Yang was dying.

She couldn't breathe, all the air was escaping from her lungs and her body was unable to make the requisite muscle spasms to replenish it. Instead, her heart was racing uncontrollably.

Even though she had dashed along streets and rooftops from her hotel for several miles, that wasn't the reason. She was a Huntress, something as simple as that barely registered in her aura.

No, what was making her heart race was the house that towered before her.

After so many days crying in her room until she worked through her feelings, after traveling so many hundreds – no, thousands – of miles to get here, she was so close to her goal it was almost like a dream. Now that she was here, she finally felt the monumental weight of what she was planning, as though it were crushing her chest with the force of a dozen Paladins.

Gritting her teeth, she punched her iron fist into the palm of her other hand, snapping herself back into reality at the slight pain as her aura absorbed the impact.

She was Yang Xiao Long.

She was the one who burned like the sun.

She could do this.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

The air was her resurrection, returning her to life as she inhaled deeply of the night air. The past didn't matter, all that mattered were the present and the future. A future with Blake.

She had been broken when her partner ran away, had left her alone, but countless days of doing nothing but training and thinking had fixed that. She understood everything now. Or at least she felt like she did. And belief, Yang knew, was one hell of a force of nature.

With a degree of stealth one might not expect from someone so hotheaded, Yang made her way up to the house. The hot Menagerie night meant that the windows were open to let in air, which was perfect for her. Peeking in, and with the help of the faint moonlight, she saw the silhouette of a lithe girl resting on her bed. Not just a girl, a woman. It had been over half a year since she had seen the object of her affection, after all.

Steeling her resolve, she stepped into the house and closer to her target. When she was alongside the bed, she brought herself to her knees and gently touched the girl's shoulder.

"Blake," she whispered tenderly.

"Hrmm," the other woman started, only to be cut off by the blonde bombshell.

"Blake, please, just listen to me, I need to say this before I lose my nerve, okay?" Yang said quickly. "I love you. I love you in every way. Not just as teammate. Or as a partner. Or as a friend. I mean it as in … as in I am in love with you. Mind, body, soul, everything."

There, she had said it. There was no going back now. With the first hurdle cleared, it was now far easier for her to pour out her heart.

"I have loved you from the moment we met, and these last months without you made me realize that I need you. I need you more than I need air, and I know you feel the same, I just know it. You ran away, but that doesn't matter. You probably thought this… this 'losing my arm' thing was your fault; that staying would only hurt me. But I don't care. I would do anything for you Blake. Anything. Even if it meant facing down the entire White Fang myself, or fighting a herd of Goliaths, or having to go to Port's classes every day for the rest of my life, I'd do it. I'd take on the world for you. I'd do it in a heartbeat because the worst thing in my life wasn't losing my mom, or my step-mom, or my arm, or my friends – it's the just the thought of losing you. So I know what I want now, and that's you. That's why I've gone halfway around the planet to find you again. I will always find you, I promise. I would give an arm and a leg to be with you – and hey, I'm already halfway there."

Yang smiled in the darkness, happy she had finally said what she had been dying to tell Blake since the early days of Team RWBY.

With this weight finally off of her chest, she couldn't control herself and started to cry quietly. She knew she had gotten through, because she could hear Blake quietly sobbing as she drew in a breath as well.

"That's beautiful, I know my daughter would love to hear that," an unfamiliar female voice said. A voice coming right from where 'Blake' was resting.

Yang froze, her heart alternating between being alive with panic and dead with dread.

"Hah, you humans sure do have poor night vision," another voice said, this one a deep and booming man's voice. A man who was in bed next to the woman who Yang was now realizing wasn't Blake.

Yang jumped up, landed on her feet, and did the only thing she could think of. She yelled in panic, loud enough to wake the dead and then kill them again. Whatever apologies or words of confusion her mind were trying to force out were instead converted into unintelligible shouts by her vocal cords, only stopping when she heard the sound of footsteps and the loud slamming of a door behind her.

"Mom! Dad! What's... Yang?" an angelic voice asked from behind her, causing Yang to instantly relax. That was a voice she knew. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind now. She had no doubt that this new voice belonged to the faunus who so thoroughly possessed her heart.

"Blake!" she called out, turning to where the voice had come from, and barely making out the outline of a cat-eared beauty in the night.

"Mister B, Missus B!" another voice said as another set of footsteps stopped inside the room, this one decidedly not angelic, but familiar nonetheless to Yang. "Yang?"

"Neptune?" she asked in confusion.
"What? No, Sun!"

The room grew eerily silent as everyone processed what had happened, trying to make sense of it. Finally, Yang decided to break the quiet pause.

"Can someone turn on the lights?"