CHAPTER 15

The past two days were repeats of the first one. They fought, rested, fought again. It wasn’t all too different from the past year in Beacon where they did their patrols and defended the school. The waves of Grimm had become all too familiar, too. Still, they couldn’t get used to sleeping in a make-shift tent and being woken up by haggard voices in the middle of the night.

An hour after dusk, they were benched for a while and they were thankful for the downtime. It gave them a chance to talk.

“Dude, call her already.” Sooyoung could no longer stand seeing Yuri moping and sighing to herself. It had turned from sort of cute to pathetic.

“I can’t,” said Yuri. She was flat on her stomach, her voice being muffled by the pillow she planted her face in. “I don’t wanna…”

Hyoyeon pressed the tip of her boot to Yuri’s side. “You can’t? You don’t wanna? Or you’re chicken?”

“Whatever. Everything.”

No one noticed when Sooyoung took her scroll out and speed dialed Yoona’s number. “I’m calling Yoong now. Hello? Hey—”

Sooyoung flew to the floor after Yuri tackled her and knocked the scroll out of her hand. Yuri scrambled to get the device but Hyoyeon was quick to grab Yuri’s ankle with her claw and she dragged Yuri backwards toward the tent entrance.

“Hyo! Let me go!!”

Sooyoung successfully claimed her scroll and pressed it to her ear. “Yoong? What? Hyunnie? No, it’s me. Sorry to disappoint you, buddy. Yeah, Yuri tried to end the call… Yeah, she is pretty mean. So we heard that—Ah, so you know about it too. Yeah. Well, Sica started it.” Sooyoung paused and listened intently to Yoona’s every word. Then she grinned. “What? Of course Yuri liked it.”

“What did I like?! What is she saying?!” Yuri was still trying to free herself from Hyoyeon’s hold. She tried prying the claw open but it didn’t work.

“That was Yuri screaming of the ground. Hyo tied her down,” Sooyoung told Yoona. “Huh? Sica’s frozen? Awesome!! Way to go Krys!” Sooyoung let out a series of laughs before returning to the conversation. “So what do we do about these two lovebirds?”

“Soo, please stop! I’m begging!”

“Just a second.” Sooyoung put Yoona on hold then turned to Yuri who looked like she was nearing tears. “Let the grownups take care of your mess okay baby Yul?”

“Hyo! Tell them to stop, please? I’ll do anything.”

“Talk to Sica then,” Hyoyeon answered.

“Anything except that!”

“Don’t be such a wuss—”

A tall, broad figure stepped into the tent and commanded their attention. Sooyoung hid her scroll behind her back and Hyoyeon finally released Yuri. “The current wave is retreating but we need more people to join the reconnaissance team to see what caused the sudden change. Let’s go.”

“Yes sir!” they replied in unison.

After the huntsman nodded and left, Sooyoung got back to Yoona. “Hey Yoong, we have to go. Something came up. Stay safe over there, okay? We’ll talk about the lovebirds later.”

Yuri threw Sooyoung the nastiest look she could muster then left the tent to follow the huntsman. Sooyoung and Hyoyeon looked at each other, shrugged then followed.

+

It was definitely morning already but ever since Remnant fell into the void, the sun steadily grew weaker and there was nearly no difference between dusk and sunrise. A streak of orange peeked from behind a pool of clouds but it was swallowed seconds later by the stretch of black surrounding it.

Yuri lowered her gaze and faced forward. She ran faster to catch up to the huntsmen and huntresses who were leading the way to where the Grimm were last seen. She saw Sooyoung and Hyoyeon from the corner of her eye, running alongside the others. She knew they were just trying to help but for once in her life she wanted to give herself some time to think. Of course she wanted to talk to Jessica. She had been wanting to do just that ever since she woke up the morning after the kiss. But Jessica didn’t seem to want to talk let alone breathe the same air as her. What was she supposed to think of that reaction? Does she hate me? Does she regret what she did? Did I smell bad?

The train of thought ended at that when everyone else around her sprinted toward a dilapidated building and pressed themselves to the walls that were still standing. Yuri ran around back past Sooyoung and Hyoyeon then she slowed down as she approached what looked like a stairway to an old wine cellar. She heard the others talking in hushed voices, giving out directions and signals. She knew she should go back to them but her bullheadedness got the better of her and she descended into the unfamiliar space on tip-toe. It didn’t help. The steps still creaked with every careful step.

She saw something move after she got to the last step. . It can’t be Grimm. Too quiet. It must be a person! She backed up until she hit the wall then waited for another sign of movement.

Nothing.

She couldn’t see anything past the rows of shelves before her. Goddammit. It’s like the library! She tried looking for another exit in the meantime. Still nothing. She thought of going back up the stairs but an attack from behind would be inevitable. Screw it. I’ll just take my chances with whoever’s over there.

She walked over and regretted it immediately. But she attacked anyway.

The shorter figure crashed into a shelf after Yuri threw a punch with her bare left hand.

“Yuri?”

“Finally got you.” Yuri watched as her former teammate pulled herself up against a shelf.

Sunny let out a little giggle as she faced Yuri. “So you can control your semblance now. Interesting.”

Yuri wasn’t going to take any of this anymore. “Stop beating around the bush, Sunny. Tell me why you left. Was it really for some ‘change’ you’ve been dreaming of?”

“How did you know—”

“Tiffany told us.”

“Oh. So she’s with you guys now, huh? That’s good. I got a bit worried about her when she didn’t come back. Now it seems she’s getting what she always wanted: friends like family.”

The tone of the conversation seemed off. Yuri didn’t know whether she wanted to hug Sunny or attack her again. If Sica was here, she’d know what to do. But she wasn’t and Yuri didn’t know what to do so she repeated herself: “Why did you leave, Sunny?”

“You won’t understand. It probably doesn’t matter. You all seem fine without me anyway. So let’s just—”

“Really? Really? Do you have any idea how we felt when we woke up one morning and you weren’t there?! We were devastated! Yoona was a wreck! Do you know how many times she tried to sneak off just to look for you even though we were weren’t allowed to? And how bruised up she was every time we managed to find her? How she’d cry herself to sleep and there was nothing we could do about it? Do you have any idea how much we lost when you left?!”

“I’m sorry, Yuri. But this is something I have to do. No matter what.”

The reply came so quickly that it sounded like Sunny didn’t hear anything Yuri said. No pauses. No awkward silence. No guilt.

“So all of it was just an act? You were never really our friend? All this time when we were hoping to find you and take you back, you never had any intentions of coming back to us? Or at least explain to us why you had to leave? And all I get is ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I have to do this?’ What the hell is it that you have to do exactly?!”

“Of course, I was your friend. I am. I mean, I used to be. I can tell by this conversation that you guys won’t ever take me back. This and the way you guys attacked me back at Mountain Glenn.”

“That was just because you were with Tiffany! And that was after she attacked Sooyoung and Hyoyeon! What was I supposed to think? You didn’t tell us anything either! Geez Sunny! If you’d just tell me what—”

“I left because I didn’t want to keep lying to you guys anymore—”

“Then stop lying! Tell me what’s going on! I deserve an explanation, Sunny! Yoona and Sica, too! We deserve an acceptable reason.”

Sunny clutched her buckler to her chest and there was no response.

“I guess I’ll just have to beat it out of you!”

Sunny received Yuri’s first punch and didn’t budge from her spot. Then the second and the third and the rest after that. She just closed her eyes and held her buckler up to hide her face.

Frustrated that none of her attacks worked even with her semblance, Yuri gripped the upper half of Sunny’s buckler and wrest it from Sunny’s arm. It hit a nearby shelf.

Sunny quickly raised her arms in front of her face and met the rest of Yuri’s punches, still not moving from her spot. Even when Yuri got behind her and hammered a fist into her back and into her sides, she remained still. She only shifted her arms to cover her face again, still with her eyes closed. The walls around her crumbled from the force of Yuri’s attacks. She could tell that Yuri had doubled her strength but it didn’t matter. She just stood there and waited.

“Why? Why?! Why!!” Yuri huffed in between punches. Even the kicks didn’t work. Sunny took everything.

“Do you get it now, Yuri?” Sunny finally revealed her face, her arms now spread to her sides while Yuri continued to attack. The faint glow of tear tracks ran down her cheeks. “I can take whatever you dish out. Even if it’s that semblance of yours.”

Yuri wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. She thought controlling her semblance would help but apparently it didn’t make a difference. No matter how much she put behind her attacks, even when she had given everything she could, she was still useless.

“Don’t worry about using up all of your aura on me, Yuri. ‘Cause unlike that guy you killed, I won’t explode or anything.”

“!”

Fists still raised, Yuri slowly closed her eyes. It was as if her body had gone to sleep and she wanted to fall into that state. She heard voices and then there was nothing. She didn’t open her eyes until she felt someone hug her from behind. Hyoyeon was the first person she saw. That meant that Sooyoung was the one she had been leaning on. In the distance, she could still make out Sunny’s outline but only for a fleeting second. Then she was gone.

“Are you okay? Did she hurt you?”

Yuri shook her head. Sunny was really gone.

“Hyo, she’s trembling. We should get her out of here,” said Sooyoung. She took Yuri’s hand and pulled her toward an opening in the wall. “I’m sorry we didn’t come sooner. When we didn’t see you after we reached this building, we thought you ran ahead with the others. We were sent to check another area so we figured we’d see you back at camp. But when we ran into the others and you weren’t with them, we got a feeling that you were doing something stupid again.”

“And we were right,” Hyoyeon chimed in.

Yuri mustered a small smile and they walked back to their camp in silence. She listened to Sooyoung and Hyoyeon talk about how Sunny staggered back when Hyoyeon attacked her from above. She didn’t know what to worry about the most: the fact that Hyoyeon somehow managed to damage Sunny when she couldn’t, the fact that she saw Sunny escape on a Griffon after Hyoyeon’s attack, or the fact that she wanted to kill Sunny. I was going to do it. I felt it. And this time it wouldn’t have been an accident.

+

The Grimm really had gone. They didn’t encounter any on their way back and neither did the rest of the huntsmen, huntresses and the other students. Back at the make-shift tent, Sooyoung shifted uncomfortably in her sleeping bag.

“Yuri-yah, do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“But—”

“Leave her alone. Let’s get some rest.” Hyoyeon got into her sleeping bag and tried to get some sleep.

There were no more questions from Sooyoung after that. Yuri was grateful but the silence grew unbearable. She rolled on her side and clutched her hands to her chest. I was going to kill her. I wanted to kill her. The thoughts alone scared her. That she had to keep this feeling to herself was even more terrifying. She pulled out her scroll and almost speed dialed Jessica’s number. She probably doesn’t want to talk to me. So she settled for typing in a text instead: “We need to talk. Ran into Sunny.” She waited for a reply but nothing came. She didn’t know how long she waited but she fell asleep with the scroll pressed to her chest.

+

It was already nearing noon when she woke up. Sooyoung and Hyoyeon offered her some food but she didn’t have an appetite so she only took the canister of water. They reminded her to eat something to restore her aura and she just smiled.

She almost forgot about her scroll and found it lying beside her sleeping bag. There was a message from Jessica that was sent earlier that morning: “Okay. Let’s talk when you’re available.” She didn’t know what to reply with and before she knew it, Sooyoung snatched the scroll from her side.

“What the , Soo?!” Yuri grabbed the scroll and saw the sent message: “I miss you.”

“What? Wasn’t that what you wanted to say to her?”

“Stay out of this!!”

“Okay, okay. Sorry.” Sooyoung retreated to the other side of the tent where Hyoyeon smacked her arm and told her it was too early to play pranks on Yuri.

Yuri frantically typed a follow-up message and sent it: “Ignore that! Soo typed it!”

There was no reply. An excruciating five-minute-wait later, there was still nothing. Yuri sent another message: “I miss you. Really.”

BEEP

“I miss you too,” read Jessica’s message.

+

The marshes in Mistral gave off the thickest, most inexplicable scent at noon. The closest comparison would be a cross between wet grass and gasoline after a barbecue inside a bird cage that hasn’t been cleaned in days. It made Yoona’s nose twitch.

She shook it off and started walking back to the clearing where they set up camp. It was the driest piece of land they could find. The other huntsmen and huntresses settled for the slightly more damp side. She checked her scroll as she walked. No messages. No calls. Huh. Not even one from Seohyun. They had been communicating every chance they got since they left Beacon. I miss seeing her though. And being with her. She remembered texting Seohyun that last night and she got a lot of smiley faces in reply. She thought it was cute. She was also hoping to get another call from Sooyoung or Hyoyeon last night but nothing ever came.

She laughed to herself when she remembered what happened after she answered Sooyoung’s call the day before. When she told Krystal and Jessica that Yuri already told Sooyoung and Hyoyeon about the kiss, Jessica turned bright red and lunged at her. She almost dropped her scroll into a nearby swamp. “Yoona! Stop it!! Or else I’m gonna kick your so hard—” Jessica was having a fit so it was a good thing that Krystal already started to lower the temperature around her older sister and the latter didn’t notice it until she was frozen in place.

“Ah, that was something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. A frozen Sica unnie.” She laughed to herself again. The rest of the conversation was a blur of screams. She could hear Yuri on the other line and Jessica was right beside her, although immobile against a tree. In the end, they couldn’t decide what to do about ‘the lovebirds’ as Sooyoung says. If she wasn’t so busy fighting the Grimm the other day until past midnight then she would’ve figured something out by now.

As she approached the camp, she saw Jessica reading something on her scroll.

“Is something wrong, unnie?”

“Hm? No, I was just reading a text from Yuri-yah.”

“Oh thank god!” Yoona clamped shut when she saw everyone look in her direction. For such an open space, the clearing could still carry an echo. “Now you two can finally tell each other how you feel,” she said with less volume.

“No, not about that. It’s about Sunny.”

Hearing Sunny’s name no longer made Yoona jump but something tugged at her heart whenever she heard it. “What? What about her?”

Jessica put her scroll away and recalled what Yuri said. “Yuri ran into her. So we have to talk.”

“Oh.” Yoona sat down on her sleeping bag – the one that she had to share with Krystal because she forgot to take one before they jumped down from the airship. “So that confirms it then. She’s with them. She’s… working with the White Fang.”

“Yoona…”

“What?”

“Don’t let this get to you okay?”

“I’ll try. Try.” Yoona was hesitant to commit to anything that had to do with Sunny. It still scared her less that there was a possibility of her being left alone again.

“Besides, we don’t even know what she was doing there. Let’s not jump into any conclusions.”

Yoona nodded. She thought of second chances and how much Seohyun believed that she had it in her to give Sunny hers. “Fine. But I want to hear it from Sunny unnie. I want to hear her say that she didn’t leave to join the enemy.”

Jessica gave her dongsaeng a smile. “I’d like that, too.”

Krystal joined them a few minutes later. “Unnies? I heard that we’re leaving in a while. Looks like something happened in Atlas and they need more people.”

Just then, Jessica’s scroll beeped. It was another message from Yuri: “Flying to Atlas for some reason. Sorry but our talk has to wait.”

Jessica sent a reply so fast that she didn’t even bother to check if she spelled everything right or put the proper punctuation marks: “See you soon, Yuri-yah. Flying there too.”

After two days of avoidance and three days of doing nothing but fight Grimm, she was aching to see her partner again. She scrolled up to the previous messages.

“We need to talk. Ran into Sunny.”

When she saw that the message was from Yuri, she hesitated to open it. She feared for the worst. That fear dragged on when she saw those four words: We. Need. To. Talk. About what? About the kiss? About how she realized that she hates me for what I did? About how she just wants to be friends? That last one didn’t seem so bad. It wasn’t supposed to be a bad thing. She wanted Yuri in her life. Yuri was her friend. Yuri was her partner. So why do I feel like I just got shot in the gut when I think of her just wanting to be friends with me?

Apparenlty, that didn’t matter because Yuri wanted to talk to her about Sunny. She wanted to ask about what happened but she was afraid of what Yuri would say. She would’ve acted just like Yoona did. She would’ve lashed out and felt bad about not being at Vacuo to knock some sense into Sunny somehow. Yuri didn’t say anything so something bad must have happened. It pained her to know this as a fact and even more so that she wasn’t around to comfort Yuri who was unfortunate enough to face their former teammate and have her leave again. It wasn’t fair. Not to Yuri. Not to any of them.

Then there was the other message.

“I miss you.”

She wanted so much to hear Yuri say those words and she wanted to say them back. Whether Yuri meant it as a partner or as something else didn’t seem to matter as much. She just wanted it to be true. She got so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t notice that she hadn’t hit send yet and just as she was about to, another message popped up.

“Ignore that! Soo typed it!”

And then everything felt ty.

She had no other way to describe it. She put her scroll away and reminded herself to punch Sooyoung in the face the next time they meet. That damn shikshin. Always poking her nose into everything! She was imagining the look on Sooyoung’s face after she punches her and leaves without a word when the scroll beeped in her pocket.

“I miss you. Really.”

She didn’t need to think too much about what to reply with. “I miss you too,” she muttered to herself as she typed.

+

The Griffon glided above the edge of the cliff then lowered itself to the ground with its wings slightly folded inward. She jumped down from its back and headed straight to the biggest tent. Geez, this thing is overrated. It was only a passing thought, one born out of frustration over what happened earlier with Yuri.

“Back so soon, Soonkyu?”

“Shut up! Where do you get off sending me to Vacuo only to call back all of the reinforcements?! I didn’t see one White Fang member there to watch my back! And you left one Griffon to help me? Just one?!”

Bob offered Sunny a seat but all he got was the same scowl he saw when he first met her. “I needed everyone to be at Atlas instead. The military has to go. They’ve caused us too much trouble.”

“Have to go? I told you I didn’t want anyone to die! You agreed to keep people out of this!”

“Relax. I meant that their technology has to go. Those mechanical soldiers that they keep making are overwhelming, don’t you think? The Grimm can’t get stronger as fast as those machines are made. And without the Grimm’s help, nothing will change.”

“Before I agree to anything, can you tell me one thing?”

“Anything.”

“Are we still in this together?”

“Shouldn’t you be asking yourself that, Soonkyu? You’re the one who has mixed feelings after all.”

Sunny couldn’t deny that. One look into Yuri’s eyes earlier and she wanted to break down. She wanted to apologize and even though she said the words she knew that they meant nothing without explaining why she was sorry in the first place. She wanted her friends back but what she wanted more was to change the world. She wanted the wars to stop. She wanted the humans and the faunus to live together peacefully. If she had to threaten them with extinction just to accomplish it then, by all means, she was up for it. That was what Bob offered her. He offered her the one thing that humans and faunus could agree on fighting. He gave her the Grimm. Most of the faunus – members of the White Fang – were already on their side. That left the remaining few and the rest of humanity. Once everyone decides to give up, the fighting will stop. Or else we’ll let the Grimm run loose and the fighting will only stop once everyone is dead. Yuri will never understand. Yoona and Jessica won’t, either. Besides, Yuri did try to kill her earlier. She could feel the heat starting to creep under her skin until Yuri decided to stop and Hyoyeon caught her off guard with almost no aura left. Fine. That just means that next time we meet, I’ll give her a real fight.

“Was it something I said?” asked Bob. Sunny had been silent for quite some time.

“Do you want me to go to Atlas too?” Sunny asked back, ignoring the previous question.

“No. It’s too messy over there right now. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, you know? That’s how much I care about you. So stay and rest awhile.”

Sunny nodded then left. She petted the Griffon’s head before retreating to her own tent.