Chapter Text
Tai is sitting by a fire.
He doesn't remember how he got here. Or how long ago. He vaguely remembers walking out of the main part of the refugee camp to hide from Qrow.
It's not his fault. It's not. But this is the third time he's said it, she's not coming back. It's too much right now. Everything is too much right now.
"Mind if I join you?"
He blinks. Looks up, and finds a white-haired woman he's never met before standing over him with a bottle in her hand. Tai can't find it in himself to care what this stranger does. He shrugs.
She sits down closer than he expected, and wordlessly offers him the bottle. Tai grabs it, takes a swig, and chokes. "Sorry," she says. "It isn't exactly top shelf."
It wouldn't matter if it was. Tai's always hated the taste of alcohol—Summer used to tease him about it. He takes another drink and gags. This time he gives up, and hands the bottle back. He goes from feeling tired and empty to feeling tired, empty, and a little dizzy.
"I haven't seen you around the camp before."
Tai grunts.
"Are you with the Beacon Huntress? Professor... Goodwitch, was it?"
Another grunt.
"Ah." She sits there in silence for a moment, then clears her throat. "Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I've seen a few pictures, and you look... well... are you Yang's father?"
"Yang's and Ruby's," he says, pushed to speech at last by the familiar urge to claim them, both of those perfect girls he got to be part of raising. It wakes him up enough to notice that the woman's hair isn't white from age. "You're Weiss' mother."
She holds out a hand, which he shakes, and doesn't say it's a pleasure to meet him, which he appreciates.
"Is your husband..." Tai asks, because it is very important that he not be trapped in conversation with Jacques Schnee, in general but also especially right now.
"Dead."
"Oh." Tai swallows. "I'm sorry."
"He helped them. The ones who—attacked the kingdom. I should be glad he's gone."
"Should."
She takes a drink. "It's pathetic to miss him, but here we are."
Tai thinks of Raven. Of how he'll probably never know if she couldn't save Yang, or if she just... didn't. She'd already used her one save, after all. "Yeah," he says. "Here we are."
"You still don't have to be sorry. The person I miss died a long time ago. He probably wasn't real in the first place."
"Mine was, I think. I wish I knew where she went."
She raises the bottle, as if in a toast. "To the ones we shouldn't miss."
Tai shakes his head helplessly. "It wasn't... I don't regret it. Meeting her was worth losing her." The fire blurs. He loses track of who he's talking about—Raven or Summer or his brave, brilliant daughters. All he can think is how badly he wishes they could have been together, all of them, for just one day. One day when he could have held a baby Ruby and watched Yang wrestling with Qrow, untainted by their mothers' absences.
How had he failed to savor those days, when Raven was gone but Summer was still right there in his arms? How much did he miss in the grey fog that came after she disappeared? How many times could he have hefted Yang up onto his shoulders? Ruffled Ruby's hair? Is it selfish to wish it could have come apart all at once, and left a clean cut between the part of his life that was worth living and the part that isn't?
They were so strong, his girls. They could have gotten each other through it. It's so fucking barbaric, that they won't be here to hurt and grieve and move on into a future bright enough to make the wreck of team STRQ worth the pain. That instead all that's left is him and Qrow. The dregs of despair. Nothing will grow from here.
"It should have been me," he mutters.
Weiss' mother toasts that, too.