#[when the beowolf howls: midnight] | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

kaen-ace-of-diamonds · 4 years ago

Text

Homecoming

Word Count: 6,800+ (chapter 6) [AO3]

(chapter 5) (chapter 4) (chapter 3) (chapter 2) (chapter 1)

Genre: Angst/Hurt/Comfort

Pairing: one-sided Emerald/Cinder

Characters: Cinder Fall, Salem, Tyrian Callows, Emerald Sustrai, Mercury Black

Summary: Making it out of Beacon alive turned out to be the easy part of the whole disaster.Returning home in agony and shame, learning how to take the first steps forward into living in this newly broken state...that, Cinder has decided, is definitely going to be the hard part.

Warnings for implications of abuse and graphic descriptions of injury.

~0~

“Does it get your blood boiling, does it make you see red?

Do you wanna destroy it, does it get in your head?

'Cause it gets my blood boiling and I'm coming unglued

It would hit you like poison if you knew what I knew.”

- Angry Too, Lola Blanc

~0~

After so many months, Cinder was beginning to feel a nervous shake in her stomach every time she turned the corner and saw the door to this training chamber.

Ridiculous, really, she chided herself. It wasn’t even as if it were an intelligent human opponent she was facing, just a pack of the same Grimm she’d been exterminating ever since she was old enough to hold a blade. It didn’t matter how many there were. Power would always triumph over everything else, up to and including a beast’s instincts.

But then again, there were far more frightening things in this world than the Grimm.

Salem had nothing to say to her as she opened the door and stepped inside. What had at the start of this new wave of training been reassuring smiles and instructions, had now faded into a cold glare. A warning to prove herself for another day.

Her beloved bow and arrows still wouldn’t come to her, which twisted her heart every time she tried and failed to get them back. And even if she did, it would be another trial entirely to relearn how to use it sans binocular vision. A small, bitter voice at the back of her mind told her it wasn’t even worth it to try.

However, a single sword was getting easier to form with every attempt, and the one that molded itself into her hand now was like a slab of molten rock. It didn’t feel the same as Midnight, which she had been unshakably confident would never break. This one felt somehow incomplete. It was narrower than before, with far more visible imperfections and cracks running through the surface. And if one perfect sword was unachievable, then two was entirely out of the question.

Cinder did not like to have Emerald’s voice running through her head as well as talking her intact ear off, but she could still hear her infuriatingly gentle reminder, One step at a time.

So she would make this do for now. She had no choice.

She brandished the sword before her, and braced herself. Mere moments later, the shadows began to move.

The clicking of claws and gnashing of teeth followed soon after. A small pack of Beowolves stalked towards her in a semicircle, surrounding her. She hadn’t had to fight down her fear of death like this since she was a child...

(“Feel nothing,” rumbling in her ears as the hilt of the knife slips around in her small, sweating hand, shaking more than ever. She tells herself it’s from exhaustion, but the eyes boring into her always know better. “Fear nothing. You’re still too weak to matter.”)

She grit her teeth, burningly aware of the scar on her face. It had taken years for her to understand. But he was wrong. She did not fear. She was not small. And she was not weak!

Heedless of danger — for nothing could be more dangerous than the eyes boring into her back — Cinder threw herself into the fray with a vicious slash of her blade. The Beowolves howled with hunger and fell upon her, all six of them. She couldn’t take her eyes off their claws, long as her arrows. A chill settled in her gut that hadn’t in years: the one that chased away all thoughts of battle and replaced them with those claws curving underneath her remaining eyeball to tear it out and blind her completely.

(“ — no point in keeping broken tools. If you’re no longer useful, you’ll be thrown away.”

“Like they threw you away?”

Her heart leaps into her throat, afraid that she’d blurted out too much. But the mouth twists further, into a sickly smile.

“Exactly.”)

She was no longer the refuse of Mistral’s underbelly. She was more than him, more than all of them, like he’d wanted but never believed.

Just a few months ago her flames had been second nature to her. Now, to swing her arm and bring a swath of fire with it was like pulling teeth. Well...her arm worked just fine, more or less. It was this thing stuck to her that was holding her back. She swung and clawed back, as she weaved her way around the thrashing limbs and snapping jaws. Her heart pounded, to flood her veins so strongly with adrenaline that she barely felt it when they tore her dress and grazed her skin.

She felt nothing. She feared nothing. Her determination to kill, the wrath that spurred her forward, were all that mattered.

It was as natural to her as breathing, why were only these pathetic spurts of flame coming out now, after everything she’d done?!

Even now her attacks still hit more often than not; she wasn’t entirely broken. But still it took her what felt like an eternity to do what once took only minutes. She stood like a cornered animal at the side of the room, as the final Beowolf advanced on her, growling and slavering. It wasn’t like the Wyvern, or any other Grimm. It did not see her as a hand of its master, or as one of its own. Only as prey. A worthless little thing to be slaughtered and tossed—

(“Alone now, girl?”)

The beast surged towards her, towering over her, gold shining from its faceless head as the giant hand reached for her — no —

Hands —

Blade —

Claws —

Her blood hasn’t spilled yet but gods, she can smell his, sour and heavy, filling her nose and polluting the fresh air, and that’s what she’ll look like, they’ll rot together, if she doesn’t do something right now!

A sharp white point starts to dig under her skin, snapping her back into the present with a gasp. Why had she been reaching for Scorching Caress when the blade was in her hand? This wasn’t — she wasn’t the one who —

Sunlight and wind were worlds away. Everything now was darkness and smoke and how long had she been frozen, her shoulder swelling and burning? She didn’t have time to consider it. Before she knew it, fire was flaring from what felt like every pore in her body, beyond any semblance of her control despite the arm she had thrown out in front of her much too late.

The Beowolf didn’t have time to howl as it burned away, scraps of filmy black floating into the air before disintegrating. Cinder heard it anyway, in the ringing of her ears in the newly silent room.

As she crouched there — like a cowed animal, the small rational part of her sneered — she realized several things in rapid succession. She realized that she was frozen, unable even to tremble. She realized that a thick, warm drop of blood was trickling down her good cheek, her depleted Aura delaying in patching up the claw graze beneath her eyelid. And she realized that the narrow place around her left shoulder, where flesh met Grimm, was a ring of searing pain. The only reason the arm hadn’t dropped limply to her side like the rest of her was —

Her gasp of horror came out sounding more like a cough, but it seemed to burn her throat all the same. The arm was rippling, stretching, elongating and springing off like the branches and twigs of a dead tree. Every muscle in her upper arm felt ablaze, and her mind raced trying to remember her lessons, what to do to make the Grimm inside her bend to her will instead of letting it run free and wild on its own.

But she couldn’t, her head was too full of glittering gold and burning, burning silver to fit a single other coherent thought in.

And then there came a different kind of burning, a cold and ice-white burn, and all of a sudden she felt as if her entire limb was shriveling, sucking itself inward. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but the pressure and the wrongness of the sensation took Cinder’s breath away and nearly doubled her over. A soft, disappointed sigh came from just above her shoulder, and without thinking about it she went utterly still.

“Cinder. Did you listen when I taught you how to control your gift?”

Her instinct, shamefully, was to cringe. But she fought it — her master was not the sort to be sated by groveling — and turned to look her in the eyes as she nodded.

Salem fixed her with a glare that would shrivel lesser humans like weeds in frost. “Then why do you continue to let it control you?”

Cinder did not whimper as her master’s claws retracted from her skin, their tips thinly lined with blood; after all her treatment sessions, she was used to it by now. The Grimm in her was cowed back to its proper shape and size, but she could feel its roots buried deep in her muscles and nerves. It was a part of her now, it would obey her like any other part. It should obey her...

“You already know, don’t you? You still dread it.”

She swallowed hard, uncaring of the twinge of pain it still caused her throat. Sometimes she truly hated it when her master was right.

“In the spawning pool, while it was bonding with you, it communicated with you, didn’t it?”

Cinder startled badly. It was only a vague memory now, like a childhood nightmare. But still, it had happened, and she was glad for the concrete confirmation. She nodded.

“I told you before I put you under what was in there: everything a Grimm is. Hunger, desperation, fear...the things that were buried deep inside you and that now have been brought to the surface.”

Cinder had to try very hard not to stare. So that was why...

“You must be better than that part of yourself. If you’re not, after all the time and effort that’s been put into you, then at best you’ll never unlock the Maiden’s true power again. At worst, the Grimm will realize it’s the dominant presence in your body, and consume you from the inside out.”

There was a stirring from deep in her muscles, right around her shoulder bones, that felt almost spiteful. As if it were agreeing. She remembered when just the thought of rage and vengeance would bring tongues of leaping flames to her fingertips, warm her like boiling water from the inside out, the Maiden’s power surging up at her command. Now, she could practically feel it being quenched the instant she tried to let it loose. It was the closest she had come in seven years to feeling helpless again...

Without Emerald there to translate for her, it took a painfully long few seconds to choke out, “I...will...m-ma’am.”

She could have sworn she saw a smile ghost across Salem’s face. “One more question, Cinder. Do you think you’ve earned your voice back?”

Cinder didn’t enjoy feeling as if she was now the one having a carrot dangled from a string in front of her face. And she especially disliked that she didn’t have to think about the answer: not what she thought her master wanted to hear, but simply what was.

“...No.”

“Very well, then. You are dismissed.”

With a bow, Cinder made her exit. Now that she could walk unassisted again, she appreciated the long and thankfully lonely walks around the castle. She thought she had learned as a child never to take a single thing she had for granted, but after this, the lesson was burned into her like any one of these scars.

Now the immediate question was: where was she going?

Before heading to her training session, she had instructed Emerald and Mercury to go to the castle library and get some research done for her, but she was hesitant to go join them just yet. The weight room appealed: her muscles still weren’t in one hundred percent fighting form, and a few runs through the basics she’d perfected years ago, and had no chance of screwing up, might make her feel better. Exhaustion was no excuse to avoid training...but it wasn’t exhaustion that made her decide against it. It simply didn’t feel like enough.

Going back to her room to rest wasn’t an option, either. Sleep had never been much of a respite for her, but she hadn’t had such constant nightmares since...well. And this time they came twofold. Gold and silver, gold and silver...

Both her fists clenched tightly; it appeared she and the Grimm were of one mind about one thing only, and that was the thirst to kill. She envisioned sinking her claws into Ruby’s flesh, the optic nerve tearing free, soft tissue shredded with a swipe of her fingers. Like the gold before it, the silver would be drowned in blood, and the girl’s scarless body ruined until even her sister couldn’t recognize her. Justice for her own body at last; she would never trust anybody who said that justice and vengeance weren’t exactly the same thing. All that was left was how to achieve it...and for that, she could not be caught off guard again.

Fortunately, she already had the spark of an idea. She just needed information, more relevant than what she had gathered from her spying at Beacon.

And unfortunately, there was only one person she could go to about that.

Cinder bit back a frustrated growl and made a sharp turn, towards the other side of the castle.

~0~

Tyrian didn't think he was ever going to get used to this.

It certainly wasn’t the worst part of the whole disaster, but the nagging feeling of being off-balance just wouldn't go away. Perched on a wide spike jutting out from the castle’s surface, he could feel how his whole center of gravity had shifted just from losing part of his tail. He had never used to wobble up here, never feared that he would fall.

Now, though...

Carefully, so as not to lose his balance, he brought what remained of his tail out in front of him, grimacing at the leaking blood and venom that still stained the thick bandages on the stump. He knew that the others wouldn’t notice or care, but whenever he moved, he felt as ugly and ungainly as a one-winged bird, flying helplessly in circles.

It hadn’t had to come to this, had it? What more could he have done, what must he remember so that he would never again fail his queen so shamefully? Would he have to change his fighting style to compensate for the loss of a stinger? What was —

All right, what the hell was that incessant thumping noise behind him?

He turned and looked below him to see Cinder standing by the large window he’d climbed out from, glaring up at him and banging impatiently on the outer wall with her gloved hand.

Tyrian’s face broke into a grin. “Why, Cinder, how long have you been there?” he called down. “If you wanted to get my attention, you should have said something!”

He didn’t understand why the girl made such a fuss about being rendered essentially mute. As she demonstrated now, she could still perfectly communicate ‘I’ll kill you’ with only her remaining eye, and really, wasn’t that all anyone could ever need?

Despite her clear irritation, she was now gesturing insistently for him to come down to her level. Well, considering how, whether she’d wanted to or not, she had watched as he was humiliated before their queen, Cinder was perhaps the last person he wanted to interact with at the moment. But, on the other hand, the sooner he gave her whatever she had come for, the sooner she would go away and leave him alone.

So, he stood up, darted forward, and leaped from the spike, front-flipping twice in mid-air before landing hard in front of Cinder. (He managed to land on his feet well enough, but hoped that the way his legs quivered wasn't noticeable.) Before, this would be the part where Cinder would roll her eyes and call him a show-off. Now, she just gave him an unimpressed look.

“Well, then, what is it you want?” He glanced around the hall, and realized that the little green-haired girl was nowhere to be seen. “And where's your pet rat?”

Cinder made an indignant noise and pulled out a small notepad, with a pen stuck in the spiral binding. With some difficulty, she balanced it on her new left hand, which Tyrian couldn't see underneath that huge sleeve, but which seemed to be remaining stubbornly stiff. And with her decidedly smoother functioning right, she started to shakily write something out.

Tyrian snickered. “Look at you, you’ve managed to get some of those fingers working! What an amazing accomplishment!”

She ignored him. After a moment, she held out the notepad for him to read: Tell me about your fight with Ruby Rose.

Any happiness Tyrian had gleaned from mocking her dissipated. “You get right to the point, don't you?” he drawled, narrowing his eyes. “Have you come all this way to gloat?”

No, for once I’m taking the high road. Cinder paused, then wrote some more. You weren't really doing it for my sake, but I appreciate your ‘eye for an eye’ offer. But you understand how I can’t exactly go out and take a tail for you. For a number of reasons.

“Yes, that is rather unfortunate. It would have been an interesting little experiment had I succeeded, though, wouldn’t it? What would happen to you, I wonder, if we stuck one of those precious silver eyes in your empty socket? I ought to bring it up to our dear doctor, don't you think?”

Cinder grumbled unintelligibly: clearly, the idea of such a replacement didn't appeal to her. She has to have changed since the fall of Beacon. Tell me what she looks like now.

“Why do you need to know that? You think she’s undergone as drastic a transformation as you have?”

It’s part of my training. I won’t hold back when I’m killing her. That should be enough for you.

“Hmph. You’re not exactly in a position to be making demands of your superiors, you know,” Tyrian reminded her, crossing his arms and pointedly looking away.

He didn’t know how Cinder managed to make a cough sound so annoyingly high and mighty, but she did. The trademark smirk didn’t help either, as she gestured with the notepad at his poor bandaged tail: Superior? You?

“That’s right. My failure, though tragic, has left my body largely in one piece.” His goddess’ displeasure had cut far sharper than the little rose’s scythe, but Cinder’s loyalty did not quite go that far. “And my priority above all is making up for it. Where do your priorities lie, dear sister? Do you wish to further our cause, or only yourself?”

Cinder grit her teeth. Good luck, then. But that has nothing to do with this.

“And why should I help you with anything? Consider yourself lucky that I’m taking time out of my busy day to speak with you at all.”

With a disgusted noise and a roll of her eye, Cinder wrote for a very long couple minutes, while Tyrian waited. Technically, he didn’t feel the need to tap his foot impatiently, but oh, how he did love that growl of irritation the action elicited from the back of Cinder’s throat.

You can’t tell me you don’t want to see that girl beaten and bloody. Broken beyond repair, while we recover. Move on with our lives, while hers ends here. You know more about what that might entail than I do, don’t you?

“Oh? Don’t tell me you intend to go against our lady’s wishes by actually killing the little flower?”

Aggressive scratching of the pen. You can end someone’s life without killing them. Trust me.

“And you’re satisfied with that.”

Being captive here would be a fate worse than death.

“You really think so?” he prodded further, fighting valiantly to repress his grin.

Whatever Salem wants her alive for—

Oh, he couldn’t help it any longer, he burst into a fit of giggles. “How did you manage to infiltrate the academies with such terrible acting, little stepsister?”

Cinder nearly cracked the pen in half. She bared her teeth, hissing through them, and took a threatening step forward. Tyrian’s eyes were drawn to her fingers and the way they twitched, straining for fire and barely achieving sparks. What a far cry it was from when she had first won the Maiden powers, raising and commanding powerful flames as if she’d been born doing it. How awfully sad. How funny.

“I would love to help you, Cinder, you know that. But in order for me to do that, you’re going to have to be a little more honest with me. Why do you actually want my help? What’s so important about hearing this, of all things?”

Why do you care? Cinder wrote, pen tip threatening to pierce the pad. The details don’t matter so long as we get what we want.

“Oh, there’s no fooling me, dear sister. You have something in mind, and I think you ought to share it with me if you want to get anything out of this conversation. If not...” He gave her a dramatic shrug. “Well, then I suppose you’ll just have to get used to being left in the dust by the privileged few, after all.”

Before she could do anything but look outraged, he spun on his heel and started away, idly waving his tail as he went. Most people, he assumed, would have left it at that, deciding that they’d thrown enough fuel on this fire for now. Tyrian was not most people.

“My, what would your father say?”

The reaction was as immediately explosive as raw Dust. Tyrian felt the heat washing over his back even before he saw the fire.

He whipped around to see Cinder much closer than she had been a second ago, having clearly just caught herself while lunging for his throat. Flames flared from her eye, poured from her hand, and spun in a furious wheel around her feet. He could feel the sparks flying off of it, catching him in the neck and chest, and grinned.

“Oh, what’s the matter? Daddy still a sore subject?”

Cinder glared absolute murder at him, and a series of awful hissing and rattling noises came up from her throat, like a snake about to strike. Even without speech, the message was crystal clear: Not my father. Not from you.

Perfect.

“I have to say, it’s been a long time since you wore your heart on your sleeve like this, sister. I’d say...what, seven years?”

She ground her teeth harder, plainly regretting being fifteen and far easier to trick into letting slip her deeper vulnerabilities.

“You surprise me. If I had brought up your little family just a few months ago, you wouldn’t have batted an eye. But now...what’s made you so sensitive? Something remind you of him?”

Cinder looked at him suspiciously, sensing that he already knew. Very astute of her; he would never taunt somebody with a question he was not certain of the answer to.

“When you can, you really need to tell me exactly what it’s like down there in the depths of the spawning pool. I hear it has such sights to show you. All the things you like to think you’ve already overcome and put behind you.”

Her lips pulled into a stiff, crooked smirk as she picked the singed notepad up off the floor and scrawled, ink bleeding through the paper, I bet you’d love to relive how you got those scars on your chest, wouldn’t you?

Tyrian’s tail stump twitched, and his eyes narrowed. She clearly thought that two could play at this game. Well, she was sorely mistaken.

“I’m not ashamed of any of my scars, Cinder. Can you say the same?”

Her smirk broadened, but she was...shaking her head? The much-abused notepad burst into a high flame in her hand, and it stayed burning that way even after the paper was ashes on her glove.

What a confusing girl. No matter, his guesses were usually good.

“You will one day? How optimistic. Tell me, when?”

If she tapped at that glass mask just a little more aggressively, it would probably shatter. Not that it could do much more damage to that half of her face, but still. The fire in her fist burned even brighter.

“When you get your precious revenge? How lovely. I’ll be waiting with bated breath for your next riveting performance. And I suppose I can give you the little leg up you need from me. If you fall again, it won’t be my fault, after all.”

Cinder continued to glare, and he could picture her new claws flexing hungrily inside her billowing sleeve. But that was all: with a sharp nod, she turned and started away, considering their business here finished. Tyrian wasn’t quite satisfied yet.

“Let’s just hope that when you finally face your little Huntress in battle, you’ll have more luck than Daddy did with his Huntsman.”

Cinder whirled back around blurringly fast. A truly feral growl ripped its way from her throat, and though she was visibly fighting to keep from flying at him again, her eyes burned murderously. She could only make a harsher rattling sound instead of words, but in their place, fire poured from her mouth, gleaming off her bared teeth.

Tyrian quirked an eyebrow, still snickering. He wondered if that was the look she had worn as a child, hands about to be filthy with blood.

This was certainly more like the Cinder he had known for so long, the one who had swapped barbs with him and shown off her new powers the same way she had the day before she left on her long mission. And yet, even with all that fuel, she still couldn’t quite bring her fire back the way she used to. It was almost a shame.

“What’s the matter, little stepsister?” He leaned forward, tail reflexively curling upward. True, it was no longer intimidating with its end blunt and bandaged, but it was just second nature. And they both knew it was far from his only strength. “Itching for a real fight? I have to say, I don’t know how well that will turn out for you. As we both have wound up with handicaps, I see no need to go easy on you.”

Cinder kept up the growling for a few seconds more, then broke off into a frustrated huff, her shoulders sagging as the flames went out. It looked like it was physically painful for her —and, Tyrian realized, it probably was — but she surrendered the bout to him and wrenched her body around, stomping back off down the hall. Rage still radiated from every inch of her, from her frizzing hair to the downright aggressive clack of her heels.

When she was raw and irritated like this, it was so easy to poke her into an entertaining rage, and he hadn’t seen her in such a fun mood since she was a teenager. Whatever she wanted with the information he had to give, only time would tell if her plan would work.

It was no real concern of his, anyway. Perhaps if the troublesome girl still failed to live up to Her Grace’s expectations, it would start to redeem him somewhat in her eyes.

Giggling to himself, Tyrian spun on his heel and bounced cheerfully back out the window, swishing his tail in a far more jovial manner. It was like when Her Grace sent him out as her liaison with the sects of Grimm worshippers, scattered out there in the shadows of Remnant: conversing with the less fortunate never failed to make him feel better about himself.

Back and forth his tail swung, slower and more purposefully this time, and he made his way to the edge of the crystal spire with far better balance than before. He supposed that only time would tell whether Cinder’s stability would improve as well.

For now, he decided, it would be home life as usual: skulking in the shadows and waiting for the next bit of fun to arrive, before he had to leave again on his endless duty.

~0~

In hindsight, Cinder thought, she should have expected to walk away from this conversation seething, no matter how calmly she had entered it. Tyrian could be perfectly tolerable when he felt like it, but in the past few months he had made himself just as unbearable as Watts. She had hoped that being beaten and mutilated just as she had would humble him somewhat, but apparently no such luck. Perhaps it was the ability to speak that made all the difference.

Well, no matter. She would get what she wanted out of him, and that was what counted, she had to remember. She could not be mired in her own self-pity any longer: she was one step closer to grabbing a rope that would pull her out of it, that she would climb back where she belonged with. Now she could, for a while, put her teammates out of her mind.

It was a ten-minute walk from Tyrian’s chosen brooding spot to the fortress’ library. When she pushed open the heavy door, she had barely taken a step into the cavernous room before Emerald’s head popped up from behind the huge book she was perusing at a nearby table.

“Cinder!” she said brightly, sitting bolt upright.

She flipped over the book and left it on the table, heedless of what it might do to the spine, and darted out of her seat and over to her leader. Cinder’s leg had healed and she hadn't needed help to walk in weeks, but Emerald still felt the need to hover over her anyway, just in case of a relapse.

(Of course Emerald would never say it out loud, but Cinder could tell: Salem’s method of healing was not one she trusted at all.)

Cinder had been doing her best not to mind, which she had to admit had gotten much easier as she gained more and more of her autonomy back. But still, she was glad that Emerald didn't try to touch her as she walked her to the table. She didn’t think that she quite needed to have her chair pulled out for her when she got there, but she wasn’t going to complain.

Emerald did seem to be put in better spirits by Cinder’s presence, but she still let out a huff as she sat back down in the wooden chair.

“This whole library,” she groused, “this whole gigantic library, and only four books on sign language!”

“Well, actually...”

The two of them looked up (and up) at the towering bookshelves next to the table. Against one of them was laid a long wheeled ladder, and twenty feet high on that ladder was Mercury, pausing from pawing through the books to smirk down at them.

“We've only looked through half a row of these.” He waved his arm around at the dozens upon dozens of rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves, and his voice echoed in the cavernous room. “We still have the rest of this freaking place to hunt through!”

Cinder rolled her eye. Maybe the library could do with some reorganization, yes. But if a little bit of frustrated searching was the price to pay for unrestricted access to the collection her master had been patiently putting together for millennia now, then she didn't think it was anything to complain about. She caught Mercury’s eye and pointed emphatically to the chair next to Emerald.

“Fine, fine...”

Mercury gave himself a strong push on the ladder, zooming on squeaky wheels down to the end of the row and leaping off the top. Rather unnecessary, Cinder thought, giving him a supremely unimpressed look as he made his way over to them.

“So,” he said, flopping down in the chair and immediately leaning it back onto two legs, arms behind his head. “This is going to be a fun time. Does anyone remember any of the stuff Neo used to do?”

He glanced at Cinder, who shrugged. She’d reasoned back in Vale that she wouldn’t be working with Neo long enough to justify the effort of learning to understand her completely, so she hadn’t bothered to pay too much attention to the sign language that the girl had been trying to teach them. Oh, well. It wasn’t as if she’d ever see her again for any further conversation. She suspected that the Fall of Beacon had gone even worse for Roman and Neo than it had for her.

From the blank looks Emerald and Mercury gave each other, it appeared that they hadn’t been paying enough attention either.

“Okay. So we know nothing. Great start,” Mercury said flatly.

“That’s not true! Remember, she did that spelling thing with her fingers? We can start with that, can’t we?”

Cinder tried to answer properly anyway, lifting her hand and twisting her fingers into what she recalled of the fingerspelling alphabet. It was about the only part of the language she did remember, and only because an increasingly exasperated Neo had resorted to spelling things out when her temporary teammates couldn’t understand her words. Closed fist with the thumb outside, A. Flat hand, thumb inside, B. Curved hand, C. D...

She narrowed her eyes at her hand, as if it were to blame for her lapse in memory and would reveal its secrets if she just glared it down.

“The D, it’s like this, right?” Mercury put his pointer finger and thumb together, holding it out to her sideways.

“No, no, like this,” Emerald said, putting her middle finger and thumb together with the pointer sticking out. “That’s D.”

“What? No, it’s not!”

“Yes, it is!”

One hiss from Cinder nipped their argument in the bud. With her good hand — it was still hard to think of it as her human hand — she flipped back several pages in Emerald’s textbook and pointed.

“Oh.” Mercury blinked. “Point for Emerald, then. It’s kind of cheating to look at the answers, though.”

“It’s not a test. We are all just learning this language together. Wasn’t it you who said learning was fun?”

“When do we learn the swears? Neo taught me the swears but I forgot.”

“That’s not in the book, Merc!”

Cinder tapped the thick pages with her knuckles, pointedly glaring and making the next letter sign with perhaps more aggression than was called for.

“Okay, finish the rest, we got it...”

The rest of the section went by with few hitches. Cinder found it much more palatable to remember that it was just learning a new language, instead of relearning how to talk, of all damned things. It was...surprisingly calming, as well as interesting. This, however, only lasted until they moved on to the Basic Words and Phrases section.

Mercury thumped his chest with a flat palm and tapped both his middle and pointer fingers together — My name is... — and then looked over to Cinder and tilted his head in concern. “Uh...you think you’re gonna be able to do the rest of this okay with, um, your little buddy there?”

Both of them went tense in their chairs, as if trying not to flinch away, when Cinder shrugged her sleeve back and lifted the Grimm arm. She experimentally flexed the long-clawed fingers. They were stiffer than she would like, and still felt like whatever was inside the limb was actively fighting her when she tried to move it. It would be difficult to bend them to her will...but not impossible, she decided. Fine motor control practice, and all that.

It took her several moments longer to do it than it did Emerald or Mercury, but she managed to perform the signs properly with both hands: My name is Cinder. She peered over at the book —Emerald helpfully turned it around so she could see more clearly — and added a slower, careful I learn MSL with both her arms.

Emerald watched, copied her movements. “It took some digging, but we found an Upper Mistrali dialect book and a Lower Mistrali one, a Valerian one, and one with lots of dialects from all over. I wanted to focus on Mistral, but maybe the variety will help?”

Cinder nodded. Even after getting her voice back, it could come in handy to be able to communicate nonverbally when necessary...when they were back out in the field together.

Emerald and Mercury weren’t specifically trained for stealth missions like she was, but they could learn. Though the element of surprise regarding their Semblance and prosthetic weapons, respectively, had been spent, they could still be plenty useful. She could keep them by her side until the day they eventually exhausted their usefulness, however far in the future that ended up happening.

It might even never happen at all, it occurred to her, and the thought brought a small smile to her face. Perhaps they would stay following at her heels for the rest of their natural lives, existing only for her use.

Emerald blinked, hands pausing mid-sign. “Cinder? What is it?”

Cinder glanced at the book once more — yes, she was reading it right — and her smile broadened. She rested her head in the Grimm hand, and she pressed the fingers of her human hand to her lips and then extended them towards Emerald, locking eyes with the girl as she did.

As expected, Emerald startled and went wide-eyed, and Cinder could almost imagine a blush on her cheeks. “Uh...”

Mercury looked puzzled for a moment, then squinted at the book and sighed. “She’s not blowing you a kiss, Emmy. She’s saying ‘thank you.’”

“Oh! Thanks for...helping you? With this?” Cinder tapped the book and nodded, and wanted so very badly to laugh at the way Emerald’s face lit up. “Don’t worry about that, I’m happy that I can do this for you!”

Emerald subtly bit her lip to keep herself from rambling on further, as she used to do very early on, but Cinder still knew her well enough to hear the unspoken I would do anything for you. Now that she had her attention, Cinder checked the book again, looking to see how to construct the sentence she wanted.

Before she found her answer, her eye landed on another diagram, and stuck there for a moment. Without thinking about it, her hand rose to copy it...but stopped as her fingers brushed up against her throat, before it could say father.

They faltered there for just a second, and she swallowed against them, remembering another pair of hands around her neck: warm and rough, fingers interlocking, so much stronger than her...

No. This was her hand, his no longer mattered. She gave herself an imperceptible shake, and focused her attention back where it needed to be. The first word, naturally, was easy enough.

I...

Cinder pointed to herself with the Grimm hand while rifling through for the rest with her human one, so as not to shred the pages in her claws. This chapter didn’t seem to tell her any way to say she had something, so she ground her teeth in annoyance and went ahead even faster to the nouns section. And...there, that would work. She laid a flat palm on her chest, then pressed the tip of her pinkie finger to her forehead and pulled it back out into the air again.

My idea.

“Your...I know it was your idea, but —”

Ugh. Cinder cut her off with a frustrated shake of the head. “N...n-new.”

“Hey, I thought this was a no-talking game,” Mercury said with a smirk. Cinder didn’t think that hissing and slashing a clawed finger across her throat was an official MSL gesture, but it got the message across perfectly clearly anyway.

“You have...another idea?” Emerald guessed. “Do you want us to put the books away, then?”

Cinder groaned again. This was going much less smoothly in real life than it had in her head. She searched through the book again: this was going to take so many words to explain...

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