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Weiss doesn’t know when she fell for Blake and Yang. Not exactly.
But she can pinpoint the exact moment she realized it. The exact moment she realized that she was in love with two people who were in love with each other.
She can pinpoint the exact moment, down to the second, that she started coughing up flower petals.
The night they returned from Mount Glenn. The night after the three of them talked about their careers as huntresses, the night they confessed their desires.
She remembers thinking back on that moment as she lay in bed, listening to the sounds of Ruby shifting in her sleep, the sounds of Yang snoring, Blake’s soft breathing. She thinks about that moment from the night before, and suddenly her throat starts to itch. It starts to ache.
She fell into a momentary coughing fit, squeezing her eyes shut and rolling onto her side as she coughed until she couldn’t breathe. And when she opened her eyes, she saw yellow and purple flower petals resting on her bedsheets.
In a moment of confusion, she gathered the petals into her hands and dumped them into the bathroom garbage. She fell asleep shortly after, and convinced herself it was a dream.
It wasn’t a dream, she realizes two weeks later. Because when the Vytal Tournament rolls around, it only grows worse. After their first fight, after they won and she watched as Blake and Yang cheerfully celebrated, she feels something in her chest ache and a strange pricking in her lungs.
She locks herself in the backstage bathroom and coughs out petal after petal, watching in shock as they drifted to the floor.
This time, she convinces herself she is just going insane from stress.
During their second fight, the duo battle where they voted for Yang and Weiss to compete, Weiss pushes herself and Flynt into a geyser in an attempt to protect Yang. It doesn’t deplete his aura, but it still buys Yang time.
When her teammates come rushing to her side, all of them looking concerned and worried, Yang gently cradling her body, that familiar choking feeling grows.
She coughs out a single yellow petal before she can stop herself. She grips it tightly in her hand so that her teammates don’t see it, and drops it into the geyser when they aren’t looking.
Her feelings for Yang are growing unbearable, she realizes, so she begins to distance herself from the blonde brute. After the incident during Yang and Mercury’s fight, Weiss invites Blake out for coffee to take their minds off of anything.
But Blake is so kind and gorgeous, and Weiss finds herself hiding in the bathroom ten minutes into their ‘date’, coughing up purple petals into the porcelain toilet.
Then, things get worse. It all happens so quickly, Weiss barely knows what happens. A mysterious woman takes over the channel showing the Vytal Tournament, and suddenly both the Grimm and the White Fang are initiating a somehow-coordinated attack on Beacon.
Weiss and Blake have to separate once they get to the courtyard. Weiss knows that her teammate needs to deal with the White Fang, so she let’s her go with a wish of good luck and a single purple petal.
A lot happens in the time between leaving Blake and finding her again, one of said things being gaining the ability to summon. She’s ecstatic that she finally unlocked that part of her semblance, but all of that happiness is wiped away when she arrives at the docks and sees Blake and Yang.
The first thing she notices is that Yang’s right arm is missing, a blood-soaked bandage tied around the stump that remained. Blake is holding her hand and sobbing, frantically apologizing and deaf to everything else happening around them.
The sight of both of them like that causes Weiss’ throat to burn, but this time it isn’t from the petals.
That was the last time Weiss saw them.
When they’re separated, it feels easier. Weiss can feel the thorns in her chest retracting, can feel how it’s so much easier to breathe as the days go on.
In her mind, Weiss is in complete turmoil, but physically, she’s the best she’s been in months.
Something about that makes her feel sick.
But the pain eases, and she can breathe properly, and eventually, the only sign that the flowers and petals were ever there is the small prick she feels in her lungs when she thinks about them for too long.
During her time trapped inside the manor, she does research on flowers. The library is filled with books about flowers and gardening; her mother used to read them, back when she was sober.
She learns that the yellow petals were chrysanthemum and carnations, that the purple ones were bellflowers and belladonna.
(She looks for their meanings in the book, but finding out makes her feel sick. She doesn’t touch the books again after that.)
When she’s had enough of her father and his cruel imprisonment, his abuse, she leaves. Klein helps her sneak out and a kind pilot lets her onto his ship to take her to Mistral.
It goes well, until it doesn’t. Lancers attack, and just when Weiss thinks she’s won, the tail of the dying Queen Lancer pierces their engine and they crash.
She doesn’t know what became of the pilot.
She gets kidnapped by a black-haired woman who looks infuriatingly familiar and her goons. They keep her in a cage, and for a brief moment, she ponders if this is better than what it was like back at the manor.
(The answer is easy: yes.)
She plans an escape by using her knight, has it chip away at the metal bars keeping her captured, until there’s a big commotion some hours later.
People shout and grumble, the guards watching over her rushing behind the tents to see what’s happening. Weiss doesn’t bother paying attention at first; not until something causes the tent blocking her view to collapse, and her eyes land on a blonde woman who makes her heart stop.
Within mere seconds, all of the healing Weiss’ lungs have done is diminished. She can feel her lungs fill up with stems and flowers and petals. She can feel thorns scratching at her throat. She can feel her heart soaring in her chest.
“Yang?” she calls, and her world completely stops when the blonde looks over.
What happens next is a bit of a blur. Both the happiness and excitement and comfort of seeing her teammate, along with the shock and confusion and sheer exhaustion she feels from Raven’s story about Ozpin and Salem and birds.
They reunite with Ruby and the remnants of Team JNPR. Weiss is so happy to be back with them again. Her true family.
But there’s an emptiness that Weiss feels. The spot where Blake is supposed to be.
But Yang is clearly upset with Blake. Upset that her partner abandoned her, abandoned all of them. When she speaks of her frustrations towards Blake and storms off early one morning, Weiss tells Ruby that she’ll handle it.
Her throat prickles and her lungs ache as she speaks to Yang, as she defends Blake. When she’s speaking, Yang gives her a soft look that makes her lungs feel like they’re being stabbed from the inside.
(When she leaves, she coughs up multiple yellow petals that are tinged red, with a few purple petals dotting the mix.)
The battle at Haven is a mixture of positive and negative emotions. For starters: Weiss gets impaled. She gets stabbed through the side with a burning spear and passes out for a solid ten minutes, before she wakes up to Jaune Arc of all people healing her.
So that’s… not great.
And then Blake shows up.
She learns later that Blake came from Menagerie to foil the White Fang’s attack with Sun, a girl named Ilia and hundreds of volunteers from Menagerie. But all she knows at the moment is that Blake is here, standing by her side and holding Gambol Shroud, ready to fight by her team’s side once more.
She admires Blake so much at that moment. She feels her heart skip a beat, feels warmth in her chest, feels pain in her lungs. She chokes back purple petals and holds out Myrtenaster, ready to continue fighting.
(When Team RWBY is finally reunited, Yang returning from the vault alone with the lamp in her hand, the four of them fall into a group embrace. Weiss feels so warm, so happy, so complete for the first time in months.
She feels the flowers ever growing in her chest, but she keeps the petals down.)
They don’t stay at Haven for long. They need to head to Atlas, much to Weiss’ delight, and so they only stay for a few days more before heading to Argus.
In the time between their leave for Argus, Weiss watches as Blake and Yang awkwardly fumble with each other, Blake trying to atone for leaving and Yang trying to convince Blake that she doesn’t need to.
It’s cute, Weiss thinks. Cute how they both clearly have feelings for each other, how they’re both fumbling their way into a relationship that goes deeper than just being partners.
It’s cute, Weiss thinks, but it only makes the flowers and thorns in her chest grow.
Their trip to Argus is just short of terrible, which seems to be the new normal to Team RWBY, much to their chagrin.
While fighting the Grimm, their train goes off the tracks and they’re forced to stumble through the tundra to hopefully reach Argus, without any cell service to contact their friends or see where they are. They also gain the added bonus of a blind old lady with faulty goggles.
They find a place called Brunswick Farms just as the snowstorm begins to grow unbearable, and they decide to take residence in the first house they find.
As they separate to search the house for food and blankets and other important items, Weiss and Yang stumble upon two rotting corpses lying in their bed. As if they just fell asleep and never woke up.
Weiss feels… empty, for the rest of the time. So empty that she barely even feels the way thorns prickle her throat when Blake slides a blanket over her shoulders, as Blake and Yang sit on either side of her to provide her comfort.
Eventually she sleeps, but when she wakes up, she finds herself in a nightmare.
Because she’s so strangely tired - it seems that everyone but Ruby is - and their leader ends up dropping the lantern down the well on accident. And when they go to retrieve it, they find the most terrifying thing Weiss has ever seen: the Apathy.
The Grimm who steal their will to go on, who forces them to become apathetic and empty before killing them.
As the four of them are fleeing from the Grimm at the bottom of this well, just as they reach the doors that lead into the wine cellar, it becomes so hard to go on.
Blake is laying just in front of the Grimm, eyes empty and soulless. Yang is at the bottom of the stairs, desperately reaching for Weiss.
And Weiss, even though she’s inches from death, feels petals escaping her lips because she cares so deeply about these two women who love her like a sister.
(They escape, thanks to Ruby’s silver eyes, and they never speak about the Apathy again.)
Argus consists mainly of Weiss panicking about her inevitable return to Atlas, her teammates trying desperately to calm her down, but only causing Weiss to either choke on petals (not that they knew), or grow tired of Ruby’s constant attempts at distraction.
When they finally enact their plan to leave for Atlas (a plan that Weiss is positive will get them all arrested at best ), Blake and Yang disappear. First, Blake stops replying to Yang, and their blonde teammate goes to investigate. And then both of them stop replying, and Weiss feels terror gripping her heart.
She pushes it to the side, does what she does best and ignores the petals that are tickling her throat, and helps Ruby and JNOR fight Cordovin.
When things have calmed down, when they’re finally flying to Atlas, Blake and Yang don’t separate from each other’s sides. They sit side by side on the airship, their sides pressed flush against each other, their hands intertwined.
(No one asks what happened when they went missing. The blood on their clothes and coating Blake’s blade is evidence enough.)
Weiss excuses herself to the back of the airship and coughs up a half-bloomed purple and yellow pansy. She doesn’t know what it means, but she’s positive she doesn’t want to.
When she returns, she catches Yang’s eye. The blonde offers her a grin and scoots to the side, opening a space between her and Blake.
Hesitantly, Weiss takes the seat. She feels Yang wrap an arm around her shoulders as Blake easily rests her head on Weiss’ lap.
Yang starts talking about anything and everything, and Weiss instantly knows that they’re trying to distract her from the fact that they were heading closer to Atlas with every single second.
She’s almost surprised that it works.
When they arrive in Atlas, Ironwood basically enrolls them in Atlas Academy. They are to live in the dorms, to spend every day training - the only difference is that they’re training with the Ace Ops.
Weiss hasn’t dormed with Blake and Yang since Beacon. She has been sharing rooms with her partner ever since they reunited, and she had been perfectly content with that.
Now, she had to see them at every waking moment. Seeing them when they’ve just woken up, when they’re about to go to sleep. She sees the way they basically cuddle together on Blake’s bed after a long day of training and she coughs up purple and yellow pansies.
She makes the decision to try to distance herself from them, truly for her own health, but it goes very poorly.
Because even though Weiss tries to distance herself from Blake and Yang, even though she tries to make herself hate them, she only feels her affections growing through their time in Atlas.
When they run into her father at the mines, they’re by her side. They stand tall beside her in confidence, fix her father with glares and looks of hatred, and she feels so powerful.
But they’re in love , her brain reminds her. And she is reminded of that fact by them , when they are all given a night off from training.
Because Blake and Yang fool around with each other, doing some strange dance that Weiss can’t recognize, and she feels the thorns pricking her throat, can feel the tears pricking her eyes.
They love each other. It’s so blatantly obvious. And here Weiss is, pining after the only two people she can’t be in love with. Falling in love with the two people who have already fallen.
Jaune pokes his head into the room, asking if any of them want to join him and Oscar at the movies, and Weiss agrees before he can even finish his sentence.
Weiss leaves halfway through the movie to cough up yellow chrysanthemums and purple bellflowers, purple and yellow pansies. She stares at them until Oscar knocks on the bathroom door, informing her that the movie’s over.
Before Jaune and Oscar can ask her anything, sirens warning of a Grimm invasion begin to wail. For the first time in her life, Weiss finds herself grateful for the Grimm.
But maybe they love me, too, the hopeless part of her brain tries. The part of her brain that continues to feed into her illness, the part that keeps providing this disease with ammunition.
Because when they go to Schnee manor, they hold her hands. When they see the portrait of the Schnee family that was painted a decade ago, a couple with two sons and a daughter, they instantly understand and they accept her without question.
They always watch over her, always check in with her when she leaves to search for evidence against her father, and she still feels the flowers grow.
No matter how hard she tries to dislike them, they just make her love them even more.
Ironwood turns against them and forces them to fight against the Ace Ops. It’s painful and miserable, half of them spitting out insults and the other half clearly not wanting to fight them, but they have no other choice.
They defeat the Ace Ops, and Weiss feels terrible.
Things get even worse. Cinder attempts to steal the Winter Maiden’s powers. She fails, and the powers that were supposed to go to Winter end up going to Penny.
When Winter chooses Ironwood over her, Blake and Yang sit by her side for the rest of the airship ride as Ruby comforts Penny. They hold her hands and cuddle her between them and try to take her mind off it by talking about anything they can think of.
When they split up for the next part of their plan, Weiss feels torn apart. Being separated from the others, from Yang , worries her to no end. They’ve been reunited for almost a year now, and being away from even just one member of her team terrifies her.
But Blake is worried, and Ruby is worried, and Weiss has no right to be worried. Because Blake is Yang’s partner and basically her girlfriend, and Ruby is Yang’s sister, and Weiss is just… Weiss. She isn’t supposed to be in love with Yang, so she simply pretends she isn’t.
She doesn’t think about Yang and doesn’t look at Blake, and she almost convinces herself that it helps keep the flowers from growing.
(It doesn’t. Nothing does.)
But she continues to live in ignorance, even as Nora gets hurt and Penny gets possessed by something that wants her to self-destruct and Ruby almost gets killed by a Grimm with a silver-eyed human inside it.
She ignores it, all of it, until Yang and the others come back with a new ally. Until Yang hugs Ruby, hugs Weiss for a few seconds longer than her sister, and then moves to Blake.
She moves to Blake and presses their foreheads together, both of them closing their eyes in content, and she feels her throat begin to ache.
No one notices as she rushes off to the bathroom, coughing up yellow and purple petals into her hands until an entire, fully bloomed yellow chrysanthemum landed in her palms.
(She flushes the petals and the flowers down the toilet and decides to just keep doing what she had previously been doing: ignore it.)
The next few hours are spent coming up with the plan to save both Penny and the citizens of Atlas and Mantle. The plan is… insane , truly, but Weiss has realized that most of their plans are.
Just before they leave for Atlas Academy, just as they are preparing to go on the airship, Weiss watches as Yang pulls Blake aside and whispers something to her. Her heart and her lungs and her throat all ache, but she accepts it, at this point.
They’re in love, and she’s happy for them. Truly, she is.
As the two of them separate, Weiss is surprised when their focus turns to her. They both walk over, Yang with a confident grin and Blake with a natural smirk.
“Good luck, Ice Queen,” Yang says, pressing a kiss to her cheek. Blake’s ears fold back against her head in happiness, relaxation.
“When this is over, we need to talk,” she says with a wink, before the both of them saunter off.
For some reason, the flowers and thorns in her throat feel like they recede, just the slightest bit.
She has no time to think about it, though, because within minutes they’re heading off to Atlas Academy. They have a set amount of time that they need to act in, before Atlas completely falls and kills everyone on and beneath the floating chunk of rock.
Ambrosius is irritating and ominous, but Weiss isn’t sure what else she expected from an omniscient being who could create anything in the blink of an eye.
Penny is saved from her self destruction, turned into a human girl, and they have Ambrosius build a space that can take residents from all over Atlas and Mantle to a set point in Vacuo.
It’s amazing, and it’s terrifying, but they don’t have time to ponder it because suddenly Cinder and Neo are there.
Cinder is there, blowing innocent people into the void below, before coming directly at them with Neo in tow.
They target Ruby, because of course they do, and Yang protects her sister.
Yang protects her sister and gets sent off the edge of the platform, tumbling into the void below.
Weiss feels something inside her break, feels like her heart cracks. Blake almost dives over the edge after Yang, and Weiss has to pull her back using all of her strength.
Blake turns her anger towards Cinder and Neo, barking at Weiss to get up and help her fight, and Weiss does as told.
The fight is a blur from that moment, Weiss taking blow over blow as she forces herself to not think about Yang. She wishes to stop thinking about Yang, the beautiful, stubborn, blonde brute. The woman who owned half of her heart. The woman who teased her and ruffled her hair affectionately and kissed her on the cheek only hours earlier.
In a turn of events, she gets her wish, but not in the way she wanted.
She stops thinking about Yang, because she’s distracted by Ruby being sent over the edge, a scream tearing from her lips as she watched her best friend spiralling into the void below.
Blake jumps after Ruby, uses Gambol Shroud to swing the two of them to safety, and Weiss is momentarily filled with relief.
And then, the ribbon attached to Gambol Shroud gets severed. Ruby and Blake fall into the darkness below, and the cracks in Weiss’ heart grow and grow and grow until it shatters .
They’re gone.
Her family. The women she was in love with and her dearest friend were gone.
Weiss was alone.
She doesn’t remember anything after that. An emptiness overtook her, so scarily similar to the emptiness that the Apathy provided, and she blanks out.
All she remembers is Penny dying, hobbling towards the exit with Jaune, and Winter screaming her name as she was blown off the edge.
Weiss wakes up in the middle of nowhere.
She feels something soft beneath her, hears what sounds like waves crashing onto shore, sees palm trees hovering over her.
Her body aches. Her head and her legs and her arms and her lungs - Gods, her lungs. They all ache.
She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again, it’s significantly darker.
She groans as she forces herself to sit up, lets out a cry of pain as she stands. For some reason, her aura isn’t healing her injuries. When she reaches out for it, it’s as if it wasn’t there.
What usually would have panicked her only makes her sigh, and she begins hobbling towards the treeline ahead of her in search of anyone or anything.
She couldn't be alone here. Her teammates had to be here, the civilians who were blown off the edge had to be here.
She couldn’t be alone.
She wanders aimlessly through the apparently gigantic forest, hoping and praying that she will eventually stumble upon someone, whether she knew them or not.
She doesn’t know how long she had been walking for when she hears rustling nearby, faint voices talking to each other.
In a moment of desperation and exhaustion and fear, Weiss wanders towards the voices, not bothering to be quiet. She rustles against the bushes and twigs snap beneath her feet, and she shuffles towards the voices because she’s hurt and her head is all muddy and she doesn’t want to be alone.
When she pushes herself through the final set of bushes, she’s surprised and relieved by who she finds.
Blake is latched onto Yang’s left arm, ears flat against her head as she glares at Weiss. When they notice who she is, however, the glare fades away. Instantly, there are twin looks of concern on her teammates’ faces, both of them rushing over to her, and she feels her throat begin to ache.
It’s such a bad time for this. They’re in the middle of nowhere, all of them covered in sand and grime, blood staining her clothes and an aching bruise on the left side of her face that she’s pretty sure gave her a concussion. It’s such a bad time.
But still, her body doesn’t seem to care. She can still feel the thorns crawling up her throat, can taste the metallic blood in her mouth, can feel how much she’s struggling to breathe.
It’s now or never, her body has decided. She has to confess her love to her teammates on an island in the middle of absolute fucking nowhere, and pray to the Brother Gods that abandoned them that her feelings are returned.
What a messed up situation she’s gotten herself into.
She falls to her knees as Blake and Yang reach her side, taking in shaky gasps as she feels the flowers spreading through her lungs.
Coughs wrack her body as they force their way out, not leaving any time for words. She coughs up blood-tinged flowers: yellow chrysanthemums and yellow carnations, purple bellflowers and belladonnas. She spits them onto the sand and can feel their eyes boring into her, and she hates herself and everything is.
She curses herself for developing feelings for the only two people she shouldn’t have, for this stupid disease and these stupid flowers. She curses herself for reaching her limit here , in front of them, when she could have just died somewhere else on the island and wouldn’t have to face their reactions to seeing her cough up flowers that were so clearly meant for them.
“Weiss,” she hears Blake whisper as her coughs die down, as the stems grow and grow up her esophagus and into her mouth, “why didn’t you say something?”
She can’t speak, can’t bring herself to respond. The pain and the embarrassment and the agony keep her silent, even as Yang places a hand on her chin and tilts her head up.
“You should have told us,” the blonde chides her, and Weiss can feel tears pooling in her eyes at the way they were so kind and caring, even though she was coughing up flowers that all but spelled out ‘I love you’.
“This is why we wanted to talk to you after the fight,” Blake softly said. “We wanted to let you know that we like you. But if we knew you were going through this , we would have told you much sooner.”
Weiss stares at the bloodied flowers in the ground in front of her and her head feels like it’s spinning. Her lungs and her throat that were previously aching so much begin to feel soothed. It feels like the stems that had crawled up her throat are slowly retracting, dissipating.
“You… like me,” Weiss repeats in a raspy voice, eyes shifting between her two teammates and the colourful flowers in front of her.
“Yeah,” Yang nods. “I thought it was obvious when I kissed you on the cheek. I mean, we've been dropping hints since we left Argus. You didn’t notice?”
She feels the flowers and stems recede further, feels how much easier it is to breathe than it has been in well over a year.
“You like me,” Weiss says again, and she feels a mixture of emotions. Happiness and confusion and relief and frustration. “What are you, 12?” she croaks out. “Just say you love me.”
That seems to take them both by surprise as they share a small look, before Yang bursts into laughter, pulling Weiss into a tight hug.
“You’re right,” she agrees. “We love you. Is that better?”
Weiss feels like she’s about to cry at the embrace and those words. “Yes,” she chokes out as the pain in her lungs disappears completely. She feels Blake join the hug as well, the faunus letting out a quiet chuckle. “Sorry,” Weiss murmurs. “I think I have a really bad concussion.”
“You - what ?” Yang asks in a panic and they both instantly pull away. She examines Weiss’ face, looks over her entire body in worry. “You should've told us before we hugged you!”
“I was kind of busy coughing up flowers,” Weiss quietly points out, and Blake rolls her eyes.
“Now isn’t the best time to be sarcastic,” she fondly lectures the girl. “Just… relax, okay? Yang and I set up a camp a bit away, we just came out here to look for food. We’ll take you there, okay?”
Weiss nods her head, feeling Yang gently lift her bridal-style, offering her a soothing grin when Weiss looks at her.
“We’ve got you, Weissy,” she assures the girl. “Just rest. When you’re better, we’ll talk about this again. Promise.”
“Okay,” Weiss murmurs, and for the first time since that night after Moun Glenn, Weiss’ feels completely content.