After The Battle (ch2)

EARLY RELEASE FOR ALL PATRONS! THANK YOU SO MUCH!

I hope you can appreciate my twist on canon events. I still want to have some happen in this story, but they will happen in different ways.

Disclaimer: I do not own RWBY.

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											Chapter 2. Where To Go From Here

Pyrrha entered Yang's bedroom slowly, making sure to give Yang the space and authority to tell her to turn around and leave if she suddenly changed her mind.

But Yang didn't send Pyrrha away. She was one of the few people she had left.

Pyrrha closed the door behind herself, and quietly looked Yang over in the darkness. Her clothes and hair were ruffled, the right sleeve of her nightgown hanging limply at her side. Her face was streaked with the trails of dried and fresh tears, and her eyes were leaking more by the second.

But despite all the misery in her gaze, there was also a certain level of clarity. They'd been talking to one another from opposite sides of that door for hours on end, but now that they were face to face, both girls fell silent.

Where did they go from here? Neither really seemed to know.

So Pyrrha tried anything she could think of, settling for two familiar words.

"I'm sorry..."

She lowered her gaze, feeling a stinging sensation behind her own eyes now as Yang stood there before her, broken in every sense of the word.

Pyrrha didn't know what to expect. If Yang told her to leave, she would offer one last effort to remain there, but if she was asked a second time, she would go. If she was told to stay, then she would stay.

But what she couldn't bear was the silence. This heavy, deafening silence, where everything felt suffocating, like it was about to collapse the walls with them both still inside.

Had it not been for Pyrrha, talking to her for hours on end tonight, Yang would have been alone with that silence. It would have consumed her, in body and in mind. Yang needed her to know she was grateful, but it took her a amount deal of time to rediscover her own voice.

For a while, they both just stood there, facing one another, fighting back tears. The silence ensued; not even the wind outside the house made any noise for a long while.

The only time Pyrrha took her eyes off of Yang was when she noticed a flash of movement outside the window. A black bird was perched there, looking in. A shudder ran through Pyrrha, and she didn't understand why. But when she made eye contact with the bird, it flew away.

Finally, Yang pushed a rasp of a voice up her clogged throat, and out of her lips.

"Were you lying...?" she croaked.

Pyrrha lifted her head right away, tears brimming in the corners of her eyes. A few of them slipped down her cheeks as she met Yang's stoic gaze. Her eyes looked almost dead, almost void of emotion during a time where they should've been overflowing with them.

It didn't take Pyrrha long to understand what Yang was referring to, that being Pyrrha's earlier statement that she wasn't going to leave her. Pyrrha inhales sharply, and replies surely.

"I wasn't."

Yang didn't flinch, didn't even blink at her response. Her expression remained one of stone, her voice equally as cold and hard.

"What if I asked you to leave?"

"Then I would ask you to let me stay."

"What if I told you to leave?"

"Then I would go."

After that, the silence returned for a while, both girls struggling to keep themselves upright past the threat of blinding tears and shaking knees. Their eyes moved slowly, up and across one another. Each of them observed something of themselves in the other person, be it loneliness, fear, or something a little kinder, a little more vulnerable.

After a time, Pyrrha posed the next question.

"Yang. Are you asking me to leave?"

And something broke inside of Yang, something that made her waver and take a step back.

"N-No..."

So Pyrrha didn't waste another second. If Yang didn't even plan to ask her to leave, there wasn't even a reason to consider the possible idea of Yang telling her to.

Pyrrha rushed forward, as quickly as her bad foot could allow, and placed a hand on Yang's back just to keep her from falling. She didn't want to initiate any more contact than was absolutely necessary, even if she herself might have wanted to.

But Yang's entire weight wobbled, and Pyrrha found it necessary to hold her with both arms, guiding her with heavy steps back toward the bed to sit her down on the edge.

But even after Yang was safely and surely supported, she reached up for Pyrrha anyway. With her lone hand, Yang curled her fingers into the back of Pyrrha's borrowed nightgown, digging her nails in.

Pyrrha had no choice or oppositions to it when Yang pulled her down beside her, sitting on the edge of the bed with their arms wrapped around one another. They pressed close together, letting the tears fall not-so-silently anymore into each other's loose hair and stiff shoulders.

Pyrrha could only manage to repeat her apologies in fragments.

"I'm sorry... I-I'm so sorry, Yang..." She felt more and more wretched each time.

Yang soon discovered that Pyrrha was crying more than she was, even though she arguably had far less to be upset about. Eventually, Yang cut off her string of apologies with a single word.

"Why?"

Pyrrha bit her lip immediately when she heard Yang's reply, when she got any kind of reaction from her other than silence and sobbing. She clung more tightly to Yang, some part of herself frustrated that Yang could only hug her back with half as much force and fervor.

And Pyrrha hardly thought. She just answered.

"Because of what happened... because of everything... because it was my fault..."

Yang had expected the first two, to some degree. But not that last one. She swallowed thickly, and only half of it went down, causing her to cough.

"How...?" she whispered. "How the hell is any of this your fault, Pyrrha?"

That answer seemed so obvious to Pyrrha herself.

"Because... The prophecies, the Maiden's powers, the things you had to do... All of it happened... because I exist..."

And Yang truly hadn't believed that was why Pyrrha had been apologizing all this time. She understood now that it wasn't out of pity for Yang, that they hadn't just been helpless, empty words to fill the silence.

Pyrrha... truly believed it was all her own fault. Simply for being born.

Yang wouldn't allow her to continue thinking like that.

"Pyrrha..." Slowly, she eased herself back from her, though her hand still clung to the side of Pyrrha's nightgown. "None of this... is your fault..."

Pyrrha shook her head.

"I can't see it being anyone else's..."

Yang grunted to clear her throat.

"Of course you can't. You're Pyrrha Nikos. You don't blame anyone except yourself, if you can help it." Yang lifted her gaze and found hers, holding it so imploringly that Pyrrha couldn't look away. "Pyrrha... This... all of this... Beacon, the dragon, the prophecies..." She moved what was left of her right arm, to imply its inclusion as well.

"This wasn't your fault, Pyrrha. If it hadn't been you and me and the rest of us, the Maiden's powers would've... caused all of this for someone else. And maybe those people wouldn't have been able to do what we did. To save the Maiden, her friends, and everyone else by only paying one arm."

Pyrrha shuddered at the blatant mention of it.

"But I... if it weren't for me... those people wouldn't have infiltrated the Tournament and sabotaged your match, the school never would have been attacked, none of us would've been as hurt... and Ruby never would have left you..."

The silence began to creep back in after that. Pyrrha did her best to stifle her sobs, just so she might be able to hear Yang's response clearly. She couldn't look her in the eyes anymore at this point. She could only look at what was left of her arm, believing it was all her fault Yang had lost it.

Perhaps it was better overall for only one person to have lost a limb than for thousands more to have lost their lives. But even as things were now, the suffering hadn't ended. It continued in various other ways, for all of them.

/But... if we were all dead... we wouldn't be able to suffer like this.../

After all, suffering is a privilege of the living.

When she thought about it that way, Pyrrha slowly began to understand Yang's strange level-headedness on this topic.

At last, Yang gave a response.

"Maybe."

Pyrrha sniffled again, and lifted her eyes just a bit, though still not high enough to find Yang's. The blonde continued, elaborating on her response.

"Maybe... none of this would have happened," she murmurs correctively. "We can't ever really be sure, can we? If you hadn't existed, who's to say the Maiden wouldn't have been Weiss or Nora or any of our other friends at Beacon? Who's to say I wouldn't have been given the same visions and done the same things for them and it all would've ended the same way?

"But the truth is... we'll never know... because that isn't the reality we're living in, Pyrrha. The reality we're living in... is the one where you're alive, and you're the Fall Maiden."

Despite her precarious emotional state, there was nothing but sound truth in her words. Pyrrha was astounded by Yang's strength, by her ability to realize all of these things Pyrrha herself couldn't even begin to observe past all of her self-resentment and guilt.

She couldn't think of anything else to say. All she could do was slump forward into Yang's chest and cry into her neck.

And Yang just kept her arm around her, resting her chin atop her head. Oddly enough, providing comfort for someone else remained to be her own primary source of comfort, even at a time like this.

"Maybe..." Yang repeated. "Maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe it would have. But... you know... there's one thing that definitely wouldn't have happened if you hadn't been born, Pyrrha..."

Only then does Pyrrha lift her eyes to Yang's once again. She can't find her voice in order to ask, so she lets her gaze do it. To her surprise, Yang actually manages a small, wobbly smile.

"I... never would've fallen in love with you..."

Pyrrha's breath hitched.

"Y...Yang..."

Silence again.

Truth be told, hardly a second had gone by since that kiss on the rooftop when neither of them had been reliving it. Small as it had been, it had held more meaning and more secrets than either could ever have put into words.

That kiss hadn't just been something for Pyrrha to do to help ease Yang's pain at the time.

That hadn't just been the potential farewell kiss of a friend.

It had, in fact, served as both of those things to some degree.

But it had served as something else much greater.

They hadn't had the time or reason to address that kiss, or reflect on it properly, until now.

In the end, it had taken all of this – nightmarish prophecies, lingering threats of death, the loss of an arm and a little sister – for them to see what had always been there.

None of this would have happened without Pyrrha's being alive. Above all others, her existence had been the one Yang's had been drawn to, just as Pyrrha had been drawn to hers.

That might've been the only form of destiny either of them were willing to accept.

Their eyes locked, frozen together through the darkness, emerald and lavender. The silence returned for a time, as both girls tried to figure out things they'd never been able to consider before.

They'd always been good friends, back when times had been simpler; when they'd hurry to classes together along with their teammates, when they'd train and spar together when they managed to get half an hour alone together, when they'd made jokes and laughed until there were tears streaming down their faces.

Now, the tears were for different reasons, but hardly ones less pleasant.

It was all Pyrrha could do to stay still as Yang reached forward and brushed her thumb across her wet cheeks, one at a time. Pyrrha made no move to return the gesture. She was still in shock.

"Yang... are you...?" Certain about this...?

For fear of offending her, she didn't finish the question.

She didn't want to believe Yang was just doing this because of all else that had gone wrong. She didn't want to believe Yang was only trying to hold onto Pyrrha simply because she was the only person Yang had left.

That fear was there inside her chest, the fear that perhaps this wasn't love in the way Pyrrha had always longed for it to be.

But such fears were dashed when she finally managed to find Yang's eyes once again.

And they were clearer than they had ever been before.

With a single, simple glance, Yang gave her answer.

And it wasn't because Ruby was gone.

It wasn't because Pyrrha was all she had left.

It wasn't because she needed her just for tonight.

It was because she'd always needed her, even before she had known it, and because she'd keep needing her for as long as she lived.

As such, Yang had never been more certain about anything in her entire life. She'd be damned if she wasn't going to do everything within her power to be with Pyrrha, especially when the feelings were mutual.

Yang demonstrated her certainty in a way that would be unmistakable. She cupped her hand on the side of Pyrrha's face and leaned close, closing her eyes. She stopped when her lips were just an inch shy of Pyrrha's, and waited.

Pyrrha, on the other hand, felt they had waited long enough. She covered that final inch of space between them and kissed her.

It was gentle, but firm – timid, but real. Pyrrha's arms found their way around Yang's sides and back, while Yang looped her arm around Pyrrha's shoulders.

Their lips bumped together again. But just that was enough.

Both were excited to lie their emotions bare and feel the elation of having them reciprocated.

But it was still a hurtful night. Ruby was gone, they were still separated from their friends.

The kisses only soothed them for so long, until they both decided it would be best to hold them off until a time when they would be able to appreciate them to the fullest.

For now, the kisses remained light, soft, existing merely to erase tears and stave off more of them. Their hair shimmered in the slivers of moonlight streaming in, highlighting the last of their tears as they dripped into each other's laps.

They held one another until neither one was crying any longer.

Pyrrha longed to stay, but she was afraid this kind of conduct wasn't appropriate, especially since she was a guest in someone else's house. Her eyes spoke of such fears, and Yang interpreted them with ease. The blonde girl sniffled, and interlocked her fingers with Pyrrha's.

"Stay."

Just one word.

That was all she said.

But it was the only invitation Pyrrha needed.

After all, Pyrrha had promised to do as much, herself.

So she pulled down the bed sheets and helped Yang underneath, only to have Yang coax her down as well. They tangled themselves together, in an embrace that was desperate yet soft. The strength of their emotions gave strength to their arms around one another, but their kisses remained light and feathery.

They were both so delicate. The two who were once some of Beacon's strongest huntresses, now trembling in each other's arms.

But there was no fear to be found in that room anymore. Only something much, much stronger.

Something as strong as their arms, but as gentle as their kisses.

Something they couldn't quite say yet.

Something that could remain without needing to be said.

Pyrrha kept her promise.

She didn't leave her.

And when Yang woke the next morning, she wasn't alone.

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A/N: I always enjoy writing scenes like these, the nights when two people realize something for the first time.