Chapter Text
pyrolytic: decomposition or transformation of a compound caused by heat
When she joined, she had nothing. Four years old and balanced on her mother's hip, entranced by the sound of her father's voice, with no concern beyond the immediate circle of her family and no possessions beyond the clothes on her back and the stuffed bear clutched in one arm, she hummed happily as her parents founded the White Fang, the family she would grow up in, a small collective of environmental activism and communal change that meant, for a toddler, more hands to hold her and family to love her.
When she joined, she had nothing. When she left, she had less, stealing out of the house in the middle of the night with nothing but a bruise on her cheek and a knot of guilt dragging at her spine. Her parents' work has become twisted, the good name of the Fang dragged into something violent and dangerous, something more synonymous with hurt than progress, and she's been plotting her escape from the splintered off version of the Fang she'd followed Adam to three years ago for weeks.
Adam sleeps light, but she steps lighter, and she leaves everything-- her clothes, her books, her stuffed bear-- behind. With just her dusty Social Security card shoved into one pocket and the wad of cash she's been stockpiling under a floorboard for two years-- initially for when Adam inevitably needed bail money, then for when she’d eventually need it for herself-- in the other, she sets off at a tiptoe, and then a walk, and then a run, summer air warm in her lungs.
When she joined, she had nothing. When she left, she had less. Her lungs burn as she runs, and she grins wide into the dark as she settles into a jog, and then a familiar sub-seven pace along the road, because for the first time in years, she feels light enough to breathe.
She has a GED, barely two grand in cash, and not a friend in the world, but she hitches her way to the closest town with a concerned elderly couple and then buys a bus ticket to Portland from there. It’s not ideal, but it’s affordable, and she spends half of her money on six months for a shared room in a hippie hostel that smells of an unfortunate mix of patchouli and stale sweat and most of the rest on study materials, and keeps her head down until she can test her way into the next round of entries in the fire academy. She has to charm her way through the mental health assessments and convince the people at the hostel who she’d rather not interact with, at the diner she’s waiting tables at, to be character references, but it’s worth every faked smile and fluttered eyelash when she gets the verbal admission.
It’s not much, but it’s a start, and she doesn’t breathe until she has the admission letter in hand. She folds it with steady hands and steady breaths, because she’s been reeling for years but her body has always refused to admit it, and she slides the paper back into the envelope and laces up her shoes and sets out for a run.
When she joined the Portland Fire Department, she had nothing. When she leaves, she has something she could almost call a family. They throw her a party and also throw her into a dunk tank, and it gives her an excuse to pretend she isn’t tearing up, because she’d left the White Fang, left Adam, running on the side of the road with nothing but her Social Security card and some cash and set her sights on making up for the damage she’d done, but in the process had found people-- good people, kind people, people who she lived with and cooked with and trusted with her life-- who she grew to care for, and now she’s leaving them behind.
“To Belladonna!” The captain yells out, holding his beer out and only sloshing half of it out of the glass and onto the driveway. Their shift is off duty and they’ve all been drinking for hours, and Blake’s pleasantly blasted, her limbs loose and skin buzzing, and her head lolls back on her neck when the rest of the team yells out good-natured boos. “Leaving us to go pop a squat in the woods--”
“Wildland firefighter!” Sun interjects, flinging an arm around her shoulders.
“--and fall out of helicopters!” The captain carries on.
“Helitack crews!” That one garners a round of cheers, and Blake drags her head back down so she can bury her face in her hands.
“Shut up, all of you,” the captain says with a huff, and he tilts his beer towards her. “Blake, it won’t be the same without you in the house. But we couldn’t be prouder to have someone from this house joining helitack, and they couldn’t be luckier to have you.” He raises his beer again. “We also couldn’t be luckier to have you not trying to cook in our kitchen anymore. Seriously.”
A laugh cracks out of her, and she hugs him, because it’s better than the way she wants to cry, because she’ll miss him. She could have stayed here forever, fighting house fires and responding to traffic accidents. She sniffs and lets herself be buried in a bear hug from Sun and Neptune, crushed between the familiar smell of aftershave and firehoses that always clings to them. She could have stayed here forever, but she has a plane ticket to California and the small life she’s built here already packed up, promises she made herself still left to keep.
She keeps moving forward. The helitack work is thrilling, skidding down ropes to attack wildfires a whole new world from breaking down doors to suburban homes with kitchen fires, the fires bigger and the stakes somehow just the same, but the elite crew is never a family the way her house in Portland was. It’s a stepping stone more than the PFD ever was, and she keeps her head down and puts in her hours and, the second she can, puts in her application for the Missoula smokejumper base-- the most elite of firefighters, the ones who parachute out of planes into the middle of nowhere and stop fires before they spread, stop the fires the rest of the world is blissfully unaware could rip through trees and houses if left unattended-- and is rejected immediately.
It doesn’t phase her. Blake is stubborn-- she ran away with a splinter cell that turned full eco-terrorist when she was twelve, she knows how to be stubborn-- and she files the rejection away and immediately submits another application. And then another. And another. She knew the odds going in-- less than five percent-- and also the importance of persistence, and she knows she can outlast them.
She keeps moving forward. She excels with the helitack crew, rappelling out of helicopters across California to put out wildfires, accumulating hard-won burn scars and fractures as she does, collecting her rejections from the smokejumpers in turn with her steady hands until the day she gets an acceptance instead.
Blake stares down at the email for long seconds, uncertain for the first time in years, and then shakes her head and laces up her shoes so she can go for a run. She has her notice with her helitack crew to put in and six weeks before she has to report to training in Missoula, plane tickets to book and her spartan apartment to pack up, forward momentum to hold and promises left to keep.
Blake walks into the first day of rookie training at the Missoula base and is, immediately, accosted by a redheaded lightning bolt spilling coffee on her.
“Shit!” she grinds out, because the coffee is hot-- not enough to burn, but enough to be annoying, and now it’s all over her t-shirt, and also not how she wanted to start her first day.
“Sorry!” the redhead says cheerfully. “My bad. At least your shirt’s black?” She brushes uselessly and too hard at Blake’s shirt, as if she can flap the wet coffee away, and the force of it nearly sends Blake through a wall.
“Please stop,” Blake says through her teeth. “I-- it’s fine.” She wrangles her t-shirt out of the other woman’s fist and steps around her, unloading her backpack at an empty table and settling down to sit and then immediately closing her eyes when the chair next to her is pulled out. “Really, it’s fine, I--”
“Uh, sorry, I--”
Blake opens her eyes and immediately shuts up, because the redhead’s somehow all the way over on the other side of the room, chattering away at someone else now, and the chair next to her is half pulled out by a blonde woman who’s frozen in place.
“Sorry?” Blake says stupidly, because she’s off on the wrong foot now twice with her classmates, and she wanted today to go well.
“I was, um--” She sets the chair back down and rubs at the back of her neck, and Blake frowns down at her own coffee-stained shirt. “I was just going to move this to the other table so I could sit with my sister, actually.”
“Oh,” Blake says. “Of course. Go ahead.”
“No, sorry, it was rude.” She shoves her hands into her pockets and tilts her head, rocking on her heels. “I’m Yang, by the way.”
“What?” Blake immediately curses herself and does her best to school her face into neutrality, because she doesn’t fluster, she doesn’t lose her cool, but she’s off balance on her first day of training and can’t find it in herself to act like a human being. “Oh, sorry. I’m Blake.”
She pushes halfway up to standing and offers a hand, because it’s the polite thing to do, and Yang seems relieved for something to do, yanking a hand free to shake hers, firm and strong and lingering. It relaxes her, and as Blake settles back down into her chair Yang pulls the other one back out and plops down into it.
“So,” Yang says cheerfully. “Saw you already met Nora.” She points to the coffee Blake’s wearing on her shirt.
“Is that her name?” Blake mutters.
“Yep,” Yang says, popping the p. “I ran into her at the gym yesterday. She’s a handful, but she seems like a lot of fun. Said she’s from Nebraska. I cannot believe that Nebraska ever contained anything with that much energy.”
Blake snorts without meaning to and then immediately slaps a hand over her mouth, and Yang glances at her sidelong, grinning sly and knowing.
“So what’s your deal, then?” She folds her arms over her chest, head tilting and eyes narrowing. “Everyone else is being chatty and social but you’re being all. You know.” She waves one hand towards Blake, gesturing vaguely from her head to her feet, encompassing the tense set to her posture, the cross of her arms, the way she has one knee hooked over the other.
“What does that mean?” Blake raises an eyebrow, frowning, because Yang’s right, maybe, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Blake has to admit to anything.
“The only other person here as tense as you is her.” Yang juts a thumb over her shoulder to the front of the room to where a woman with white hair is sitting stiffly, alone, ignoring the rest of the rookies, a book open in front of her. Blake stares at her for a long moment, because she doesn’t look big enough to lift an ax, much less swing one, yet she’s sitting in the room with the rest of them with enough imperious disdain oozing out of her than even from just a view of her back Blake can see it. “And I figured out her deal. I don’t know what yours is.”
“Why do you need to?” Blake shifts in her seat-- not uncomfortably, because she’s comfortable, because this is where she’s supposed to be, where she’s been working to be for years-- and uncrosses her arms, folds her hands into her lap in a less defensive posture.
Yang shrugs, waves one hand casually. “We’re going to work together, right? Don’t we need to trust each other?”
“Assuming we all make it through training,” Blake counters. “One in five fall out, right? And I count a lot more than five in here.”
“Right,” Yang says drily. “Well--”
The door in the front of the room opens and an instructor walks in, cutting Yang off, and they all snap to attention, scrambling around, and Yang mutters an apology before absconding with the chair. She scuttles off and resettles at a table in front of Blake with, presumably, the sister she mentioned-- shorter, dark red hair, practically vibrating in her seat-- and Blake straightens in her seat. Yang’s bright ponytail flashes in her periphery, but it barely registers as her palms burn, because she’s worked years to get this far and, finally, as they’re hustled outside to see who can load up the hundred-ten pound pack and haul it three miles in less than ninety minutes, she’s here.
The first day is hard. There’s the packout and then a rest and then, cruelly, a mile and a half run. Yang’s sister-- Ruby, Blake’s learned by that point, cheerful and bright and unfailingly strong based on how much energy she has after the packout-- blasts past Blake’s time by twenty seconds, leaving her gasping on the side of the track and wondering how someone with a stride almost six inches shorter than hers left her so far behind and was barely winded from it.
“Don’t try to keep up with her,” Yang gasps out at her side, slapping at her shoulder in what’s probably meant to be an encouraging way but instead mostly just nearly knocks over because Blake may be plenty strong but Yang is built like a brick shithouse and hits like one to boot. “She’s still got like half the track records at our high school.”
The afternoon is jammed with classes, and Blake can barely keep her focus on the lectures over the way her muscles scream. She shifts uncomfortably in her seat, as subtly as she can, and takes small comfort in the fact that everyone else-- except the tiny white devil, who Blake is still convinced can’t possibly have hit the minimum weight requirement and who won’t speak to anyone and also sits still like a statue except to glare every time someone cracks a joke or mutters a complaint-- is as uncomfortable as she is.
The first day is hard. The second is harder. She wakes up stiffer than a frozen pipe and twice as miserable, ankles blistered and shoulders aching and every muscle protesting when she tries to sit up.
“Fuck,” she gasps out, flopping back down onto the mattress, and immediately regrets it when pain lances through her entire body at the impact. Today’s going to be so much worse. She peels herself off the mattress with a whimper and it takes every bit of willpower she has to drag herself into the barrack showers, and even more to get her feet into shoes.
She’s the first one to the training room, and she rewards herself with allowing herself a whine as she settles into a chair, since no one can hear her. She drops her head onto the table once she’s sitting and lets out a sigh, reminds herself that this is worth it-- it is, because she’s good at this, because she loves it, even if she doesn’t have to do it, because it needs to be done-- and closes her eyes, relaxes into the table, grants herself a moment to rest in the quiet--
The door opens and she bolts upright, and immediately groans because her entire body protests, and then again, quieter, because pausing in the doorway is the only person in the entire training program she doesn’t want to see.
“Hello.” Even this early, her white hair is neatly tied back, her clothes perfectly pressed, as if they aren’t about to go run through the mud all morning.
“Hi,” Blake says, for lack of anything better to say.
She doesn’t say anything else, hands on her hips, and Blake breaks first, looking past her shoulder to the door. It’s too early for a staring contest with someone whose name she doesn’t even know. Blake sighs and focuses instead on stretching, because it’s something to do, and watches idly as coffee is set to brew and the other woman busies herself with organizing the containers of sugar packets and creamer pods neatly.
“Let me guess,” Blake says before she can stop herself. “You were on a hotshots crew, right?”
She leans against the table, arms folded over her chest, watching as the last of the sugar packets are turned so they’re right side up and label-out and then set in the proper containers before the woman turns around.
“Lucky guess?” she says, mirroring Blake’s posture.
“Organized, structured, precise.” Blake shrugs. “Educated guess.” She takes a breath, shrugs again. “I’m Blake.”
There’s a long silence, long enough that Blake starts to wonder why she bothered trying, even though she knows why she tried-- because they’re meant to be teammates, because they’re meant to work together, to trust each other, to leap out of a plane together and spend hours or days in the middle of the wilderness relying on each other to stop the fires the rest of the world will never know exist-- before she finally gets a response.
“I’m Weiss,” she says eventually.
“Nice to meet you,” Blake says, mouth tilting, because it is, because there’s something interesting about everyone in the training program, all of them, elite firefighters training for thankless careers in obscurity. “Yang mentioned she knew you?”
“She did?” Weiss’s mouth twitches, and Blake can’t tell if it’s a smile because to be perfectly honest Blake can’t tell yet if Weiss knows how to smile.
“She said she knew what your deal was, at least,” Blake amends.
The door opens again before Weiss can answer and Nora tumbles in, nearly falling on her face, Yang on her heels with Ruby hanging onto her like a spidermonkey.
“Hey!” Nora yells. “Ooh, coffee.”
“Coffee!” Ruby scrambles off of Yang’s back, elbow cracking into the back of her head as she does. Blake sighs and rubs at her forehead, and across the room Weiss does the same. The door opens again and more trainees pour in, and Blake drops back down into her chair, muscles still protesting, but she’s more awake, less heavy, and Yang settles into a chair at her side.
“Hey,” Yang says simply, elbow prodding at her side lazily.
“Hey.” Blake elbows her back. Ruby appears a moment later, three coffee cups triangled in her hands, and sets them down on the table, only spilling half of them and grinning broadly when Blake thanks her. Blake sips at her coffee silently, listening with half an ear as Ruby and Yang chatter at each other, raising an eyebrow when Weiss settles without a word in the chair at her other side.
The instructor comes in and claps his hands, yelling about weight room assessments, and Blake groans into her coffee.
“It’s not all jumping out of planes, is it?” Yang says solemnly, slapping a hand on her shoulder as they file out of the room, and Blake considers punching her because Yang has to know exactly how sore her shoulders are. But then Yang smiles at her, wide and bright, a flashover waiting to happen, and Blake nearly walks into a wall. Yang grins wider and nudges an elbow against hers and squeezes through the door to the weightroom ahead of her, stretching her arms over her head and twisting this way and that, and Blake breathes in deep, flexes her hands, resets her focus. She’s here to work.
She’s paired up to spot Ruby, who’s stronger than she looks, and it’s easy to keep her focus on that: safety is an imperative she can keep her head tied to, always, and her eyes stay tied to the tension in Ruby’s muscles as she lifts, the rhythm of her breathing, the likelihood of her body giving out. It’s easy to keep her focus on keeping Ruby safe, because Blake is a firefighter, and safety is what she does.
It’s harder to keep her focus on herself when she’s got a bar on her shoulders and Yang is deadlifting in the cage straight across from her. Blake knows exactly what she can squat and it’s more than this, but she nearly fails at the bottom of the fifth rep because Yang, apparently, can deadlift an absolutely absurd amount and is right in front of her, doing just that, and winking at her as she does it.
“Whoa, whoa,” Ruby hurries out, hands on the bar, and Blake lets out a huff and rights herself and surges up before Ruby can get a proper hold on the bar.
“I’m fine,” she says. “I’m fine. I just-- weird blister on my ankle from yesterday. It’s messing up my stance.”
“Okay,” Ruby says slowly. Her hands pull back, hovering, and Blake looks to the ceiling and settles, resets, breathes. She thinks of fire and the kernel of guilt still aching in her gut, the one she hasn’t had to draw on in years, the one that helped her see the White Fang for what it had become, and sets back to her reps. She’s here to work.
Later, when their afternoon first aid classes end and the instructors drive them out into the woods and leave them with rations and sleeping bags and tarps and let them know they’ll be sleeping outside until further notice, she’s almost grateful. It’s hard to be distracted when she's sleeping under a plastic sheet in April, the ground cold and the air colder the later into the night it gets.
A week later when they’re dragged out of sleep and given two minutes to eat and then handed axes and pulaskis and set to 24 straight hours of cutting fireline, she’d give anything to be back in the weight room nearly falling on her ass staring at the flex of Yang’s quadriceps. She focuses instead on her own movements, the repetitive push and pull familiar, her time on helitack full of laying firelines. To one side, Ruby is a whirlwind of motion: to the other, Weiss is methodical and stronger than she looks. Yang is more powerful than the three of them combined, knocking out entire small trees from the roots up with single swings, setting the path for the fireline that the rest of them clear the brush out of.
By the time they finish Blake’s sure that sometime in the last ten hours she died and no one was kind enough to tell her. Her back and shoulders have circled past hurting all the way to numbness; she’s beyond tired, beyond exhausted, reaching into a state of giddy adrenaline that assures her she could go for another 24 hours if she needed to. An instructor has to pry the pulaski handle from her hands, her fingers locked into position, forearms cramped for so long she can’t let go, and she can’t even protest as she’s loaded into the backseat of the truck next to Weiss. Yang’s the last one in their truck and even she seems shellshocked and dead on her feet, and the four of them, crammed into what’s technically only three seats, slump into each other, a domino of Ruby slumping into Weiss slumping into Blake slumping into Yang’s side and immediately passing out now that she’s not moving anymore.
She doesn’t remember the ride back to the base in Missoula, but at some point she wakes up on one of the cots in the barracks. The room is full of the sounds of sleep-- Nora snores loudly, and Yang snores quietly, and Weiss moves constantly in her sleep-- but there are six empty beds, neatly made and untouched. Blake rolls over and her whole body protests, less a body and more one raw nerve of overworked muscle and blisters, but she manages to flip her pillow over and smile, because six people fell out, and she didn’t.
Yang’s curled on her side on the cot next to her, masses of hair bright even in the dark, and Blake rolls back over to face the other way instead of inspecting the way that she cares that Yang didn’t fall out, either.
After that, the rest of training slides by like water. Compared to the blur of exhaustion that they survived, the pack tests and calisthenics, landing simulators and parachute training, all feel simpler. By the time they make it to the end, no one’s managed to survive without Nora spilling coffee on them at least once, and Blake has learned that Weiss is from New York, that Ruby and Yang had started with the Sacramento Fire Department before shifting to wildland and that Ruby was accepted into the program a year ago and somehow managed to defer her acceptance until Yang got one as well. Blake’s the fastest at rappelling down a tree, but Ruby can climb one faster than anyone; Yang isn’t as fast on the timed runs without weight but has the best time of the whole group when they have to haul the hundred-pound packs across rough terrain, and Weiss was the only one who walked away from their first real jump without a scratch. Nora, incapable of keeping a cup of coffee upright for more than ninety seconds at a time, is somehow better than all of them with both a chainsaw and at sewing a chute, and more than once Blake has to go to her, grudgingly, for help as she struggles with sewing her own parachutes.
Weeks go by and then, suddenly, Blake blinks and she’s a smokejumper. Training ends with little fanfare-- a certification, a handshake, an official assignment to the Missoula base along with Yang and Ruby and Weiss, Nora to the Yellowstone base to be near her boyfriend-- and then suddenly Blake’s hit on one side with the whirlwind that is Nora and on the other by Ruby, and in the background somewhere Weiss is yelling because Yang hauled her up on one shoulder and is saying something about going into town for beers. There’s a low hum in Blake’s ears, a ten year old echo of sparks flying off a sledgehammer and landing on dry ground, Adam shoving away her concern, the news a day later of a wildfire out of control, and the paper that officially certifies her one of the most singular firefighters in the country wrinkles in her hands.
“Hey!” Yang appears in front of her, disheveled from manhandling Weiss around like they weren’t all supposedly the newly-declared elite, bright like a flashover, and Blake shakes her head, shakes herself back into the present, pastes a smile onto her face. “Come on, let’s go, let’s get a beer. Ruby’s driving.”
“What--”
“She doesn’t drink.” Yang hooks a hand through her elbow, turning her towards the doors, and slings an arm around Weiss’s shoulders as well, ignoring her protests with a huff. “Hates the taste. But she will hustle you in darts shamelessly after you’re a few rounds in, though, so keep an eye out for that.”
Blake hums noncommittally, glancing down at the certificate in her hand again. “Noted,” she says drily. “I hate darts anyways.”
“Coward,” Yang says, cheerful and dangerous, and it burns down Blake’s spine like a line of accelerant. She lets go of her hold on both Blake and Weiss and shoves them towards the training barracks. “We’re leaving in twenty, go get pretty!”
The bar is somehow both larger than Blake had expected and still cramped. There’s space enough for something approximating a dance floor, but it’s mostly crammed with people drinking instead of dancing. Nora had laid eyes on the mechanical bull and disappeared immediately, and the rest of them had landed a table in a corner. Blake hasn’t moved since she claimed her chair, working her way slowly through a beer and watching with increasing interest as Yang loses miserably at darts to Ruby.
Across the table, Weiss is overdressed and her beer is mostly untouched, and she’s been texting nearly the whole time since they arrived. Blake props her chin in her hand, pulling her attention away from the way Yang’s entire body seems to flex when she throws a dart, broad shoulders on display in the criminally cute yellow dress she’d worn to the bar, and focuses on Weiss instead, rolling through the information she knows about Weiss as a distraction from the ripple of muscle in Yang’s shoulder. They’ve been in training cargoes and t-shirts for weeks, covered in dirt and mud and sweat and she’d been sure nothing could surprise her about her teammates--once you learn how someone wields both a chainsaw and a sewing needle, there are few gaps left to fill-- but then she’d nearly walked into a door when Yang had stepped out in a sundress, broad shoulders on display, one shoulder covered in flowering tattoos the crept around to her back and wound down around her scapula, edging along her spine.
She’s learned a lot about each of them throughout training, filing information away as she does, because she has to jump out of a plane with these people, spend hours or days at a time with them in the middle of nowhere, trust them with her life. Their quirks could save her life. She knows that Weiss grew up in New York and that she drinks her coffee black, that she’s physically incapable of complaining, that she was on a hotshot crew and was strict and precise even by their exacting standards. She knows that Weiss is uptight and unyielding and standoffish, that she has no patience for Ruby’s enthusiasm or Yang’s jokes or Nora’s reckless energy, that she offered help without hesitation and never took the last of the coffee even if she hadn’t had any yet, that except for possibly Yang she was Blake’s first choice to jump out of a plane into a wildfire with right now.
Blake knows almost as much about Weiss as she knows about any of the rest of her now-teammates, but she doesn’t know a thing to say to her in a social situation, and she stares down into her beer stupidly instead.
“Hey!” Yang and Ruby drop back down at the table, wide smiles and bright eyes alike, jostling the both of them back to attention. “I definitely won the last round. Don’t let Ruby tell you otherwise.”
Blake cranes her head around to look at the dartboard and the scattered collection of blue darts, and then back to Yang, one eyebrow raised, and Yang clears her throat loudly.
“Not a word from you, Belladonna,” she says, and takes a long swallow from her beer, one hand shoving at Ruby lazily and nearly dislodging her hat in the process.
“Weiss,” Ruby says with a huff as she straightens her hat. “Stop texting. We’re celebrating!”
“Is that what we’re doing?” Weiss drawls out, finally looking up from her phone. “I thought your sister was just losing miserably at darts.”
“Excuse you,” Yang says with a gasp. She slaps a hand over her heart. “I was losing beautifully, thank you very much. Which you would know, if you’d been paying attention, ma’am.” She reaches out and grabs for Weiss’s phone, narrowly missing when Weiss yanks it out of her reach with an offended yelp.
“Who’re you texting so much, hm?” Ruby props her chin in her hands, eyes wide, swerving to one side to avoid Yang’s elbow as she keeps trying to grab the phone without looking away from Weiss. “Boyfriend? Is it a boyfriend?”
Blake leans back in her chair, sipping on her beer, watching with interest as Yang keeps trying to grab Weiss’s phone and Weiss keeps dodging, Ruby watching wide-eyed and bright. It’s warm in the bar, the first edges of summer reaching in through the open windows, and she’d rolled up her sleeves the minute they walked in; the further into her drink she gets, the looser she feels, after almost two months of training and no alcohol, and it’s easy, halfway into the beer, to watch three of the most elite firefighters in the country act like idiots and enjoy it.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Weiss says, imbuing enough distaste into five words that Blake nearly chokes on her beer and Yang laughs, big and loud, lighting up the whole bar.
“That’s way too much of a denial,” she says, still laughing.
“I don’t,” Weiss says.
“Girlfriend, then?” Yang raises an eyebrow, challenging, and Weiss huffs out a sigh and rolls her eyes.
“Definitely a girlfriend,” Ruby says firmly.
“You’re obnoxious,” Weiss informs her, pointing at Ruby and then at Yang. “All of you.”
“Aw, come on.” Yang drops an arm around her shoulders with a sigh and grins wide across the table at Blake when Weiss makes a noise of disgust but doesn’t try to move away. “What about Blake? She’s nice and quiet. You can’t call her obnoxious.”
She winks at Blake, crackling like a live wire, like a flashover on the verge of combustion, and Blake burns and focuses on her beer instead of the way Yang’s arm around Weiss’s shoulders draws a clean line from her bicep up to the bottom edges of the tattoo, black inkwork and contrasting floral lines disappearing along her deltoid and under the curtain of her hair. Blake is here because of thousands of acres of lost wildland and lost homes, a debt owed and a repayment to make, not to make friends or eyes at the well-built lines of charm and muscle that make up Yang Xiao Long.
“All of you,” Weiss says primly, even if the snide edge to her voice doesn’t reach her eyes, and it slices through Blake’s uncertainty and she’s drawn into the way they all laugh. She’s not here to make friends, but she is here to be part of a team. This team.
“So,” Yang says, arm still around Weiss casually, and she pokes at her cheek and grins when Weiss slaps at her hand. “Tell us about her!”
“What’s her name?” Ruby says. “Does she live here? How’d you meet?”
Blake leans her elbows on the table, tilting forward over her beer, because in nearly two months of slogging through mud and rain and heat, diving out of planes, climbing trees and putting out fires and swinging axes, she’s never seen Weiss blush before.
“I think you hit a nerve,” she says, and Ruby crowds forward next to her, pressed against her side and nodding solemnly.
“I think we did,” she stage whispers.
“I hate all of you,” Weiss mutters. Her phone buzzes in her hand, screen lighting up, and Yang yelps victoriously and grabs it out of her hand.
“Is this her?” She holds the screen up, eyes wide and illuminated by the bright screen. “Oh, come on, you can barely see her face--”
“Give that back--”
“Hey, share!” Ruby yanks the phone out of her hand, upending Blake’s beer in the process, and Blake only barely manages to dodge the spill, chair clattering out behind her as she leaps back. Beer drips off the table and the rest of them freeze like a record scratch, Ruby leaning half over the table and Yang holding Weiss practically in a headlock. “Oops?”
“Honestly, Ruby,” Yang says, for all the world a scolding older sister, even as she keeps her headlock hold on Weiss, who seems to drive her elbow into Yang’s ribs under the table. “Pretty sure you owe Blake a beer now.”
“It’s fine,” Blake says, even though she does want another beer, but Ruby’s already bolting up to the bar, and she sighs and sits in Ruby’s vacated chair. “I’d settle for getting to see Weiss’s hot girlfriend.”
“Oh my God,” Weiss says indignantly, pulling her way out of Yang’s headlock with a huff and slapping at her arm. She yanks her phone out of Yang’s hand and unlocks it, thumbing through pictures for a long moment and then offering her phone to Blake, mouth set in a thin line.
Blake takes the phone and then also steals her untouched beer, taking a slow sip before she peers down at the screen, and then blinks, looking up at Weiss and then back at the picture on the screen of Weiss curled into the side of a redheaded woman, the two of them dressed glamorously but barefoot and drinking fast food milkshakes, sitting on the hood of an expensive car with a corporate logo barely visible. “Wait, is that--”
“Yes,” Weiss says flatly.
“What?” Yang says. She grabs for the phone again. “No way.”
“Yes,” Weiss says again, sighing. “Are you done?”
“Done with what?” Ruby reappears with a fresh round of beers and a pitcher of water. “Ta da!” She drags a chair around and plops down at the head of the table, skewing the circle odd-ways.
“Weiss is dating Pyrrha Nikos!” Yang bursts out, shoving Weiss’s phone into Ruby’s face.
“Wheaties box Pyrrha Nikos?” Ruby says. She nearly upends the entire table. “Super G gold medalist Pyrrha Nikos? Downhill legend Pyrrha Nikos?”
“Please be done.” Weiss rubs at her forehead. “Yes. That’s her.”
“You’re dating the greatest skier in the history of ever and you never told us?” Ruby’s nearly vibrating in her seat. Blake raises an eyebrow at her, glancing over towards Yang, who’s laughing into her hand, and moves the beers further away from Ruby. “How did you meet her?”
Weiss sighs and claims one of the beers, taking a small sip and then a larger one. “We met at an-- event. After her first Olympics.”
“An event,” Yang says slowly.
“An event,” Weiss throws back.
“You’re being weird,” Blake says, and Yang points at her without looking away from Weiss.
“You are.”
“I am not!”
“She is not!” Ruby says indignantly, and then pauses. “Actually, you are.”
“Hey!”
“Nice try, Rubes,” Yang says, patting her on the arm. “Come on, Weiss. Spit it out. Teammates, remember?”
Weiss sighs and rubs at her forehead, and Blake leans her chin into her hand. Around them, the bar carries on, loud in the summer air, and Blake watches with growing interest as Weiss works her way rapidly through almost an entire pint before she speaks again.
“We met at an event,” she says again, staring with great interest into her mostly-empty glass, one finger tapping carefully against the rim. “In New York. In May.”
“Uh huh,” Yang drawls out.
“On a Monday,” Weiss says carefully. “The first Monday in May.”
There’s a long second of silence that drags out over the table, confusion setting heavy in Blake’s head, but then Yang sits up straight so quickly the whole table rattles.
“The-- you what,” she yells out and then slaps a hand over her mouth. “The-- you-- the Met Gala?”
“Yes,” Weiss says miserably, slumping in her seat.
“How did you end up at the--” Ruby cuts herself off, one hand slapping down on the table. “Oh my God! You’re Weiss Schnee, aren’t you!”
Weiss nods, miserable and flushing scarlet, and a dull roar builds in Blake’s head, pressure heaving behind her chest, the half-hidden logo from the picture of Weiss and Pyrrha suddenly growing into a familiar one that’s lived locked away with her guilt and drive for years and years--
“Hurry up,” Adam mutters, hand locked tight around her arm, tight enough to hurt, tight enough to bruise, tight enough that she bites down on the inside of her cheek until she can taste blood. She nearly falls trying to match her stride to his longer legs, the bag slung over her back too heavy, but she hurries as she’s told, dry leaves and brush crunching under her boots.
It’s dark, the sun long gone past the horizon, but there’s no reprieve for the dry heat, and the pace they’re keeping has sweat dragging down her spine and dripping into her eyes. He’d told her this would be fast, he’d told it would be easy, he’d told it would be some graffiti and vandalism. The White Fang’s protest and policy approach had done little to provoke change, he’d said, and they’d splintered off to drive real change forward: companies like SDC would only listen to people who hit their wallets, and vandalizing the machinery set to start constructing their next refineries and pipelines would do that.
He’d said it would be easy. He didn’t say it would involve taking a sledgehammer to backhoes and cranes and generators, sparks flying with every contact. She’d stomped out every spark she could see, certain she got them all, and on the way home she’d felt sure it had been a good night because the tens of thousands of dollars of property damage wouldn’t stop SDC, but it would cost them, and it might make them think twice, at least for a moment.
Ten hours later, when the fires had spread, no one had been sure when they started, but by the time they had ripped through three towns she was certain and by the time it was officially determined they’d started at an SDC warehouse site and millions in fines were levied against the company, she’d already planned her escape, guilt setting her towards a career as a firefighter.
--and her beer glass skids out of her hand, wobbling on the table and sloshing beer out, and it’s only Yang, faster than someone her size should be able to move, grabbing it that keeps it from knocking over entirely.
“You people are a literal hazard,” Weiss mutters. “Jesus.”
“Sorry,” Blake mumbles. “I--phone buzzed. It surprised me. I just need to--”
She cuts off and fumbles with her phone, digging it out of the pocket of her jeans and then pushing up to her feet and out of the bar. She doesn’t breathe until she’s outside, around the corner of the building and slumping against the cool brick.
It’s been nearly ten years since she made the decision to leave the White Fang, leave Adam, since she realized how far astray she’d gone and watched a fire she helped start spread across thousands of acres and ruin hundreds of lives. It’s burned into her bones, the way she’d been so sure she was doing something right and how it had twisted into something that could have killed so many innocent people. She hadn’t felt guilty, necessarily, when SDC was hit with the fines for the fire, because SDC was a terrible company, but then: then there was Weiss.
“Hey.”
Her eyes snap open and the swirl of confusion and guilt in her stomach contract and twist into something entirely different because Yang’s standing there, hands behind her back and concern plain on her face.
“You okay?”
Of course Yang would be the type to follow her. Then again, her exit had hardly been graceful. Blake rubs a hand over her face, wishes they were somewhere louder. Even Portland, hardly a bustling metropolis had more nightlife, more distractions, more to disappear into than this.
“Yeah,” she says eventually. “Sorry, I just--”
“Got totally weird about the fact that Weiss is, like, corporate royalty?” Yang shrugs and one side of her mouth tilts up into a smile, easy and calm, and Blake’s chest burns traitorously. “Gotta say, I didn’t see that coming.”
She tilts her head over towards a bench further down the wall, and Blake sighs and nods. Yang grins and tilts her chin until Blake leads the way, and waits until Blake’s settled down before pulling her hands out from behind her back, presenting two beers with flair and a deep curtsy.
“Are you even allowed to take these out of the bar?” Blake says, even as she accepts one of them.
“I’m one hundred percent sure that I am not,” Yang says, settling delicately at Blake’s side and tapping her glass to Blake’s. “Cheers, Blake Belladonna.”
“Cheers,” Blake says drily. “Thank you.”
“What are teammates for?” Yang lifts her glass to Blake and then takes a sip, settling more comfortably into the bench. Blake busies herself with sipping at her beer, focusing on that instead of the way that the bench isn’t really big enough for there to be space between them and how she’s pushed into Yang’s side, bare arm to bare arm. It’s not hot, but the air is warm, and Yang is warm enough to burn, practically, a flashover moments away from combusting, and Blake should be running in the opposite direction, moving to safety, putting distance between herself in the impending combustion.
Instead she takes another sip of her beer and melts a little further into the bench.
“So are you, like, afraid of rich people or something?” Yang says eventually, and Blake chokes a tiny bit on her beer.
“What?”
“Hey, valid question.” Yang shifts, curling one leg up under her and propping an elbow on the back of the bench. It pushes her knee into Blake’s thigh, bare skin against denim, and Blake’s had an ironclad control over her pulse for over a decade but for a moment she’s certain her heartbeat is loud enough to be heard in space. Yang takes a moment to fiddle with the hem of her dress, distractingly, and Blake takes the same moment to bury her focus in her beer once again. “You’re fine around Weiss for weeks and then you find out she’s, like, a Kennedy and then immediately bolt out of the room.”
“Oh,” Blake mumbles. “Right.”
“Ruby’s afraid of geckos,” Yang says. “You’d probably still win the weirdest phobia award. But not by much.”
“I’m not afraid of-- wait, geckos?”
“Geckos.” Yang shrugs. “To each her own, I guess.” She leans her temple against her fist, easy and unconcerned. “So what’s your deal, then, if you’re not secretly afraid of rich people?”
Blake stares down into her drink, one foot tapping slowly against the ground. For a brief, dizzying moment, she considers the possibility of honesty, of explaining, of her life story from growing up homeschooled in an environmentalist commune and running away at twelve to join a splinter cell of eco-terrorists, causing the worst wildfire in recorded North American history that Weiss’s family’s company was blamed for, working her way to joining the most select group of firefighters in the country dedicated exclusively to stopping wildland fires before they ever spread as some form of atonement for her sins.
Instead, she takes another sip of her beer and shakes her head and parses through the truth like she always has, picks out the pieces she can live with and discards the rest.
“I’ve read about SDC a lot in the news,” she says eventually. “I’m not a fan of the company.”
“I mean, yeah.” Yang shrugs. “Is anyone? But Weiss clearly isn’t like that. She’s here working with us. She earned her place here. And she’s pretty great, once you get past that whole prickly exterior thing.”
“Yeah,” Blake says into her beer, smiling in spite of herself, because Weiss is pretty great, and so is Ruby, and so is Yang. Yang who’s sitting out here with her, smiling at her like she’s worth her time, worth her effort, even though Yang burns bright like the sun and Blake’s never been anything but the faded flickering edges of a shadow. “She is.”
“And so are you, once you get past your whole prickly exterior thing,” Yang adds, poking at Blake’s shoulder with the hand holding her beer. Her teeth flash bright in the dim streetlights and Blake’s shoulder burns with the contact, and she barely manages to compose herself enough to let out an offended gasp.
“I’m not prickly,” she says with a huff.
“You’re almost as prickly as Weiss,” Yang says solemnly. She holds her beer up like a salute and winks, and Blake’s chest aches around her unsteady breaths because in the decade since she left the White Fang she’s had crushes and friendships, people she trusted and people she loved, but no one has ever burned as bright and dangerous, warm and kind, like Yang has in the short months Blake’s known her. “Don’t tell me you’re also secretly a billionaire, too.”
“What?” Blake blinks slowly, shakes her head, redirecting her attention from the clean lines of Yang’s shoulders, the way her smile burns like embers on the edge of ignition. “I-- no. Definitely not.”
“Too bad,” Yang says with a shrug and a swallow from her beer. “We could’ve been the richest jump team in the country if you were.”
“I’m pretty sure we already are,” Blake says drily. She takes a long drink of her own beer to distract herself. The music from the bar pulses through the wall, humming in the alley around them, and one finger taps against her beer glass absently as it does.
Yang hums quietly in agreement and props her temple against her fist, eyes unfocused and unconcerned as she watches Blake.
“Maybe so,” she says eventually. She pushes up to her feet and holds a hand out to Blake, tilts her head towards the bar. “Come on, let’s go back inside.”
Blake takes her hand without thinking about it, the movement and trust automatic and borne of too many weeks of sharing space with the whole of her team, and Yang pulls her up to her feet lazily. Blake clears her throat and looks down into her drink, the half-empty pint glass an easier focal point than the fact that Yang’s hand is familiar in her own, the both of them calloused and strong, and pulls her hand free too slowly. Heat crawls along her cheeks at the way Yang’s eyes seem brighter than usual, her mouth softer, and Blake clears her throat again and shoves her free hand into her pocket.
“Are you as bad at a mechanical bull as you are at darts?” Blake says after a too-long moment, desperate to redirect attention away from the way she wants to lean closer to the familiar edges of Yang’s smile, the way her instincts tell her to run in the other direction as fast as she can from the inevitable flashpoint.
“I’ll have you know I’m much worse, thank you very much,” Yang says loftily. She lifts her chin primly and spins on one heel towards the entrance to the bar. “Just for that, I’m signing you up for the bull.”
“Don’t you--” Blake starts to say, and then nearly drops her beer because Yang’s set off at a run towards the bar, laugh trailing over her shoulder. Blake curses and sprints after her, skidding around the entrance and into the crowd at the bar just in time to see Yang at the mechanical bull sign-up sheet, pen in hand and Nora bouncing on her heels at her side. Blake shoves her beer into Nora’s hand and launches forward, wrestling for the pen in Yang’s hand.
It’s easy, scrabbling for the pen in Yang’s hand, fighting to stop her from signing Blake up to absolutely humiliate herself on a mechanical bull. Easier than focusing on the way her skin hums at every point of contact, the way Yang’s laugh lightens the whole bar and her smile, wide and easy, drags the air from Blake’s lungs like a backdraft before it combusts.
She’s managed to get an arm around Yang’s and twisted it out straight, knee in her ribs and other hand trying to reach the pen without losing her grip, unconcerned with the fact that there’s a crowd around them cheering them on and taking pictures, when Weiss’s voice cuts through the noise.
“Honestly,” she says with a huff, and both of them freeze in place. “You two are a menace.”
“KIck her ass, Yang!” Ruby says, bouncing on her heels at Weiss’s side, and Weiss rolls her eyes and shoves an elbow into Ruby’s side.
“Are you done yet?” Weiss folds her arms over her chest.
“Absolutely not,” Yang says cheerily, planting one foot and pushing until Blake starts to lose her balance. There’s a familiar yell from the crowd and a redheaded whirlwind hits both of them, Nora joining in on the fight. Somewhere around the time Blake and Yang both lose their balance and go toppling to the floor along with Nora, there’s another sigh from Weiss in the background, a cheer from Ruby, and Blake’s breath is shoved out of her lungs when she lands with Yang’s elbow crashing into her stomach and they all lose track of the pen they’re ostensibly fighting over, and Blake smiles easy anyways, more at home than she’s felt since the day she decided to leave the White Fang.