Work Text:
one
It’s been three days since Weiss left, and Pyrrha hasn’t slept.
Or, more accurately: she’s slept, but not well and not without waking up to pace the length of the apartment again and again, footsteps carrying her past milestones and remnants of Weiss-- the cheap poster from the first concert they went to together, mounted in an ostentatiously expensive frame to the right of their bedroom door; the running shoes settled neatly on the mat by the front door; the couch with the blue blanket that Weiss always wrapped herself in when they were watching a movie; the phone and keys Weiss had left sitting on the kitchen table.
It’s been three days, and Pyrrha’s alone, out sick from work as she paces and cycles from grief to anger to strategizing and tries to sleep, tries to think, tries to decide what to do because it’s been four years since she came home to an apartment without Weiss in it and six years since she woke up to a life that didn’t have Weiss in it and now she’s cold and empty and alone. It’s been three days and she’s played off the texts from her friends, from her team, deflecting and obfuscating when they ask if Weiss is playing doctor for her, if she needs soup, if she got them all sick at the office.
It’s been three days and someone knocks on the door. Pyrrha trips over the edge of the couch in her scramble to get to the door because it could be Weiss, she could have come back, it could--
“Finally!” Nora yelps out when the door opens, and she charges right into the apartment. “Are you faking sick? I know you when you’re sick, you don’t ever respond to texts.”
“Nora, I--” Pyrrha starts, hand still locked around the doorknob. “Now really isn’t a good time.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Nora says breezily. She folds her arms over her chest. “I’ve known you long enough to know when you’re lying, so spill it.”
“Nora, please,” Pyrrha says, and her voice shakes enough that Nora’s eyes narrow and she marches back to the door, unwinding Pyrrha’s hand from it and pushing it shut.
“What happened?” she says, uncharacteristically quiet, still holding onto Pyrrha’s hand, and Pyrrha pulls in a shaking breath. “P, what’s going on? Do you need me to call Weiss?”
“No!” Pyrrha says sharply, sharp enough that they both flinch, and she pulls her hand free and presses both over her eyes. “I’m sorry, I just-- don’t.”
“Come on,” Nora says, authoritative and calm and so unlike herself that it makes Pyrrha dizzy. She pulls until Pyrrha follows, leading her over to the couch and settling her down, leaving her there in a daze as she bustles around the kitchen, starting the kettle and brewing tea.
“Okay,” Nora says eventually, once she has tea for the both of them and a seat on the couch opposite Pyrrha. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Pyrrha stares down into her tea and the way it sloshes in her mug when she breathes, her hands unsteady in a way she’s never experienced before. It’s Weiss’s favorite tea, the one she’d always kept extra boxes of in the kitchen, the one she’d converted Pyrrha over to three years ago triumphantly.
“Weiss left,” Pyrrha says finally. Her voice wobbles and she nearly spills tea on herself, and busies her hands with settling the mug carefully on the table and twisting her hands around themselves in her lap.
“What?” Nora freezes, mug halfway to her mouth, and blinks slowly at her. “What do you mean?”
“She left me,” Pyrrha whispers. “She-- after everything that happened she had to-- she’s gone.”
Nora discards her own mug, hands falling into her lap helplessly, and stares at Pyrrha, eyes wide and confused. “Why-- how? She just walked out?”
“She was gone when I got home.” Pyrrha pulls in an unsteady breath and squeezes her eyes shut. “On Friday. She-- she left a note, said she was sorry, left her phone and her clothes and everything . She left .”
“Pyrrha,” Nora says helplessly. “There’s no way she would just-- she loves you, so much it’s obnoxious to witness.”
“I know,” Pyrrha says, and her posture finally breaks, face falling into her hands and shoulders shaking uncontrollably, composure holding itself together enough to keep her voice steady at the expense of her body. “She’s scared, I know she is, and she’s trying to-- I know but she’s gone and she asked me not to go after her.”
“Screw that,” Nora snaps out. “She doesn’t get to-- you go after her. You track her down and tell her she’s being an idiot and it doesn’t matter what her family said--”
“Nora, I can’t,” Pyrhha says into her hands, dragging her head up enough to take Nora’s ramrod posture and hard bright eyes. “She told me to let her go and I know she had to have her reasons and--”
“Oh, fuck off with that, Pyrrha,” Nora says over her, suddenly on her feet and pacing the length of the living room and back. “Remember when you first met her and refused to ask her out because you were sure that she didn’t want to and you had to respect that? Remember how stupid that was? Don’t do that again. You know she loves you, you know she’s scared and that she’d never want to leave you, so don’t sit here talking about her reasons when you should be tracking her down--”
“I can’t!” Pyrrha says, louder than either of them expect, and an apology slides out right after it, her shoulders slumping back into the couch. “You didn’t see-- you know what happened at work but you don’t know all of it, none of you do. He took everything from her, Nora, and I couldn’t stop him, no one could stop him. He took her whole life and ruined it.”
“He didn’t take you,” Nora throws back.
“Not yet .” Pyrrha pushes the heels of her hands over her eyes. “But you know he would and he could.”
“So, what, she abandoned you to protect you?” Nora says snidely. “Like that’s--”
“It’s Weiss,” Pyrrha says softly. “Of course she did.”
Nora stops pacing and scrubs her hands over her face, groaning quietly and dropping her head back to stare at the ceiling. “Of course she did,” she echoes.
She drops back down onto the couch, reaching for Pyrrha’s hand and latching onto it. “So what are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to throw Jacques Schnee in prison for the next eighty years,” Pyrrha mumbles with a venom that she’s never heard from herself again.
“You know if it was that easy then he’d already be there,” Nora says, rolling her eyes.
“I’ll figure it out.” Pyrrha turns abruptly, gripping onto Nora’s hand with both of hers. “Don’t tell anyone what happened,” she says quietly. “Please.”
“You want me to pretend that your partner of six years didn’t just up and leave you? Your partner who is friends with literally every single one of your other friends?”
“I just-- I need time,” Pyrrha says, hands tight on Nora’s. “Please. Just-- I’ll tell them, but you can’t tell them why. Please.”
“She’s my friend too, Pyrrha.” Nora shakes her head. “She left us all, too. They deserve to--”
“If they know, they’ll try to fix it,” Pyrrha says sharply. “Especially Jaune, you know he will. And that will just make it worse.”
“You don’t get to keep this from them--”
“It’s Weiss , Nora,” Pyrrha says over her. “Please. Just-- let me deal with it. Please.”
“You really think she’ll come back, don’t you?” Nora says softly. “Even after-- you think she’ll come back.”
“She’s throwing herself on her sword,” Pyrrha says, fingers too-tight around Nora’s hand. “You know how she is. She wouldn’t have left for anything else, you know that.”
Her chest aches and her throat tries to hold onto the words, tries to steady herself, tries to force truth into them, because the alternative is too much for her to manage. Nora’s eyes go soft, her mouth turning down, and she shakes her head.
“You haven’t cried yet, have you?” she says, because of course she knows. No one except Weiss has ever known her as well as Nora does, and it unwinds the final frayed edges of self-control Pyrrha’s clung to for three days and she finally-- finally-- cries because Weiss is gone and Pyrrha’s been left behind.
two
The knock on her door isn’t surprising, the message from downstairs that a junior agent was bringing a visitor up to see her still flashing in her inbox, and Pyrrha doesn’t look up from where she’s finishing up her paperwork initially.
“Sorry, just one second,” she says, scrawling her signature and looking up and her pules stutters over a flash of familiar silverwhite hair in her doorway, six months after Weiss has disappeared without a trace and left Pyrrha with a shell of their life together.
It’s not Weiss.
“Mrs. Schnee,” Pyrrha says slowly, staring up from her desk at the woman she’d met once, years ago, with Weiss’s hand locked around her own at the one and only family dinner at the Schnee’s mansion that they attended. Willow Schnee had been halfway into a bottle of wine when they arrived and halfway into her second one by the time the first course wrapped up, drunk enough that she barely blinked when Jacques had flung his disdain across the oversized table at Weiss and the audacity she’d had to bring a woman home.
Weiss hadn’t gone back to any family events after that, swearing she saw enough of them at work, and had only let herself cry once into Pyrrha’s shoulder over it.
“I’m sorry to show up unannounced,” she says, and Pyrrha’s instincts have her standing from behind her desk and offering a chair to Weiss’s mother wordlessly. She shuts the door to her office and flips the blinds mostly shut and gives herself a moment, just a moment, with her back to the office, to close her eyes and breathe.
“It’s fine,” she says after a long pause. She slides back around her desk, settling her elbows on the desktop and pressing down against it, the ache against her arms as grounding as the physical barrier the desk offers her. “Can I ask why?”
“I haven’t heard from my daughter in three months,” Willow says, and Pyrrha’s heartbeat stumbles again. “I know that things have been-- difficult, for her, with her father, but I was hoping--”
“Mrs. Schnee,” Pyrrha says carefully, holding herself as calm as she can manage. “If you’re here looking for your daughter, I can’t help you.”
Willow’s forehead creases and her mouth turns down and Pyrrha shakes her head, rubs at her forehead.
“Your husband ruined her life,” she says, flat and unconcerned at the way Willow flinches. “You know that, right? Or maybe she was right and you’ve spent too long in the bottom of a wine barrel to notice.”
Willow jerks back in her chair, nostrils flaring, and some part of Pyrrha stirs with sympathy but it loses out to half a year of loneliness, of being left, of holding onto an empty shell of a life without Weiss. She folds her arms over her chest and digs her fingers into her own skin, jaw aching with tension.
“Your husband is a criminal,” she says, picking her way through the words carefully. “He took your mother’s company and ruined it. Weiss uncovered all of it and confronted him about it, and he fabricated evidence to pin his crimes on her to blackmail her into signing everything she had-- everything -- to your son.”
“He wouldn’t,” Willow says, even as her eyes go wide with understanding. “And Whitley never would have--”
“They did,” Pyrrha says. “And Weiss left. He drove her away. Six months ago. You just didn’t notice until now.”
“Where is-- where did she go?”
“If I knew, do you think I’d be sitting here?” Pyrrha says thinly. She breathes in slowly and closes her eyes and stands, hands curling into fists against her desk. “You lost her a long time before I did, Mrs. Schnee.”
“You have no idea where she is?” she says, sounding for all the world like a lost child, and it pushes at the edges of Pyrrha’s anger.
“She doesn’t want to be found,” she says quietly. “When she wants to be found, she’ll make it happen.” She uncurls her fists and stands up straighter, shoving her hands into her pockets, and sighs. “You need help, Mrs. Schnee. I know Weiss tried, but it clearly never took.”
She digs a business card out of her desk, one of the stack she keeps for witnesses in her investigations, the ones caught up in addiction and problems they never meant to stumble into, and offers it to Willow.
“Is she going to come back?” Willow takes the card automatically, blinking and bewildered up at Pyrrha.
“I don’t know.” Pyrrha pushes her hands back into her pockets, shoulders slumping and chest aching. “But if she does, don’t you think you should be sober for it?”
Willow leaves without another word and Pyrrha watches her go, the familiar glint to her hair burning into her chest. She waits until no one is looking and shuts the door and slides down against the wall with her head in her hands, hands shaking with six months of knowing Weiss was somewhere out there hiding herself away, six months of sleeping alone, six years of knowing how splintered Weiss’s family was and how it had ruined both of their lives.
three
Pyrrha nearly knocks over the mug of tea at her elbow when a raucous series of knocks sound out at her door, jerking her out of the trance-like state she’d been in for longer than she can account for, staring at her computer. The knocks keep coming, following by a familiar-sounding yell of her name, and she blinks rapidly, pulls herself away from the computer, shuffles over to the door.
“Finally,” Jaune huffs out, leaning against the doorjamb and glaring at her. “I called you four times. What are you doing ?”
“What?”
“Saph’s birthday, Pyrrha,” he says exasperatedly. “You never showed up.”
“Oh my God,” Pyrrha says with a groan. “I’m so sorry, I completely forgot-- let me just--”
“It’s almost midnight,” he says, folding his arms over his chest. “Saph is cool, you know she’ll let it go, but just-- what’s up? You don’t forget things like this.”
“I just,” Pyrrha starts slowly, and pauses. “I was working on something and got caught up.”
“Don’t tell me you already started all of those write ups for the raid,” he says with a scoff. “Come on, P, it’s Friday night. It can wait until Monday.”
“Not exactly,” Pyrrha says slowly. She drifts back into the apartment, stretching her shoulders out with a wince, knowing Jaune will follow because he always does. The door shuts quietly behind him and he trails after her, leaning against his preferred spot on the kitchen island. She dumps her abandoned tea into the sink and pulls out a bottle of wine instead, offering it to him. “I was going to bring it tonight, but I’ll find something better to make it up to Saph.”
He rolls his eyes but accepts the bottle anyways, retrieving the bottle opener while she pulls two glasses down and leaves them for him to fill, taking her time circling back over to her computer and the paperwork spread out across the kitchen table.
“So what’s so pressing that you forgot about my favorite sister’s birthday?” He hands her one of the glasses and pulls his tie loose with a sigh.
“I was just-- going over everything,” Pyrrha says slowly. “It all fell together too easily, you know? Anonymous tip about a massive illegal deal with a government contractor and we get there at the exact right moment and everything is just tied up neatly for us.”
“I mean,” Jaune says just as slowly, frowning down into his wine. “On the one hand, yes, it’s probably some level of corporate bullshit from-- well. Who knows. But on the other, it is a massively illegal deal they made with a truly offensive amount of illegally obtained personal data, so. I’m counting it as a win.”
“I know,” Pyrrha says. She wrinkles her nose and sighs. “But I just-- I wasn’t sure, you know? It felt weird. So I was doing some digging and then I just lost track of time.”
“You never lose track of time,” he says drily. “You just find things. So what did you find?”
Pyrrha is quiet, staring down into her wine, swirling it around in her glass. She switches her laptop over to another window and turns it to face him. He pushes off the island with a groan and leans down, squinting at security camera footage of a woman with dark hair in the same office they’d raided earlier that day, a scowl etched into her features.
“Who’s that?”
“Officially, no one,” Pyrrah says, still staring down into the swirl of her wine, fingers on her other hand digging into her own arm. “According to facial recognition, at least.”
“Okay?”
“It’s Blake Belladonna,” Pyrrha carries on. “I know because she’s robbed the Schnees like ten times and every person who goes to Weiss’s parents’ house or the executive offices at SDC is checked against a picture of her.”
Jaune straightens back up slowly, leaving his wine on the table and folding his arms over his chest carefully as soon as Weiss’s name comes up.
“I started digging around more,” Pyrrha says, and she discards her own wine and starts to pace, arms folded over her chest as well and fingers tapping against her arms rapidly. “Because it doesn’t make sense for a thief like her to be there, and it really doesn’t make sense that facial recognition didn’t catch it. But she’s been deleted from the system, completely. There are still records of her arrests, but every mugshot and every piece of data for facial recognition is gone.”
Jaune’s forehead creases, his mouth opening and then closing again, and he bends back down to look at the picture.
“That is weird,” he mumbles.
“So I went through all of the security footage,” Pyrrha carries on, still pacing. “All of it. From the office building, from the traffic cameras, from the adjacent buildings.”
“All of it?”
“All of it,” she says again, and she finally slows to a halt on the other side of the kitchen table and reaches for the laptop, spinning it back to face herself and switching to another window. She pauses, pulse stuttering over itself, and pushes it back to Jaune before she loses her nerve.
“What-- oh,” he says. “Weiss?”
“Yeah,” Pyrrha says softly. “She was there today, Jaune. She was right there . Across the street. She set this up, I know she did. She’s the anonymous tip.”
“Hold on, wait.” Jaune shuts the laptop and straightens back up, hands out in front of him. “Just think this through, Pyrrha, okay? If Weiss set this up, then she broke I don’t even want to know how many laws to do it, and for who knows what reason--”
“It’s Weiss , Jaune,” Pyrrha snaps out, as sharp as she’s ever been with him, and he flinches back momentarily. “I know you’re still angry at her but she’s a good person and you know it. If she’s involved in this then it’s for a good reason. You know her.”
“I knew her,” he says sharply. “Past tense. Knew. She was my friend until she walked out on all of us. She was my friend until she abandoned you. She broke your heart, Pyrrha, how can you still--”
“I’m not giving up on her!” Pyrrha throws back, hands curling into fists at her side. “I know her, okay? I know her. I’m not saying I’m not angry but I know that whatever this is? This is her doing something good.”
“You have to stop holding onto--”
“Do not finish that sentence,” Pyrrha says, deathly calm, and Jaune takes a full step back without meaning to, her voice lower and heavier than he’s ever heard. Her fists shake at her side and she seems taller than ever, even barefoot in sweatpants in her kitchen. “I know you’re angry but you don’t know the whole story, so don’t--”
“How can I know the full story when you won’t tell me?” He shoves a hand through his hair roughly and laughs, thin and humorless. “Of course there’s more to it than I know, because you won’t tell me. Nora knows, and she won’t even tell Ren, because you made her promise not to. Obviously there’s more going on than her just dumping us all but you won’t tell us, so what am I supposed to do besides be angry? She left, Pyrrha! You guys were my best friends and she left and now she’s gone and you’re barely here, so of course I’m angry at her.”
He points at the closed laptop with a shaking hand. “You said it yourself. Everything about this case was too clean to be anything but someone wrapping it up in a bow and handing it to us. That means that something severely shady happened before we even got wind of it, and if Weiss was involved? That means her hands are dirty, too.”
“Jaune--”
“I’m going to go home,” he says stiffly. “Thanks for the wine.”
Pyrrha slumps back against the wall of the kitchen, head dropping back against it with a thud and hands still shaking, and Jaune pauses halfway out of the room.
“You deserve better than this, Pyrrha,” he says quietly. “It’s been over a year. She’s not coming back.”
She doesn’t move until the apartment door closes behind him and leaves her alone in the apartment, again, hands shaking and chest aching, and she slides down to sit on the floor. Her fingers dig into her own shins and her breath comes in shaking gasps and she wishes, desperately, for the first time, that just for a little while she could give up on Weiss Schnee.
four
It’s two in the morning, and Pyrrha’s awake.
She’s never been prone to late nights, but after a spate of surgeries and too much time in a hospital with nurses checking on her hourly, she finds herself haunting her own apartment, pacing through the insomnia half of the night and dozing on and off all day long anyways.
It’s two in the morning, and she’s awake, and she’s painstakingly reorganizing her bookshelves with one hand, the other still tucked into a sling. She’s half drunk midway through the second beer, her alcohol tolerance wasted away after so long in the hospital and then recovering, and wondering how much she really needs to keep her criminal law textbook from college when there’s a knock on her door.
Her chest seizes up almost immediately, book tumbling to the couch and hand moving automatically for a firearm she doesn’t have, before she remembers that she’s not about to be ambushed again.
There’s another knock, firm but restrained, and she breathes in deep before opening it to a woman she’s only seen in pictures, tall and blonde and smiling, and Pyrrha blinks.
“Hello,” she says slowly. “You’re Yang Xiao Long.”
“I guess I don’t have to introduce myself, then,” Yang says, shrugging lazily. She offers a hand, holding it out patiently until Pyrrha shakes it.
“You work with Weiss,” Pyrrha says, pulling her hand back and shoving it into her pocket. “What are you--”
“She’s fine,” Yang says quickly. “That’s not why I’m here.” She tilts her head towards the apartment. “Can I come in?”
“You have the single most redacted black ops file in existence,” Pyrrha says. “I probably shouldn’t.”
“If I wanted to hurt you, do you think I would have knocked?” Yang tucks her hands into her pockets and shrugs again.
“Depends on why you’re here, I guess.” Pyrrha steps back anyways, letting Yang into the apartment, and shuts the door behind her. “Did Weiss--”
“She doesn’t know I’m here,” Yang says. Her hands ball visibly into fists in her pockets and she focuses deliberately on Pyrrha’s injured arm. “She would’ve told me not to come.”
“So why are you?”
“She told us all what happened to you,” Yang says, pacing into the living room lackadaisically and pausing at the empty bookshelves and the books scattered all around. “Moving?”
“Reorganizing,” Pyrrha says automatically. “I haven’t been sleeping well since the hospital.”
“Nurses’ rounds, right?” Yang picks up a book and flips the cover open absently. “You get so used to them waking you up all the time, even when you’re supposed to be sleeping.”
“I-- yes,” Pyrrha says slowly. Yang snaps the book shut with a too-loud crack, and they both wince at the noise. She sets the book back on its stack on the coffee table and unzips her jacket, shrugging out of it. “Why are you here?”
“Because Weiss loves you,” Yang says, blunt and easy, and Pyrrha nearly tips over right where she stands. Yang smiles, hands on her hips, and shrugs again. “She’s family to me, and she’s been out of her mind worrying about you ever since, well.” She tilts her head towards Pyrrha’s arm.
“I’m fine,” Pyrrha says, for lack of anything else to say.
“You’re reorganizing your bookshelves with one arm at 2:14 in the morning and nearly had a heart attack when I knocked on your door,” Yang counters. One eyebrow lifts and If Pyrrha didn’t know any better she would be sure that Yang was staring straight through her.
“It’s not unusual after--”
“Of course it’s not,” Yang says, features softening more than Pyrrha would’ve thought possible, warm and calm and comforting, and the mild edge of panic that had been pushing at her ribcage since Yang knocked on her door vanishes. “You went through something traumatic and horrible. It’s not unusual at all.”
She pulls her sweater over her head, the collar catching on her masses of blonde hair momentarily, and she mumbles a curse that somehow has Pyrrha smiling, as if they’re friends, and--
“Oh,” Pyrrha says abruptly, staring baldly at the mass of scars covering Yang’s arm, stretching out from her shoulder and on full display in the tank top she's left in without the sweater.
“I get it,” Yang says, quiet and level. She steps forward but keeps her distance, allowing Pyrrha the space, and holds her arm out between them, turning it slowly to show the pinched and pockmarked skin of her forearm, the rippled tissue grown over deep burns, the surgical scars drawing parallel lines on her shoulder, her elbow, her forearm. “You think that once you get out of the hospital, even if you’re still healing, that you’re past it. But then you can’t sleep, no matter how tired you are, because if the nurses aren’t walking in every hour then are you really past it, or are you still in danger? The hospital is safe and home should be safe but it doesn’t feel the same.”
“What happened?” Pyrrha says in spite of herself, free hand pushing against her injured arm unconsciously.
“Our team got put on a suicide mission,” Yang says wrly. “Not that we knew it at the time. Needless to say, it didn’t go well. Our humvee was blasted into nothing and I was the only one who survived, give or take a fully functional limb or two.” She keeps her arm out, steady and unwavering, for Pyrrha to stare at for long seconds.
“You’re going to be okay,” she says eventually, and she pulls her arm back, pushes her hands back into her pockets. “It doesn’t feel like it now, but you will. You have to focus on that, okay? Be patient with yourself, and trust that you can work your way past it, and you will.”
She tilts her head to one side, smiling lazily. “Also, like, do your PT. But that should go without saying.” She picks her sweater back up and shrugs back into it, mumbling again when her hair catches in the collar.
“How long did it take you?” Pyrrha says. “For that--” she glances pointedly down at Yang’s now covered arm. “--and for the rest of it.”
Yang shifts her weight, hand clasping around her own elbow. “A few years for this,” she says after a long moment. “For everything else? Longer. I shut down, shut myself off. I thought that that version of me, the one with the flashbacks and the triggers, was all that was left.”
“What changed?” Pyrrha’s fingers twitch, as if to reach for her, as if she knows Yang, as if the commonality that is loving Weiss makes them friends. Or maybe it’s just the way Yang stands, shoulders broad but slumped, power rolling off of her and the way she occupies space but eyes downcast and shadowed, strong and sad at the same time.
“I started trusting people again,” Yang says, her voice wavering for the first time. “It feels like shit at first, deciding to trust someone with all that weight, but it’s where you have to start. You have to find somewhere to put it down.” She smiles and it warms the whole room, lifts the ballast that’s been pushing at Pyrrha’s shoulders since she woke up in the hospital.
“I don’t know a lot about you, Pyrrha Nikos, but I know that Weiss loves you as much as she loves anything in this world, and I know you have friends who’re ready to go to war for you, even when they’re completely outclassed, and that’s enough for me to know that you’re going to be okay.” Yang offers her hand again, waiting patiently while Pyrrha stares her down for long seconds before shaking it once more.
“I still don’t understand why you came here,” Pyrrha says, not giving up her firm hold yet. “But thank you.”
“Weiss thinks she’s going to be able to stay away from you until she’s righted every wrong her dickbag father’s ever done to this world.” Yang rolls her eyes. “But I know her, and she’s not, not now. There’s enough for you two to sort through without you having to deal with PTSD on your own. And, frankly, FBI shrinks are useless at it, to be honest. So I thought I could give you a jumpstart.”
“Thank you,” Pyrrha says again, shaking her head, at a loss for what to do in the middle of the night when her ex-girlfriend’s combat prodigy teammate visited to offer advice on how to handle post-traumatic stress.
“How-- can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Yang says, grinning easily and pointing at the half-empty beer on the coffee table. “But that’s the limit on free questions. I will accept payment in the form of a beer, though.”
Pyrrha points her towards the kitchen with a smile, following after her and settling at the kitchen table carefully, holding her immobilized arm close to her body with her other arm.
“How’s she doing?” Pyrrha says softly. “Weiss, I mean.”
Yang flips her cap from her beer in one hand, frowning down at it for long seconds, before taking a slow sip. “She’s-- well. She doesn’t sleep enough, but she never has.”
“No kidding,” Pyrrha mutters, having woken up too many times in the middle of the night to Weiss sitting up in bed, laptop on her knees and nose wrinkling at whatever business crisis she was caught in the middle of fixing.
“It’s different, though,” Yang says quietly. “Since we were here she’s been throwing herself into figuring out how to take down Jacques. We have other clients, other jobs, and it’s not like she’s slipping on them or anything. She’s not going to rush into it. But anytime she’s not working on another job, she’s working on it.”
She takes another pull from the beer and raises her eyebrows at Pyrrha. “I don’t know what you said to her, but it lit a fire under her.” She flips the beer cap in her hand again and leans on her elbows on the counter. “What did you say to her?”
Pyrrha looks down at her hand, pressed hard against the tabletop, mouth opening and then closing again, and again.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Yang says after a long moment. “I get it. What’s between you two is between you two, and despite the fact that I totally showed up at your apartment uninvited in the middle of the night to drink your beer, I do understand boundaries.”
She smiles crookedly, enough that it unwinds some of the tension aching in Pyrrha’s chest, and Pyrrha flexes her fingers and relaxes them. She stares down at her hand and flexes her fingers again, as if she can still feel Weiss’s hand in hers. “She left, and it hurt, but I understand it. So long as her father has his company, she’s a threat to him, which makes me leverage against her.”
“Honestly, I still think I could change his mind if I had an hour to talk to him alone,” Yang drawls out, grinning wolfishly, and for the first time since she first opened the door Pyrrha remembers that Yang Xiao Long was the most dangerous combat asset any branch of the military had for the better part of a decade. “But Weiss wants to do things the civilized way, so here we are.”
“You guys-- your team, you’re going after him?” It’s the question that’s pushed against the back of her teeth since Yang arrived, since Weiss said goodbye in the hospital weeks ago, the one she’s pushed away, the one she desperately wants to know the answer to.
“We always were,” Yang says easily. “I mean, not that Weiss knew. But the rest of us? We knew that early on.” She flips the beer cap in her hand again and then flings it over across the kitchen. Pyrrha’s hand snaps up automatically, snatching it out of the air before it hits her in the face, and blinks rapidly. “A month out of getting shot and still got mad reflexes. I can see why Weiss likes you.”
Pyrrha clears her throat and looks down at the bottle cap sitting in her palm, prodding at it with her thumb.
“Take care of her, will you?” Pyrrha says, still looking down at her hand. “She never lets anyone, but just--please.”
“Don’t worry, Nikos,” Yang says cheerfully. “We’ve all got her back, even if it means locking her in a Faraday cage to make her sleep without trying to do research.” She winks and straightens up, finishes her beer and rinses the bottle in the sink.
“I’m sure she loves that,” Pyrrha says. She points to the cabinet under the sink when Yang holds the bottle up in search of recycling.
“You know it.” Yang wipes her hands against her jeans and disappears into the living room, returning before Pyrrha’s even made it back to standing, jacket in hand. “Get some rest, okay? Your body needs it to heal, and so does your mind.”
She shrugs back into her jacket, flipping her hair out past the collar, and pushes her hands into the pockets. “You’re gonna be okay, Pyrrha Nikos.”
“Thank you,” Pyrrha says, wondering where the urge to hug someone she’s never met before came from, and instead pushes her free hand into her pocket, the other curling into a fist in the sling. “Really.”
“I mean, we’re practically family, y’know,” Yang says with a wide grin. “You’re, like, my best friend’s person . So I’ve got Weiss’s back, and I’ve got yours. Not that you need it, for the record. You seem to be doing pretty good so far on your own.”
“Thank you,” Pyrrha says again, and clears her throat. “I really do appreciate it.”
“Sure thing,” Yang says with a salute.
“Can I ask one more question?” Pyrrha says without meaning to, stopping Yang halfway to the door.
“Don’t see why not,” Yang says, head tilting as she turns. “What’s up?”
“Your team, they’ve been wiped from digital systems,” Pyrrha says, curiosity getting the better of her. “I only tracked you all down because I’d seen hard copies of Belladonna’s picture and knew who she was. She’s been wiped out of facial recognition, and so has Ilia Amitola, and Weiss, and Ruby Rose, even though she keeps sending us selfies just so she can hack back in and delete them just to screw with the cybersecurity team. But not you.”
Yang sucks on her teeth, eyes rolling up towards the ceiling slowly, and exhales slowly, shoulders dropping as she does.
“I spent a lot of time dealing with my past,” Yang says eventually. “I don’t want to not be connected to it. Even if it makes some things harder.” She pulls her chin back down until she can lock her eyes on Pyrrha. “Shitty things have happened, and I’ve made bad choices, but they’re still mine, you know?"
She tilts her head to one side and shrugs. “I didn’t want to lose sight of that.”
Pyrrha nods slowly, tracking Yang’s movements as she zips up her jacket and opens the door.
“Thank you,” she says belatedly.
“I told you, Nikos,” Yang says, backing out of the apartment with a grin, cocky and assured. “You’re Weiss’s person, which means you’re part of the family, so you’ve got a whole host of criminals watching your back now. We got you.” She salutes Pyrrha lazily and pulls the door shut behind her, leaving Pyyhra standing alone in her apartment.
She doesn’t move for long minutes, staring down at the sling on her arm and the way her injured hand can barely form a weak fist, the lingering damage to her body and the way it had somehow brought Weiss back into her life with a whole new family in tow.
She drags her phone out of the pocket of her sweatpants and hits the speeddial before she can stop herself, breathing unsteady as the phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Jaune, hey,” she says, not bothering trying to hold herself steady anymore and slumping down to sit on the couch. “I know it’s late but can you-- can you come by?"
“Of course.” He still sounds half asleep, but she hangs up and sets her phone aside and waits, ready to start.
one
Pyrrha’s only just made it home after one of the follow-up appointments she has to go to every third month for the last two years to have her arm checked-- to check on her mobility, her strength, the way the bones have healed around the screws and plates holding them together-- and pulled out a bottle of wine to open with dinner when someone knocks on her door. She pauses, halfway to the kitchen, and frowns, because only Jaune or Nora or Ren would come by unannounced and they're on an assignment out of town, and the food she ordered shouldn’t be ready yet.
Her pulse doesn’t jump at unexpected noises anymore, holding steady and calm like it always had before she was shot. Her arm has mostly recovered, even if it’s not as strong yet-- or maybe ever again-- as her other one. Her hands don’t shake anymore, not like they did for the first six months. She’s doing better , even if she still doublechecks the locks on her apartment door every night before going to sleep and has spent twice as much time on the gun range as she used to, just in case.
She’s doing better, but she opens the door and immediately drops the wine bottle, because Weiss is on the other side.
“Shit,” Pyrrha mumbles when the bottle hits the floor, thankfully not shattering, but she doesn’t move to pick it up because Weiss is there, standing in the doorway of the home they shared for years, her hair still cut short and hands twisting together in front of her.
“I’m sorry to show up unannounced,” Weiss says formally, and she kneels down to pick up the bottle and offer it to Pyrrha. “But I--”
“It’s fine,” Pyrrha rushes out. She takes the bottle out of Weiss’s hands dumbly, staring down at her and the way she looks so small . “I-- come in.”
Weiss nods, short and sharp and almost like how she used to be, and Pyrrha nearly collides with the wall behind her when she steps back to leave her space to slide by. She discards the wine on the coffee table and steps back, putting space between herself and Weiss, uncertainty clouding the air between them.
“Nothing’s changed,” Weiss says quietly, turning in a slow circle in the living room, taking in the way the shelves are still half filled with books she’d bought, the artwork on the walls in frames they’d picked out together, the coffee table she’d drunkenly bought online on New Year’s Eve the first year they lived together because Pyrrha had dropped an empty champagne bottle on the old one and chipped the lacquer. The bar cart that was the first piece of furniture they bought together that had mostly just held books for the first few years, until Weiss started giving in to her need to collect different bottles of whiskey and Pyrrha had picked up a renewed taste for gin.
There’s a bottle of 21-year-old Hibiki, ostentatiously expensive and still untouched, tucked to one side of the top shelf of the cart, left over from the last Christmas they’d shared together and Pyrrha insisting that Weiss had earned it with how hard she’d worked all year. Weiss’s fingers slide over it, skidding through the thin layer of dust accumulated on top of it.
“You kept this?” She doesn’t face Pyrrha when she speaks, her shoulders tight with familiar lines of tension, and Pyrrha crosses her arms over her chest and digs her fingers into them to stop from reaching out to touch Weiss because she’s right there, in their apartment, after years and years of being gone.
“I never had the heart to get rid of it,” Pyrrha says, and she manages to keep her voice and pulse more level than she expected, right up until Weiss turns back to face her and her heartbeat stumbles over itself.
“How’s your arm?” Weiss says quietly, hands linked in front of her, holding herself too stiffly and just out of reach.
“It’s fine,” Pyrrha says automatically. Her stomach twists around itself when Weiss flinches minutely at the brush off. “I mean-- it’s mostly better, I think.” She untangles her arms and stretches her left one out, pushing her sleeve up to show the pattern of surgical scars that map the damage underneath, punctuated by stubborn dimples in the skin where the stabilizing rods had protruded for weeks.
Weiss reaches for it, hesitant, uncertain, and Pyrrha holds her arm steady and tilts her head, quiet and patient, waiting as always for Weiss to be the one to move first. The space between them cracks in the silence and Weiss finally steps close enough for her fingers to hover over slick lines of scar tissue, still raised and pink.
"It's okay," Pyrrha says eventually, and Weiss's fingertips skid gently along her arm, following the precise cartography of the surgeries that had bolted Pyrrha's bones back into place and stitched her joints back together. Her hand is cool against Pyrrha's skin but her touch burns anyways, and Pyrrha bites down on the inside of her lip and wills herself not to move, not to breathe, not to grab onto Weiss and never let her leave again. “It’s not back to full strength, but it’s getting better.”
“Good,” Weiss says, absent and unfocused, fingertips still following the lines on Pyrrha’s skin, scalding and comforting at the same time, and Pyrrha bites down harder to hold herself steady and keep from pulling Weiss closer and holding on with everything she has. “I’ve been worried.”
“You could have called to check in, you know.” Pyrrha does her best to keep her voice light, but guilt flashes across Weiss’s face anyways, a flickering downturn of her mouth and shadow in her eyes. “Why are you here now, then?”
Weiss doesn’t answer for long seconds, her focus still on Pyrrha’s arm, her other hand dragging up to press against the scarring tracking up from her wrist, familiar touch burning against Pyrrha’s skin and drawing her pulse up to the surface, heavy and heated. It’s almost too much, the way everything is different in her touch-- the nerve endings in Pyrrha’s arm are rawer and sharper under the skin; Weiss’s hand is more calloused, her fingertips rougher than they’d ever been when Pyrrha knew her-- but still so very much how it always was, Pyrrha’s skin reacting immediately and her whole body leaning into Weiss’s touch.
“Weiss,” she says, strangled and shaking, her other hand clenching into a fist at her side.
“I’m sorry,” Weiss says, but she doesn’t let go, palm flattening and following the line of Pyrrha’s forearm, wrist to elbow and back down again, as if she’ll disappear if she’s not touching Pyrrha in some way. She breathes in shakily and exhales hard enough that Pyrrha feels it against her shirt.
“Why are you here?” Pyrrha manages to say, the question scraping against her throat and the way her body keeps wanting to tilt closer and closer to Weiss. She looks smaller than ever, even smaller than she’s always been, somehow, and in spite of everything-- of years alone, of being left behind, of bearing just of much of the burden of Jacques Schnee’s cruelty as Weiss-- all Pyrrha wants, right now, with two functional arms and Weiss right in front of it, is to grab her up and hold her close.
“I,” Weiss starts, slowly, almost dazed, her eyes still locked onto her hands on Pyrrha’s arms, the sharp contrast in their skin tones, as if she can’t believe she’s here either. She clears her throat uncertainly and her fingers press harder against Pyrrha’s arm. “I need you to take some time off from work.”
It’s enough to jostle Pyrrha out of her own reverie, to pull her away from her focus on the sharp line of Weiss’s jaw and the uncertain set to her mouth. Something traitorous and hopeful flutters deep in her chest, the part of her that knows that if Jacques Schnee had been taken out of the picture then she would have known already, that knows that Weiss isn’t here to ask to come home yet, losing out against the hope that maybe, maybe this whole nightmare is over. “What?”
“I-- we’re starting a job,” Weiss says carefully. She clears her throat again, shoulders settling into a familiar posture, and finally pulls her hands away from Pyrrha’s skin, leaving a prickling cold in her wake. She pushes her hands into her pockets and Pyrrha steps back automatically because Weiss as she knew her, the Weiss she fell in love with, haughty and glamorous and always so carefully put together, never put her hands in her pockets. “And I need to know that you’re going to be safe while we’re on it.”
“What?” Pyrrha says again, dumbly, unwilling to consider that even if this all hasn’t been fixed yet it might be soon. “What does that have to do with--”
“It’s going to get messy,” Weiss says, quiet, careful, precise in a way she so rarely ever was with Pyrrha. “It should be fine, but if it goes sideways I have to know that you’re somewhere safe.”
“You’re going after him.” It clicks into place and Pyrrha sits down heavily onto the couch, hands falling into her lap. “Your father, you’re going after SDC.”
“It’s not just him at this point.” Weiss closes her eyes and breathes in through her nose and exhales slowly, precisely. “Whitley has-- well. He always did take after Dad.”
“Weiss, I--” Pyrrha says, folding her arms over her stomach, because Whitley was always cold and distant but Weiss had tried, for so long, to hold onto a relationship with him. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” Weiss murmurs. Her shoulders tilt forward, leaning towards Pyrrha, and there’s something building behind her eyes, her mouth opening again, only to be interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Shit,” Pyrrha mutters. “Sorry, I-- it’s dinner, just a second.”
She’s grateful for the excuse to turn away from Weiss, to stop looking at her and thinking back over the years of space between them and the years they’d spent together before that, the way Weiss looks like everything Pyrrha’s wanted to hold onto since she was barely 22 years old. She takes her time moving to the door, going through the motions of unlocking it and opening it, accepting the food, locking and then doublechecking the door after before she turns around.
Weiss isn’t in the living room anymore, and panic stabs through Pyrrha’s sternum for the shortest of moments that Weiss is gone, again, disappearing without a trace. She’s in the kitchen, though, wine bottle in one hand and opener in the other.
“You looked like you needed a drink,” she says simply when Pyrrah drops the bag of food carelessly onto the table. “I’m sorry if it was presumptuous--”
“It’s okay,” Pyrrha says, rubbing her hands against her jeans, unsure of where to put them. “Are you back, Weiss? Are you here?”
It’s enough to still Weiss’s hands, corkscrew halfway into the bottle of wine when she freezes.
“I can’t be,” she says after a long moment. “Not yet.”
“But after this,” Pyrrha presses on. Her chest aches with exhaustion and she pushes a hand over her heartbeat, too tired, too worn down, too everything to keep holding onto some nebulous someday. “After this--after this job, whatever your plan is.”
“It could go very wrong,” Weiss says carefully. She twists the corkscrew slowly, carefully, cork squeaking against the glass neck of the bottle. “There are always variables to consider, to control for, but no matter how well we plan there are constant risks to account for and this, specifically, is a much bigger and more complicated--”
“Weiss, please,” Pyrrha says, voice cracking between them. “Just come home.”
Weiss’s knuckles go white around the wine bottle and her shoulders tremble under the tension.
“Can’t we just be done with all of this?” Pyrrha says, gesturing uselessly between them. “I’m tired, and I miss you, and I want our life back.”
Weiss sets the bottle down onto the counter carefully, movements too controlled, too precise, to be anything but the consequence of knots of tension holding her together.
“I do, too,” she says, slow and quiet. “Please know that that’s all that I want.”
“It’s all right here,” Pyrrha says, the words souring in her mouth. “I’m right here.”
“Pyrrha, please,” Weiss grinds out. “I can’t-- not until I’m sure that--”
“Then why are you here now ? It’s not fair, Weiss! If you’re coming back then come back, but if you’re not you can’t-- it’s not fair to show up when I’m in the hospital and then out of the blue--”
“I know!” Weiss’s voice cracks out, brittle and breaking, and Pyrrha’s mouth snaps shut. “I thought I couldn’t ever go back, Pyrrha. I-- you were hurt and I was terrified and I had to see you, I had to see for myself that you were still breathing. I thought you would hate me and I was okay with that because at least you were okay , and I was sure you would-- it never occurred to me that you wouldn’t hate me.”
“You really think I could hate you?” Pyrrha shakes her head and drags her hands down her face, laughing humorlessly. “How am I supposed to hate you for trying to protect me? As much as it hurts, how am I meant to make myself hate you?”
“Pyrrha,” Weiss says, empty and aching, and she slumps back against the kitchen counter, crumpling in on herself. “I’m trying. I promise. I don’t want to keep living my life without you in it if I don’t have to, and I’m trying , it’s why I need you to be somewhere safe when we--”
“I know!” Pyrrha half-yells. It startles them both and she slaps a hand over her own mouth, eyes wide and breaths coming heavy. “I’m sorry, I just-- I know, I know . I get it. But God, Weiss, I’m tired of missing you and now you’re right here and I don’t know how to think.”
“I’m sorry,” Weiss mumbles, pressing further back against the counter. “We’re so close, Pyrrha. I really think this is going to work, I just-- I need to know you’re out of his reach while we’re doing this. And then I just want to come home. If you’ll have me.”
“If I’ll--” Pyrrha bites out, and shakes her head. “If I’ll have you?”
“I know you said you understand why I left,” Weiss says shakily. “But there’s so much I still need to apologize for, and it’ll take time for me to earn your trust again, and I don’t expect you to just--”
“Jesus, Weiss,” Pyrrha says, and it comes out like a curse, like a promise, and she crosses the kitchen in a stride and a half, hands fitting at Weiss’s waist like they always did and mouth finding hers, heavy and heated and so desperate she can barely recognize herself. Weiss responds immediately, hands fisting into Pyrrha’s shirt and pulling, allowing herself to be lifted up onto the counter and locking her legs around Pyrrha’s waist, habitual and easy and everything Pyrrha’s missed for too many years. They've done this before and it feels right-- Weiss's hands in her hair and skin under her lips--but it's different all the same, a different shade of home, Pyrrha pushing harder than ever and Weiss pushing back, Weiss's grip heavier and Pyrrha's whole body shaking like an overworked muscle, recovering arm aching with the effort and the way Weiss's fingers skim carefully over it.
“We have to,” Weiss gasps out when Pyrrha pulls back for air and then kisses her again. “Talk, we have to--”
“Later,” Pyrrha mutters against the side of her neck, hands flexing at her waist and pulling, lifting Weiss off the counter, feet following the familiar blind path towards the bedroom.
“Later,” Weiss says, and her hands curl around the back of Pyrrha’s head, tilting until she can kiss her again.
“You know,” Weiss says, voice heavy with fatigue. “This wasn’t exactly how I thought this conversation was going to go.”
Pyrrha drags her head over until she can see Weiss, sprawled out on her stomach and head pillowed on her arms.
“I can’t say it’s how I thought my night would go either,” Pyrrha says, swallowing a yawn. “Not that I’m complaining.” She rolls onto her side and reaches out habitually, thumb skimming along the line of Weiss’s cheek and carrying past her ear, until her fingers can run through the close-cropped hair on the side of her head. Weiss’s eyes slip shut, shoulders softening under Pyrrha’s touch.
“I missed this,” she says, half into her arms, almost too quiet to hear.
“What, sex?” Pyrrha says drily. “Imagine that.”
“No, just-- being near you,” Weiss says, too engaged with the way Pyrrha’s hand is sliding through her hair to be anything but earnest. “Everything always feels like it’s going to be okay when I’m near you.”
“So stay,” Pyrrha says, the words scraping against her throat, and her hand drops down from Weiss’s hair, follows the line of her shoulder, her spine. She’s leaner than she used to be, before. She was always thin and lithe, then, but now it's as if she’s been reconstructed out of harder lines, wiry muscles coiled tight under her skin. “Let me help.”
“I wish I could,” Weiss mumbles, dropping her forehead onto her arms and letting out a content groan when Pyrrha’s fingers trip over a knot of tension in her shoulderblade and dig in, thumb working absently at the knotted muscles. “But if it goes badly then I don’t-- shit ,” she mutters with a whine when Pyrrha’s pushes harder into her back. “I don’t want you to be caught up in it.”
“You know, I could, I don’t know, help it not go badly, maybe,” Pyrrha offers, shifting close and up onto her elbow so she can work harder at the knot in Weiss’s back. “I’m a pretty solid FBI agent and everything.”
“Which is why you have to stay out of it,” Weiss groans out, wincing. “I go to prison, fine, whatever, but you? You’re FBI. You would be such a target.”
“You could go to prison for this?” Pyrrha’s hand stills and she ignores the whine from Weiss. “How likely is it that things are going to go sideways?”
Weiss rolls her head over so she can stare at Pyrrha, eyes wide and pouting, until she sighs and sets back to working at the knot in her back
“Seriously,” Pyrrha says. “How likely?”
“The primary plan has a 58% chance of unmitigated success,” Weiss mumble, eyes sliding shut. “There are eight likely scenarios following that, each with three subsequent backups built into them.” She opens one eye and manages a smile that could almost count as cocky. “We’ve been working on this for a while.”
“How likely?” Pyrrha asks again, and she presses the heel of her palm hard down over the knot.
“Less than fifteen percent chance of anyone going to prison who isn’t my jackass of a father or brother,” Weiss says through a wince.
“And you’re sure--”
“I practically rewrote the rules of actuarial science, Pyrrha,” Weiss says quietly, her voice level with a new sort of confidence, different from the cocky assurance that Weiss had carried into her first day in the executive offices at her father’s company, barely 23 years old with her advanced degrees slapped onto the wall and a lifetime of preparation propping her upright. “I know how to run these jobs, and I know how my father thinks. The only variable left that I can’t account for is you.”
Pyrrha’s hand goes soft against Weiss’s skin, abandoning the knot in her shoulder and skimming down along her spine and back up again absently. “You want me in a safehouse.”
“I do.” Weiss leans up onto her elbows, eyes sharp and locked onto Pyrrha’s unfocused gaze. “I want to know you’re protected, in case of a worst case scenario.”
“You think he’s been watching me?”
“Not overtly,” Weiss says, too confident to be anything but right. “There aren’t any eyes on this apartment, I made sure of that. But I do think he’s keeping track of you, enough that if he wanted to do something he would have the option.”
“Wouldn’t moving me give him a heads up, then?”
Weiss’s mouth snaps shut, lips pressing together tightly. “I’d still--”
“Wait, hold on,” Pyrrha says, hand stalling out and fingers digging into Weiss’s hip gently. “You did think about that, didn’t you? That’s one of your variables. And you’d still rather risk forecasting your whole plan to put me in a safehouse?”
“Yes,” Weiss says stubbornly. “You’re--”
“Staying right here,” Pyrrha says, firm and unwavering. “Weiss, I know how smart you are and I know how much this matters to you. And I know you want to protect me, but you can’t decrease your likelihood of success just to hide me away in some safehouse somewhere. It’ll undermine everything you’re trying to do.”
“You have to be safe--”
“I will be.” Pyrrha presses her hand against Weiss’s cheek. “Trust me, okay? I’m pretty good at protecting myself. Don’t worry about me.”
“I always worry about you, though,” Weiss mutters, leaning into Pyrrha’s hand.
“Then don’t worry about me more than you worry about the rest of your team,” Pyrrha says, and it’s enough to snap tension into Weiss’s jaw. “Moving me could warn your father that you’re about to do something, which puts them at risk. Don’t do that.”
“I hate it when you out-logic me,” Weiss says with a sigh.
“No, you don’t,” Pyrrha says, hand working it’s way back up into her hair. Weiss rolls over, dropping down onto her back and catching Pyrrha’s hand in both of hers, holding it over her sternum and tracking her fingers along the bones of Pyrrha’s hand.
“I don’t, you’re right,” she says, rolling her eyes. She drops her head over to the side, eyes sharp and bright and burning into Pyrrha’s. “I never stopped thinking about you, you know. Every day.”
“Me either,” Pyrrha says softly. She follows when Weiss pulls at her hand, letting herself slide closer, hand falling onto Weiss’s stomach lazily, and kisses her again. Her fingers find their way to Weiss’s ribcage, laddering down to the protrusion of her hip. “When do you have to leave?” she mumbles against Weiss’s mouth, heartbeat shuddering when Weiss’s nails scrape down over her shoulderblades.
“Not til tomorrow,” Weiss says, tilting her head back so Pyrrha can bite at the side of her neck gently.
“And after that?” Pyrrha says against Weiss’s collarbone, her sternum.
“Six-- six weeks,” Weiss says, stumbling when Pyrrha’s teeth scrape over her hipbone.
“Six weeks,” Pyrrha says with a nod. “You promise?”
“I promise.” Weiss’s fingers tangle into her hair, holding her in place for long moments and staring down at her, eyes hard and bright. “Six weeks.”
“Okay,” Pyrrha says, internalizing the promise burning out of Weiss’s eyes. “Six weeks.”
Six weeks, and Weiss would feel safe to come home. Six weeks and Jacques Schnee would be powerless. There was a whole new family of Weiss’s to account for, but compared to six year of Pyrrha, alone, haunting the empty spaces of the life they’d built together, that was nothing. She presses another kiss to Weiss’s hip and keeps moving forward.