#being singled out and treated as either token 'eye candy' or just being treated in a really sexist manner

[enci-rebloggies]

This.

https://twitter.com/delaneykingrox/status/1090402436995473408

[kaen-ace-of-diamonds]

i’m going to talk about some of my Emerald headcanons for a little bit because i can’t shut up about my faves for a single second

and because come on, being homeless, alone, and starving for most of her life absolutely 100% left her with physical and psychological scars that may or may not ever be brought up in canon

- Like her teammates, she doesn’t have a good relationship with either of her parents.

Her father, also a skilled thief, left the family when she was five years old, and she has no idea where he is, what he’s doing, or why he’s gone, only that if she ever sees him again, she’s going to make him pay dearly for abandoning her. 

(He actually left to try and make a fortune to support his girls, but refuses to return or contact them until then, out of pride. He doesn’t think things through very well: he ends up becoming the successful leader of a gang of forty thieves, but returns home to find his family gone without a trace, years after his wife died and just a few days after Emerald left their home city with Cinder. He has no idea where to go from there.)

Her mother was a drug dealer, which wasn’t a very profitable profession seeing as dealers of illicit products are a dime a dozen in Mistral, and compared to the rest, she didn’t have much to bring to the table. Life in abject poverty with a bitter, stressed, temperamental mom was difficult enough, but then Emerald unlocked her Semblance and somehow shit got even worse.

Her mother freaked the fuck out at the idea of her kid being able to mess with her head, and threw Emerald out of the house, calling her a freak and telling her to never come near her again. Emerald was eight. About five years later, she came across her mother in the street, dead of a gunshot wound, and was disgusted with herself for still getting upset at the sight.

Cinder is the only one who has ever told her that her Semblance wasn’t bad or wrong, that it made her wonderful and special and was something to be proud of. It was the first time in Emerald’s life that she felt like she was worth something.

- Her immune system is total shit. She used to get bad cases of flu and chest infections every winter, and even had pneumonia once, which would have killed her if she hadn’t managed to steal some antibiotics. Even now that she’s able to take better care of herself (despite mammothrider’s claims to the contrary, Cinder doesn’t exactly have a healthcare plan for her minions, but she can pay for medicine, vitamin supplements, etc., when needed), she’s still pretty vulnerable in bad conditions, and absolutely detests the winter. 

- She’s touch-starved as all hell, and would love to be held and cuddled, even if she doesn’t yet realize that fully. Cinder, however, gets exactly what’s going on when Emerald reacts more strongly than is typical to things like quick hugs and little hair strokes, and immediately files it away as another tool of emotional manipulation.

All I’m saying is, back in “Best Day Ever,” Emerald probably wouldn’t have tried to go in for a hug if she didn’t think there was a chance she’d get one

- She’s an avid reader when she can get her hands on books (a habit she unknowingly shares with her father), and primarily enjoys mysteries and suspense. Adventures are okay, too, so long as the protagonists aren’t annoyingly happy and pure of heart and all that. Antiheroes are her favorites.

- She sleeps curled up tight in the fetal position, either hugging herself or hugging a pillow, under as many blankets as possible; the warmth and pressure make her feel safe. She's also a very light sleeper; any touch or noise near her will wake her up and for a second, she’ll be terrified and think someone is attacking her, until she remembers that she’s not alone on the streets anymore and calms down. 

- She based her current outfit partially on the one Cinder used to wear. Look me in the eyes and try to tell me that this didn’t look at this and become this. 

- She and Mercury got along surprisingly well with Neo when she was brought onto the team to go to Beacon, though Neo’s cheerful sadism still unsettled them both at times. 

They were the ones who helped her come up with an alias to use on her fake records, since she was the only one whose name and face were public knowledge and had to be kept secret. It took a little while, but the three of them finally decided on Nero Midori: “black” and “green” to go with her chosen disguise. 

(Cinder thought it was ridiculous that it took them that long to come up with the idea of just adding a letter, but whatever, she supposes that that’s just what happens when you discourage your subordinates from thinking too much.)

Emerald and Neo conspired to steal one of Mercury’s legs and keep hiding it as a joke, but had to stop after only a couple times: they had to keep the secret that the legs were prosthetics from the rest of the school, and there were only so many hiding places in Team CMNE’s dorm room.

Neo was interested in comparing her own Semblance to Emerald’s, since they both deal with disguises and illusions, and wanted to see how far Emerald could take hers. Emerald is...far less willing to experiment with the boundaries of her Semblance, considering that she gets those splitting headaches whenever she pushes it too far.

- The illusion of the little girl that she used to lure in Amber was based on how she herself looked as a child. It’s the easiest for her to create, so it’s one of her go-to illusions for distractions.

- It’s not by much, but she’s the youngest member of Team CMNE.

- She can’t eat more than a little bit at a time or it will make her nauseous, but Emerald has found that she loves candy and other sweet things. 

Both Mercury and Ruby have had a lot of fun giving her new treats to try and watching her have a quiet “oh my god this is so good this is so good this is sO GOOD” freakout. 

Neo’s first token of friendship was to steal her a tub of neapolitan ice cream, signing, “Food is always sweeter when it’s stolen, don’t you agree?”

Cinder, in the background with no sweet tooth at all, snacks on her Dragon’s Breath chili peppers and Ghost Pepper hot sauce and wonders what all the fuss is about. 

- Now that she has unlimited access to food (something she’s still lowkey shocked by, every once in a while), Emerald is fascinated by the idea of cooking and baking, and likes to experiment in the kitchen when she gets the chance, but hasn’t quite gotten the hang of it yet. The first time she seriously tried to cook something nice, she accidentally burned Mercury’s eyebrows off. (Not that they were missed, but still.) She’s trying, though.

- Speaking of which, she has...quite a few issues centered around food.

She has an absolutely cast-iron stomach, from scrounging around in the garbage to eat when she couldn’t steal any money. There’s nothing she can’t choke down if she has to, no matter how disgusting it is.

She also can’t quite break the habit of eating as much as she can, as fast as she can, because there’s still that little part of her that’s warning her that she doesn’t know when she’ll eat again so she has to. 

Now that starvation is no longer a real possibility for her, she needs to be careful not to gorge herself so much and so fast that it makes her sick. Her stomach still isn’t 100% used to normal meals or too-rich food.

(Cinder watches her new subordinate bolting down the meal she’s been given like she’s afraid somebody is going to snatch it away from her, and she smiles, because gods be praised, this is just too easy.)

(“It’s all right,” she says sweetly, “don’t make yourself sick. It’s not going to disappear on you. And there’s plenty more when you want it.”)

- But, more than anything else, Emerald has a Sakura Kyouko-like tendency to get furious whenever she sees somebody wasting food. 

(If Team CMNE had gotten to Beacon in time to witness The Epic Food Fight of 2014, she would have had no conflicted feelings about seeing everyone in the school get eaten by Grimm; death to those who would throw away perfectly good food that could have gone to starving Mistrali orphans named Emerald - !)

She and Mercury bicker plenty right from the start, but the first serious argument she has with him is one night a few weeks after he was recruited, when the trio are on the road and eating dinner around the campfire. It’s nothing special; Emerald finishes it off quickly, true to form. But Mercury decides halfway through that he’s had enough, and throws the rest of the meal away uneaten. Emerald freezes, then flares up and starts reaming him out. 

Mercury is startled and extremely confused, and defensively yells right back, not getting what the big deal is. “Lay off! It’s just a little food!” and Emerald sees red for a moment because not too long ago, just a little food could have made the difference between her surviving the day and starving to death. And instead of silencing her, Cinder takes her side for once and chastises Mercury, too (though her anger is far more restrained), and it only frustrates Mercury more. “Damn it, what is with you two? What’s your problem?!”

Because neither of them have leveled up anywhere near enough to unlock her tragic backstory yet, Cinder clams up, refuses to explain herself, and storms off. But Emerald and Mercury stay by the campfire -- no longer shouting, but still angry, still unwilling to back down. The silence hangs, for a solid minute of glaring. Then, without really thinking about it, Emerald snarls, “You want to know what my problem is?” And Mercury snaps back, “Yeah. Fine, I do. Why don’t you tell me all about it?”

Both of them are fully expecting for it to devolve into another argument. But, to their surprise...They end up actually talking, albeit with some reluctance to divulge their most personal pains. Emerald explains, in the most bare-bones way she can, how she has lived up until now, stealing and struggling for every scrap of food she ate, never quite feeling satisfied. Mercury has never known starvation or thirst, but he knows suffering intimately, knows how deep its roots run even after the worst is over, and it’s shared knowledge of suffering and their new release from it that the pair start to truly bond over.

The fire cools and dies, and their anger does, too. Calm is restored, maybe a grudging apology or two is uttered, and Emerald and Mercury can’t exactly call each other friends, but they understand each other a bit better, now, and that’s what counts.

(Damn it, thinks Cinder, with her ear to the tent flap five feet away from them. I should have been the one to solve that and establish dominance. I really need to get a better handle on this whole ‘being in charge of people’ thing.)

- Before joining Cinder’s team, she’d only ever killed in self-defense before, and even then only once or twice. (She always tried not to think about it. That hasn’t changed.) But she’s always felt bitter and vindictive towards the people around her, both hating and envying their happiness when she has never known any. Cinder, having very similar feelings, catches on right away and uses that to coax Emerald into taking things further and further, down the slippery slope into true villainy. 

You want to do this, says Cinder’s voice at the back of her head, sweet and dark and poisonous. You’ve always wanted to do this. Remember how they’ve laughed at you, looked down on you, beaten and starved you. They don’t care how you suffered, wouldn’t care if you had died. Why should you care what happens to them? They deserve all of this. 

And for a while, it works. Instead of guilt or sadness, she feels only the vindictive pleasure that she was promised. 

Fighting the Fall Maiden is terrifying, but the girl falls to Cinder’s arrows, just as planned. Emerald grabs her arm and yanks her up, kicks her hard in the back (can she even feel it anymore, the way that arrowhead pierced her spine? Who cares, it doesn’t matter), smirks as Cinder approaches to rip the girl’s powers away. She remembers the stark terror of moments before, the wind knocked out of her and the point of a sharpened gem just seconds from being driven through her body, and thinks, Serves you right. 

It’s easy, she thinks. It’s her idea to find and kill Tukson, in hopes of impressing Cinder by succeeding where Roman is failing. A thief, in many cases, gets her mark by acting friendly and accomodating, and Emerald has perfected her earnest voice and false smile. Both are easy to pull out when she toys with the Faunus, watching him try not to squirm under her cool, unperturbed gaze and liking the sensation of power it seems to give. (She wonders if this is what it feels like to be Cinder.) 

There’s an instant of fright when the claws come out, but between Mercury’s devastating kicks from one side and her own blades flying in from the other, Tukson never stood a chance. Easy -- her self-assured attitude is only broken when it turns out that Cinder’s not impressed, not at all, and scolds her instead of thanking her. She’s a little taken aback (she was only trying to help, wasn’t she?), but decides it must be reasonable: she should know her place by now, and of course Cinder knows better than her anyway.

Plans take time, Cinder emphasizes patience above all, but living at Beacon only makes her want the promised night to come faster. She plays the part of the friendly visitor perfectly, as expected, but it makes her want to puke. These idiot kids, always with their happy-go-lucky smiles, always laughing over nothing...She’s sure none of them have ever known what it is to be hungry or cold, to be terrified right down to the core, to be completely, hopelessly alone. They’re not like us, Cinder says. We’ll teach them pain, Mercury says. She smiles along with them.

The doubles round and the trick with Mercury’s leg are, minus the headache, so simple she barely remembers them. Her final task, however...gives her some pause, when the time comes. She does her best to think of Atlas’ robot as “it” instead of “her,” but she still feels an unpleasant twist in her chest to see the girl torn limb from limb on her own wires. It passes quickly; hearing Cinder’s voice in the air, returning to her side, makes her feel safe again: one of only two in Beacon whose safety is guaranteed tonight.

But when the massacre is finally unfolding below them, that feeling evaporates even faster. The air filled with screams, bodies trampled under the Grimm’s hooves and shredded by their teeth and claws, the scent of blood and terror, heavier than anything she’s ever felt before...Her insides go cold, her stomach turns. She doesn’t want to watch but she can’t look away. This isn’t the grand, perfect revenge she’d been thinking of at all. 

Mercury’s smile is vicious, like a wolf scenting blood and knowing it means a feast. Beautiful, croons Cinder, looking on the chaos like an artist at their masterwork. This time she can’t smile with them, much as part of her wishes it could be just like before; now she can only feel sick. Because it’s just now dawning on her that there’s a limit to how far she can go (willing or not), just how much bloodshed she can stomach. If Cinder and Mercury have any such thing...It certainly hasn’t been found here. And for the first time in a long time, she feels her confidence -- in her place, in Cinder, in herself -- start to shake.

Still, even now, even now, she knows she can’t run away. She isn’t even certain she wants to. When the blinding white wings arch out from the top of Beacon Tower, and she knows with a deep, gut-wrenching certainty that it means Cinder is in trouble (that Cinder needs her), she doesn’t think. Her body just moves, has her sprinting for the tower to help before her mind’s caught up with her. The perfect chance to escape, and she’s too terrified to consider it, or even fully realize it’s there. 

But she wouldn’t have taken it, anyway. This is where she was meant to be. It must be, she tells herself insistently, because where would she be if not for this? Because there is one thing that she is absolutely certain of: she will never go back to where she had been before. She would rather die than risk that, she’ll go through anything if only to protect herself from being alone in the world again. No one else has ever accepted her, or will ever accept her, especially after tonight. And so, she will stay, follow Cinder into hell and back, because there is nowhere else to go.