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Published:
2020-06-22
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2020-08-10
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7/7
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here i sit like a beginner beginning again

Summary:

She turns her back on Yang and busies herself with the backpacks, leaving Yang with half a cup of coffee and an unfamiliar feeling in her gut, half the long-standing apprehension of trying to find her family and half something new and scalding and tied exclusively to the way her hands want to reach for the guarded set to Blake’s jaw as much as they want to reach for the familiarity of Weiss’s hand in hers.

Notes:

Last Christmas, I wrote a Bumbleby Tomb Raider AU as a gift for a friend, and halfway into writing it realized that deep deep in my heart what I really wanted was for it to be a Bees Schnees fic. With the gracious permission of maladyofthequotidian, I now present the single most self-indulgent thing I have ever written in my life, also known as adapting that fic into an OT3 version. If you've read the original fic, this will be super familiar because-- shockingly-- the first 80% of it required, like, the most minimal of tweaking, because the heart wants what it wants and apparently what my heart wants always is new and angsty iterations of Blake and Weiss and Yang getting together. I have literally nothing to say for myself at all.

Chapter Text

and now i’m standing disheveled at your door
covered in dust and dirt but full of hope
we might never be normal again
might never be normal again, but who cares?
i ask, who cares?


Yang’s just barely dodged one of the fists on its way towards her face when she hears her name from somewhere in the periphery, sharp and annoyed and unmistakable, and it distracts her just long enough that the next hit smashes into her cheekbone and sends her staggering back into the ropes.

“Come on!” she grunts out around her mouthpiece, shaking her head to steady her vision and barely dodging the next flurry of punches, barely getting her arms up enough to protect her face.  A knee slams into her ribs and she’s going to feel it for days, she’s sure of it, with how it shoves the air out of her lungs and upends her balance, arms wavering for just a split second.  It’s enough for an uppercut to snap her head back and leave her legs unsteady, and suddenly she’s on the floor with a forearm wrapped around her throat.

“Yang,” Weiss says again, suddenly at eye level from Yang’s spot on the floor, mouth set in a thin line and jaw tense in the way it only is when she’s worried, tense enough that it pulls at the lines of scar tissue framing her eye.  “Give up, you lost this one.”

She glares back and struggles against the hold, trying to find a grip that will break the unwavering arm around her throat, even as her vision starts to blur and Weiss’s sharp edges soften as her brain starts to fight for oxygen.  

“Tap out, you moron!” Weiss snaps, eyes yanking from Yang’s to behind her, and Yang finally relents, tapping out rapidly before Weiss can glare Pyrrha into letting her out of the hold.  

“That’s cheating,” she gasps out, flopping down onto her back and flinging one arm out towards Weiss.  “I can handle my own shit.”

“You would’ve stayed there until you passed out and you know it,” Weiss informs her.  Her gaze shifts to Pyrrha, who’s up on her feet and offering a hand down to Yang, smile bright and apologetic as always.

“I almost had you this time,” Yang says with a groan as Pyrrha pulls her up to standing.  “Until someone came in and started distracting me.”

“It’s true,” Pyrrha says helpfully.  Weiss rolls her eyes at the both of them, arms folded over her chest.  “I thought you had work today.”

“Plans,” Weiss corrects.  “And someone skipped out on them.”  

“I never agreed to anything.”  Yang groans as she slides between the ropes of the ring, abdomen burning as she lands.  

“Yang,” Weiss says, careful, quiet, and Pyrrha leans on the ropes, chin propped in her wrapped hands, watching the both of them.  

“Fine,” Yang says.  “Let me shower.”  She holds a fist up for Pyrrha to bump against.  “Next time, Nikos, I’m kicking your ass.”

“Sure you are,” Pyrrha says cheerfully, and Yang rolls her eyes and resists the urge to wrap Weiss up in a sweaty hug just to annoy her, instead skirting around her and making her way into the locker room, unwilling to accept the insult of having to keep herself in check while watching her training partner flirt with her best friend after the injury of her absolutely flattening Yang in a sparring match.

She takes longer than she needs to unwrap her hands, and spends as long as she can justify in the showers, dragging everything out as much as she can, toeing the line of procrastination until Weiss barges into the locker room with a sniff and glares at her.

“Stop procrastinating.”  She leans against the door to the locker room and folds her arms over her chest, looking marvelously out of place in her perfectly pressed suit and the coat that probably cost as much as the entire gym itself, all sharp edges and clean lines amidst the blurred edges Yang consistently tried to lose herself in, a fixed point always keeping her from drifting too far away.  

“You could have gone without me, you know,” Yang says, groaning as she pulls her shirt on.  Her ribs are bruised, enough that she’s going to be feeling it for a few days, and they protest again when she bends over to tie her shoes.  

“You know that’s not true,” Weiss says with a huff.  “Don’t act like you don’t need this, too, you know.”

Yang doesn’t respond, instead focusing on gathering her hair up into a ponytail at the back of her head.  “Come on,” she says, ignoring the way Weiss watches her with careful eyes and the soft set to her mouth that she only gets when she’s worried about Yang, like she always has since they were kids, since the week after Summer died when they were all still grieving and Yang had broken into her father’s study and found out that Raven-- cold, absent Raven from her parents' company, who’d never expressed even the most fleeting of interests in Yang as a person-- was her biological mother.  Weiss has always been the only one allowed to look at her like that, and Yang ignores it as best she can, slams her locker shut with more force than she needs to.

One of Weiss’s towncars is outside the gym, idling in a loading zone, and Yang flops into it without saying anything.  It’s a long drive out of the city and she spends the whole time on her phone, texting everyone at work to see if there are shifts she can take tonight so she’s not stuck at home sulking.  Weiss is on her laptop the whole time, spreadsheets open and fingers flying, and Yang keeps her focus on the cracked screen of her phone until the car pulls to a stop.

“You ready?” Weiss says, laptop shutting softly and disappearing into her briefcase.

“Ready as ever,” Yang says with a shrug, and she bounces out of the car before the driver can get the door for her, not waiting for Weiss to follow.  Winter’s held on unseasonably long this year, dragging its feet into the end of April, and the wind slices cold across her cheeks.  She shoves her hands into her pockets and scrunches her shoulders up against the cold, shivering under her wet hair, and makes her way through the overgrown grass of the unkempt estate to a towering mausoleum in the middle of the enormous backyard.  

Her shoes scuff against the grass as she pulls up to a stop in front of the door, staring down at her laces instead of the oversized door in front of her.

Weiss appears at her side, wrapped up in a coat and with another folder over her arms.  She offers it silently to Yang, holding it out unwaveringly until Yang relents and takes it, shrugging into it and sighing in spite of herself, the expensive cashmere soft and warm.  It fits perfectly across her shoulders, even though she hasn’t worn it in years, since before she started fighting, before her shoulders had broadened and arms filled out, which means Weiss has had it tailored.

“Do you want to go in?” Weiss says softly.

“Do I ever?”

Weiss’s hand curls around her elbow and she waits, like she always does, until Yang pulls in a slow breath and steps forward, pulling the door’s key off the necklace she’s never stopped wearing and unlocking it.  She holds onto Weiss’s hand, the way she always had to Ruby’s when they came here together, and they step inside.

It’s huge and cold, like always, white marble and polished granite amplifying the chill outside.  The benches are clean and cold, and she focuses on the way it bites through the coat into her legs as she sits, staring up at her mother’s grave.  

She keeps her focus there, instead of to the left, where her father’s empty coffin is interred, or to the right, where the same is all that's left of her sister.

“I miss them,” Yang says eventually, after long minutes have gone by.  

“Me too,” Weiss says, holding onto one of Yang’s hands with both of hers and leaning her head down onto Yang’s shoulder.  She breathes in, slow and shattering, and pushes closer to Yang.  “Ruby would’ve finished college--”

“Weiss,” Yang says, strangled and cracking.  “I can’t.”

Weiss is quiet for long seconds, and Yang bites down on the inside of her cheek and wishes she knew how to talk about them.  For Weiss, if not for herself, because Weiss has been a practically permanent fixture in their lives since they were toddlers, their parents’ companies too intertwined for them not to know each other, most of Weiss’s childhood spent at the Xiao Long estate with Yang and Ruby.  Weiss has always been right at her side, Taiyang and Summer more parents to her than her own, attached at the hip with Yang since they were toddlers, Ruby more a sister to her than Winter or Whitley ever cared to be for the Schnee’s ignored middle child.  

“I’m sorry,” Weiss says eventually, not moving from where her head’s pillowed on Yang’s shoulder.  “I know you don’t like to talk about them.”

“I can’t,” Yang starts, and then pauses, breathes, pulls air as deep into her lungs as she can.  “If I talk about them like they’re dead then I can’t tell myself they might still be alive.”

“Yang,” Weiss says, so softly, so sadly that Yang wants to punch the granite in front of her.  

“If their bodies were anywhere to be found, we would have found them,” Yang says, firmly, desperately, repeating the same thing she’d said over and over again to Raven, to the police, to the countless therapists she’d been shuttled to over and over again throughout what had been left of her childhood.  

“It’s been almost ten years,” Weiss says gently.  “They would have found their way home by now if they were still alive.”

Yang pulls her hand free, jerking away and pushing up to her feet and pressing the heels of her hands over her eyes, hard enough the pinpricks of light burst behind her eyelids.  Her breath is ragged and sharp and she can practically feel Weiss folding in on herself at the movement.

“I’m not ready to give up on them,” Yang says, pulling her hands away and turning her back to the empty coffins behind her.  

“I know you aren’t,” Weiss says, carefully.  Her hands are folded in her lap, her shoulders slumping in a way she never lets anyone else see except Yang, chin drooping down towards her chest.  She breathes in deep, posture straightening with the effort, and sets her jaw.  “I need to talk to you about something.  And I need you to promise you’ll listen.”

“What, now?  Here?” Yang gestures back towards her sister’s name, the just shy of twelve years of her life marked into the granite.  

“Yes,” Weiss says.  Her hands clench in her lap, knuckles going white.  “Raven came to see me yesterday.”

Yang freezes, jaw clenched tight and fists tighter.  “Weiss--”

“Yang, please,” Weiss says quietly.  “They can’t fill your dad’s position permanently until you sign the paperwork and the board is tired of waiting--”

“Why should I care?”

“Because they’re going to dismantle the whole company if they can’t fill his seat!” Weiss says, loud enough that her voice echoes off the hard stones surrounding them, and the tension in Yang’s spine evaporates.  “All of it.  There’s only so much they can do when they can’t have a permanent chairman, but they can’t have one until either you sign the papers or you sign over the rights to--”

“I’m not giving my father’s company to Raven ,” Yang spits out.  

“Of course not,” Weiss says, mouth turning down in the particular way it does whenever she considers Raven and all the ways she’s hurt Yang.  “Don’t be ridiculous.  But if you sign the paperwork, then the rights pass to you .”

“I don’t want the company,” Yang says, her voice shaking.  “I don’t want it.  I didn’t even go to college, what am I going to do with--”

“I can help you,” Weiss says.  “You know I will, and you know you can trust me.”

“-- and I don’t want to act like he’s dead,” Yang carries on.  “I can’t just-- Weiss, you know I can’t--”

Weiss pushes up to her feet, hands settling on Yang’s arms firmly, and holds steady against the way Yang’s body shakes and her breathing turns uneven.

“Yang, listen to me,” Weiss says sharply.  “Listen to me, okay?  You’re my best friend and I love you more than anyone else in this world, so please trust me, okay?  You know I wouldn’t tell you to do this if I thought it was the wrong play.  But your family’s company, the whole estate, the house and this--"  She presses a hand, careful and reverent, to the cold marble edges of Ruby's coffin, of Summer's, and something hot and familiar, something Yang has held padlocked away for as long as she can remember, something that's deflated her relationship with every other person she's ever tried to date, flares against her sternum-- "Will be lost and chopped up and sold off in pieces if you don’t save it.  You don’t have to do the legwork if you don’t want, I will handle all of it, I promise you.  I just need you to sign the paperwork so it doesn’t all fall to Raven.  You do that, and I will handle the rest of it.”

Yang’s hands shake, curling into fists, and she stares down at Weiss and the wide-eyed promise in her eyes, the solid set to her jaw, and thinks of her family’s home, overgrown and falling into ruin after so many years of disuse, and nods, finally.

“Okay,” she says, low and aching.  “Okay.”

“Okay,” Weiss echoes, and her hands tighten on Yang’s arms, practically holding her upright until Yang finally moves, curling down and around Weiss’s smaller form, arms wrapping around her and holding tight.  Weiss doesn’t waver, because she never does when it’s Yang, never has since the day Taiyang and Ruby disappeared, has always been a fixed point for Yang to cling to, an anchor to keep her from sliding off the edge of the world.  

Minutes click past until Yang unwinds herself with a loud sniff, pulling herself back up straight, and Weiss regards her carefully, hands hovering at her side.  

“Are you--”

“I’m okay,” Yang mutters, swiping at her eyes.  

“Let’s get you home,” Weiss says quietly, curling an arm around Yang’s.  “It’s freezing out here.”

“Yeah, well,” Yang says with a snort.  “Heat’s out at my place anyways, so it’s not that much better.”

“What?”

“Landlord said he’d fix it tomorrow.”  Yang shrugs.

“You know, once you sign, the funds will unlock,” Weiss says.  She takes the key out of Yang’s hands gently when her fingers shake, bright red in the cold, and locks the door for her, offers the key back with a reverence that Yang hates and can’t help but appreciate anyways.  “And you can finally move somewhere that isn’t a shoebox in Gowanus with the worst landlord in history.”

“I like my shoebox,” Yang says without any real conviction behind it.

“Yang, please,” Weiss says with a scoff.  “The penniless martyr thing is old.  You’re getting a new apartment immediately once you sign.  I’ll buy your current building and evict you if that’s what it takes.”

“So bossy,” Yang mutters, but she smiles in spite of herself at Weiss’s familiar snap.  She follows Weiss into the car, letting the driver shut the door for her this time, and blows on her hands, the heat in the backseat comforting.  “Don’t suppose you want to buy me dinner after all this, do you?”

Weiss sighs and rolls her eyes, indulgent as always, and calls out a familiar address in Astoria to the driver.  “Only because you got the shit beat out of you earlier.”

“I wouldn’t have, if you’d just stayed quiet and let me do my thing instead of trying to help Pyrrha by distracting me because you have the hots for her.”

“Don’t blame your failures on me, you moron,” Weiss says with a huff, and Yang laughs, loud and bright, and leans into Weiss’s side.  She doesn’t feel better or lighter or like she’s healed over any of the grief burning in her chest since she was fourteen by agreeing to sign the paperwork declaring her father and sister dead, but it does feel like a step, even if it’s a small one, towards something, and a step is more than she’s managed in the better part of a decade.

 


 

The conference room is big enough for thirty people, towering forty stories over the street with enormous windows flooding the room with light that reflects off of the overly-shiny table.  Yang stands behind the chair she’s meant to be sitting in, hands shoved in her pockets uncomfortably while Weiss sits silently, posture sharp and formal and every inch of it Schnee haughtiness.  Yang feels ratty and underdressed, her leather jacket worn and boots scuffed, compared to the clean pressed lines of Weiss’s suit and the sharp edge of her tie.  Her father’s lawyer, portly and disheveled in his overpriced suit, occasionally tries to make small talk with either of them while they wait for the paperwork to be brought in, but Yang ignores him entirely every time and Weiss shuts him down politely.  

The door opens and in strides Raven and a small team of lawyers, a heavy briefcase in her hand.

“What are you doing here?” Yang says flatly, hands curling into fists in her pockets.  “You--

“--are the acting COO for the firm,” Weiss finishes for her, standing with her arms linked behind her back.  “Though I’m not sure you necessarily have the legal expertise needed to oversee such an endeavor.”

“Don’t worry, I brought backup,” Raven says coolly, gesturing blindly towards the lawyers.  “Shall we?”

“By all means,” Weiss says, icy and level, one-upping Raven’s attempt to unsettle the both of them, and Yang thanks the universe for Weiss Schnee and the way she doesn’t have to be the one who tries speaking to the woman who signed Yang away the day she was born.  

Raven hefts the briefcase up onto the table and flips it open, hauling a stack of papers out and offering them to the lawyer across the table.  Weiss intercepts them with a chilly thanks and flips through them rapidly, impassive and silent.

“I think you’ll find that everything is in order,” Raven says, overly sweet, and Yang considers throwing one of the chairs at her.

“I’ll do my own due diligence, thank you,” Weiss says without looking up.  Uncomfortable minutes slide past as she reads through the paperwork and finally offers it to Yang with a silent nod.  

“So I sign this and they’re dead,” Yang says quietly.  “That’s it?”

“They’re already dead,” Raven says, sounding almost bored.  “This just acknowledges it.”

“Your input is neither required nor requested,” Weiss snaps at her.  “Yang,” she adds, softer.

“I’m okay.” Yang stubbornly refuses to look at Raven.

Next to Weiss, the lawyer pulls his own briefcase out and produces a puzzlebox, setting it on the table with a quiet hum.

“What’s that?” Yang says, suddenly unconcerned with the paperwork.  

“It’s for you,” he says, pushing it towards her sleepily.  “Your father’s will indicated that you receive it upon his death.”

Yang reaches across Weiss for it, paperwork ignored, and pulls it towards her. 

“What is it?” Weiss says quietly.

“One of dad’s puzzleboxes,” Yang says, turning the cylinder comprised of rotating pieces and levers in her hands.  Her fingers slide across the carved symbols on it, tripping over familiar edges and turning pieces habitually.  “We had a ton of them, they were more Ruby’s thing, but we both were always--”

She twists a final piece and the box pops open, ejecting a rolled-up photograph, edges worn and crinkled.  Yang glances over at Weiss and unfolds it, revealing the Xiao Long estate courtyard and Yang's parents, in sweats and t-shirts like they always wore at home, a three year old Ruby on Tai's shoulders and a five year old Weiss on Summer's, Yang between them both swinging recklessly from their hands, all of them full of laughter and bright smiles.

Her hands shake, nearly crushing the already damaged edges of the picture, and she pulls in a steadying breath and folds the picture into her pocket rapidly, turning her focus back to the puzzle box and pulling the ejected cartridge further out.  A yellowed slip of paper, carefully rolled around a key that's eerily similar to the one hanging around Yang's neck, falls out onto the table.

Raven sits up straighter, suddenly interested, and Yang immediately pushes her chair back with the key in one hand, unrolling the paper and tilting it so only she and Weiss can see it.  

Weiss’s hand curls around Yang’s wrist, her posture careful and shielding.  “That’s his handwriting, right?” she says softly.

“Yeah,” Yang breathes out. 

“What does it--”

“We're going to find out,” Yang says, eyes locking onto Weiss’s for a short moment before she rolls it back up and steps around her to grab her coat and the puzzlebox.

“What are you doing?” Raven says sharply.  “We’re not finished--”

“Call my assistant to reschedule,” Weiss says, saccharine sweet.  “I have availability next Friday.  I’m sure you can make that work with your schedule.”  She slaps a business card down onto the table and hurries after Yang.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Weiss says once the elevator door closes, and Yang pulls the paper back out and offers it to her.

“Home,” she says firmly.  

Weiss pulls in a careful breath and nods, staring down at the paper.  “Do you think--”

“I don’t know,” Yang says over her, apology written into her eyes for interrupting even as she does it.  “But I want to see what it means before I sign anything.”

“I’ll call the car,” Weiss says, handing the paper back to her, phone in hand before she hesitates.  “Unless you don’t want me to--”

“Of course you’re coming,” Yang says.  Her hand curls around Weiss’s automatically, holding tight to steady her breathing like always, and she nods, sharp and definitive.  

Weiss’s business facade, the Schnee family coldness she wears like armor in public and at work, cracks to show Weiss, Yang’s best friend since they were three years old, and she nods with shining eyes.  

“Okay,” she says.  “Let’s go.”

 


 

“I’m not saying this isn’t what it said,” Weiss says carefully from where she’s inspecting a corner of the mausoleum.  “But if there was some kind of door or something here, don’t you think we would have noticed by now?”

“I’m only here once a year,” Yang says with a shrug, running her hands methodically over her sister’s headstone.  

“I’m here a lot,” Weiss says, so quiet it almost disappears into the dark corners of the room, and Yang pauses but doesn’t turn around.  

“I know,” Yang says after a moment.  She moves onto her mother’s headstone, pushing at corners and edges until suddenly marble gives under her hand, the S in her name suddenly depressing under her hand and opening into a keyhole.  “The first letter of our final destination.”

“Shit,” Weiss breathes out.  “You were right.”

“Always the tone of surprise,” Yang says, rolling her eyes, even as she holds her breath and pushes the key into the lock and turns it.

The floor starts to pull away under her feet and she leaps back, putting herself between Weiss and the hole appearing in the floor, but it stops abruptly, displaying a staircase down below the floor.

“What the hell,” Yang mutters.  

“Are you up for this?” Weiss says, a hand curled tight around her arm.  “We don’t have to go down there today--”

“I’m fine,” Yang says, already starting down the stairs, phone out to use as a flashlight.  Weiss’s steps and annoyed mumbles follow her down the dusty staircase to the cavernous room that opens up below the floor.  “Whoa.”

It’s filled to bursting with wooden crates and enormous dusty maps, artifacts and supplies and an oversized, pockmarked wooden desk just like the one that lived in her father’s study even still.  Half of the crates are open and filled with paperwork and folders full of files, binders and binders of legal documents spilling out in a disorganized mess.

“God, I’d forgotten what a disaster he was at organization,” Weiss mutters.  She flips open the closest binder and brushes dust off of the first page, bending over the legal document and squinting at it.

“What is that?” Yang doesn’t look away from the desk and the chair, just like the one her dad had in his study, the one she and Ruby had used to steal and roll down the hallways in races to annoy the house staff.  

“Looks like an acquisition,” Weiss says absently, flipping through the pages and sneezing irritably when dust kicks up into her face.  “For-- oh.  The Branwen subsidiary.”

Yang circles around the desk, fingers trailing over a shiny worn-down spot just left of center in front of the chair where her dad would have constantly leaned his elbow while he was taking notes.  When Ruby was little, especially after the car accident that had killed Summer and Qrow, she’d spent hours in the study with their dad, sitting in his lap while he threw himself into his work, until he would inevitably fall asleep slumped back in the chair, Ruby forgotten and playing with one of the hundreds of puzzleboxes scattered around the house, until Yang came to put her to bed.  She stares down at another remnant of her family, fingers pressing down through the dust.

She shakes her head and clears her throat, eyes watering, and turns her focus to the drawers, cracking them open and digging through them, ignoring the quiet concern radiating off of Weiss.  She bypasses more folders and papers, flipping through the semi-organized files until she finds one labelled from the month they left and yanks it out.

“It’s travel plans,” Yang says slowly, absently, turning pages slowly, skimming over email chains about finding a guide through rural Hungary, Slovakia, Romania.  “Why was all of this down here?”

“Taiyang was always a bit eccentric,” Weiss says carefully, half her focus still on the acquisition paperwork.  

“That’s one way of putting it,” Yang mutters.  She dips back into the drawer and finds an old camcorder.  “What the-- they haven’t even made these since the nineties, I’m pretty sure.”

“It’s not that old,” Weiss says, rolling her eyes.  

“Do you know how to work one?”

“What sort of A/V club nerd do I look like to you?” Weiss drawls out.  “Really, I want to know.”

“So helpful,” Yang says with a roll of her eyes.  There are cables attached to the camcorder still, and she squints at them, sorting out red from yellow and dragging it all over to a dusty old TV on the other side of the desk.  She fumbles with the cables and the inputs on the side of the TV, flapping one hand out in irritation when Weiss tries to help, and finally gets them plugged in.  The TV flashes to life with a hum, and Yang circles back around the desk to stand by Weiss before hitting play on the camcorder.

Her father’s face fills the screen, and an ache lances through her stomach.  She reaches out blindly and grips onto Weiss’s hand, tight enough that she knows it must hurt, but Weiss holds back just as tight, nails digging into the back of Yang’s hand, keeping her from falling off the edge of the world at the first new glimpse of her father she’s had in ten years.

“Hey, Yang,” her dad says, his familiar voice burning into Yang’s ears.  “So, I-- well.  If you’re down here listening to this, I’m gone.  And I know it’s not fair of me to ask this, but I need you to do something important for me, and you can’t tell anyone about it, okay?  Not even Ruby.  I don’t want either of you caught up in any of this, but she’s only eleven and I know you’re still so young too, but you’ve always been more mature than anyone realizes, haven’t you?  Holding our whole family together after-- um-- well.”

Weiss’s other hand comes up to wrap around Yang’s forearm, gentle and familiar and grounding, and Yang covers it with her free hand.  

“So I’m sorry to ask anything more of you after you’ve had to shoulder so much responsibility, but I need you to burn everything in this office, okay?  All the research, all the maps, the documents, all of it.  Chuck it into a bonfire and let it all go up in smoke.  I really can’t tell you how important this is, there’s so much at stake.  It all has to go, okay?  Please, Yang.”  

He pauses on the screen, somber and strained and so very much the same hollow shell he’d been for years after her mother died, nothing of the warm boisterous man he’d been once he recovered.  Yang’s fingers dig harder into Weiss’s hand.

“Do this for me, and for Ruby, and Weiss, and everyone else.  Burn it all.”  He pauses again and smiles, a flash of who he’d been before he disappeared, and Yang’s chest burns.  “Never forget that I love you, kiddo.  So much.”

The video cuts off, turning to static, and Yang exhales without realizing she’d been holding the air in her lungs.  

“What do you think that’s about?” Weiss ventures.

“I have no idea,” Yang says slowly.  She doesn’t let go of Weiss’s hand, dragging the closest crate over with her free hand and pulling out a stack of files.  Weiss takes half silently and they flip through them, skimming through pages and pages of research.

“The wild girl,” Weiss reads out after a moment.  “Why’s he concerned with some-- what is this, a folk tale? From-- Poland?”

“Hungary,” Yang says absently, then pauses.  “They were going to Eastern Europe.”

“Yang,” Weiss says, turning to face her, finally pulling her hand free.  “It doesn’t make sense.  If whatever’s down here is so worrisome he wants it all burned , then it can’t be connected to whatever they were doing on that trip.  You don’t really think he would’ve taken a seventh grader with him on anything connected to that?”

“They were just going to go camping,” Yang says slowly, tilting her head back to stare at the ceiling, sorting through memories she’s tried to avoid for the last decade.  “For a few weeks along that river, the-- um--”

“Danube,” Weiss supplies automatically.

“Yeah,” Yang says, pulling her head back down.  “The Danube.  Ruby wanted to go camping, you know how she was about it, and they were going to do that for a week or whatever and then she was coming home.  Dad was going to stay and work for a while after she came home.”

Yang rubs her hands over her eyes, breathing in deeply and letting it out.  She sorts through the folders on the deck until she finds the one with travel plans.  

“Look at this,” she says, pushing it towards Weiss.  “He hired someone.  A guide.”

“Why would he need a guide--”

“I don’t know, but he did ,” Yang says excitedly.  “None of the search parties knew about this, the cops didn’t know about it.  I’ve read every single file they have and I know you have too, all of their searches started in Budapest and right outside, but he wouldn’t have hired a guide for that.  This is new information.”  

“Yang,” Weiss says, hands hovering out towards her.  “Slow down, don’t--”

“Weiss, I have to try,” Yang says over her.  “I have to.  I have to know.”

“Just-- breathe, okay?” Weiss takes the paperwork out of her hands and sets it on the desk carefully.  “This is a lot to take in in one day, okay, you need to just-- take some time to think.  Please.  Sleep on it and then we’ll sort through all of this tomorrow.”

“Weiss--”

“I want to know, too,” Weiss says sharply.  “You’re not the only one who lost them.”

Yang flushes, a different ache burning in her chest, and she nods after a long hesitation.  “Okay,” she mutters.  “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Weiss echoes.  She wraps a hand around Yang’s arm.  “This will all still be here then, okay?  So let’s just--come on.  Stay at mine tonight and we’ll come at this with fresh eyes tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Yang says, casting another glance down to the papers on the desk before nodding again and heading to the staircase, head still reeling over the fact that there had been information about her family’s disappearance under the mausoleum this whole time, right under her feet, and she could have found it so much sooner if she’d just signed the paperwork when everyone told her to.

“Stop it,” Weiss says as the floor over the staircase slides back into place.  “Stop overthinking it.”

“It’s been here this whole time.” Yang’s hands dig into her pockets, pushing against the nausea twisting in her stomach.  “I could have--”

“You didn’t want to give up on them,” Weiss says, solid and unwavering like always.  “You did nothing wrong.  Stop blaming yourself.”

She watches as Yang slots the key onto her necklace and tucks it away, taking in big shaking breaths.  

“Come on,” Weiss says eventually.  “You need food, and a stiff drink, and a good night’s sleep, and we can look at this with fresh eyes tomorrow.  Together.”

She’s right, like she so often is, and Yang trails after her silently, allowing herself to be taken back into the city and to Weiss’s apartment, high above the park, with a room for Yang that’s only rarely ever used.  

Weiss does her best to keep her grounded, to keep her from disappearing into thinking back to the dusty maps on the walls and the collections of islands marked on them, the thick stacks of papers full of research on eastern European mythology, the diagrams analyzing riddles and death queen must die to bring back life, the trail of emails organizing someone to guide her father through the ever-shifting topography of islands and caves scattered throughout the Danube.  

She does her best, but Yang stares up into the dark of the room kept for her just in case, and she dresses warmly and shoves her feet into boots and sets off.  She pauses and considers leaving a note for Weiss, an apology, something, but knows it would probably just make things worse, so instead she just leaves and makes her way back to what’s left of her family’s estate.

Weiss’s driver takes her without question, leaving her at the estate with instructions to take the long way home that she knows he’ll ignore-- Weiss has a way of inspiring unwavering loyalty in people once they know her, and he’s never much liked Yang anyways, tolerating her only for Weiss's sake and perfectly happy to deposit her anywhere that isn’t in Weiss’s immediate proximity-- and she disappears back down into the vault.  She documents everything she can, memorizes maps, uploads pictures of research onto her phone and downloads as much onto it as she can from the fossil of a desktop on the desk.  She watches the recording four more times and considers setting fire to the whole building, but her mother’s bones are resting over top of it all and she doesn’t have time to move it.

She leaves and takes the train to the airport and spends nearly everything she has left in her bank account on a one-way flight to Budapest.