening, she didn't have a clue what exactly she was supposed to say now.

Yang coughed in a way that made Blake retroactively expect a tumbleweed. "Well. That's out in the open."

"How long?" There was something, possibly a dissertation on why the phrase "something was better than nothing" was only an old wives' tale.

"Uh . . . forever?" Yang ventured, after looking around for, presumably, hidden cameras. "I uh, thought I already said that, bu-"

"No, no, I mean . . ." Blake mapped the logic's route in her mind, just to make sure it was even within a reasonable distance of this conversation, before she let herself speak again. "How long have you felt this way?"

"Oh!" Blake had met lamb faunus that looked less sheepish than Yang did at that moment. "Wow, completely misunderstood that one. Uh . . . would you believe me if I said 'no clue'?"

Blake let her head tilt, because, who knew, maybe that would make everything else look level for once. "Huh?"

"There was never a moment where I thought about it and said, 'holy cow, I'm head-over-heels for that super-cute kitty I hang out with all the time.'" Yang's mouth turned upwards as she scratched her cheek, possibly trying to scrape off their red with nonexistent fingernails. Maybe she could do the same for Blake later, if she was going to keep handing out compliments like that. "Actually, there totally was. There were kind of a lot of moments like that. But none of them were the moment I realized it for the first time, you dig? Heh. I don't think there was a single time where my heart suddenly screamed in my ear about it or anything, so much as . . . so much as . . ."

"A process." Blake supplied, in return for one of the many favors Yang had done her in the short time they'd known each other. "Like growing a garden. Nothing is ever really 'grown'. Just growing."

And as if that sentence had completed some impossible task, instead of being a mild observation about the effects of sunlight on petunias and daffodils, Yang flopped back onto the bed with a wintry sigh and an evergreen smile. "You know what?" She asked, in the tone of Archimedes having just stepped from the shower, "I think maybe I always knew. Right from when I met you. It was like you were a part of me, you know? But you were another part I kept forgetting, and I only remembered how to get back when you lit the way for me." A chuckle like nectar from the sister of a rose. A sunflower smile, Blake might say. "I guess, when it comes down to it, that's what I mean to say by humming in your ears all the time. You're my sunshine, Blake. You light my way."

The static cleared away, the melodies revealed the elegant underlying structure, and it was Blake's world that lit up with light and shook with sound. "No one's ever told me I'm 'sunny' before."

Yang sat back up, realizing, perhaps, the task hadn't been nearly as complete as she'd thought it had. "You've got this sort of sexy brooding loner thing going on, buuuuuut you're lacking in the actual 'gloom' department."

Blake barked a laugh, and immediately recognized the irony. "Imagine the world's biggest storm, swelling with its own self-importance." She looked to Yang, and hoped something in her own gaze might communicate a picture through the distance between them. Like the stars in Yang's twilit eyes. "Then you might have something approaching what I was like before coming to Beacon."

Yang was silent for a time. Then a time-and-a-half. Blake tried not to worry about it, and let her work at her own pace. "I adore every moment I spend with you."

Blake had learned a long time ago to make certain she listened carefully to statements with no discernible cause. It was the only way to discern. "I can tell." She almost said 'me too', but this was Yang's time to shine, not hers. Sunny day similes or otherwise. Blake would get her turn at the confessional. "I'm honored."

"I mean it. When we hunt together, it's like nothing can stop us, but when you look at me, it's like I stop in my tracks. Except my heart, which goes all pitta-patta-pitta-patta, but you probably already guessed that." In turn, Yang had a certain narration to her that was all her own, and Blake could read it for hours. Utterly fascinating. "Every move you make, you make like you meant to do exactly that, like you've already got everything figured out and the rest of us are all just trying to catch up with you before you ascend completely into the heavens. I mean, I've never met someone who can say stuff when they're quiet before, but you do it all the time." She paused, and Blake wondered if Yang recognized the volumes that span of breath wrote out plain as day. "Not to mention, you're way funnier than I am."

Blake blinked, as she stumbled upon the sheer disparity between that thought and reality, leaping the gap just a quarter-second too late. Then she blinked again, further falling with the realization that Yang was expecting her to say something observant about this strange pathway she found herself on. "Although I've given up on my days of blowing up railways, for the most part, I'm going to have to cut your train of thought there. I'm wittier than you?"

"I've been keeping track of our little tit-for-cat tonight. The score is 5 to 4, your favor." Then, before Blake could gather her thoughts, Yang gently took them – and the conversation – back out of her hands. "I'm good with puns, but you're good with them too – you're good with everything. I mean everything. You're smart . . ."

"You make the highest grades out of the four of us," Blake said. It was maybe not the best time for it, but she recognized a contest when she saw one.
Yang raised one brow as she turned to look at Blake, and the battle was on. "You kick butt . . ."

"Who was principle in knocking Roman and his mech down about six pegs?"

"You're calm, cool, and collected . . ."

"You're passionate, powerful, and put-together."

"You're sexy as hell."

"Says the gorgeous girl with the body of the goddess of athleticism."

"No no no no, I gotta stop you there," Ah, this was certain to be good. "Look, if Ember Celica and Bumblebee were to have a June wedding and produce a super-sexy-robo-lovechild, you'd be, like, twice that child's hotness on the hot-o-meter."

"A lovechild of Ember Celica and Bumblebee," Blake repeated, if only to give her brain time to reclassify Yang from "sunflower" to "celica"; obvious, in retrospect. "Are we talking about you, here?"

"Well, duh," Yang's voice matched the flex of her upturned arms: toned to perfection. "Have you seen these guns?"

Do not, under any circumstances, touch the bicep, Blake. Don't do it. "Frequently."

"Sun's out, guns out," Yang recited with all the solemnity, rhyme, and sheer, unbridled joy of a young child's poetry recital.

"Okay, but technically the sun went down a while ago." The metaphor sideswiped Blake, and her Mercedes of thought was forced to take an early exit. "Wait. If I'm the sun . . . are you trying to say you show off for me?"

"You know it." Yang could easily have been mistaken for a childhood daydream with that kind of mischief written on her countenance. "What, like you don't, bend-over-and-pick-up-my-book-real-quick?"

Breathe in, breathe out. If with proper meditation one could control one's body temperature, surely Blake's practiced mind could imagine the heat wave rising in her cheeks was only a passing summer breeze. In some respects, it was. "That was a special occasion. You stole my book. Desperate times . . ."

"Call for disparate measurements?" Perhaps it was Yang who was really the more catlike between the two of them. At this moment, she certainly looked like the cat who'd gotten into an entire lake of cream, somewhere off in Candy Land.

And, possibly, for that pun, she deserved it. " . . . a masterstroke." Understatement, along with sneaking, poetry, and gloom and doom, was one of Blake's many finely-honed talents. "Did you come up with that off the top of your head?"

"More like the top of the bed," Two knuckles' raps against the headboard gave rhythm to Yang's statement. "But yeah."

"Well, either way, that was actually pretty impressive. 5 to 6. Bonus point. You're in the lead." But there were more important things to consider than who was winning at the moment. Game called on account of . . . explain. "And leading us away from our prior conversation, I notice. I believe you'd been trying to say, perhaps, one last thing to me?"

Yang's laughs were so vibrant, so colorful, so real, like a aurora borealis, that any attempts by her to fake a laugh were immediately spotted by their similarity to Blake's choices in fashion. "Ha ha ha ha!" Like that one, for example. "No, that was, like leading up to stuff, not away from . . ." She stopped on a luen, face stooping to pick up a smile she'd lost somewhere back along the way. "Yeah, okay. I'm still terrified."

"I've been listening, and I've understood every word you've said. But I have to confess, it's still a little difficult to imagine you being scared of anything." It was what terrified Blake more than anything else: ghosts. Not the spirits of the dead, but the living without spirit. The idea of Yang terrified was so antithetical to everything she was that a thousand horrors – some perpetrated by her own quick claws – were far easier to imagine than her retreating from anything. "What's got you so worried?"

Yang was quiet as a grave, and Blake prayed that there wouldn't soon be raindrops on her tombstone. This was probably counterproductive, considering that statement was entirely "self-important storm levels of gloom" worthy. "The thing I like best of all," Yang briefly resurrected, then sank back into the cold, hard ground. Then, like some mild manner disappearing into a superheroic countenance, she turned her usual radiance up to full blast, rising fully from her earthen bed in accordance, Blake was certain, with some prophecy or another. "I'm getting there, trust me. Just getting a running start!"

Blake felt like the world's biggest fool for having worried. "Take your time. I'm not going anywhere." Yang's huff and puff signaled that she was getting ready for a homewrecker. "Lifelong, remember?"

Yang's laugh shook the scene, and she needn't have bothered with blowing the house down. "That's kind of the point." She barreled onwards before Blake could get a leg up, and tripping was, perhaps, inevitable. "The thing I like best about being with you, Blake, is the challenge of it."

At some point when Blake wasn't looking, Yang had apparently ceased to be straightforward. Something quantum, perhaps, and gosh darn it Schrodinger and his pet of all things had to both pop and not pop into her head. "You think it might be a good idea to rephrase that?"

"Hmmm . . ." Yang drew her mouth into a pout and Blake couldn't help but keep coming back to lemonade, for some reason. "Nope."

"Figured." Sad news, Schrodinger: your cat was dead.

But Yang could bring life anywhere. "There's a thrill to being challenged that's better than riding the fastest motorcycle in the world. Trust me, I would know. And it is knowing, you know? Knowing how much you have to improve in order to call yourself 'better'. You and me get in little contests all the time, like who can think of more puns, or who can kill the most Grimm, or who has the best comeback, or . . ."

"Who can play utter havoc with the other person's sexuality the most effectively?" Blake was justifiably proud of her innocent eyelash flutter: she'd been born with it, lost it at an early age, and practiced for years to get it back.

"Wasn't gonna bring it up unless you did, but yeah, that's probably my favorite game we play." Yang looked over Blake's form like she was eyeing a new dress, and Blake quite suddenly felt very in fashion that season. Frill her up as much as necessary, so long as Yang's body touched her silken skin. "You're really good at it." Look who was talking.

"Oh, and here I was thinking your favorite was chess." Yang's concentration and desire to win focused like laser sights over a tableau of black and white waiting for her to make a move? Perhaps it was Blake whose favorite game was chess, come to think of it.

"We did get to be partners because of that pony piece, so maybe." There were moments in Blake's life that made her days worth going through, such as every time Yang opened her mouth.

But that was enough horsing around. "It comes down to sparring." Blake understood. She wanted to believe she always did, if Yang would only open her mouth. "The games we play aren't just games, are they?"

"Yeah. The games themselves aren't really important. It's just that you keep giving me opportunities to play." She moved her hands like she was building something up, either in her head or clockwork, fragile, in front of her. "It's like this: normally, when I lose a race on Bumblebee or a spar or whatever, I'm pretty sore a loser about it. Stuff goes 'boom'. But every time you pass me you look back like you're expecting me to be right behind you, and all of a sudden, that's where I'm going with my life. Right behind you. Blake, you don't just make me want to live up to you." Another look, like a world where honey might be made from amethyst gemstones. "You make me believe I can actually do it. I love you, Blake. Really. I've thought about this for a long time, now." Stars fell. "I've just been so scared of losing what makes our time together special that it stopped me from telling you sooner."

And there was the point Yang had been getting at for – understandably – too long. "I meant what I said, I promise you that." Blake tried for one of Yang's smiles, something comforting, kind, careless of one's self. "Life. Long."

Yang showed her how it was done. "I know. But you have enough masks to keep track of, and plus, I'm sort of selfish." The smell of warm chocolate chip cookies transplanted into a touch might match the way Yang's fingers, gentle, felt upon her cheek. "I want you to show me how you're really feeling, even if that hurts me, and this isn't the kind of thing you hear without changing how you treat someone, you know? I really wanted to hope that maybe we could keep . . . playing around like we do. Making each other better. Even if you don't like me like that."

The needle of Blake's thought process slid across the record of this conversation, and with a sound like a horrifying realization, Blake noticed that these cookies were, in fact, oatmeal raisin. "At the risk of sounding redundant: huh?"

Yang's hand, regrettably, withdrew, leaving Blake to focus fully on the miscommunicated map of her heart that was unfolding before her. "It's sort of obvious, you know?" Her voice, tinged with that sadness, was reminiscent of a cloudy day after the snow had fallen and the sun was just starting to break through. "You wear your heart like a ribbon in your hair. Trying to hide things with it."

A small black cat of a faunus writing lovelorn words three years ago would have killed for a simile like that. Had killed for less than that, if indirectly. "I . . . have to admit. This isn't quite where I saw this conversation heading."

"I get called a lot of things, but predictable isn't one of them," Yang said, while somewhere in the background, Blake was now wondering how many other of Yang's smiles to her this evening had been so hollow, so false, so leaden with well-meaning false cheer. So painful. "Really, I just wanted to clear the air. Say my piece; I've . . . made my peace. It's hard to turn someone down, especially someone you turn up with. I understand, really."

Blake wasn't sure she understood anything about Yang nearly as well as she thought she had. "I don't recall us ever 'turning up'." There was a distinct lack of anything more intelligent to say than that at that point in time.

"Work with me. Work with the puns." There would someday be a moment unruined by odd sentences and too-quickly turned phrases, Blake was certain. But it didn't look as though it was going to be today.

"I thought there were puns everywhere if you knew how to look?" Like quicksand, Blake's now-sluggish thoughts hardened when struck – though she wasn't quite used to having to strike them herself. "No. Wait. Hold on. That's entirely off-topic, I . . ." This was probably not the reason that Hunters and Huntresses were taught deep-breathing exercises, but this conversation suddenly felt as impossible as beating back the darkness that threatened her entire world. In some symbolic senses, it was exactly the same thing. "What makes you think I don't like you like that?"

". . . ah, I gotcha. Wanna know where you slipped up. I can dig that." She was digging something, alright – possibly Blake's grave, the way this conversation was threatening to kill her. "Knowing I was in love was a movement, and so was realizing you didn't like me like that. You never seemed like you didn't like me as a person – I know you do – and I never heard you talking about anyone else or anything like that. Saw you looking at Sun a couple times, though. Plus, I also never heard you talking about me, or saw you looking at me, or . . ." She laughed, and it was real, despite everything, and Blake wasn't sure she could have managed. "Gosh, Blake, we've tried to seduce each other so often, and you're unflappable. I can't even get you to blush."

All at once, their games didn't seem nearly as fun anymore. "Well, I mean, I was trying not to blush, and there . . . was the scratchy thing," she attempted, in the same way a man at the bottom of a canyon "attempts" climbing.

"Eh, that doesn't really count, though, does it? It'd be like you licking my clit and calling that a victory." A breath of silence was just enough time for this to sink in, and then Yang opened her mouth and destroyed Blake's entire sense of balance once again. "Heck, I pretty much tried that! You didn't even stutter!"

Blake debated with herself how wise it would have been to say that rubbing her ears was nothing like that other thing, and also how truthful. In the end, all she could find to say was: "Was stuttering what you were going for?"

"Maybe call it a last ditch attempt to see if I was wrong. Maybe I finally wanted to win something, say I was doing better than you, show off. Little of column A, little of column B." This sense of resignation fit Yang like one of her little sister's sweaters. Too tight, too uncomfortable, far too revealing. "No, actually, the reason I did it was to bring you back to me. That's the real reason I know you're not into me, because you're not ever completely there. We hang out all the time, and we have fun, but you're always focused on something else besides me. Like studying, or training, or . . ."

The tumblers in Blake's head fell into place with a click, the lock on a heavy, solemn tome was unsealed, and the situation could be read plain as day. "Or a book. Something I find more engaging than massage or song or . . . or you." She could have phrased that better, she realized even as she said it.

"Yeah." There was density to her affirmation, like the entire force of the conversation had been compressed into that single word. Heavy. "I don't blame you, trust me – you've got your own thing you like doing. I'm not trying to guilt you or say you're doing wrong by me, but . . . I don't know. I just think . . ." She shut her eyes like a book that ended badly. "You probably deserve someone a lot better than me."

The silence enveloped them like a numb, frostbitten winter's day.

"I'm a big girl, you know." Yang spoke as if she feared one tone out of line might trigger an avalanche, an eternity of silence and cold. "I can take rejection."

"Is that why you sound like you're about to cry?" Blake asked, as gently as she could manage, and she suspected nowhere near gently enough.

Yang's breath came in shaky, as though she was uncertain there was really air there for her at all. "I promised myself, if I could ever just build up the strength to talk to you like this, then I wasn't going to make you feel guilty." She didn't realize the power she held: a solitary sniffle could shatter Blake's uncaring facade and too-caring heart alike. "Not the first promise I've broken, I guess."

A night of casual, intimate touches, and suddenly Blake didn't know what to do with her hands – but she settled for settling, a palm on Yang's (all too apparently) weary shoulder. "Don't cry just yet, okay? Not until I've had my chance to respond." She only hesitated for a moment before grabbing Yang's chin, turning her head with gentle insistence to let amber and amethyst alloy. It was somewhat selfish in and of itself; she wanted to look at Yang as much as she thought Yang needed to look at her. "Not until it's all over."

Yang didn't respond immediately, searching for something in Blake's face like a desert dweller searching a cave for water. "Sure." A swallow, an expression hollow as a crab's shell with something pinching living inside it. "Right on. Gotta keep fighting, right?"

"I've never known you to give up before," Blake said. Her lack of action had been the poison, so she swore she'd be the anti-venom. "Though apparently you've come into the practice of making assumptions. You might think we have this little game we're playing solved, but you only have half the pieces available to you. You've said your piece, now let me say mine, and we can puzzle out where we go from here some other day." She smiled, and hoped it reached Yang. "Do you think you can do that for me?"

A pause. Like the space between throwing the knockout punch and the ref confirming that you hadn't, in fact, just hit a little too hard. "I dunno, I . . ." Yang sagged to a stop. Blake, in turn wondered if she'd made the wrong move – wondered when she'd gotten so deep into this at-play mentality that she even thought of this as a series of moves. Then, at last, she closed her eyes, breathed in deeply, and held it, and finally, Yang smiled gamely. "Alright. Anything for you."

"Thank you. I hope I'm worthy of your faith." Blake leaned back into her memories, like a warm blanket in front of the roaring fire that was Yang Xiao Long. She'd beat this wintry weather yet. "I've never been much of a talker, so either this shouldn't take too awfully long, or else I've got way too much bottled up for either of us to be comfortable. Still, if you'll allow it, I'd like to sculpt a tale for you just as involved as the picture you've painted for me today. To mix my metaphors." She smirked, and leaned her head away as if the action shifted her entire balance. It was enough of a smirk to do that, if smirks could. "I apparently need to practice my authoring skills, anyway."

"Floor is yours." Yang could accomplish with the subtlest shift in facial expressions the same thing that one of Blake's smirks could, if smirks could. "Ceiling, too, if you want it."

For lack of a witty retort, Blake sat in thought for a few moments. "You know I was part of the White Fang. But I haven't been forthcoming with the details, so far. I think maybe it's time for that to change – just a little bit." Her heart in her chest felt like, of all things, a hot air balloon, weighty and ponderous but slowly lifting. Just how heavy was the load she'd been carrying?

"You sure?" Yang always promised she'd be the first to fall in battle – protecting someone, most likely. She'd never said as much, of course, but Blake could recognize the signs – the self-sacrificial attitude paired with the reckless personality.

"You deserve to know." Blake could make sacrifices too. She'd been born into it, as a matter of fact. And in point of that same fact: "My beginning . . . I never knew my birth parents. In all aspects that mattered, I was raised by the White Fang to punish the Schnee's sins. From the age I could lift a sword, I was trained to be, I suppose, an assassin."

People called Nora bouncy, but as energetic as she could be, "I know you're talking more like eleven or twelve, here, but I'm imagining a four year-old swinging around a black sword and talking about how they're gonna be the best ninja ever someday, and it's freaking adorable," There was no question in Blake's mind that it was Yang who was best able in their circle of friends to bounce back from anything.

"You're not as far off as you think. Make the sword a sign board, and you're right on the money." There seemed to be some sort of sale on sudden realizations, as well. "My formative years were spent staging peaceful, if angry, protest, which explains a lot about me in retrospect, I'm sure."

"Like the flag thing!" Yang had just seen a two-for-one sale, it sounded. "On our first day in class! I always wondered where you got it from."

If Yang really wanted to see what Blake looked like when she was off-balance, that would be the way to do it. Either that or something involving that wall and finishing what she started, but admitting that would have both set the blushbomb off early and put aside any possible chance of them finishing this conversation in a reasonable manner and amount of time. "I thought that was something everyone would do to support their teams. Cheer them on." Wicked words danced on her tongue, and she ejected them from the gathering hall before she quite realized what she was doing. "You were imagining something with pom poms, perhaps?"

"A cheerleading outfit?" Yang fidgeted beneath the idea, and the innuendo was almost too natural. "Actually, uh, I was sort of thinking a baseball uniform would suit you the best. Maybe some holes cut out in the helmet for the ears . . ."

And that was, to put not too fine a point on it, something of a curveball. It was also something entirely off-base from their current conversation, but Blake filed it away for future reference at any rate. "I see." Just in case. "I'll keep that in mind."

"Uh, thanks." Yang coughed into her fist with enough enthusiasm to make Blake reflexively check her other hand for memory-erasing devices. Which was silly. Because if Yang had any memory-erasing devices Blake wouldn't remember finding them after the fact. "Continue!"

Blake gathered her thoughts like seashells, ocean-carried memories of things long since dead. "I can fault the White Fang for a number of things, but child-rearing isn't actually one of them. They provided for me, kept me safe, taught me about the world, and even taught me valuable life skills. Besides the poisoning and jumping around fighting everyone things."

"Like how to seduce people?" Yang asked, very nearly on cue, all things considered. "Later on, I mean. Because there's no way you came up with some of that stuff you did on your own."

It was like a wave crashing over Blake's consciousness, washing away all of her hard-earned seashells. "You're not going to let that die, are you?"

"If by 'die' you mean . . ." Well, if Yang was going to be that effective at keeping things alive, the gentle art of assassination could go die in a ditch.

"Duly noted." Blake would pay a silver dollar not to let that happen again. "And, no. They didn't teach me about that at any point. That all was more . . . instinct than anything."

Yang's gaze was not withering. Heat was withering. Too much starch was withering. A poorly cooked fish was withering. This look was dead on arrival. "Instinct? Really?"

Blake scratched the back of her neck like it might agitate some different words into coming out. "And books. Lots of books."

"I figured." Blake would never have called Yang insufferably anything, but this was about a 9.5 on the smug-o-meter. And worse yet, she was cute when she was smug.

Not even remotely fair.

Still, life wasn't fair – the fact that someone like Yang seemed to be interested in someone like her was proof enough of that. Nothing really for it but to work with what you had. "The White Fang wears masks for a reason, as obvious as it might be to say. Anonymity has always been our greatest strength." Like Grimm.

"Like secret agents," Yang supplied, an invitation to a child's party, written in carefree handwriting. A surprise party, evidently.

" . . . exactly like that." While Blake had long been certain of her genre and embraced the conclusion that had been written,Yang was a fairy tale ending, and worse, she was contagious. Even the Big Bad Wolf ended up alright in the end, when she was around. "But it was more than just a matter of strength for us, which is quite possibly why the Fang is so good at it. Oftentimes, being able to keep your cards close to your chest was the only thing that kept the organization from folding."

"So they taught you how to keep secrets." Yang was going to steal her glory at this rate – there was a twinge, judging by the data between four different ears, that meant she was beginning to cotton on to the situation. Like when she started murmuring aloud at the numbers in their hyperkinetic physics homework started adding up, and Blake had never quite realized the extent of a mathematical curiosity she was. "Bluff."

"And go all in, if necessary." Blake could play the numbers game. She could play a lot of games. In fact, "It's more of an apt metaphor than you may already think it is. Not just poker, of course, but risk and sparring in general. I was too young to understand what was really at stake, in those early years, so they fell back on the oldest parenting trick in the book." Blake let her chin rest upon her hand, an acquiescence to the rising tension in her back as she approached her point. "Everything they taught me was framed like it was a game of some sort."

Yang's nose scrunched, and somewhere very deep down, Blake had a brief but definitive battle with the urge to take a picture. "Like hide and seek?"

"Keeping people from finding our meeting places." With her big toe, Blake traced the old, familiar hallways and secret passages – all different now, she was certain – in the carpeting. "Making and reading codes were puzzles, tactical simulations were brainteasers. Parades aren't really games, of course, but they were close enough for me to take part in the protests and sort of understand what I was supposed to do." This was like finding a forgotten box three years after the moving vans leave, and finding it full of old pictures of all your friends. "And I was good at most of those things. Not all of them, particularly not espionage or the use of, pardon the pun, catspaws. Well, of course you'll pardon the pun; what am I saying? But I was good at most of them. And I loved all of them with all my heart."

"It's how you grew up," Yang spoke like someone who had just discovered an underwater cave system while scuba-diving: with awe constrained until the surface could be reached. "Playing games was how you interacted with your family. The whole world!"

"Hidden sees hidden. It was one of our basic philosophies as an organization." There was a wist to the waste, a purpose in a time of chaos, and even now Blake had to smile at the idea that there was a treasure to be discovered in every word everyone said. "Ninjas of Love expresses the same philosophy as 'Looking underneath the underneath'. We all knew, as a general rule, that we meant more than just what we said or showed." Shame, ever the uninvited guest, crashed the party at this point. "That probably also explains a lot about me, in retrospect."

"Like why you're so quick to pick up on stuff," Yang said, as if she'd just said 'Faunus are equal to humans' or some other very basic and objective truth that Blake was entirely prepared to go to war over. "And so considerate."

If only Yang didn't make such a habit of striking her speechless, then Blake might be able to articulate precisely how amazing it was that she seemed to do so on a daily basis. The incongruity of what she knew to be true about herself and the amazing person Yang somehow believed her to be was such an odd mismatch, like when one set of her ears picked up on something at a pitch her other ears couldn't, that her heart was able to break in and start shooting off bottle rockets before her brain could even begin hiding the matches.

"Yang Xiao Long," Blake was sort of used to keeping her voice monotonic, until moments like these, when suddenly, she was anything but, all daring and chocolate. "You absolute flatterer, you."

The usual over-the-top attitude seemed to melt away from the heat in Yang's cheeks. "I guess I'm kind of making it hard for you to say what you need to say, huh? Sorry."

"It isn't as if I mind, you know." No, she didn't mind at all, as in, she didn't seem to be using her mind properly every time Yang did anything whatsoever. And even worse, somehow, she was beginning to like that. "You're basically the first person to ever say anything like that to me."

"Ah, heh heh . . . wait, hold on." Yang questioned things like stoplights questioned traffic, so Blake braced herself. "You said that the White Fang taught you all that stuff about secrets and games when you were a little kid. Weren't they all, like, hippies and stuff back then?"

Ah. Yes. Heavily revelatory conversation left unfinished. Yang really did have that kind of effect on people. "Well, no. Not really. They were far more peaceful than they are now, but to tell the truth, the difference between the White Fang of before and the White Fang now isn't as wide a gulf as everyone believes it to be." Blake had to be careful she didn't lose herself in her memories, which was odd considering how many times she'd revisited them. "The idea that humans will always believe we Faunus are inferior, the desire to take up arms and revolt, the hate and mistrust; they didn't spring up overnight. If anything, they were the seeds the White Fang sprung up from."

"It's kind of hard to sit back and say they're entirely wrong, huh?" Yang's voice rang like windchimes, pushed more than played, a little hesitant, somewhat quiet.

"Often, yes, it is." Blake tried, as a general rule, to keep movement to a minimum. It was a leftover of a childhood not wasted, but rejected: conserve your energy for when you need it and avoid drawing undue attention to oneself. Here and now, though, turning to Yang felt like something she needed to do with her whole body instead of just her head. "But sometimes, occasionally, you meet a human that makes you believe there might be something more to tomorrow after all. Someone with a good heart, a listening ear, a fantastic sense of humor, and strengths both loud and quiet. But that's getting a little ahead of myself, even if I've yet to get ahead of you."

"You mean all that?" Yang's eyes moved guiltily away from Blake's own, and Blake hadn't even realized she'd leaned forwards. It was an inane thought, and yet she couldn't help but feel in that moment as though magnets were entirely unaware of their movement towards each other. "I'm just . . . trying to be a good partner. Especially after that whole thing at the end of last semester . . ."

"Exactly." At least she was able to fight off the urge to pull a Nora on the end of Yang's nose, instead leaning back to a proper distance. This was supposed to be a serious talk, baseball aside. "I've spent my entire life rubbing elbows with professional killers and hired guns, trying to avoid causing too much friction, seeking to improve myself only so I could, maybe, catch up to them. I suppose on some level I expected the same thing from Beacon." She let a giggle free and, ok, maybe not entirely unlike Ms. Valkyrie. "Imagine my surprise to find out that the best partners don't just work with you, but alongside you. To make you better. On and off the battlefield."

Yang blinked beneath the alluring glow of moonlight, and Blake was struck by the urge to compose a haiku. "I . . . well, I wasn't . . ."

"A bombastic girl," Blake held up her fingers, counting off the syllables. It wasn't really necessary for her, but it would hopefully let Yang know what she was doing. "Beautiful inside and out. She shows me the way."

Yang was silent for a moment – presumably, stunned by Blake's mastery of wordplay and sophisticated choice of words – before bursting out into the kind of laughter that seems to shake the room it occupies. Well, not quite shake. Bouncy house laughter. "Blake, I'm sorry, I'm really touched you'd write a poem about me . . ." She coughed into her other fist with enough force to leave Blake safe from all potential memory alteration procedures, "But you're kind of a dork. You know that, right?"

Blake was surprised to find that hearing this pleased her. She was even more surprised to find that she wasn't at all angry with herself about that fact. "Says the girl who, I'm certain, reads X-Ray and Vav with an almost religious fervor."

"Holy scriptures, X-Ray!" Yang could narrate one of Professor Port's books and make it seem exciting. "You just can't appreciate the subtlety and nuance behind the last few issues. They are masterworks. Like Ninjas of Love!"

Laughter had always been a challenge for Blake, but as Yang had so elegantly articulated earlier, she longer saw challenges as things to be avoided around her. "I'm pretty sure this started out as a serious conversation."

Another laugh from Yang, another opportunity for Blake's heart to run away with her. "I guess I just have that kind of effect on people."

"I know you do. It's done wonders for me." And some things were just too difficult to resist. "A lifetime's worth of brainwashing, and you come along and dirty my mind back up again like you'd been doing it all your life."

If Yang turned any redder than she already was, she was going to have people mistaking her for her little sister. "Well, I can." Yang stopped cold like a frozen brake pedal, unable, apparently, to quite bring the current line of conversation to the halt it needed to come to. "I can definitely say I'm proud of that accomplishment. Happy to be of service."

Blake felt her thoughts align, like roadways and street corners, a map back someplace familiar. If not necessarily the nicest part of town. "I guess I wasn't ever really brainwashed, though. If I had been, I wouldn't have ever left."

"For what it's worth, I'm glad you did," Yang said, in the small, quiet voice of a fifty-foot giant who didn't want to hurt anybody. "I'm glad I met you. You and your unwashed, dirty mind."

Blake was glad Yang was there to ground her – even it was still having your head stuck up in the clouds, even if they were a stormy gray. Yang was a silver lining, perhaps. "I had to. I didn't belong in the White Fang any longer." What Blake said was at odds with the small smile on her face, but they presented the same politics to the rest of the world nonetheless. "The games stopped being fun, but I never stopped playing them. I had to. Instead of being for the survival of the White Fang as a whole, they were for my own." A mirthless chuckle, like an apple from an evil queen. "I got a lot better at I Spy subterfuge, let me tell you."

Her words reverberated like dropped pins in the ensuing silence.

"Uncle Qrow always used to tell me something whenever I got too angry, or too scared." Yang's voice rang like a walk on the beach, slow, contemplative, and careful of sudden jagged edges. "He said that it wasn't what we thought, but what we did that was important." She paused. Presumably, squinting at the sun was involved. "I don't think I really got what he was trying to tell me before now."

"He has a point." Blake was able to get half the sounds out, at least. "When it comes down to it, swords and signs really are all the difference between the two Fangs. Same secrets, same members, same revolutionary zeal." A sigh through the nose, because the mouth would be giving away too much, or something. "Same idealistic, naive self."

"Playing the same games." When Yang whispered, it was the same as when other people shouted, and the echo of it rang in Blake's head.

"You know, sometimes I feel like the least intelligent person on this planet." It was a bold statement to make with people like Cardin wandering the halls of Beacon, but then again Blake wouldn't have even known of Cardin's existence unless she had decided to hide from the rogue terrorist organization she used to be a part of in an academy for Hunters and Huntresses in the first place. "I honestly thought – if you can believe this, after the sleepless nights and threats to our lives – I honestly thought that maybe we were making a difference for a while, there."

"'That's why we're here, right?'" Yang coaxed the words out more than said them, a series of uncertain syllables hiding in caves made from pauses. "'To make things better.' 'This girl's a lost cause.' Basically Weiss's entire existence, too. Man. Right from the beginning." Her voice was a feather, light and airy, but drawn inexorably, nevertheless, to the ground. "Life at Beacon must have been like a million-mile guilt trip, huh?"

"I'm not opposed to the idea of penance." Blake spoke without venom, but she wasn't unaware of the bite. "All I wanted to know was what I was guilty of."

It was the kind of sentence that occurred to people when they were lying in bed with the covers over their head at 3 in the afternoon with all the lights off, and Yang was far too intelligent to do something like turning on the lights. "I wish things had gone differently for you."

"I've lost people, too. More than I can count." It was a stubborn, splintering thought, and a thought like a stubborn splinter. Ignoring it or, on occasion, forgetting about it, didn't change the fact that it was there, waiting to be hammered into the cerebellum like the tiny stake of wood it was. "I promise I'm not trying to make this yet another contest between us, but at the same time . . . it is the truth."

"Yeah, that's . . . that's one contest I'm pretty sure I can go without winning." At that moment, if the way Yang was speaking could be compared to anything, it would be a pebble. One already in flight, heading towards the water, and desperately trying to avoid ripples. "I don't think I want to be part of that contest at all."

"Me either." Blake bunched her fists into the fabric of her tights, wondering how exactly, or if exactly, that related to the ways cats tended to knead at things when they were happy. If only to keep from wondering about anything else. "They didn't die, or leave me, or the Fang, not usually. But every day, we were told, in one shape or another form, that if the humans wished to make monsters out of us, we would grant them their wish. Every peaceful demonstration, every cheek turned, every kind word spoken in place of an evil thought, and we threw it all away for the idea that if we acted like animals we'd be treated like people."

"And they changed." Yang filled in the answers Blake had kept skipping over. Just like when they were doing homework – only this time, the problem was that Blake knew the information all too well as it was. "Right before your eyes."

And always right at the forefront of Blake's thoughts. "It was like a parade in your head, celebrating exactly how terrifying we could make ourselves." The words spilled forth like vomit. Something posionous her body needed to get rid of, immediately. "Do you know what it is when the people you love – your family – begin to make monsters of themselves, and insist on taking you with them whatever dark paths they travel? What it means when images of protest become symbols of violence and anarchy? What thoughts you begin to think . . . when you become convinced that you, too, are nothing more than an instrument of hate?" She paused for the space of a breath, but held her own. The gentlest breeze could throw the entire delicate balance she'd built up for herself out of whack, send her careening over the edge, and destroy everything she was working towards. "Do you know what that all feels like?"

The words drained Blake like speaking a sacrificial spell, all the warmth and life within her disappearing into nothingness, because she remembered exactly what that felt like. It was the dawning realization of a lesson learned a thousand times before, that outside Blake's head there was a world that was cruel for cruelty's sake and uncaring of what smaller creatures it stepped on, and she was just as much a part of it as anything else. She'd never make it out there. She was too kind. For a moment she believed she hadn't prepared herself properly, that at any second she'd break down into nothing – and then.

And then.

And then there was Yang.

And then there was Yang, like a comic book hero, to catch her before she fell, to draw her in closer and whisper that the day was saved. There was Yang, to remind Blake that gentle smiles and optimism might yet win the day, and that kindness was not ever to be considered the same as weakness. Fingers atop Blake's head and gentle humming were what had started this whole mess, and they seemed to be what Yang intended to get her out of it with. Bless her. "I bet it feels like dying."

Blake leaned her head back into Yang's palm, if only to brace herself for the next sentence. "It feels worse. It feels like wanting to die."

Blake didn't truly notice the gentle pressure Yang put behind her fingers until it was gone, and she hesitated to think of an idiom to match the situation lest it hit altogether too close to home. "I'm sorry," she repeated the words, like once wasn't already too much.

The smile rose from something that had burned within Blake long ago. "You of all people have nothing to apologize for. I've made my own peace with that – I'm trying to move on. I want to live. And, Yang . . ." At last, she breathed in, and marveled at how her lungs and heart alike filled with the motion. "I never feel more alive than when you touch me."

Blake Belladonna was one of perhaps three people on the face of Remnant who could claim the dubious honor of having struck Yang Xiao Long speechless.

Blake would fill the gap, she swore, with every good thing Yang had ever done. "When everyone around you is telling you, day after day, that you're nothing more to people than a monster under the bed, you start to believe them. Especially when 'monstrous things' are practically the calling card of the organization you belong to." She shook with the effort of memory, and with the realization of where the future was going. "But you're, in some ways, my reassurance. Sometimes, deep down, I start to believe I might just be some other horror hiding in the woods, waiting to prey on a world of light and goodness that was never built for me. Then you're there. You're holding me close, so close in your heart and with your hands that I think surely, if I were as horrible a beast as everyone else believed, you would never . . ."

Her voice, at last, failed her. She'd never been much of a talker. And evidently, Yang's voice was still failing her, too. The silence in the room stung like a wall of needles, not quite piercing the skin, making movement impossible.

Impossible for her. But for Yang, the impossible was only a suggestion of what not to do.

She moved like honey, a nourishing, golden glide of sappy situations, sweetness, and light. Her arms encircled Blake like an answered prayer, and miraculously, unprecedented, Blake was met with the wild idea that someone might accept her for who she was, ears, claws, and human failings all.

It happened every time. Every time Yang touched her. Any idea that it didn't had only always been playing pretend.

Blake had fought that feeling like some people fight the lifeguard who comes to rescue their drowning selves, but here and now the realization of what she had been doing struck her like Yang's eyes, about to shed tears, and she let her head lay on Yang's shoulder. An exhalation like the world drawing to a close, and inhale like the next chapter.

"'Course you're not a monster, Blake." Yang could light any darkened woods, tame any savage beast, baffle any process of thought, but she wasn't in the practice of lying. That made Blake's heart not race, not skip, but still its anxious beat. And listen. "Monsters don't hug people back."

Blake had started hugging Yang too, hadn't she? She hadn't even realized. Maybe that was just further proof. "I guess I'm the one who should be saying sorry."

"If you have to apologize for that, we're all pretty much irredeemable." Blake felt Yang's smile against her skin, like an endorphin donation.

"No, I mean . . ." All Blake's cleverness must have been used up on witty comebacks and innuendos, the way she wasn't speaking now. "I wanted to say something entirely different than all that, but it all got mixed up between my brain and my mouth somewhere." She drew back once more; as nice as Yang felt against her, talking directly into someone's shoulder blade wasn't exactly conducive to communicating heart to heart. "Sorry."

"Nah, it's okay. That's just how people work – they get to talking and everything just starts falling out." Yang chuckled, stopping herself halfway through, and Blake nearly had to bite her tongue to keep from asking her to do it again. Her own or Yang's? Either. "Unless, you know, you've been practicing for weeks in advance to make sure you don't screw everything up when you finally start making your grandiose speech."

Forget either of their tongues, for Blake had advanced to biting down her own lip to keep the laughter from spilling out. Nothing was funny – everything was funny. Something like that. "And then the person you're talking to can't stop themselves from saying every tiny thing that comes to mind because they can't handle how serious the conversation is becoming?"

Yang could do sarcasm just fine. Where Blake indicated it with her tone of voice, Yang used a sincere tone and conveyed her intentions with body language. "Well, you know, sometimes things happen that are entirely out of our control, Blake."

"Like the way your hand keeps wandering up to run through my hair?" Blake flicked her upper-left ear against Yang's index finger and decided to pretend she had meant to do so.

Yang's eyes widened, overfilled like a flooding pool of lilacs and water, and suddenly Blake remembered unshed tears. "Oh, sorry, I thought – your hair's really – I can stop, if you -"

"No, it's okay. More than okay." Blake took in as deep a breath as she could, as though her vocal cords were operated by air pressure alone. "In fact, it's about the only thing keeping me from having a breakdown right now. If I'm being honest."

If fire could consider something carefully, it might look a bit like Yang did at that moment – feel a bit like her palm against the top of Blake's head. "Alright, I gotcha." A smile to stoke the flames. "Set fingers to fun."

Blake was tempted to say that sort of thing was supposed to happen later in the evening, but . . . "I had more I wanted to say." It was as much a reminder for herself as it was for Yang. "Think you can give me one more shot?" It was as much a request for herself as it was for Yang.

"I'm dying to hear what else you've got to tell me." Yang was going to kill Blake too, at this rate. Her gravestone would read "Warmed to bursting by the twinkle in Yang's eye."

"Alright. I'll make my first entreaty to hold on to life just a little longer, then." Blake's eyes fell more than looked over Yang's entire form, and she wasn't sure herself whether she'd slipped up or dropped into her proper place in the world. "And as for the other . . . could you . . . maybe? . . ."

If Blake was going to be forgetting her lines, Yang might as well move ahead in the script. With slow, deliberate movements like a metaphor Blake might think of when her heart wasn't pounding so loudly as to drown out her own thoughts, Yang brought her other hand down the length of Blake's back before wrapping an entire arm, crafted like a piston but cushioned with pillows, around her waist. The otherwise occupied hand atop her head splayed across the back of her mind, and with little more than a nudge Blake felt herself be drawn nearly into Yang's lap.

It wasn't being a perfect ninja that Blake had always dreamed about with the last part of her imagination protecting her childhood. She dreamed of being a pirate, of being someplace unjudged by laws, man, or nature, of wooden ships and treasure chests and adventures without concern. Perhaps it was quite silly to think of something this intimate in those childlike terms, but Yang felt for all the world, lying against her as she was, like clear skies, warm weather, and the open sea.

"Mmm." It was the third law of motion more than any conscious choice on Blake's part as her arms wrapped, fit, around Yang's neck, like lock and key to the chains that had been anchoring Blake in place. Freedom; that was the crux of it, the crossroads of it, the kisses and hugs or Xs and Os of it. "Thank you."

"No problem." It was odd, the way a statement of magnanimity could sound so much like a statement of gratitude. At least, the way Yang had just said it. "Now that I've done that, what was that second thing you were going to ask me to do?"

"For you to stop being insufferably smug for three seconds." Forget the claws, no matter how quick; this situation necessitated a whip. Bad Yang.

Bad Yang, as Bad Yang usually did, chortled with all her strength. "Aw, come on. You love the smug hug."

"I believe we had established that I was the poet here?" It was the testing toe in the warm bath after a day spent shoveling snow. "I hadn't taken you as a plagiarist."

"I've got a reputation to protect as a non-dork. I can't be seen writing trochees or whatever." And there they were, the jets in the hot tub. Or maybe something to do with friction and silken sheets would be the better turn of phrase. The thing to note was, the agitation was more about warmth and comfort than anything else.

"I can honestly say that amongst the people I call my friends with blond hair and D-cups, you are the least dorky one." Blake pulled over to let Yang's laughter pass by. Pass through. Pass through her by route of the places she and Yang's bodies touched with a feeling like a strawberry sundae tastes. "Despite the possibility of driving this conversation into a rut . . . thank you, Yang. Really."

"You're welcome." There were millions of minuscule muscle movements attached to one of Yang's smiles, even one as small as this one. In that moment, Blake decided she was going to put a good deal of effort into memorizing each and every one of them. "You sure you wanna keep going? We can stop for now if that's what you want. Upsetting you was so low on my list of things to do today, I actually had to move it over to my list of 'things I never want to actually do'."

"I'm sure. You need to hear this, and I need to say it." Blake only realized after she'd inhaled the scent of wildflowers that she'd moved in closer, laying her head down on Yang's shoulder. She looked up to Yang's face and told herself it was an apology instead of an attempt to draw even closer than she already was. "I think I'll have to do the rest of this from down here, though. I'm very tired, all of a sudden."

"That's . . . not going to be a problem." Yang feigned calm in much the same way, Blake suspected, as she might feign cowardice. Without the slightest hint of insincerity, save that she would never do such a thing in her entire life. "In fact, that's going to be the opposite of a problem."

"Good to hear." Feel, really. The acoustics were so extraordinary from this position that Blake felt she could reach out and touch them. Touch something, certainly. Some work of art with a "do not touch" sign attached to it, metaphorically speaking. "Hopefully your muscles don't overly muffle me."

Yang's arms tightened, and she settled back – like she was riding her motorcycle, even if that meant Blake was the vehicle in this situation. Hopefully there had been enough hairpin turns and death-defying stunts for one evening. "Reading you loud and clear, good buddy."

Blake held on for the ride, and watched her thoughts as they raced by, a blur of possibilites. "People give the Ninja books and its spinoffs a lot of flak, but they've always been one of my guilty pleasures." One slowed down to wave, and Blake figured, why not wave back. Maybe she could ask directions. "To quote someone I'm very fond of, I'm going somewhere with this, I promise."

"This someone sounds like an extremely wizened and radiant young woman." Yang's Glynda Goodwitch impression fit her to a T – which, considering her initials were "GG", meant Yang was extremely off the mark. "I'll allow it."

Speaking of guilty pleasures. Rolled eyes and widened smiles weren't typically considered to be matching accouterments, but Blake had always felt that a slight twinge of her ears neatly completed the ensemble. "I found something in Ninjas that was lacking in other books, and believe it or not, I don't mean the gratuitous sex scenes." It was like a stalactite looming just over her head, doing nothing else, the way she felt Yang distinctly not say anything in response to that. "The dialogue is often clunky, and they tend to meander, but I always appreciated their vivid and descriptive use of metaphor. Nearly every other book I've read does nothing but fall back on age-old aphorisms like 'familiarity breeds contempt' or 'absence makes the heart grow fonder'." It was a breath of air – it might have been a sigh, but it might have been a laugh. Whatever it was, it was entirely beyond Blake's reckoning. "I can tell you from personal experience that all those expressions are one hundred percent untrue."

"You're still talking about the White Fang, aren't you?" Yang's voice belied astonishment that wasn't actually there, like someone who had gotten an invitation to their own surprise party. "Them and their tired old aphor-whatsit of 'kill all the humans!'"

Blake giggled, because to do otherwise would have been to refuse hot cocoa after falling down an iceberg. "The only good man is a dead man," she boomed her recollection of their rallying cry, but soft, like explosions a considerable distance away. Sometimes the distance was all that made the noise bearable. "And then, I guess, their plan was for the lesbians to inherit Remnant."

Another wave of laughter like a sugar high, like comfort food. Yang was a bakery made manifest. "Blake, you're absolutely wonderful. If anyone ever tells you any differently, come find me, and I'll knock their lights out. They obviously weren't very enlightened anyway."

There was a dearth of thoughts worth smiling over out there – but that was one of them. "That's exactly what I mean, though. My absence from the White Fang wasn't anything to grow fond over. In retrospect, leaving them was the best thing that ever happened to me."

"Me too." Yang said it thoughtlessly. Not without care or consideration, not harmfully, not with selfish intent. Without thinking. Like she didn't even have to.

Blake ducked her head, smiled into Yang's shoulder, and tried to hold her tongue – if only she could stop wondering whether Yang tasted as sweet as she acted. Like a bakery made manifest. "The way you talk, I'm starting to wonder if you keep a shrine to me hidden under our bunk bed."

"Blake, you are my shrine." Yang's enunciation could damn an angel and, possibly, save Blake's soul. "What time do you open up for worship?"

Blake wasn't quite sure what piece of her was still resisting, but it wasn't working. Not the way Yang could beat down doors and break windows and let the sunlight in. "Still trying to cheer me up?"

"Whatever keeps the gloom away." Yang blew words like bubbles, iridescent and carefree. Ready to pop at any moment. She deserved so better than to be speaking hollow words.

Blake bit her lip nearly hard enough to make it bleed, and oh, to have Yang's lip intercept the blow. There was, after all, still a part of Blake, perhaps feline in nature, more likely human, that believed there was an art to violence. There was a subtlety and grace to any knife, and a dance of expression and interpretation unique to its wielder. But most importantly, she reminded herself as she slowly moved upright to look into Yang's crystalline orbs, there was a craft involved.

Playing ninja.

She didn't need to think about what she wanted to say anymore.

"At first, leaving the White Fang was just like leaving home, if home was a place that used the word 'traitor' and was known to cook with poisons. It was like tearing hooks out of myself and watching the pieces I left behind rot away, a stinking reminder of how I hurt others and hurt myself. After some time passed, I looked within myself and looked to other people, and in those places I found my missing pieces. I began healing. And absence did end up making my heart grow fonder, but not of the White Fang. The longer I stay away from them, the easier it is to keep staying away from them, like the opposite of an addiction." The smile Blake wore upon her face would be her killing blow. "Like the opposite of you."

Yang even blinked in bewilderment beautifully. It would be enough to make Blake envious if it wasn't enough to make her dizzy. "Okay, I'll admit it. You caught me off guard with than one." She smiled like a landmark, something to slow down and appreciate even if you weren't in the business of getting directions. "I know I'm pretty radical and all, but how exactly am I habit-forming?"

Being caught daydreaming in classes where she already knew all the answers was good practice for this moment, Blake surmised. "Around you, I take regular hits of the chemicals 'endorphin' and 'dopamine', both known to be brain-altering and addictive in nature." She dropped the academic act with as much efficiency and debaucherous intent as a night out clubbing. "You're both a bigger rush and a sweeter taste than chocolate, I'm willing to bet."

Yang smiled like an improvised weapon, as though her real smile were just somewhere out of reach. Perhaps she'd been exaggerating before – between that and the short little intake of breath, surely this was what catching her off guard actually looked like. "Says the world's . . . swirliest . . . piece of marble cake. With chocolate frosting!"

"And you believed I got my best lines from reading books." Blake moved her hand to Yang's cheek and began a slow circle, watching with fascination as Yang's eyes slowly sank shut. "But the best part of me has always come from being with you, Yang. Every quip, every move in battle, every good night's sleep and scratch behind the ears." She rubbed her nose against Yang's own, if only because it was just about the only way she could stop herself from doing something requiring much more commitment. "Every piece of me I left behind in the bloodshed, you found, picked up, and asked me if it was mine. You put me back together again. The new and improved Blake Belladonna."

Yang opened her eyes and looked around just the slightest bit. Like a sleeper slowly awakening, and then realizing with a start that they were still someplace they'd always dreamed of. "You really mean it." She didn't ask, but stated, with a voice shaking to match the hand she brought to Blake's cheek. "Aw, Blake. How could I not?"

"It isn't just that, though." Blake treated the touch as a treasure, hording it for herself with a palm as gentle as she could manage atop Yang's own. She'd avoid kissing the wrist this time, though. For now. "When I came to Beacon, I was emptied out completely. Everything was new and unfamiliar, and I tried to find anything I could to latch onto that might be like a reminiscence or a new start, or anything at all besides just . . . gloom. I was so certain I was going to spend the rest of my life lonely, but you refused to let that happen to me. Never would have guessed that gloom spelled backwards was pronounced 'Yang', and yet . . ." A squeeze, a brush of one body against the other like jigsaw pieces testing their fit. "Here we are."

"We're practically familiar territory at this point, huh?" For a few moments, Yang only stared, as if inspecting Blake for defects. No, not defects – clues. Blake was so used to thinking of them as the same thing. Not the holes, but the pieces that fit into them, the promise that they'd work out this puzzle together. "You know. If only because we keep exploring."

"Honestly, I never want to stop." There was so much uncharted territory, because Yang was more than a world. She was a book. Could memorize every sentence and find something new when reading again. "Familiarity and contempt are as far apart as East and West, when it comes to you. And you were the only thing in Beacon that was ever close to familiar. You and your smart mouth." A smart mouth, a brilliant smile, and a tongue clever enough to match her own. That kind of mouth could swallow up all of Blake's fears with a single predator's smile. Including her fear of saying too much. "With a smart brain, to match."

"Getting familiar with you was the smartest thing I ever did." There was an offer, many years ago by Blake's reckoning, to go out for milkshakes. Yang's voice was sweeter and thicker than the most scrumptious vanilla treat. "Although to be honest, 'familiar' is starting to sound like it's not a word at this point."

"It still sounds perfect to me." Blake drew a finger in a spiraling shape – she'd draw how her thoughts were drawn by Yang, further in, collapsing on themselves, a wild rush to a perfectly calm center, and then depth. "Then again, most every word sounds perfect coming from your mouth."

"Well . . ." Color rose, rubies in Yang's cheeks, and possibly it was a sign for Blake to try strawberry shakes the next time she went out. Two straws, even. "I think every part of you is absolutely purr-fect."

"How long have you been saving up that line for?" Blake could bank on Yang being there to make puns. Even if the rest of the world crashed and burned."

Yang's giggle was like a pattern of lights – they were playing a soft, slow song at the local disco. "You don't even know."

"Probably. But what I do know is how I feel around you." Blake knew how she felt around Yang. It was a sensation that had yet to lose its novelty. "I feel like I'm safe. I feel like trying again. Around you, Yang . . . I feel like I'm at home."

The look on Yang's face was the look of someone who had unknowingly lived underground their entire lives, and then, upon hitting the surface, had been immediately struck by lightning. " . . . you mean that?"

"More than anything I've ever said." The dam had cracked open, and Blake stood just beneath it. The outpouring flowed overhead, rather than really from her. "I've always believed that home isn't a a place, or even a person, but an ideal worth fighting for. And as strange as it may sound, this back and forth between us feels more like home than anything the White Fang ever said was true. No matter how much bouncing we do off of one another at whatever speeds and angles, I always feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. Right next to you." There was only one cliché left in the bag – and it was the most basic and truest of them all. "I take back what I said earlier about leaving the White Fang. You're the greatest thing that ever happened to me."

Yang's expression looked, for as non-romantic as the concept was, as though she'd ordered a mild curry and bitten into the hottest pepper in the world. She'd always been capable of handling spice, but the surprise was a bit much. "So why didn't you ever say anything like that?"

"I'm scared, too, Yang. I'm scared of losing these silly conversations, of our games and contests, of moments like this. But most of all, I'm scared of losing the one thing that makes me feel like I might be worth something." It was a dark enough future that even acknowledging the chance seemed to dim the world. Only Yang still seemed bright. "I've always been taught – by experience - that nothing lasts forever. As much as I don't want to believe that, I'm terrified of that possibility." Something in her voice cracked – which was good, because Blake was finding she needed something to breathe through. "I've already lost everything once."

"The memory clogs you up, doesn't it?" The words sounded like Yang had to dig them up from somewhere, all heavy and covered with grime. "Like some kind of gunk in the back of your head. Your heart starts beating faster like it's trying to pump it out, but then all that happens is that you . . . choke on it."

That was what partners were for, Blake supposed. Helping take the weight of immeasurable darkness off of your back through combined strength and understanding. "When everything in your world can become a living nightmare with only the smallest change, you do everything you can to make sure nothing changes outside your control. The games we play are fun, and I don't want to lose them either, but . . . I was scared of what they were becoming, I think. Something more than a game, something that I couldn't quite comprehend." And then, upon the three hundredth swing of the pickaxe, Blake hit something valuable – worth her time. Yang was still there, she realized. Even now. "Actually, I know we were still playing a game, but I misunderstood its stakes. I didn't stop to think about what I was actually doing, how it affected me, how it affected you, or most importantly, why you were going along with it at all."

Yang's grip around Blake's waist tightened briefly, before slackening again. Blake was sure it was a metaphor for her thoughts. "Yeah, but . . . why would you, you know?"

"Because you're important to me, and you deserve more than compliments – you deserve consideration." She deserved a castle and a litany of loyal subjects, but Yang's potentially royal heritage wasn't at all related to the present – or peasant – matter. "And I didn't think. I didn't think about your feelings at all. What I thought was that I was playing your libido, not your emotions. No one should ever have their feelings treated like a game piece. Even like a cute little pony."

"Heh. Such a good thief you didn't even realize you stole my heart, huh?" Yang could steal things, too – the words right out of Blake's mouth, for one thing.

"Maybe you could look at it that way. But I'm trying to move past my past, and put my general tendencies towards skulduggery behind me. Some things are too precious to simply say 'oops' and return, no harm done." Blake's brow rose like a hand in class. After a teacher asked who was responsible for defacing the picture of the Headmaster in the hallways. "And I think matters of your heart are slightly more serious than accidentally swiping a pen at the bank."

Yang dipped her head like she was ducking the thought, but the look on her face made it seem like she was just catching it underhanded."Yeah, but I can see how you'd make that mistake. Pens and your heart are like peas in a pod."

Blake reran that sentence through her thoughts a second time. It didn't make any more sense to her. If anything, it made less. "Really? This should be interesting. How so?"

"They're both tiny, focused on written works, and black as coal." Yang blazed brilliance and everything burned to ashes – if only it were real, and not just special effects. Excellent scripting, admittedly.

"Everything I've done for you, and this is the thanks I get." Blake could have made her voice more monotonic than she already did. She also could have jumped up and acted convincingly offended enough to make Yang think she'd taken what she said seriously. Neither of them seemed like worthwhile uses of her time.

" . . . also, I was pretty sure they both belonged to someone else besides me." Yang and the word "dejected" went together like the beach and heavy rainstorms, and yet there it was. Muddy sand and water in the air, a day-long vacation gone wrong.

"Someone else?" It was like looking away from a movie at the climax to check one's phone for routine texts, but Blake searched her memory. Or at least the parts of it that didn't involve aiding a clandestine organization with their rebellion, which left comparatively little scrolling through her contacts to do. "Oh. Of course." Might as well give this one to Yang, then: her name in Blake's contacts may have been "Goldy-rock-your-face" but there was, after all, a little heart next to it. "I know you believe everything in the world revolves around puns as opposed to the sun, but Sun isn't actually my only sunshine."

"I know for a fact puns make the world go 'round; you just have to keep your eyes open for them." Yang gulped, obviously still nervous. The stars, astonishingly, did not fall from their places in the heavens, and the whole of Remnant remained unflooded. "And uh, I . . . I'm starting to wonder if maybe your heart belongs to someone else besides him, anyways."

The butterflies were back from their southward migration, it seemed. Blake hadn't noticed before, but things did indeed seem to be heating up again. "Pens and puns. Maybe your heart's simpler than I thought it was."

"It's only ever wanted one thing." Yang got that look on her face, sometimes. Blake had last seen it when the girl with boundless optimism was attempting to fold one thousand paper cranes. The time before, when she was buying a teddy bear for her little sister. Sometimes, Blake wondered if maybe the world felt like it was made of glass, to someone with superhuman strength. Potentially sharp if you treated it too roughly. "Just took me a while to realize what that was."

She could turn Blake's perception of the world upside down with a single sentence. It would take Blake an entire poem to say the same thing. In fact. "You know, your heart and an ink pen are pretty similar, too."

"How's that?" Two words. Angel-esque visage. Two more.

Blake allowed the answer to dangle for a moment, like a little red laser dot in a library. Lasers didn't typically dangle, of course, but the mind worked strongly enough in idioms that they became a bit literal, sometimes. Like every word from Yang's mouth seemed like a message from Heaven. "They both make it a lot easier to write poetry." As evidenced.

Yang seemed taken aback, which meant less that she had nothing to say and more that she needed a good running start to get out to the front again. "You mean like haikus?"

"Haikus, sonnets, limericks, freeform verse . . ." Blake gave Yang a look that, previous to meeting her, had only been reserved for constellations and fictional characters. "I'd call you my muse, but muses are fleeting, and you have this habit of sticking around." A shrug, not to say she didn't care, but to say she didn't care that she did care, which was such a new sensation to her she felt she'd have to commit crimes against literature if body language hadn't had certain untranslatable expressions. "You show off by striking pose, I show off by writing prose – and I think we have the same goals in mind. Either way, words just fall out of my mouth around you."

"I haven't caught any of them." Yang said, with a grin on her face that seemed to signify one of the pastries she'd just handed you had been licked.

It took a second for the pun to hit Blake, but it was worth it. "Well, I never said where they landed. Tell me: I used to belong to an underground rebellion of troublemakers whose very survival hinged on their ability to keep secrets. Do you think, if I really cared about it, you guys would know about my reading Ninjas of Love?"

"Eh? Well . . ." Yang had a habit of pulling the corner of her mouth with her finger when she really thought about something. Besides being adorable, it made Blake think about other things that lip could be doing. "We'd probably have turned up something eventually. But . . . no." She paused, like the end of a move in Dust and Dragons where she realized she could play another card in her hand at no penalty to herself. "Not fast, anyway."

"Yang, I'm about to tell you a secret that I've never told anybody else." Well, two of them. But one had a tinge of immediacy to it, and the other a slathering of inevitability. The inevitable could be held off a little longer.

"O-ho." Yang was many things, but she wasn't a gossip by nature. She'd worked hard at picking up the trade. "Sounds juicy."

"Positively overflowing with the liquids of impropriety." It wasn't Blake's best idiom, but everything else she could think of involved come-ons, mostly revolving around the word 'juicy'. "I do genuinely enjoy reading Ninjas of Love, but I don't really care if people know that about me. What I really care about getting into the wrong hands . . . is my diary."

"It's not even hidden, is it?" Yang got outraged like a volcano got outraged. She didn't. Not really, despite all appearances otherwise. But then again, volcanoes didn't pretend to get outraged, either. "You just knew if you pretended to hide the Ninja stuff we wouldn't go looking for it! I bet it's chock-full of all your dirty little secrets, too!"

"Absolutely. And it would be a disaster if anyone got hold of my thoughts. My journals are my friend who keeps the secrets I cannot tell anyone else." The words were truthful, but that was no reason for Blake not to treat them with impropriety. In fact, it was all the more reason to do so. "My past, my identity as a faunus . . . my sordid fantasies."

"And what you think about me." Yang didn't even inquire as to what sort of naughty daydreams she had. It may not have been a common occurrence, but she could be just as distracted as Blake by too-rational thoughts, a raindrop leaving its downwards drop for the slower, more interesting patterns in the leaves it encountered. " . . . poetry. You wrote poetry?"

"I know." Shock. Scandal. Riots in the streets. Cat faunuses and heiresses of the Schnee company living together. Mass hysteria. "Not only am I a huge dweeb, but now you've got physical evidence of it as well. My reputation as a non-dork is completely shot."

Yang tried to hold back her laughter, though Blake wasn't sure exactly why. Maybe for the same reasons she did. Either way, it didn't last for long, and the chuckles seeped out sweet and thick, like sap. "You're not serious. There's no way."

"What's wrong with self-expression?" Plant a seed and wait a season, and then watch the time-lapse, and Blake's sentence might be comparable, the way it started off amused and nearly grew into something similar to genuine reproach. The shape of the tree, though – the target of her recriminations – that was less capturable on anything as simple as film.

"Nothing, nothing. Really. It's just . . ." The last few chuckles leaked, knock on wood, and Yang proved her skull a wooden one with a light tap on her head. "For a second, I thought you were writing poetry about me, or something. That's just ridiculous."

"Oh, Yang." Autumn came. The leaves fell from the tree of rebuke, and Blake lay her hand – upside-down, against gravity's wishes, but lay nonetheless – to cup Yang's chin. "What on Remnant could be wrong with you?"

". . . really?" Yang sounded like a young girl who had never heard of Aura or Semblances, trying to fight against hope with the idea of magic tricks. "Me?"

Blake nodded. She had to let go of Yang's chin to do so, lest she unconsciously make Yang nod too, which would have done quite a good job of ruining the effect. "Of course."

There was a moment where a sword, knocked from a hand, might hold itself suspended in the air, before, inevitably, it would come spinning downwards to land, in accordance with dramatic tension, hilt-first in a living hand or blade-first in a dead body. Yang seemed to be experiencing one of those moments. Completely silent.

"Why?" The sword fell. It landed flat-first, on her head, which just went to show.

"You vibrate at a certain frequency." Blake moved quickly, before any jokes involving the word vibrating could be made. But hopefully not before they were thought up. Word choice wasn't always a complete accident. "It makes the strings up in my mind . . . twang, if you'll excuse the brief foray into country music." Blake shrugged, because sometimes the word choice was a complete accident, and there wasn't anything she could do about it. "I can't help it, I guess you could say."

"Could I hear some of what you wrote?" Yang usually asked for things like it was Spook's Evening, an enthusiasm to be met with an obligate response. Here and now, though, she seemed afraid of being tricked instead of treated. "If you're okay with telling me, that is."

"I wouldn't have mentioned it otherwise. Let's see . . ." Trying to find the right poem wasn't like trying to find a needle in a haystack. It wasn't even like trying to find a needle in a needlestack. It was like trying to find a specific page in a library where every book was dedicated to the exact same subject. With a time limit. "It's not very a good, but I did pen a sonnet. You up for that level of commitment?"

Yang's grin landed askance on the framework of the world, and something shook. "I'm down for anything, so I guess that means I'm up for anything too."

There was a breath of time in which actors breathed, just before they entered the stage, and not much else happened. Stage fright, it was called, and like most things with a name there was a procedure to fight it. Determination meeting nervousness could take on many shapes and rituals – deep breaths, brief chants, a quick prayer or quicker run of lines, everything rational, irrational, but always comforting. There were many ways for any actor or actress to make sure they gave a good performance despite the icy lance of fear stabbing into their heart. Every one was unique.

Blake didn't know what hers would be, but if this moment were any indication, it would involve twitching her cattish ears repeatedly. "Okay." Twitch, twitch. "Okay, then." Followed by a deep breath, and she stepped out onto stage . . .

"From shadows I'm revealed, my deeds all done

In name of nameless fury, and of hate.

But home's not where the hate is, little sun.

You, Beacon's light, led me from dark estates.

My mind, beset by terrors of the night,

Saw fears vanish like dewdrops in the morn.

The sunrise comes, the nightmares flee from light,

A new day for the lovers left forlorn.

A world so cold it freezes every heart,

And yet she is not gelid; no, she burns.

I cannot capture with this artless art

How truly my frostbitten being yearns

For light and warmth, a moment in the sun.

Yang Xiao Long, I say her name, and done."

Opening nights, fickle things that they were, tended to lean towards either uproarious applause and the thrill of victory, or else thrown tomatoes, in which case there was at least something to eat that evening. Here, however, there were no accolades or plant grenades to accept. Only a silence that practically roared, an extremely loud quiet.

But one must consider one's audience. And Blake had never known Yang Xiao Long to be stunned out of commenting on a work before. Somehow, that idea seemed worth the approval of the entire world.

"You really mean all that." Yang seemed uncertain, but not questioning. Uncertain about whether or not to be questioning, perhaps.

Blake looked at her for a while. Looked at her, hair rich and golden as a treasury and twice protected, cheeks like pearls chiseled into a mouth like a gateway. Looked at eyes like waking up in the middle of the night, feeling oddly refreshed. Looked at arms like safety nets to catch Blake after her neckline's plunge. Looked at legs like rock formations worn smooth, the raw force of nature given polish and restraint. Looked at abdominal muscles like complicated machinery, at shoulderblades like simple pulleys, and marveled at the precise nature of proper mechanical wizardry. Looked at Yang. " . . . I don't know why I bother writing it down." And looked away, because there was only so much spontaneous wordcraft Blake's brain could take before it convinced her to do something entirely untowards, which could very well take upwards of six hours to complete. "It all sticks in my head, just like you tend to. You amazing girl."

"No one's ever written poetry about me before." It was the truth, and it was whispered. It was almost as if speaking too loudly would make reality hear, realize it was in the wrong, and adjust.

Blake smiled, a soft dip she hoped would be as subtly seductive and affirming as an impression in a bed from where a lover had slept the previous evening. "I cannot fathom why. You make it frighteningly easy."

" . . . Blake." Yang wasn't always the explosion. Wasn't always the dynamic movement with the shotgun blast and flex of bicep at the end. Sometimes, like now, she was waiting on – begging for – the proper trigger. "Do you . . . you're not playing around with me, are you? Do you really mean that you . . .?"

There it was. The edge of a cliff, and elementary physics. No turning back.

Once more, steeling herself against the sights she knew were to be coming, Blake looked into Yang's eyes, and found herself entirely unknowledgeable and unprepared. Across a gap a couple inches long and a few million light years too wide Blake looked deep into violet eyes, and gathered from the latticework beneath the petals the very workings of the universe. There was a revelation there, one she sensed Yang was sharing with her, and the end of a millisecond's musings Blake caught a glimpse of eternity.

And believed that she, too, might be a part of it.

Impossible was only a suggestion with Yang around, Blake reminded herself. She made up her mind, and it was just as Yang described. All the words just started falling out.

"I grew up in a world of hate. A world that hates people like me, and a household that hates the ones that hate us. My family, for lack of a better term, didn't hate each other, but we hated together, and the hate was more important to us than anything else. More important than who they were, who we were, than what tomorrow might be. Hate was all I ever knew, all that filled my soul." The memories were like a wave and Yang was like a surfboard, and Blake didn't care how awkward or screamingly bad that sounded just so long as she didn't drown. "And then I came to Beacon. And there you were. And you gave me, and you give me, nothing but love." A tear down her cheek. She was leaking. She'd spent so much time trying to plug those holes, and it was a smile that cracked her wide open in the end. "What kind of person would I be if I did not give you the same in return?"

"You really . . .?" The shaking sob split Yang's expression like an atom, with just as explosive a fallout. Yang had promised she wouldn't cry until it was all over, and here and now she made good upon her word. "You actually – I didn't, I didn't actually think, I couldn't – I know that's what you've been heading for all this time, but I just, I just couldn't believe that -"

"Please, do believe." Blake said, looking for wisdom in their pool of shared tears. "Believe me. You're special, Yang. So . . . beautiful, you transcend even yourself, like a galaxy bursting from a single star." She smiled, like a petal, fallen, but still alive, and somewhere nearby, there were flowers. "I don't write sonnets and haikus for just anybody I meet, after all."

Yang made a noise – not a sob, or a laugh, not even something like both or like the child of both, but something caught between the two attempting to combine into a singular auditory sensation. "No Ballad of Ruby Rose planned for anytime in the future?"

"Not even the Song of the Schnee." Then again, if there were any way for Blake to definitively denounce her Fanged roots . . . no, now wasn't the time to be thinking of octaves and rhyme schemes. Even as a distraction.

"She'll be so disappointed. She always wanted a song written about her." Yang was probably talking about Ruby, not Weiss, and definitely not in any state where elaboration should be pressed. Other things, possibly, but not elaboration. "I, I still. Mm." She bit her lip and shook her head, the struggling signs of a drowning victim fighting against the lifeguard who came to rescue them. "I still can't wrap my head around it."

"I'm not going to say anything as cliched as, oh, 'you're the reason I get up in the morning'. But as long as we're talking about how we really feel?" A pause to let the question settle, like suds in the bathwater. Lavender, Blake thought. To match Yang's eyes. "Oftentimes, you're the reason I don't just go back to bed."

"Yeah. Be a shame to . . ." Yang's words . . . stopped. An unfinished painting. Just, nothing past a certain point. Not even an idea. Not even color. "So what happens now?" Except a whisper of white. "Where do we go from here?"

The answer seemed so obvious – plain as the look on Yang's face, teary but hopeful – that Blake half suspected a trap of some sort. "We're sort of doing things backwards, aren't we?"

"I always look at the last page of a book first." Yang trembled, a little. Not beneath the weight of the words, but beneath their sudden absence, Blake figured. The poor girl. "It's kind of a bad habit of mine."

"I think I can find it in the depths of my inky black heart to pardon your transgressions." Please. If mercy was worth its weight in gold, then Blake had a goldmine set aside for this girl who shone even brighter. "That is, if you can find it in your novel soul to forgive me for being . . . ruthlessly forwards with you. Especially today."

If mercy was valued as gold, then laughter could only be platinum – and Yang had apparently found a deposit, somewhere deep beneath the teary waves. "Please. Like I wasn't practically groping you back there." A look on her face, like she'd just seen a shark, and comprehended the meaning of the cut on her foot. "Aaaaaaand I just realized how deep into it we got with each other, oh wow."

"It was me who started this whole thing." Feathers could fall on fields of spikes without significant harm to either party – it wouldn't be hard for Blake to treat the subject with some gentleness. "Too scared to do anything but let you make the first move, too enamored to wait for the game to start. All you did was, well, play along."

"Don't suppose you've ever heard of the phrase "do not escalate" before?" Yang's smile was shaky, but not unstable. Like a gelatin. Except the watery base was a tad saltier, and sadder. Or, happier. Something. Mm. "Pretty sure it was on the last quiz Goodwytch gave us."

"Nevertheless." Blake grasped one of Yang's hands in her own, less to feel her palm in her own, and more to give Yang something steadier to hold onto. But both were good. "Whether or not you're at fault, I know I am. And I should ask you, when it comes to this kind of thing. I should have been asking. For this in particular, I know I need to, even though I'm relatively certain of the answer." This might be the moment that would break their world wide open. One hand cupped Yang's cheek while the other hand tightened around her own. Like trying to keep the planet held together. "Yang. Is it okay if I kiss you?"

Yang's gaze passed through Blake like lightning, and it was only the thought that she'd sparked the idea in the first place that kept her grounded. Then, she broke into beaming, and it was as though every cloud in the sky had disappeared at once. "Yes. Please."

Game, set, match – draw. Blake was only too happy to share the winner's cup. One pair of lips met each other after an eternity sending each other flirtatious emails, and Blake and Yang, finally, mercifully, mercilessly, kissed.

The books had said there'd be fireworks, and they were completely inadequate in their descriptions. This was beyond reason, beyond Dust, beyond Blake's biggest hopes and dreams. This was more than a transient burst of beauty and color, even a series of them; this was a constant, expanding heat bigger than anything Blake had ever known. There was a star, a supernova, touching her lips, and Blake felt like unto a goddess to be able to taste it without burning. How long had Yang been keeping herself contained, superheated like plasma in a cold night sky, to let a feeling like this pass between them now, at their culmination?

The answer was as obvious to Blake now as the shape of Yang's lips. Too long. She'd been too slow to kiss all Yang's tears away. She'd remedy that now.

She kisses even better than I dreamed she would.

After an eternity that was altogether too brief for Blake's liking, they separated, slowly, hesitantly, like a slow-motion capture of a drop of water clinging to an icicle. Their lips separated, at least – their bodies remained in close contact with each other, whispering assurances to each other with each inhale and exhale to do this again sometime very soon. And somewhere, Blake was certain, there were the proper words to say. Somewhere very far away from the look on Yang's face and the redness in her cheeks, which meant it was somewhere Blake didn't want to be right now. But still. There were words.

"Great googly moogly," Yang said, and oddly enough, those might have just been them. One last sniffle, like the straggler at the back of the bus, seemed to be all that was left of her earlier tears. "That was . . . something."

"Something incredible." Blake wasn't sure how she was saying anything without the assistance of her brain, but then again, perhaps tonight had been occupied with altogether too much in the way of thinking already.

Yang's smile broke through, and it was enough to make a lost soul adopt belief in fate and prophecy. Certainly, something of cosmic import had just occurred. "Where, uh . . . ahem." She said, wiping away the last few tears before they managed to reach the ground. Close enough. "Where'd you learn to kiss like that?"

Blake ironed out her face, if only to see how this next line would (dead)pan out. "Reading. Lots of reading."

Yang laughed, clear as a sleigh bell ringing and twice as shiny bright. "I'm gonna have to check out those books some time."

The smile overtook Blake like the sunrise overtakes the twilight. No less peaceful, beautiful, or special – only a different shade of bliss and intimacy. "I can't imagine you have anything left to learn from literature." She licked her lips, whatever word it was to describe the delicious aftertaste to Yang Xiao Long just at the tip of her tongue. "Was that . . . your first kiss, too?"

Yang's eyebrows, not having been used to waggle at any innuendo in the past half an hour or so, evidently got bored and decided to practice their magic act, disappearing somewhere in Yang's (brilliant, golden) hairline. "That was your first kiss?"

Blake shrugged, nonchalantly, paying no heed to how the action was counteracted by literally every other movement of her body at that point in time. Including her right hand, which had splintered off from the rest of Blake's organization and begun setting up territories along Yang's back. "Well, every time I met someone cute in the White Fang and found we had a lot in common, they'd start talking about how they planned to blow up a train or kidnap someone or take over the kingdoms and crush humanity beneath their heel. Things would kind of fall apart after that."

"Guess I'd better reschedule that heist I had planned for Friday, then." Yang constructed sentences like shelters, warm, safe, cozy and entirely unexpected in the life of a runaway like Blake. A place where people could laugh and mean it.

And laugh Blake did. At least, until there was a gentle tug at Blake's hips, and then she stopped to vocalize something different. With a noise like a drunken finger over the rim of a wineglass, she let Yang bring her in even closer. Not that she was certain how Yang managed to find room to bring her closer – not that she was complaining. "Another heart stolen by the infamous Long gang?"

"Like you're stealing my lines?" Yang could give looks like aphrodisiacs, like romantic evenings over candlelit dinners, or worse yet, like the one she was giving now – looks like she thought the world of Blake. "And you go around calling me a plagiarist."

"Or stealing glances." Blake drew the tips of her claws across the back of Yang's neck, appreciating the wine red echo Yang met her ministrations with. A single note that could carry an entire lullaby. "It's hard to be original when you have eyes like an amethyst universe enveloping you."

"'I take back the 'dork' thing," Yang's voice was pitched like slow jazz in a smoky, private room. "It's actually really hot when you write poetry."

There were entire romantic sonnets written by some of the greatest poets who ever lived that Blake would pay less attention to than a single sentence like that from Yang Xiao Long. Sentences like that, especially spoken that close, were crashing lips and possessive marks just waiting to happen. Sentences like that . . . "Sentences like that make me want to write more poetry."

Yang beamed like the stars reaching down to touch the surface, and Blake realized belatedly that it wasn't only a clear blue sky, but the whole context of every sky she'd ever seen at the curl of Yang's lip, the crinkle of her eye. "You're poetry incarnate."

"You're going to get yourself in a lot of trouble, one of these days." Blake let her knuckles move like oils over the warmth at Yang's cheek, if only to watch the explosions left in their path.

"Thrillseeking's what I live for, Blake." Yang whispered, and the sudden drop left Blake dizzy, breathless, and not thinking entirely clearly. "So why don't you tell me what kind of trouble you had in mind?"

Blake knew then that she and Yang were one misstep, one clever tongue, one song and dance away from doing something entirely too hasty and entirely too overdue. She'd have to choose her words as carefully and lovingly as Yang was stroking her leg. "You never did answer my question about whether that was your first kiss, you know."

That . . . wasn't what Blake meant to say. That . . . was a trainwreck. That was a disaster. That was just like her.

"Huh? Oh!" Yang was too busy recovering her sense of direction to notice that Blake was attempting not to bury her face in her hands. At least, Blake hoped. "Well. Kind of."

It was like angrily slamming a door only to find it made a squeaking sound upon impact. "Kind of?"

"Kind of not." It would have been an infuriatingly vague answer if it wasn't, in all honesty, what a question like the one Blake had posed at that specific point in time deserved.

"I wasn't aware kisses were quantum; uncertain until observed." The mystery of Schrodinger's cat was solved: it could revive itself.

"Well, okay, if you want to be extremely literal about it, then I've been kissed a few times before. It's just . . ." Then Yang was leaning in close again, finger tilting up Blake's chin to make their eyes meet, smirking like checkmate, and somewhere in all of it Blake forgot how precisely to breathe. And then Yang spoke again, and the timbre of her voice put breath and life back in her. "It's just, after the way you did it, I'm kind of wondering if any of that stuff even counts as kissing."

It was official. If Blake was ever in charge of choosing a disaster relief team, Yang Xiao Long would be relieving her of command immediately.

"Was . . . was I really that good?" Blake was too high on cloud 9 to be doing anything like grounding her thoughts.

Yang's eyes softened, heated, like gemstones melting into magma. "It wasn't so much your technique as you just being yourself. But yeah."

Blake's pulse pounded like fluttering eyelashes and sweet nothings, more speed than force, a reminder that she was yet alive. "I suppose I'll improve with experience."

"Here." Yang cradled Blake's face with both hands, and the rest of the world suddenly decided to give them some privacy. "Let me give you some pointers."

Yang kissed Blake – they didn't kiss each other. Blake kissed back, certainly, but it was like attempting to hug a wave. You couldn't hug more or harder than it could, even if you got an armful.

But this was more than a wave. It was an enveloping twist, a circle and stab, a calm desperation with no care for oxymoron. It was re-entry, hot, a roller coaster, wild, a cannon, unstoppable. It was all of what Yang Xiao Long was, concentrated into a singular point, transcending Blake's defenses, a divine revelation. It was all Blake could do to groan in response, to twine her arms with Yang and attempt to keep her from leaving too soon, to let her eyes fall shut and her ears droop to shut out anything that wasn't the girl she was kissing. It was a loss of control.

It was heaven.

It was, again, over far too soon.

Yang moved away like the perfect words forgotten between the bus stop and the writing desk, and Blake groaned at the injustice. How dare she do that. How dare she give Blake a sense of self-esteem, an idea that maybe she deserved Yang, and then . . . and then tease her like that, all sensuous curves and clever tongue and troublesome ideas. How dare she be the most beautiful thing on the planet, like an oasis, and the world was a desert. How dare she change Blake's life for the better and make promises about the future like she wasn't already overwhelmed with ecstatic fulfillment.

How dare she make Blake fall in love, forever.

But most of all, how dare she stop kissing Blake.

And as though clairvoyant, Yang smirked, eyes hooded, breath heavy, like every idle daydream Blake had ever chastised herself for having. "Think you've got the gist of it?"

"Yeah, okay. I think I get it. " Blake's next sentence was a painting. Not a masterpiece, but a necessity, a splatter of color when shape and form could not express the proper emotions. "You don't mind if I practice, do you?"

Then Yang was smiling against her lips, and everything was right with the world.

Well, almost everything. The only thing wrong was the niggling feeling at the back of Blake's brain – the part where she kept her psychosis, darkest fantasies, and collection of stray thoughts she'd never share with the world – that told her she could be doing better. Only thing to do about that was start pressing back.

Like Blake hadn't been doing so already for the last couple months.

And like the last couple months, she was met with nothing but filthy encouragement, hands like the most comfortable pair of magnets insisting on attempting to meet somewhere at the center resting on her hips and pulling forwards, because Yang was quick and delightful and knew what Blake wanted, and Blake rested her own hands like, she was sure, begging questions on Yang's shoulders, because she was intelligent and knew she needed a lot of leverage if she wanted to be doing something like moving the entire world, and they kissed with the intensity of an empty night sky burning with the sudden rush of heat and light that was the sunrise, and morning had come, and the mourning was over, and Blake felt so alive.

There were probably things out there that felt better than Yang's lips moving in concert with Blake's own, but Blake couldn't even begin to guess what they were. Something about the way Yang kept smiling against Blake's breath seemed to say that she would be finding out later tonight, though.

Yes. That sounded incredible.

They kept kissing, the sensation strong enough to knock Blake into next week. And next month. Next year. Three years from now, further, all the way into eternity. Blake felt it, the kiss, but she felt somewhere within her the echo of every kiss they might share. The tops of rollercoasters, wind in her hair, or replacing that wind with water, a kiss in the rain. Sunlit beaches for a background, or in front of their graduating class of Hunters and Huntresses, a photo for the local news and the yearbook and definitely the wide world of the net. Slow, sensual kisses existed in the same space, for just a moment, as quick teases at parties, as kisses hello and goodbye, as good lucks and aftershocks and all the moments in between. Every single kiss possible flashed at the forefront of Blake's mind.

And then Yang licked her lips, and all of a sudden, Blake was shoving all those memories out of the way so she could have some privacy, for once in her life, hello, yes, please, she opened her mouth and groaned like her hinges were creaking to do so, and, what else, returned the favor. Or retaliated. One of the two. Maybe both. Probably both.

Palms were pressing further into her skin, and Blake had never hoped for bruises before in her entire life.

Like two vines intertwining around each other were their tongues, the lines between cooperation and competition blurring and shifting at iceberg speeds of deceptively slow quickness as they each sought for dominance one moment and protection the next. Or perhaps they were like slightly misshapen gears, drawing out metallic moans of effort, shaping each other through sheer dint of force into the shapes they each needed to be. Or maybe they were like opposing armies, full of banners and passion, or a secret meeting giving coded messages to each other, or maybe like a billion different things clipping through Blake's mind at a speed she never imagined possible, like light given incentive, like the computational power given to the brain when letting an imaginary friend do some of the thinking, like an infinitely thin razorblade, a thought's edge, pressing into her where one tongue touched the other, and Blake reached out for more, more, mor-

"Ow!"

It was a sentence like a bookmark, in that it signaled the stopping place, as well as a good one to continue, later on, when people weren't screaming for you in the metaphorical kitchen of life.

"I'm so sorry!" The connection was as instantaneous and clearheaded as one of her kisses with Yang wasn't, especially because one of her kisses with Yang was the problem in the first place. Which sounded like a ridiculous sentence – like saying too much tuna fish or too much money or too much Yang in general was somehow a problem – and yet: "M-my tongue's rough, in some places, and, oh Dust, I completely forgot to warn you about that!"

"Hey, it's fine." Some people had winsome smiles. Yang had a win-all smile. "I know you're used to moving your tongue quickly. Trust me, I really want to keep going." Yang put her finger up to her lips while she pouted, and her cheerfulness put on a nun's habit in order to disguise itself. "Just be more gentle with me, ok?"

"I'll show you 'gentle'." It was a tone like untying a black ribbon, revealing a secretly bestial feature. Or, at least, that was what Blake was going for.

"I was really hoping you'd say that." Yang's eyes hooded in such a way as to make Blake wish that hood was the only thing she was wearing. "No, but seriously, maybe ease off the throttle a bit? I know that sounds sort of out of character for me to say, but I'm pretty sure that a profusely bleeding anything is not conducive to . . . whatever it is we're going for here tonight."

"Absolutely." Blake tried to wrap her head around the idea of "whatever it is", but she kept imagining Yang's thighs being wrapped around her head instead. That was a picture with staying power. "Besides, hurting you is the last thing I ever want to do."

"Huh. Here I figured you'd be all about the kinky stuff." The gleam in Yang's eyes almost lit her up well enough for Blake to see the thoughts behind them. Vaguely shaped like noisemakers and party favors.

"I think we can safely save whips, chains, and dressing up in ways society as a whole would probably frown upon for some other dark and not-so-lonesome night." Blake twisted the words on her tongue, like tying a knot in a cherry stem. And on that note. "For now . . . let me try that again."

"Anytime." Yang's tongue could tie knots in cherries, too. Yang's tongue could probably tie knots in cherry soda.

Soda fizzed, of course, but this time Blake didn't let the carbonation go to her head. This kiss was a test of the emergency liplock system, not a ravenous exercise in seeing who said "ow" first. In point of fact, this kiss, slow tongue probing centimeter by centimeter into Yang's open mouth like it was exploring a cave, was specifically designed to avoid that word by any means necessary.

Even restraint, the most hated means of all.

"Not too rough still, is it?" Blake's voice was full of concern, yes, but it was more like a concerned pinata than anything else. Someone would have to break it open to get any real emotion out of it.

" . . . I actually kind of like it." Yang looked down at her mouth like she'd asked it a question and was surprised by the answer. "Like, I went to a spa once for my birthday, and I got this really great deep-muscle shoulder massage? I know it's a weird way of putting it, but it sort of feels like that for my tongue."

"Hmm. You never struck me as the type of girl to enjoy being pampered." And Blake had been struck by a lot of things, when it came to Yang. Thoughts crashing like cars all around, lips crashing like stars hit the ground . . . there was a song in it somewhere, but there was a song everywhere in Yang.

"I take good care of my body, thank you very much." Yang's face turned from silly to seductive as fast as she expected their first date was going to go. Assuming it hadn't already happened somewhere up the line, of course. Things were so mixed up. "I could take good care of yours, too, if you wanted."

"Tempting." Very tempting, actually. It would be very easy – lie back, close her eyes, smile a bit, and nod, and Blake could let Yang take her wherever either of them wished to go. But the easy way wasn't always the right way, and the best things were worth putting effort into. Yang was one of those best things. Blake planned on a lot of "effort". "But didn't you once tell me that there was a difference between slowing down and giving up?"

"So slap some slow-motion sugar on me." Yang's lips pursed, ready to enclose valuables, and her eyes knapsacked, ready to head out on adventures, and her eyebrows raised, not like anything in particular but certainly enough to make Blake laugh, and enough to make her lean in close, but then, that was everything Yang did.

"One dollop of whipped cream, coming right up." The last few words were spoken nearly against Yang's lips, and if there were a better metaphor for flirting with death, Blake wasn't sure what it was.

It was like flirting with death, because this kiss felt like a meteorite impacting the world, landing first of all, besides the atmosphere, on Blake's head. It was a powerful, ginormous thwack of unknown and unknowable feelings, certainly, but the main thing was, Blake could see it coming. Begin to prepare.

The first few kisses had been something like near-death experiences, too, but more the moments themselves than the buildup. A sense of separation from the self, a blinding ecstasy, an indescribable idea that everything was finally going right for once, and all the while there finally found Blake's place in the world, only for her to realize that her place in this world was a place somewhere outside normal day-to-day life. Heavenly, in a word.

There was a joke in there somewhere about Yang being divine, but Blake was a little too busy being smooched to articulate exactly what it was.

But this kiss was a tad different. Or rather, it was the same, but Blake had been adjusted to fully experience it. Before, the brilliance, the orchestrated performance, had blinded and deafened her, and all she could feel or smell or taste was a sort of flurry she could only define as Yang. Or, more accurately, Yang, Yang, YangYangYangYangYangYangYang. But the novelty had worn off, leaving only the excitement, the ecstasy, the warmth, the softness, the acceptance, the exploration, and the unbridled sense of joy behind, which left just enough mental space for Blake to recognize that she, in fact, existed. And, more importantly, what Yang was doing to her at that moment.

Yang's nose brushed up against her own like a surreptitious romance novel, a passerby at a party and a wandering hand to match a wandering eye. Her hair tickled the edges of her face, as if to illustrate precisely how ridiculous that thought was, even if it was true. Her arms held Blake so tight, so close, it was as if she needed to check and make sure Blake was still there. And her lips . . .

. . . Yang apparently thought Blake would enjoy her sucking on her lower lip. She was absolutely correct.

If there was anything to compare it to, besides an out-of-body event, it would be a sense of battle awareness, which was of course directly related in any case. The first few battles, if a person had good instincts, they survived and figured out what they did later on after their recovery nap and three plates of food. After that, they began to understand a little about what they were doing.

After that, you could begin thinking about the best way to approach things.

Blake moved most of her hand away from Yang's back – a single finger left on lookout – and followed the path of Yang's spine to its inevitable end, cupping the back of her head gently, but firmly, as though holding an egg with the potential to end the universe. She leaned Yang's head just a tad to the right, tilted her own left, and managed to find the one point where the angles met, so she could deepen the kiss – if such was even possible, at this point.

Yang's shaky moan in response was almost enough to send her heavenwards again.

Blake gave Yang a smile, and felt her return the gift in kind.

And then Yang's hands moved to Blake's shoulders, she pressed her own body up against Blake's, and perhaps there was only so much gift-giving Blake could handle in a single evening.

But it wasn't like generosity, and it wasn't like a battle, either. It was like dancing, more than anything. There was no competition – not really, even if Yang kept stealing away the position of lead and Blake kept swiping it back – only the ebb and flow, the request and response, the quick darting movements that slid without apparent transition into the graceful dips and curls that brought vision and feeling to the song dancing in their heads. Yang pressed into Blake's body – inside partner step. Blake hooked her leg around Yang's hips – a gancho, perhaps, or a lock step. The swirl of Yang's tongue around Blake's and the answer of Blake's eager lips blurred with Yang's hand (not just her fingers, but her whole hand) tangling in Blake's hair, with Blake's fingers hooking just a centimeter under fabric, she wasn't sure where, time was meaningless, only the tempo mattered, it was as though they were dancing underwater, weightless and careful and free.

Which meant, eventually, they were going to have to come up for air.

It took a bit of convincing on Blake's brain's part – I know this seems like a pretty awesome way to die, but if you let yourself breathe, you can get way more kisses later – but they did finally separate, drinking more than inhaling the air as Blake's gaze looked around the room for something more interesting to gaze at than the apple of her eye – fruitlessly. Blake wasn't ashamed; the problem was in fact the opposite: she was too eager. They'd start the whole business over again if she let herself look too soon.

But eventually, once she'd managed to reduce her air intake to small sips, looking was what she did. It was like staring at her own reflection, if looking in a magic pool that made every aspect of herself more wonderful and beautiful. Swollen lips, clothing slightly askew (especially her coattails; apparently that's where Blake's fingers had scurried off to), hand over heart and eyes shining as though lit up from within, Yang looked at her like . . . like . . .

Well, like she was uncertain. Not unhappy – no one with that kind of smile could be unhappy, and anyone with that kind of blush was right out – but uncertain.

"You look pensive." That was a good word, though Blake wasn't sure where it came from. Her brain sure didn't seem to have come up with it.

If a wine snob dropped the snob, rolled down a hill covered in sunflowers, and picked up a loving selflessness, they might somewhat resemble what Yang looked like at that moment. "I'm trying to put my fing – erm, my tongue on how you taste." Blake had never thought that someone smacking their lips could be found sexy, and yet eroticism demanded Yang make several repeat performances. "Kind of like . . . not coffee. Related to coffee. Coffee beans' . . . way hotter older sister."

It was not the first time Blake had been compared to a plant, but usually the phrasing involved wallflowers. Or, well, the deadly nightshade. Usually the second one, actually. "Is the word you're thinking of 'mocha'?"

"Blake. Don't degrade yourself like that." Coffee snob it was, then – or at least, as much of one as Yang could pretend to be without frothing into laughter. "I mean, there's nothing wrong with milk and sugar – I like a caramel macchiato as much as the next girl - but nothing compares to the sophistication of pure black coffee." Her voice began dropping, and heating, and deepening, like a slow elevator ride with the proverbial cute blonde from accounting. Ah, Ninjas of Love. "Dark, steaming, rich in taste and texture . . ."

"Bitter?" Blake couldn't resist jabbing the Emergency Stop button.

"Nothing extra needed. Just you." Yang smiled like she was showing off an engagement ring, all beating hearts and far-off thoughts. It was enough to make Blake wonder at her warming warning - how could degradation be possible when Yang looked at her like she was the world's most personally precious gemstone? "Although, truth be told, I wouldn't mind a little 'cream' in my coffee . . ."

That line shouldn't have worked. Boy, did it ever. "I'm glad you're drinking this all up, then." The doubt coiled in her heart like a rattlesnake, an agitating sound filling her mind. "You . . . like the way I taste?"

Yang killed Grimm for a living, and she was good at her job. "I'm thinking of a word that starts with the letter 'e'. Guess what it is!" One little snake didn't stand a chance.

Blake giggled into her hand, like the schoolgirl she always tried to deny to herself she actually, genuinely was. "I'm hoping you're thinking of 'ecstatic' and not 'eeeew'."

"I was actually thinking of 'energizing' to go with the whole coffee thing." Sometimes, occasionally, Yang managed to say something to convince Blake all over again that she wasn't just an idealized figment of her imagination. "But 'ecstatic' is way closer to how I feel right now, so good job!" Yang's gaze dipped down to Blake's lips like a dumbbell released, and Blake noted the slow effort of them coming back up again. "Is it okay if I ask . . .?"

"How you taste?" Blake colored the question with rouge, or, really, colored the rouge with the question. "Hmmm. I'm not sure how to describe it. I think I might need another sample before I make up my mind."

Yang, Blake was beginning to notice, treated kisses like promises: easily and cheerfully given, enough so that it always caught her off guard how seriously she took them. It was about all she could notice through the thick haze of hormones, warm arms, and tiny gasps, but it was something, nonetheless.

"Think you've got the picture in your head, now?" Yang asked, once the Dust had settled. Not dust, but Dust, the crystalized potentiality. Dust which, Blake vaguely remembered, was an intoxicant when inhaled in large doses. And, Dust.

"That depends." There was, of course, such a thing as playing coy, but there was also such a thing as playing with fire. Then again, "playing with fire" basically described every single one of Blake's interactions with Yang over the past two months, if not even longer. And Blake had yet to be burned. "What was the question?"

Yang laughed, and kissed Blake again, and it was impossible to choose which one was more important or more wondrous. "Tell me what I taste like, Blakey."

Between the lingering gaze over Yang's entire form, the fingers tapping against her own lips, and the slow, lustful smirk, Blake was sure she was doing absolutely everything she could to titillate without actually touching Yang. Though if something else occurred to her . . . "I don't think I can really call it a taste. Saying there's a taste implies that I don't feel it in my whole body."

Yang's fingers skimmed across Blake's stomach, and there was the burning – but not the pain. Only the heat, only the licking flames, only the smoky look in Yang's eyes. "Believe it or not, Blake, I know you're teasing me. You'd better be a lot more careful about trying to distract me." And then her lips were at Blake's lower-left ear, and the devil on her shoulder could sit there and observe, because clearly it was only a rank amateur. "It might work."

Blake curved backwards, like a bowstring, and words like Cupid's arrows came wondrous and unbidden to her brain, from her heart. "There's a feeling I get before I go into battle, or an exam of some kind." Her voice was small, just wide enough to traverse the gap between them, as if she was trying to keep a secret from the rest of reality.

"What kind of feeling?" Yang asked, the only star in a smog-choked sky.

"It's this tingling, electrical sensation. All over me, like a second skin. It's like being on a tightrope over a sheer drop – but not because I'm scared of falling. I've never been much of a thrillseeker, after all." Not until recently, anyway. Not until her golden opportunity to indulge Yang's fantasies, and her own. "I'm eager. I'm ready. I know I'm too . . . I'm too good to fall. I know I'm worth the life I've been given. I am certain that those moments, where I feel sparks over my skin, are the moments I prove I'm worth something. Those are the moments where I get to stop hiding in the shadows and step into the light. Those are the moments where I do something incredible." Like the period at the end of a chapter, a gentle touch nonetheless indicating the largest possible pause, Blake straightened back up, placing her hands on Yang's shoulders and touching her forehead to Yang's own. "Are you with me so far?"

"I'd follow you anywhere." Hesitation had never been one of Yang's qualities, but that moment, that sentence, was proof enough for Blake that she was still, somehow, in the habit of holding back. The world must have seemed like half-tempo to her, Blake realized, and her heart skipped a beat to think on that idea that maybe she was the only one capable of playing at the same speed.

"Imagine that feeling. Focus it." Blake commanded no more of Yang than she would ask of herself. She fit as much of that feeling as she could into that sentence, compressed it into a black hole of a command, inevitable with gravitas. Almost as inevitable as the closing distance between them. Almost as inevitable as . . . where was this night heading? "Focus it into a single point, as small as you can imagine. No, smaller." Yang's chuckle could break the bonds of a black hole if she wished, Blake was certain, but she kept it small and contained as Blake's own voice. "Put that feeling at a single point on your lips, right at the forefront. And then, as I grow closer, let it intensify . . . build . . . overwhelm you until you can barely think of your own name."

Blake. It was Blake Belladonna. She was Yang Xiao Long – and easier to remember. And those two names were all that mattered.

"In short, Yang, you taste like . . ." Blake's voice took on a familiar tone and inflection, though in truth she didn't feel like could ever imitate Yang. "Anticipation."

Yang was stillness's antithesis. More than that, she was its archenemy, seeking to erase all traces of stillness from the face of the planet. She was always moving, making others move, dashing and dancing and punching out miscreants like stillness, like calm, like underachievement. But now she was still. Now she was quiet. Now she was . . . smiling? "I'm not the only one who tastes like that, you know." Arms stronger than the nightmares wrapped around Blake's waist, holding her together. "I just figured the way you made me feel went without saying."

Alright. That made up Blake's mind. Yang Xiao Long was not leaving this bedroom with her clothes on.

. . . no. No, that wasn't actually what Blake wanted. That was something entirely different. Still, the point remained: she knew exactly where this night was going, now.

But . . . just so long as they were talking about anticipation. "It's honestly amazing to hear you say that, Yang." Blake wasn't normally fond of sticky situations, but as she leaned back and Yang's arms refused to let go of her completely, she felt she could make an exception. Just this once. "But I never said that was all you tasted like, did I?"

Yang's face flared with surprise and heat, like the meteor that suddenly finds a planet standing in its way. "Ahh. Alrighty, then." The arms evaporated from Blake's sides, and she had just enough time to mourn their absence before realizing that Yang was intending to prove her unstoppable nature. "Lay it on me." The bandana around her neck disappeared like layers of ice experiencing reentry, except, in reverse order, and laying on Yang was indeed a very tempting prospect.

Blake had seen Yang's bare neck before, of course. But this was her first time seeing it privately. There were things you could do to necks, in private. Things with moans in them. "Long ago, it is said, before men and monsters, there were gods and goddesses."

"Like you?" Yang tilted her head, and, suddenly, there was another curve to her body, another line of muscle laced with feminine softness, a gentle slope to rest upon, to trace with the mind's eye . . . it was like watching waves at the beach, Blake finally realized. Gentle, straight lines to curved, the sense that they could destroy you at any moment, drown you in them. They all connected together into a single ocean. Yang. "You never did answer my question about worship, you know."

"Hush, you." Blake would not let herself be outdone by a glorified headrest. Even one as glorious as Yang's neck. She had seams, too, and thread to undo, but if she had her way it would be Yang falling apart as she unwove the ribbon on her arm, as she wove her tale. "The gods were like mankind, but also not very like them at all. They were larger, for one thing, said to be wiser and more powerful than the later dawn of mankind. But they were also lesser, limited by natures they could not change, and unable to comprehend the concepts of time, fairness, or mortality."

Yang matched Blake's lazy loops with spiral patterns knuckled into her thighs, and Blake wondered how anyone could ever think Yang couldn't be subtle, or sly. "What about love?"

"The gods claimed their domain was more than man's, and they had no time for the affairs of those below." Blake pulled the ribbon off all at once, and maybe that was what performing a striptease felt like. Just a little bit. "Our love was only a pale reflection of something much greater, to them. Our greatest inventions, only toys. Our crowning achievements, worthy of scorn, or perhaps indulgence, as one would a child."

Yang had a habit of hitting conversations with pats on the back, for encouragement, that were actually strong enough to knock them flat on their faces. That only made it all the more noteworthy when she put a metaphorical, gentle, guiding hand on the story's shoulder to say, "You're talking about humans and faunuses, aren't you?"

Blake swiveled her head. She wasn't aware her head had a swivel function, but there it was. And there were the markings on her wrists left by pulling on her ribbon too tightly. "What makes you say that?"

"I'm not saying that humans are better than faunus!" Yang rushed to catch her conclusions. "Just like the gods weren't actually better than people. They saw themselves as being better than the people, but they weren't. Just different." Her voice dwindled as she spoke, like a sales price dropping on an unwanted product. "It's the same way as humans think of faunus."

Blake moved with as much speed as she could to lay a kiss on Yang's cheek – then even more, shooting out of her afterimage to finish the kiss on her other. Twice as much the cheering up, she hoped. "I can think of at least one who doesn't think that way." She tried one of Yang's grin on for size, and found it to be an extraordinarily good fit, if a tad tight. "In fact, I find the way you think to be very impressive. Most people don't pick up on the subtext in that old fable."

"Fairy tales are kinda my specialty." Yang was blushing so thoroughly that for a second, as silly as the notion was, Blake thought she'd kissed Yang's cheeks a shade too forcefully. "I used to read them to Ruby every night. It's . . . sort of interesting, being on the other end."

"'Happily ever after' won't rest solely on your shoulders as long as I'm around." Blake had never meant a sentence more. She didn't think she could mean something more than she meant that. "But first my little story must come to a conclusion."

"Proceed, madam." Yang and posh went together like honey and truffles. They didn't. But Yang, being honey and not particularly caring what it might be attached to, as it knew it was destined to be oversweet, tried it anyway.

Speaking of foodstuff. "The gods did not work like you or I did. They needed no air, no water, and no food like you or I know. They sustained themselves not on the food of mortals, but on ambrosia, the nectar of the gods. A mysterious substance, all things considered. Some say that ambrosia was beyond human reckoning, maybe some ancient Dust no longer found in this world. Others say that the nectar was metaphysical, the consumption of belief or raw possibility. Whatever the case may be, such food was meant for gods, not mortals, for if any mortal attempted to partake, they would be the one to end up consumed."

"I get it now. You're trying to say I taste like ambrosia." Yang's eyes were like napalm, a burning in them that stuck with you. "And that I'm too much for you to handle."

Blake pushed her hair back behind a human ear, tracing the edge of her lobe like it was a road on a map. A suggestion for what to do next. "No, actually." The second part, possibly – Yang was very much like going fishing and catching the Leviathan. "To be perfectly honest, I still can't quite tell what you taste like." Blake opened up the bedsheets of her subconscious, and allowed the memories to snuggle up and share warmth. "But I know if the gods had an inkling of how good you taste, they'd feel like they got the raw end of the deal."

Yang looked for all the world in that moment like a chamelon. An awkard pose held, a stare capable of stripping paint. A slow, slow shift in shade, beginning as a light pearl and ending up with a red Blake could only describe as 'rebellious rouge, shade 47'. "Geeze, louise, Blake." Yang was the only person Blake knew who wore embarrassment like it was a ballgown – outside Yang's norms, sure, but breathtaking and elegant. It was the way she showed it off even as she tried to hide it, the lean away that only emphasized the angle, the covering of the eyes when the crimson cheeks, corset and the shaky smile, satin, were so much more interesting. "The best I could come up with was 'coffee beans'!"

"Coffee beans' way hotter older sister." Blake supposed this was how fashion designers felt seeing their models walk the runway. Except, of course, with much more heat coiling in the belly. "An important distinction."

"How am I supposed to top that, though?" Yang didn't peek through her fingers so much as not bother moving her whole hand aside. She wasn't . . . playing coy, was she? "You're, like, playing symphonies at my window, and I'm painting graffiti on your bedroom door."

"I once belonged to a subversive anti-establishment organization, and you think I don't enjoy graffiti?" It was a bullet of a question, which might have been disastrous if Blake hadn't been using a water pistol. One painted up nicely and lovingly customized, but still. "I loved the coffee beans description. It was very flattering. Full-bodied. And the barista was very cute, too." There had to be a point, Blake supposed, where they were able to stop themselves. She only knew that it wasn't going to be tonight. "I only went as far as I did because I was trying to live up to the standards you set."

"You make expressing yourself look like the easiest thing in the world." Yang sat up, and for a moment, she was a silhouette, even to Blake's night vision. Some trick of the light. Some idea of what she looked like with only curves and smiles to wear. "Like, suddenly I believe magic is real, because, listen, you're casting spells. Right in front of me."

Blake raised both eyebrows, because one didn't seem like quite enough. "Are you actually complaining, or are you just trying to be sneaky with your compliments?"

"Mostly the second one." Yang grinned like a watermelon rind except, as Blake could attest, much yummier. "Little of the first, though. I mean, I'm already jealous of your hair, your brain, your voice, your legs . . . why not add mad writing skills to the list?"

If Blake addressed any of that, they'd go over a waterfall of compliments in a barrel together, and end up somewhere so far downstream from where this conversation was they'd have to start confessing their love to each other all over again. Best to just keep paddling. "We have different approaches, that's all. I tend towards the verbose and descriptive. The flowery, if you will. You, on the other hand, have a sharper, more succinct wit that I couldn't match with a hundred hours of focus and creativity. Snappy."

"Put us together and we're a snapdragon!" Yang leaned in close and sudden to say that, a work of art displayed in gilded frame and attached to a set of rockets. She was close (and fast) enough that Blake prepared herself for another atomic bomb of a kiss. What she got instead was a pun. Somehow, that seemed just as satisfying.

Blake gave Yang what she guessed was her satisfaction, too – she giggled. "See? That's exactly what I mean."

There comes a point at which boiling must cease, and Yang had apparently reached it. Still dangerously warm, still quite steamy, but the bubbly atmosphere seemed to pop as she settled into a smaller smile and a far-off look. "Nah. I mean, yeah. You're right. But it's still sort of hard to compare the two."

It was as obvious to Blake as a missing arm meeting fire that Yang wasn't just talking about their abilities to turn phrases anymore. Sentences like that were heavy enough to leave holes in your head, holes where reassurances and good cheer could echo until they lost all meaning besides babbling. Sentences like that chipped away at self esteem in ways that didn't matter until you looked up and realized it was all gone. Sentences like that were a cage constructed for one's self.

Blake, at one point, picked locks for a living. "Then tell me a story." A hand as sure and steady as her thoughts turned Yang's head, by her chin, like a key, to stare at her own reflection as in a lilac pool. A moment like an exclamation mark extended into ellipses, and she moved forwards, and forwards, just close enough for Yang's slightly hurried breaths to ask her questions that made her cheeks warm. "See if I like it."

An unfallen snowflake, a crystalline structure held in suspension, the quartz jewel by which the rest of the timepiece kept whirring around it – they were all correct, all the same description of the same moment held in time. This one. This split second where Yang held her gaze, like a spell, on Blake's own.

And then, Yang kissed her. Like a snowflake falling, a crystal shattering, like a timepiece falling apart, a glorious moment of reality being broken and the spell taking its proper place as part of the universe. Though not actually, perhaps, a snowflake, but a snowball, a tiny thing the size of one's thumb, done as quickly as a closed palm or a clenched fist. Or, a quick kiss.

Yang's presence left like an exhalation – though out of the lungs, the air was still right there, waiting to extend your life another breath. She wasn't even a centimeter away.

And then she kissed Blake again, and it was like pushing the snowball down a 30,000 foot snow-covered mountain.

There wasn't much Blake could do to avoid being overwhelmed - it's very difficult to avoid an entire avalanche from only a centimeter away, after all. That was precisely what that kiss was: an avalanche. A chill up the spine and an unstoppable force shortly followed by a warm, sluggish, irresistible feeling you could curl up in and sleep forever.

And then Yang's arms wrapped around Blake, her neck and her waist, and like a desperate rescue the world opened up to clear skies and fresh air, her entire existence becoming aware of something something that had always been there like it was something entirely new, because Yang deepened the kiss. Leave it to Yang to show Blake the skyline of her thoughts for the wonder it was, and all with one or two movements of her lip.

All Blake could do in response was make some sort of silly moany noise that was probably meant to be Yang's name. Then her brain got completely scrambled.

Not scrambled like eggs. Scrambled like radio signals, or coded messages, or something beyond Blake's ken, which was kennier than most as it was. Everything she was saying to herself seemed to be getting misinterpreted, her desires for control translating into an arched back and a golden name whispered against liquid lips, her hands taking the excuse to rebel, to push forwards in quite the literal sense, her hips deciding they wanted to dance, too, and there was really only one kind of dancing that hips got involved in . . .

It was at that moment that Blake realized what the problem was, or at least the part of Blake not occupied with touching as much of Yang as was physically possible. Her signals were getting crossed because of simple over-communication. Most of the time, Blake thought in sentences, and Yang made her think in paragraphs, in entire pages. Maybe the girl was the literary type after all.

There was no greater thrill than opening up a new chapter in a book, they said.

"This jacket needs to come off." Even now, even with a fog as thick as tar soup covering Jaune's forehead clouding her mind, Blake managed to find literary critique somewhere deep within her.

"Lots of things need to be getting off around here." They probably constructed the Pearly Gates and Yang's pearly whites from the same material. But from opposite ends of the "sin" spectrum. "But we can start with the jacket, sure."

"Is that an invitation to finish what we've started?" The devil on Blake's shoulder must have been practicing her ventriloquist act, because that couldn't have been her own voice, all husk and silk and kitten's claws. "Or are you just planning on pulling on my heartstrings until they break?"

"Let's just say I wouldn't mind if you wanted to go a little wild."Yang just walking around, being herself, could start a fire, possibly several of them. That sentence, however, could have started a fire when it was cripplingly wet.

Blake felt like she was proof of that, to debauch the metaphor. She'd never considered herself a forest, before, but the way the fire spread from the pit of her being up to her fingers, like an eruption to reshape a continent with, Blake felt like so in retrospect. Because now, she was only the warm yellow light of the embers left behind.

Embers and fire, emboldened and golden. Being Yang seemed to be as contagious as trees coming down with cases of emblazoning.

For instance, Blake had never been a fidgeter, but Yang's clothes suddenly seemed far too restrictive on her. Fingers flittered like the flame, and Blake's mouth worked to vent the excess heat into her partner, which was a bit like trying to stop a tree from growing with water and fertilizer, but who cared about logic at this point because Yang's jacket had a single button on it and that was far too many buttons for any jacket to ever have.

If this what letting yourself lose control like, it was no wonder Yang smiled all the time.

But then, in so many ways, Yang had always been more in control than Blake. She gave herself over to her passions, but didn't let herself be ruled by them. She gave those who deserved it miles where others might give inches, but didn't let those who didn't deserve it take a single step out of bounds. She knew herself and her own heart, which was more than Blake could ever say about the faunus that she was.

Being Yang was contagious, and Blake suddenly found herself just as in control of Yang as Yang was. Her mouth gave way by inches, by miles, her heart opened up her arms and let a too-messy jacket slip off her shoulders, and her passions, oh, the way she moved. A pair of thoughts spread, like fire, to the rest of Blake's head, a couple questions like suns in orbit around some concept even closer to her heart.

Where might Yang let her touch? Where did Blake want to touch?

The answer to the second one, at least, was as simple, effortless, accidental, and monumental as falling down the longest staircase in the world. Every inch of Yang was a temptation, like a treasure horde in a temple, and despite the possibility of rolling boulders, Blake felt an undeniable urge to pay her back for a million scratches behind the ears. With, because some things were obvious and straightforward, a fair amount of interest.

Undeniable, except, she denied it, if only half an inch away from twirling a golden strand around her fingers. Some things shouldn't be messed with. Some things were important.

"You're allowed, you know." Yang spoke so quietly, Blake wasn't sure she'd actually heard her at all. She wasn't normally prone to auditory hallucinations, but then again, she wasn't normally prone to seeing stars or getting tunnel vision, and there Yang's eyes were right there. Tonight was full of unreal sensations.

"Are you sure?" Blake had been stung by hope so many times she'd thought she'd built up an immunity. Yet here and now, she tasted the tell-tale traces of its venom on her breath and in her tone.

With a hand the talk of all the clamps around town and a gentleness that metal could not comprehend, Yang took her turn at guiding Blake's hand, softly pressing it against her head, within her goldy locks. The exchange rate between actions and words being what it was, Blake wasn't surprised by the sound of fireworks. "You're special to me. I don't want you to be scared of doing anything around me." She blushed, and perhaps atomic bombs and volcanic eruptions were more accurate descriptions of the noises between Blake's ears. That, and the heat. "Or with me, for that matter."

Gold fell through Blake's fingers like she was an adventurer reveling in a new-found treasure chest. In some respects, of course, she was. But in other respects, she hadn't found this treasure, or taken it for herself. Quite the opposite. "I'm honored." If the whole world was this soft, Blake didn't see any way anyone could ever be hurt.

"That feels . . . kind of nice. Like your hands are telling me a bedtime story." There were theories, of course, that space was an infinite expanse that was, in some way imperceptible by human senses, getting bigger all the time. Until now, when Yang's blush somehow got brighter than it already was, Blake had never really understood exactly how that worked. "Just, uh . . . I know this kind of goes against what I said, but, er, don't pull on my hair or anything like that, okay?"

Blake lay a kiss as soft as the hair she was holding on the top of Yang's head. If the old fable about spinning straw into gold was true, this must have been what gold turned into when it was spun. "Only if you promise you'll kiss me until my lungs give out."

The "absolutely" that left Yang's mouth seemed redundant, even if technically the kiss that it promised happened second.

And oh, hearkening back to old stories, was it a kiss. Once-upon-a-time worthy. Yang kissed her like Blake was in a fairy tale, and she was afraid she'd disappear at midnight or fall victim to some curse, and true love's kiss was the only protection they had. Philosophically speaking, it might even have been true, though Blake was beginning to suspect that she'd had the exact opposite ideas from reality about which parts of the old standby stories were to be considered real.

Yang's hair gave her fingers a feeling like walking on warm water.

But the impossible left those fingers satisfied, which meant that wanderlust was slowly creeping over the rest of Blake's body. Even then, though, the furthest and most thorough wanderers had to settle down eventually, and that feeling chose to take up occupation as the tingling on Blake's lips. Since Yang had been kind enough to undo her bandanna earlier . . .

Of course, that whole train of thought was less a plan of action and more solving a locked room mystery with only a line of excessively flushed skin to answer the question of where Blake found herself and why she was there. Somewhere in the process, a generous portion wound up in Blake's mouth and suction was applied, a sound so small Blake tasted it beneath Yang's skin rather than heard it and a fumble of fingers flying to the back of her head, tips just below catty ears serving as all the encouragement she needed to keep going – Yang accomplished more with a sound even Blake couldn't hear and touch she was on the edge of feeling than the White Fang did with years of brainwashing.

There was a feeling in Blake's mind that was slowly overwhelming her, like molten gold pouring between the cracks in her neurons, brilliant in its blaze, and dense, so very dense. The feeling wasn't telling her she had to do anything, but its presence made certain things suddenly seem like the best portion of philosophy ever conceived of by man or faunuskind, and Blake took care of the rest without really discussing it amongst herself.

Like biting down, for example.

And Yang, with a cry to the heavens that reverberated at the planet's heart, put a noise to that great, wide feeling as she bit. "Oh!" she cried, tenuous but certain of it, like a master's fingers fluttering across piano keys.

Fingers fluttering across black and white, forcing musical tones from tension. Thinking like that might kill Blake – if the noises Yang was making didn't do the job first.

"Blake?" There was a growing bruise on Yang's neck, and Blake was unmarked. Yet the only person Yang's voice held concern for was her partner. If there was a descriptive text any more emblematic of Yang, it probably started with the word "suddenly" and ended with some type of comparison to a large explosion. "I'm not hurt, I promise. I actually really liked -"

"Make that noise again." The weight inherent to Blake's own voice surprised her. It was like attempting to pick up a dollar bill glued to the sidewalk and finding you had just somehow picked up an entire city block. The only thing more surprising was the sparks the friction lashed from between her tongue and her teeth.

Yang smiled, and suddenly there was a large explosion. "Make me."

Blake did more than make her. She marveled. She marveled, as her lips met Yang's own once more, on how a single part of someone's body could be so very much. A thousand smiles, a million in potentia, and each frown as rare and meaningful as a four-leaf clover in the bouquet of a lover. Yang's was a mouth connected to an endlessly fuzzy mind – not Yang's own, but Blake's, because that mouth was like a shot glass, with no glass bottom anywhere in reach of an eternally thirsting tongue. They were ne'er do well lips – or close, at least. They seemed to be doing pretty well at the moment.

They were a world and a comet alike, a burning, blazing, blitzing crossing of the sky, holding the intelligence and wit of an entire universe beneath its melting structure. Blake wondered, as she probed, if her lips seemed as cosmic as Yang's practical horoscope's worth of constellation, all teeth and gums and starlight.

But even though the entire universe seemed to have collapsed and left all its potential energy dancing between the two of them, something in Blake's mind rebelled, maybe just because that was what Blake tended to do whenever things seemed strange and overwhelming, like the sky was falling in, or like Yang had kissed her six, seven times now. But there was something specific – something floating free outside of universal collapse. Something itching at Blake's mind like crust in the eyes come the morni -

Eyes. Morning. Light.

That was it.

"Yang, wait, hold on. Before we do anything. I just remembered something." Eyes like morning light woke Blake, just as she always dreamed they would. Yang's orbs glowed, alright, but not literally, which was the core of the current situation. "You're human."

Yang blinked, repeatedly, like watching a video of the sunrise at a rate of one frame per second. "Well, I know I can be rather foxy, but I didn't think there was any confusion about it . . ."

"No, I mean, you're not a faunus." There was a hole here. There hadn't been a hole here before. Blake had the sneaking suspicion that she was holding a shovel. "Well, that's not what I – ugh. Okay. What I'm trying to say is that, unlike me, you don't have night vision. And in case you didn't notice, like I didn't notice, we've been sitting in the dark for at least half an hour now."

"Oh, that makes a lot more sense." The words fell from Yang's mouth like a drop to the grass to look up at the night sky. With just about as much sudden pontificating. "Still kind of funny, though. Bet I'd be a dragon faunus."

"I don't think those exist." Although Blake figured Yang would probably find a way to be one, anyway. Really, it was a surprise the girl didn't have scale plating and a treasure horde as it was. "The long and the short of it is, there are two people in this room, and only one of them can see right now. That hardly seems fair to me."

"Eh, it's not like it's perfectly dark in here. Things are a little blobby and black, but I can still kind of make stuff out." Another lovely slideshow, where all the slides were out of order, judging by the picturesque expressions on Yang's face. "It sounds sort of bad, huh? But really, it's no big deal if you want them off." There was the right slide, at last – and judging by the expression on Yang's face, it was nothing short of pornographic. "I can just feel my way around."

"I don't really care one way or the other, to be honest." Blake's shoulders didn't get a lot of practice shrugging – her talent for it was as natural as her talent for stoicism. Not natural at all, that was to say. Both were essentially domino masks to hide her face when things got too hot for the blood beneath her cheeks to handle. "After all, you're likely to do a lot of feeling around either way." Or at least Blake hoped so. The blood beneath her cheeks needed some practice of their own.

"Caught me red-handed." Yang raised her red hands into the air, and away from Blake, which was just about as disappointing as if she'd been moving ice cream cones out of her reach. Then again, it did give Blake the opportunity to see her arm muscles in motion, which was enough to convince her that removing Yang's jacket had been the greatest notion she'd acted upon this entire evening. About time some of her ideas were good ones. "But I'm gonna catch you red-cheeked one of these days. Though, now that we're talking about it . . . you aren't embarrassed?"

Blake snapped out of attempting to connect licking ice cream cones and Yang Xiao Long in her mind, which was different from what she usually did in that it wasn't different at all, actually. "Isn't feeling around the goal of the exercise?"

"No – well, yeah, if we do it right." The look on Yang's face granted Blake very limited psychic powers to let her know exactly what Yang was thinking at that moment: it was sort of hard to do it wrong. "I mean, I just thought you were being shy. It was kind of cute, actually."

"Shy?" Cute? "Ah-ha. Well, I'm sure you'll be happy to know that I have absolutely no problems with you leering at me as often and as openly as you want. In fact, I sort of like it." With a smile like a warning sign Blake knew Yang would ignore, Blake leaned forwards. Slowly, but certain, a lever to control a rudder that controlled a ship that was on a voyage to a far-off land where she and Yang could play all by themselves. "A lot."

"Ooh. Kitten likes to show off." Yang gave out nicknames like keys to her house, or maybe her heart. Very few people got them, but those who did had a place to crash when worse came to worst, no matter what. Blake, the faunus's heart leapt like children on trampolines at the thought, had received two of them.

"Only for you." The words were a negligee, all lace and seductive softness and, yes, even some showing off. "You've already seen everything in my head, after all. Why shouldn't I want you to see the rest of me?" The suspicion crept up on Blake like an old friend - one she was too scared to leave behind in case no one else wanted to be friends with her. "You do want to look, right?"

"Is that a real question?" Yang's voice didn't quite touch upon disbelief, but there was some definite flirting involved there. Both with disbelief, and with its close cousin Blake Belladonna. "If it is, the answer is yes. Also, duh. You're like liquid sex, Blake."

If Blake were liquid, Yang was solid: dependable, strong, less likely to change to outside pressures. But still some state of sex, of course. But that seemed like it would be weird to say, so instead Blake said, "I'm glad to hear that."

"I'm really glad to say it." Yang was also the embodiment of the person who, directing air traffic, decided to start dancing in order to see what patterns in light they could make with their marshalling wands. Put it another way, "solid" was not the same thing as "unmoving", and philosophy had a lot more to say about semantics than it thought it did.

It was enough to make a black cat grin – enough, in fact, to enter a black cat in a grinning competition and come second only to certain Cheshires. "Well, now I'm curious." Blake lowered her head like a sunset, and wondered vaguely if the sun ever needed to look for extra light. She felt, in a pinch, like Yang could provide. It'd be a red light, of course, but she'd provide. "If that's the case, why didn't you ask if you could turn the lights on?"

Yang started. Maybe like a vehicle starting, or maybe like an eruption. Either way, there was heat involved: Yang's cheeks burned even brighter than she would in battle, and the rest of her expression melted like lemonade ice cubes on a hot day. "I don't wanna do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable."

Hmm . . . lemonade. Was that what Yang tasted like? Lemonades's 'way hotter older sister' perhaps? No, not that. But closer. "You're a very illuminated individual, Yang Xiao Long. And awfully sweet." Blake kissed Yang as quickly as she could get away with – as in, literally get away, because if she'd held it a moment longer Yang would have had to hold her captivated. And that would be absolutely terrible. "Now, about 'illumination' . . ."

"Huh?" Yang was evidently giving Blake a preview of what she'd look like when she hit the legal drinking age. Beautiful as ever, to judge, if a tad less steady on her . . . everything. The phrase 'smile, shaken, not stirred' should really enter the lexicon. "Oh! Oh, right!" She turned on the lamp, which, metaphorically speaking, was just about everything she ever did, was, and embodied. Not a source of light, but the reason one's own light became real, electrified, instead of just some impossible idea.

The difference between night and day, as far as Blake was concerned, was mostly irrelevant. Blake's night vision was like a filter on a camera, shading everything, but keeping the definition and color balance. Things didn't really look different as much as they looked similar, like seeing the same facial structure in all the girls in three generations of a particular family, possibly one that dealt in Dust and bigotry. Put it more simply, when it came to most things, Blake didn't really care about lighting.

But Yang Xiao Long was made for the limelight.

The night was fine. Not fine as in mediocre, but fine as in wine. Yang was curves a faunus with complexes could get drunk to forget on, and smiles as wicked as devil or wicked as a skateboard trick, and tap-dancing eyes that made Blake's heart join in on the dance floor.

In the day, she was all that and polished to a shine. Literally, a shine, a glow around her that might have been more than the light her body reflected – it seemed odd to Blake that she should cast a shadow. Yang was a gem.

She was about as still as a gem was. Crystallized, frozen, unmoving, other synonyms listed off until Blake could find the right one because stillness and Yang were like tears and a hot cup of tea with, of course, a bit of honey. It was true that Yang usually did go a bit stiller when looking at Blake – like she had to dedicate extra processing power to take all of Blake in, and she'd be lying if she said she didn't enjoy the idea – but she never froze over, like winter, like everything this sweet Summer's stepchild would never ever be.

Her eyes. Gemstones. Beautiful, shining, priceless- but absolutely motionless. A single point, just above Blake's belly button – that's where they were looking, and nowhere else at all. They were the only things that moved more quickly when Yang looked at Blake; the way they raced over her form always made her heart race in turn. Yang could do a lot with Blake's heart with a glance, apparently – including stop it, just as they'd stopped.

"Is something the matter?" A hug seemed like too much, like dropping a boulder in a pond and wondering where the ripple went as the wave began falling on your head. So Blake instead let her hand envelop Yang's, like a hug in miniature. "If you want to stop, we can."

"No, I wanna go, it's just . . . this is gonna sound really weird." Yang face burst once more with red, and Blake was struck by memories of summer evenings and chasing fireflies. She always thought if she followed them long enough, they'd lead somewhere. Maybe she was right after all. "Promise you won't burst out laughing or anything like that?"

Blake barely managed to stop herself from saying "I would never laugh at anything you'd say." Someone needed to be editing her thoughts better. She clearly wasn't doing a good job. "I promise. What's wrong?"

It wasn't a look like Yang had let down her guard. It was a look like she was only just now realizing she'd let down her guard about half an hour ago, and couldn't quite figure out how to get it back up again. "I'm scared that if I touch you . . . I dunno. It feels like . . . if I touch you, I'm gonna . . . break something."

There was the lost ripple – or, perhaps, there was the pebble, and Blake took care of the ripple on her own. "You didn't seem to have any trouble with it before." Blake treated the words like a sword, wrapping them in foam. They would harm too easily, otherwise.

There was a bit of silence – like a beat of silence, but less musical. And then, with a look on her face and a swallow in her throat like she'd just taken some sorry medicine, Yang passed Blake the cup. "It was just a game, before."

The reality of the situation could have at least had the common courtesy to knock before it broke the doors down between them and it. But then, reality never could be called "decent", and it certainly wasn't in the practice of giving out warnings. It just sort of shows.

But as tangled as the situation suddenly was, yarn could only distract from sturdier things for so long. Considering the inconvenience of it all wouldn't do anyone any good. ". . . you're right." With a hand as certain and insistent as the inconvenience of reality, Blake grasped Yang's wrist. "Here. I want you to feel something for me." She led Yang to her heart with a smile, which was basically just an extension of what she'd already done. "And I don't mean my boob."

"Wow. Did you sneak one of Ruby's 'special' sundaes when I wasn't looking?" Yang's good humor melted like an ice cream bar, leaving only concentration intense enough to, well, melt ice cream. "Your heart feels like a jackhammer."

"I keep myself hidden, sometimes." Blake had to move quickly from that slightly shadowy sentence, lest Yang point out that 'sometimes' was an understatement the way 'likes the color black' was an understatement. "Unflappable, I think you called it. But when it comes down to it, I could never really hide my heart from you." And Blake might as well show Yang her teeth, while she was at it. It was technically a smile, though the hammer of her heart rattled its edges. "I don't think I actually want to."

"You're trying to get the gunk out." There was a tone of voice people used when they figured out puzzles. There was also a tone of voice people used when they looked in the back of the books to see what the answers were. Yang's voice was the second one. "Just as scared as I am, huh?"

Blake nodded, a single percussion tap on the rhythm of reality. "You're right. This isn't just a game, or some fantasy between the moments we get to spend together. This is real. And that's . . . wonderful, beautiful, extraordinary. But it also means that there will be consequences for this." She considered her next sentence, like she considered how she'd leave the White Fang. In the end, there was nothing to do but to do it, and there was no real way to say it, but to say it. "Your sister may be the leader of our team, but you're my partner. You're the one I believe in more than anyone else. You're the person I trust the most. And no matter what, I will always have your back, and I'll always go with you into battle." Blake smiled like an unfurling banner, and stood by for Yang to lead her charge. "That's why being scared doesn't matter to me anymore. I believe in you."

" . . . that doesn't sound right." Yang looked away. She always did, eventually, and it never felt like quite enough, and it was always disappointing. But this time, there seemed to be something furtive in the aside. "I-I mean . . . it doesn't have the ring of truth, you know?"

"If you don't think this is a mission we should go on together, at least not now, then I understand." Ah, yes, Blake's heart was worse than drumming, now. Now it was itchy and drumming. Fantastic. "It's your call."

"No, no, hold on. Hold on." Someone had nudged aside the needle on the phonograph and started scratching the record. Yang seemed like the likeliest culprit. "You're looking from completely the wrong angle here. Self-sacrifice is supposed to be my thing."

Blake blinked, belying brainy bewilderment. "You've left me somewhere far behind you on the highway, Yang. Please pull over."

"Here." Before another word was said, Yang grabbed the wrist that wasn't occupied with anything except keeping Blake's hand attached. Delaying words even further – there was evidently some sort of construction project happening on this highway – she placed that attached hand just above her breast. It was a heartfelt imitation. "Grab my boob; we're going on an adventure."

"I . . ." Blake chuckled. Sometimes life left her with no other options. "I suppose it's only fair. You get to cop a feel, I get to cop a feel."

"Shhh." As opposed to taking her hand off of Blake's chest, Yang bent down towards her hand in order to press her index finger to her lips. And in that moment, Blake realized she'd never actually taken her own hand off of Yang's wrist. "We're having a heart to heart."

Heart to . . . Blake felt her ears twitch, like a bug trying to tune into the internet with its antenna. She'd thought that heartbeat she'd heard had been her own, but . . . no, now it was clear. A second rhythm, a shadow of the first, less corporeal but sixteen times as thick, stretching ahead of the first pulse into the horizon like charcoal at mach 7. "How can you stand it beating that fast?"

Yang's smile inflated like a hot air balloon. Adventure, indeed. "Guess what makes it beat like that. If you're right, I'll tell you. It's like a game!"

"Another one?" Blake's tone of voice was dry, in the same way a planet comprised entirely of one large desert stuck in orbit around a planet comprised entirely of water was dry. "And here I thought we'd led each other into disaster often enough."

"Just one more, promise." One more game or one more disaster? With Yang, it could be either. With Yang, it was probably both. With Yang, Blake couldn't ever quite resist. "I'm feeling pretty generous today, so you get three guesses."

"You're nervous?" Occam's Razor tended to glance off of Yang's skin like, well, most things, but with two extra guesses and confirmation that, despite all appearances, Yang was in fact capable of feeling fear, it was worth the time to sharpen the blade.

"Strike one." Like a pop fly in low orbit, Yang's voice crested and didn't show any signs of coming back down. "That's part of it, but not the main reason. Try again! You've still got another two guesses to go."

" . . . you're excited." If the fingerprint-shaped bruises forming on Blake's hips could be classified as proper citizens of her body at this early stage in immigration, then yes, the vote carried that Yang Xiao Long was very excited at that point in time.

"Closer. Also a part of it. I mean, come on, look at you." Yang said it like it was something to talk about over breakfast, something easy and certain the brain didn't really have to wake up for to think about. Something nearly objectively true. "Give it another shot."

This question was a stumper, and though Blake considered herself a knowledgeable lass, forestry was not her strong suit. Branches were more for libraries and paper better served in books, in Blake's experience . . . oh. Oh. "Oh my gosh," Blake struggled to get the words out. She needn't have sabotaged herself further with the giggling, and yet.

Yang was much better practiced at cheerful insistence than her sister. An entire legion of pokes with a marching chant of cheerful "Huh?", backed by artillery shaped like cheerful smiles, was easily outmatched by the one-syllable army of Yang's "Hmmm?"

Of course, of course, of course. Far worse than merely obvious. Yang was going for cliche. "You're in love."

"Ding ding ding! We have a winner!" Yang shrugged, it matched oddly well with her smile, and Blake wondered if possibly being able to feel the movement of her shoulder muscles beneath her palm was the intended prize. Honestly, it could have been. "My heart always beats this fast when you're around. You just kind of get used to it."

"You know, if you wanted to test out your pickup lines on me, you didn't have to go through all this trouble." The realization of what Blake had just given her partner permission to do drove by her brain like someone riding the bicycle she'd neglected to chain up three blocks back. Nothing really for it but to think, "oh. Whoops."

"Really? Huh. I'll have to remember that for next time." Yang's goofy grin didn't fall off so much as it went into hiding, a prime suspect in the frown like an inquisition that was marching upon its steadholdt. "But right now, though, I need you to answer me something." The bedsprings creaked as Yang leaned forwards, a small reminder to Blake that her yellow-petaled flower of a face wasn't actually the entire world. "Is your heart only beating that fast, right now, because you're afraid?"

The penny dropped. "No." Rapidly followed by the nickel. "No, of course not. I mean, that's part of it, but I didn't mean to imply . . ." And then, at last, the rest of Blake's wallet. "But I did. I did imply. And maybe part of me meant to, too."

"Life is about more than facing down fears." Yang had always liked fortune cookies. Blake was beginning to become fond of them, too. "And hearts are basically what keeps life going. You have to listen to everything it's saying, or you don't know what's happening in your life."

Blake turned this over in her mind. It looked about the same from the bottom side, just a bit backwards. "So . . . you want to keep going, then?"

"Kitten. I know what I want, but it's not about what I want. This is about what we want. Together." The hero rose, triumphant, the dragon was slain, the princess was rescued from her plight, and Yang beamed, once upon a time, once more. Somewhere in her eyes, the sequel was being written. "That's what being partners means."

"Yang." A lifetime of absorbing words like an organized ink blotter, and that was the only word Blake could find to say. Everything else seemed to be hiding inside the lump in her throat.

"I love you, Blake." There it was again. That impossible sentence. "And I love you for a lot of reasons. Your passion, your kindness, your brain, your patience, your cute little kitty ears and way cuter butt."

It was like having a butterfly land on your nose. Blake could act annoyed, but deep down she couldn't help but marvel at the moment, and moreso that it was happening to her. "All this time and you're still trying to make me blush?"

"You kidding? I'm not ever gonna stop. It's real easy, if all I have to do is tell the truth." Yang's eyes were soft and softer and softer, like purple dye spreading through the ocean. "I love you so much, Blake, but the thing that makes me stick to the idea . . . the thing that makes me think it would work, you and me?" Her voice was softer too, now, like a bed in and of itself, someplace private she and Blake could lie down together. "You always know what to do. You always know who you are. The entire world tries to beat you down, and you stand up and say 'no', because you know what the right thing is." Her smile spread like the view from opened curtains on a penthouse suite, and somehow, Yang always made Blake think of someplace far off that was still, nonetheless, a home. "You're one of a kind, Blake. You're everything I ever wanted to be."

There was a war going on in Blake's brain. What life had taught her, hard knocks and deep cuts and more dead and wounded than most people could imagine, fought against a single girl with a smile that could disarm a nation and a Semblance built for combat. And Blake was losing. Or . . . winning. Maybe. "I . . ." It was less that her preprogramming won, and more a final charge on dying horseshoes. "I'm not anyone special."

"You absolutely," a kiss on one cheek. "Positively," a smooch on the other. "One hundred and ten percent are." A peck on the forehead, to complete the set. Some collectibles you couldn't put a price on. "That's why I know you'll make the right choice. You always have." What was that look on her face? A promise of some kind. Blake was certain she knew what, if she could just . . . remember. "So look past that fear. Look past your concern, and whatever it is you think you're . . . supposed to be doing. Look past the fact that you're really turned on, even – I know that part's super hard with your hand on my chest and all, but . . ." Yang let go of her wrist, seeming fearful that might actually be true instead of simply more banter. Blake couldn't help but hold her hand there, so, maybe it was. "Tell me what you want, Blake. Deep down, past everything else. That matters just as much as what I want."

For a few moments, there was a reverberating quiet, like the absence of sound left by the cessation of a booming horn and the quieting of a marching army.

Then there was the sense that something was about to happen, like a tingling sensation in the Aura just before a firefight broke out.

And then . . . and then . . .

"I want your fingers beneath the fabric of my shirt." The sentence glimmered like gold, heavy enough in Blake's hands that her whole body seemed more sluggish for the weight. It seemed the centerpiece of the entire evening, a brick like that. "I want to feel you groan my name against my lips. I want you to trace patterns on the small of my back. I want to see your hair spread out across my pillow. I want you to come undone. I want to hear all the different ways you can say my name." But she couldn't slow down, not now, not when speed was the most important thing, not when she couldn't afford to give herself a chance to think about things, not when Blake always, inevitably, led herself to the wrong conclusions. "I want to go to the beach with you. I want us to draw our own constellations in the night sky. I want anniversaries and birthdays and fighting and making up and building a life together." Her heart so fast, so full to bursting, it felt like one long beat, Blake drew breath in heaving pants. She felt lighter, somehow. "I want to believe in the future again. I want you, Yang."

And then, hands over each others' hearts like they were swearing an oath, Yang moved in to kiss her again, and Blake met her as close to halfway as she could manage, and together the prison walls finally fell down. Freedom, sure, blue skies, yes, fresh air, wonderful, but Yang's mouth . . .

Blake was crying. Two or three tears, but crying nevertheless, and Yang reached up to wipe those tears away, by intuition, one could only suppose. She was crying, and she wasn't ashamed of it.

The separated, as slowly as they could manage, or maybe even slower than that. One more second, that's all they wanted. Maybe it was all they could bear. "I want you, too." It was totally unnecessary of Yang to say – she'd made the message clear enough. At the same time, though, Blake truly needed to hear it. "I always have."

"Heh." It wasn't quite sardonic laughter that Blake managed to stammer out, but it did have some sard on. Much closer to something genuine, but also nowhere near as close as Yang deserved from her. Or, Blake supposed, she deserved from herself. "And here you are, worried you're going to break something."

Yang had bent forwards to kiss Blake, and rested her forehead against Blake's own now. So she had to look up, as if Blake was something Yang dreamed of, but could only find in the indistinct shapes in the clouds. "Don't worry. I promise, if there's one thing in this world I'd never ever ever break, no matter what? It's your heart." Maybe she wasn't looking up, come to think of it. Direction was relative, after all – and that sure looked like a galaxy swirling twixt her eyes. "Trust me on that."

"I know. And I do trust you." Blake had smiled for effect, had grinned for the sake of distraction, had twisted words with the curl of her lip. She'd smiled for others, for Yang, before, to show she was happy, to reassure and cajole. But there and then, she smiled because she just couldn't help herself. "That's why I've given it to you. For safekeeping."

"Possibly the best thing you've said all night." Yang might've actually said the words, or Blake's brain might have merely seen the look on her face and done some translating. Blake didn't really care which it was, because Yang was leaning in again, and if nothing else, Blake was good at pattern recognition and, she hoped, kissing back.

And then the door to their room slammed open loudly enough to break the night's silence into individually wrapped pieces, which was the kind of sentence that only made sense when you had about six gallons of adrenaline and an ocean of mortification flooding your brain. "We're back." Weiss, in her usual fashion, had to remove the shades of self-aggrandization before she could see what anyone else was wearing to an evening's events. In this case, each other. "You wouldn't believe the sales they – oh my goodness."

"Toooold yoooooou," Ruby sang, precisely like the soundtrack to a horror movie creeping up on the two teenagers lying naked in bed. This was not how Blake envisioned stardom to descend upon her. "Those two have been spending way too much time together lately."

0-0-0-0

In the general chaos that followed, the only things able to be determined were that A) Weiss was going to rent a hotel room for her and Ruby for the evening, and B) Blake was "gonna be the bestest sister-in-law ever!"

The noise Ruby makes when hit by a pillow at high speed had been determined long ago, but it never hurt to check up on these things.

0-0-0-0

The cool night air contrasted against the warmth of Blake's body, and Yang wished things might remain balanced that way for the rest of eternity. Blake looked beautiful. More than looked, she felt beautiful, every dip and curve a turn for Yang's mind to race around like a motorcycle, exhilaration and adrenaline spiking the taste of dewdrops and rock candy yet lingering on her tongue. A thrill, a meaning, a rush of air and breath of life.

And gorgeous. So absolutely gorgeous – dark satin and whispered shade and honeyed words and perfect pearls given flesh, and life, and more kindness and strength than Yang knew what to do with. Still flush with effort and racing heart, even now, even asleep and the best was that she was smiling, purring, dreaming of –

Yang wanted to believe it was her.

She'd put her yakuta back on, and despite a small, insistent, cloying, opportunistic, well, heck with it, the word was horny, voice in the back of Yang's mind, it suited her sleeping form, slightly messy and hanging loosely off one shoulder. So put together, even as such a mess as Yang had made her, and in all her wise decisions and careful considerations Blake had chosen her to kiss, to hold, to make love.

Well, not really that last one. At least not like people meant it, anyway. They may have had sex a few hours ago, but they'd been creating love for far longer than just tonight.

Yang never believed she could find herself content in stillness.

A thumb and four fingers down the black length of her hair, like silk, like liquid obsidian. "Your hair's better than mine. I'm so jealous."

It would be an inane thing to say even if her partner – in more than one way now, of course - were awake, but that didn't seem like a good enough reason not to say it. And it was true, besides. Blake had everything Yang didn't and everyone claimed she did: the quick wit, the beautiful figure, the smile to launch a thousand ships, the wonder and optimism and happiness. The heart big enough to save a world from itself.

She was her sunshine, her only sunshine.

Yeah. Blake was her sun, and she . . . her moon.

. . . no, that didn't sound right, thinking about it now. The moon was a big old broken thing hanging in the sky, and although Yang might have had problems she was a long way from "broken", thank you very much. In retrospect, it was sort of obvious.

But then, a lot of things were 20/20 hindsight when Yang's life was all about charging forwards. Like how relying on her Semblance to win a pumpkin-carving competition was going to cause more problems than it solved. Or the fact that relying on your Semblance to make cookies was more likely to make cooked houses. Or the fact that relying on your Semblance to . . . well. There were a lot of nails that particular hammer could drive through six feet of steel, and that in and of itself was the problem.

They'd nicknamed Yang "collateral damage". Blake could probably come up with a better one.

But there were other things obvious only after the historical fiction. Like how of course Yang wasn't going to be able to find her mom with nothing but her little red sister and her little red wagon. Or the fact that, no matter how hard Yang tried, not everyone was going to like her. Or how far away Beacon really could be from home, sometimes. Or . . . or how fast everything went when you didn't try to keep up with it all.

Yang wasn't quite so foolhardy as to try riding a motorcycle backwards, except that her life felt a lot like that sometimes. Everything behind her, so obvious, plain as day. Everything in front of her, she could only hope everyone else was quick enough on the uptake and quick enough on their feet to get out of the way. Because there was no way she was gonna be able to tell what was going on.

Until now. Because Blake had her back, which in many ways, meant Blake was right in front of her, to tell her what was going to happen next. That had to be it, because suddenly Yang could see the future crystal clearly, and it was warm and real and bright, and Blake. Because Blake loved her.

She loved her.

Blake said Yang was her light, her sun, her needs and wants and everything she ever wanted to be. She said Yang was beautiful, intelligent, kind, and, and sexy, and then she proved herself with whispers and touches and gasps between stolen kisses, and Blake said that she needed Yang just as much as Yang needed her.

She loved her.

And it was so obvious, in retrospect. Almost as obvious to Yang, now, as the fact that Blake didn't blush with her cheeks – she blushed with her ears. Yang didn't think even Blake knew that about herself.

So maybe it really was the other way around. She was the sun, and Blake was the moon?

Didn't sound right either. Didn't have the ring of truth to it. Couldn't be right. After all, the moon was a still big old broken thing, and Blake was . . . gosh. If Yang was yet unbroken, Blake was all but unbreakable. Immune to collateral damage – but that didn't mean Yang wouldn't take a second thought for her sake. So what were they, then . . . ?

A memory leapt out at Yang like the second Ursa from the bushes after she rustled up the first one all on her own. Something age-old, from back when science class was just as much fun as learning how to hunt Grimm.

A binary star. Two suns, each one brilliant in their own way, orbiting around a common center of mass. Though, apparently, tonight, they'd both gone supernova.

Guess you could say that her and Blake's love was written in the stars.

Blake shifted, and Yang froze, guilty, awed. The moonlight gleamed in her hair, and for a split-second Yang believed if she shifted her fingers ever so slightly she might catch some and keep it for a cloudy day.

Blake made her believe in miracles. Blake made her feel like she was a miracle. Something incredible. She could never see it, but Blake possibly could. She looked at her like she might, looked at her like she was the first breaking beam of sunlight after a weeklong rainstorm, breathed her name like it fit into a song that had been incomplete her entire life, came undone beneath her clumsy fingertips, and Yang believed in miracles like fairy tales and hope and happy endings, and possibly even in herself.

Or, possibly, she was only projecting. And then, maybe, Blake was reflecting. Like the sun and the moon. Perhaps that was it, after all. Yin and Yang. Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars . . .

Blake snuggled a little further into Yang's arms, and that just about did it. Poetry was exhausting, even involuntarily, even with such a ready subject quite literally at hand. There was a time when even she had to give up the fight, after all. The sun must set, and the moon would rise soon enough.

Yang moved, carefully, put the last of her energy into being as sure and graceful of her movements as her girlfriend, what a word, what a world, and placed the gentlest kiss she could allow herself on Blake's head. Right between the ears. Maybe a kiss could serve as an angel's crown, she thought.

"Good night, Blake." Yang completed the final stanza. With, of course, a flourish. "Love you."

She surrendered.

So you've made it to the end! That means you either enjoyed my fic, or got far enough into it that you realized if you didn't finish it, it would be a complete waste of your hard-earned time. If it's the second, I'm so sorry.

This fic has been, in part, an early Christmas gift to a Tumblr user dcgcharlie - one of the first people to ever really believe in my writing. Well, the first one who wasn't . . . obligated to.

At any rate. Have a good day!