i am not your enemy. - qrow & raven
She wants to admit he’s right. She wants to say she knows he isn’t. She wants to throw herself into his embrace once more and hide the smile she gets when his stubble scratches at her cheek. She wants to continue on as if nothing has changed. But everything has changed – including him. Or maybe he’s the same, and she’s changed because there is no way she could remain unmoved and indifferent to all she’s learned. So then how can he?
Despite all she’s seen, those definitions and dualities are as crystal clear as ever. They’re maybe the only things she still sees clearly. Friend/enemy. The bandits/the huntsmen. Family/outsiders. The tribe/the academy. Brother/…stranger. There’s no doubt in her mind as to what he’s become. And she curses him; she curses Ozpin; she curses herself. The injustice of it all makes her hand curl tighter around the hilt of her sword, knuckles going white. So much was thrust upon her, upon the four of them, and they had to grow up too fast in a war that should never have been theirs to begin with. And after everything they thought they knew had been turned on its head (with no apology from the one who chose them, who thought children would be an appropriate first line of defence), after the waters had become so muddied…she wishes, she prays that those meanings and clear divides could have become unclear as well, even just a little. Because then she might have been able to tell herself that she is wrong, that she can’t say for certain if she’s doing the right thing, that she can stay with him for as long as it takes to sort this mess out. But she knows better. For that, she hates Becaon’s headmaster most. As well as herself.
We have no one else, a voice in her mind tells her; the lingering traces of a memory, a lesson from their father. Outside of this tribe, we’re on our own. We might not all be blood, but we’re all family. But the bond between the two of you runs deeper than that. And when you’re out there, you must honour that. You must protect each other. And you must each make sure the other does not forget that.
But he hasn’t forgotten, father. He still remembers. Yet he’s chosen this other path. What am I to do then? You never told me. You and I never thought this could happen. Tell me what to do. Or tell me I still tried my best to keep him with us. That it’s not my fault. She might have pleaded that of him if he were still alive, or to herself if she were still that wide-eyed little girl trekking through forests. But she’s grown a toughness that’s so much more than survival skills honed and sharpened to the most lethal point. And it’s only grown over the years, to where nothing can move her (or so she thinks. so she likes to think. so she tells herself during the waking hours of the night, when she cannot stand to lie by Tai’s side or watch the small, sleeping form of her daughter from the doorway). But nothing will move him, either. And so there is only one course left for her to take.
“For now,” she finally says to him, her voice soft yet cutting through the perfect still silence of the night. “I hope that’s still true if we meet again. But he is. And if you’re still going to side with him, even after everything he’s done to us…” She sighs. “There is no hope.” No hope for you, no hope for me, no hope that either of us will change. No hope for humanity’s surviving the growing threat that foolish old man things can be held at bay by those pure, innocent souls he decides to corrupt and ruin on a whim.
She dons her mask, slices her sword through the air, and stands in the blood-coloured glow of the forming portal. But before she steps through it, a thought crosses her mind; and it sickens her, how true it is, that if it had been she who’d tried to stop her now, there would have been no hesitation in her remaining. And I’m not even going to say goodbye to her. I wasn’t going to say it to him, the stubborn drunk, if I’d just been quieter –
But maybe she owes at least that to them. To all of them. Except she knows it would break her to face them and say it. Well, he can pass on the message. “Goodbye, brother. Tell Summer –” Her throat closes, her self-disgust grows. Not ‘tell Taiyang’, not ‘tell Yang’, not ‘tell my family something that will somehow justify this to them’, not ‘tell yourself this last piece of wisdom I will impart when you doubt if I still love you’. All I want is to tell the dying rose I wish she’d bloom forever.
“I’m sure you know,” she mutters.
And with that, she steps through, and exits.