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one
“Is this really something you do willingly?” Yang mumbles, following along dutifully behind Blake in the truly unnecessarily cramped air vent.
Blake doesn’t answer, because of course she doesn’t. Sure, she’d been just as willing to join the team as the rest of the them-- after Cinder, after nearly dying, after pulling off a score that should have catapulted them all into the most luxurious retirements in human history-- but she hadn’t exactly been willing to. Well. Talk to anyone.
“If I’m right, just stay totally quiet,” Yang says after a moment. She pauses and props her chin on her arms, watching as Blake carries on silently on her way through the vent. “Glad you agree.”
“Shut up,” Blake says thinly, not looking back, and Yang rolls her eyes and then her head on her shoulders, until her neck cracks.
“You’re not nearly as fun to work with as your ex,” Yang huffs out, following Blake’s form. The air vent isn’t exactly her first choice, but the view is good, at least.
“Aw, thanks,” Ilia says over the comms, and up ahead Blake rolls her eyes so hard her whole body moves with it, and Yang grins.
“Next left, Blake,” Ruby chimes in. “That should drop you into an empty office.”
“Finally,” Yang says, almost yawning. “It’s too early in the morning for crawling through air vents.”
“No one made you come,” Blake says. There’s an edge to her voice, guarded and sharp, that echoes more harshly in the dead air in the vent.
“Actually, I did,” Weiss says over the comms. “Stop bickering and work together.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice, princess,” Yang says cheerfully, wiggling her way around the corner after Blake, shoulders pressing against either side of the air vent walls. “Belladonna sure could use a lesson or two about playing nice, though.”
Blake suddenly flips down through a grate into the office Ruby had called out, leaving Yang to find a significantly less graceful way to the ground.
“Okay,” Blake says, peering out the door into the dark hallway. “We just need to get to--”
Yang grabs her by the waist abruptly, yanking her to one side with a hand clapped silently over her mouth.
“What--” Weiss starts to say.
“He’s in his office,” Yang says, soft enough that the comm barely picks up the vibration in her jaw, soft enough that even Blake can barely hear it from where she’s glaring up from over Yang’s hand. She shoves Yang away harshly, mouth turned down into a scowl.
“You said it would be empty,” Blake hisses out.
“It should be!” Ruby says with a huff. “It’s not my fault he decided to be an overachieving criminal who comes into work at six in the morning!”
“He’ll step out at some point,” Weiss says after a long moment. “The man has a coffee addiction worse than mine. If he’s here at this hour he’ll have to go get more coffee soon. You can get in and plant the drive then.”
“What are we supposed to do until--”
“We wait,” Yang says, cutting Blake off, an obnoxiously wide grin on her face. She steps back and leans against the wall, sliding down to sit with her elbows on her knees, and pats the ground next to her. Blake glares and sits down in the corner by the door, as far away from Yang as possible in the small office.
“So grumpy,” Yang says with a shrug.
“Excuse me if I don’t want to spend my Friday morning stuck in an office with you,” Blake throws back.
“Oh, come on,” Yang says, leaning her chin into her hand, the press against her jaw conspicuously silencing her mic. “You know that’s not it.”
Blake presses her own hand against her jaw so that she can sneer at Yang and bite out, “What the hell else would it be?”
“You joined this team on your own, Blake,” Yang says coolly. “So it’s not because you don’t want to be here.”
“Maybe I just don’t want to be here with you ,” Blake throws back.
“I mean, in the sense that you can’t stop thinking about the fact that I fucked you on a pool table last month, sure,” Yang says, one eyebrow lifting. She waits for Blake to flush darkly and then set her jaw defiantly, ready to fight back.
“It was a bad idea,” Blake says after a long moment.
“You sure about that?” Yang says, looking deliberately down towards Blake’s mouth and then back up to her eyes. “You’re still thinking about it, which means it probably wasn’t that bad an idea. Or an experience.”
“God, you’re so full of yourself,” Blake mutters out.
“Maybe, but you could be too,” Yang says cheerfully, and then winks at Blake and is rewarded with a truly offended glare.
“You’re so incredibly infuriating,” Blake snaps, hand shaking against her own jaw.
“And yet,” Yang says. She sits up straighter, moving slowly and deliberately, and pulls her earpiece out, setting it carefully on the floor out of the way. Blake’s eyes widen, following her movements, and her teeth grind together. “Here we are.”
Yang stands up, shielded from view of their mark by the door and the darkness holding most of the floor, and offers a hand down to Blake, and Blake takes it without thinking. She’s on her feet before she knows it, Yang dropping her hand and instead pressing a hand over her mouth, pushing and pushing, so unexpectedly gently, until Blake’s back pushes soft into the corner of the door and the wall.
Yang’s hand holds steady over her mouth, pressing against her jaw just hard enough to swallow any vibrations, to shield Blake from the rest of the team hearing exactly how much she wants this. Yang is warm, so warm, like she was the first time they did this, heated and harsh and rushed in the middle of the apartment, and Blake’s fingers dig into her shoulders.
Scar tissue presses against her palm through Yang’s shirt, unforgiving and rough, and Blake grips harder because last time she was too soft, last time something dark had ripped through Yang when even the possibility of pity had risen in Blake’s eyes, last time she had crossed a line. So she grips too-tight to Yang’s damaged arm, revels in the flicker of shadow in Yang’s eyes and the way one side of her mouth curls up sharply, the way her other hand pushes harder and faster until Blake’s back arches away from the wall, head slamming back into plaster, someone’s voice echoing tinnily in her ear.
Yang steps back after a long moment of Blake breathing too heavily, waiting until Blake’s legs steady under her, until she can pull her hand back and let Blake’s uneven breaths back into the comms.
“--are you doing ?” Weiss snaps out over the comms, voice cutting through the warmth that’s settled over Blake’s skin.
“I, uh,” Blake says, clearing her throat. She carefully doesn’t look at Yang or the way she’s straightening her shirt, and busies herself instead with fixing her own belt and peering through the window of the office to the other side of the floor, where the mark is out of his office. “Shit, going now.”
She slides through the door before Yang can say anything, darting recklessly from shadow to shadow, throwing a glance over towards the office kitchen and the back of the mark’s head. It’s too late to be making this run but she’s committed anyways, as much for the job as for an excuse to get as far away from Yang as possible.
“Blake, I swear to God,” Weiss says sharply. Blake ignores her, sidling into the office silently and only fumbling the flash drive in her hands twice before plugging it in.
“Ten seconds,” Ruby says immediately.
“Yang, where’s the--”
“Still in the kitchen,” Yang says, quiet and calm and completely destabilizing for Blake.
“Four,” Ruby says, pausing. “Okay, loaded, get out of there.”
Blake yanks the flash drive out and nearly dives out of the office, rolling into a crouch behind one of the cubicles outside it just as the mark turns the corner from the kitchen. She listens to his footsteps as he makes his way back to the office, counts her breaths after his chair creaks, and then slides out from behind the cubicle and makes her way back to the office where Yang is waiting.
The room smells like sex, and she hates it almost as much as she hates the way Yang winks at her and then laces her hands together, offering a silent boost up back into the vent.
two
“Unbelievable,” Wiess mutters. She kicks at the door to the storage unit with huff, and the sound echoes annoyingly loudly in the empty building. “I can’t believe this.”
“Weiss, are you okay?” Ilia says over the comms. It’s muffled and creaking, the enormous metal box that is the storage unit Weiss is in interfering with the signal.
“Just locked in a storage unit,” Weiss snaps out. “What could possibly be wrong.”
“Yang’s nearby,” Ilia says. “She can get you out.”
“What, you’re going to punch your way through solid metal?” Weiss says. She shoves one of the crates filling the room over and sits down on it with a huff, uncaring that she’s sitting on millions of dollars worth of artwork.
There’s no response from Yang, and Weiss’s indignation fades minutely, eyes narrowing. “Yang?”
There’s no answer, and Weiss’s fingers dig into the edge of the crate she’s sitting on, splints of wood pressing at her palms.
“Yang,” she says again. “Ruby, do you have a lock on Yang’s position?”
There’s no answer for long seconds, and worry starts to build in Weiss’s chest.
“Um,” Ruby says sourly. “Well.”
“What?” Weiss says.
“Um,” Ruby says again. “She’ll, uh-- be there in a minute.”
“What?”
“Just sit tight for a minute,” Ilia says, voice lilting in amusement, and Weiss breathes against her own worry for three heartbeats before--
“Are they really fu--”
“Absolutely not!” Ruby says, too aggressive and too high pitched to be anything but a lie.
Fifteen minutes when the door to the storage unit rolls up and reveals Yang, lips bruised dark red and a hickey blooming on her throat, without even a token amount of shame to her stance, Weiss flings a presumably priceless porcelain vase at her. It shatters in the hallway and Weiss sweeps out elegantly past Yang and her hickey and her overly-pleased just-fucked look, as if her banging Blake in whatever supply closet they’d found hadn’t left Weiss without backup and locked in a storage unit by a sociopathic crime lord.
“I’m going to fire the both of you idiots if you do that again,” she snaps as she strides past, not breaking stride when she shoves hard at Yang’s shoulder. Yang, to her credit, has the sense to at least pretend like it hurts, even if she trails after Weiss with an obnoxiously self-satisfied grin on her face.
three
The car is freezing, the weather outside seeping in and making Yang’s bones ache. In the passenger seat, Blake’s gloved fingers tap rapidly against her thigh, her heel bouncing as well, her eyes scanning the dark building in front of them over and over, never staying still.
“Hey,” Yang says eventually. She drops her head back against the headrest and lets it roll over so she can look at Blake squarely. “Blake. Hey.”
“What?” Blake jerks in her seat.
“You wanna tell me what’s going on?” Yang says quietly. She shifts in her seat, pushing back into the corner by the door, bulky coat and scarf pushing up and cancelling out her earbud. “You’ve been on edge this whole job. So has Ilia. So what’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” Blake says, even as she pushes her hand over her jaw. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not as good a liar as Ilia is,” Yang says. “And even she can’t hide it.” She crosses her arms over her chest against the cold.
“Blake, come on,” she says softly. “Let me help.”
“It’s nothing,” Blake says again, but it doesn’t reach her eyes this time. “I just--”
She cuts herself off, Yang’s steady breaths and unwavering eyes, her solid presence and quiet calm, warm and careful and familiar even in a freezing cold stakeout in Montana, all of it more than she can push back against.
“I used to-- a long time ago,” she starts slowly. “Before I was stealing things on my own I worked with some other people. It’s where I met Ilia. And someone from there, someone we both thought was gone, I guess. He resurfaced recently.”
“Resurfaced how?” Yang’s voice is level and calm, like she so often is, the burning volatility behind her eyes always there but never overwhelming the careful calm she moves through the world with.
“Asking around,” Blake says after a long moment. “With old contacts, looking to see what I’ve been doing since I left.”
“Blake,” Yang says evenly. “You know if you tell me who it is, he’s as good as gone.”
“I--” Blake starts to say, and then shakes her head and smiles, sad and distant and enough to disrupt the steady calm in Yang’s eyes, something flickering across her face. She doesn’t finish, instead leaning over the console and curling a gloved hand into Yang’s scarf, pulling until she can press her lips against Yang’s, cold as the mountain air around them but still burning warm somehow. Her gloves are heavy to counter the subzero temperatures but she still swears she can feel the heat radiating out of Yang’s cheek when her hand presses there, can feel it singeing the skin on the back of her neck when Yang’s hand curls around and holds softly.
Long minutes pass of Blake’s mouth moving easily against Yang’s, her hip aching from leaning over the console but the way kissing Yang somehow feels like the easiest thing in the world overwrites the pain. It’s slow and soft and everything they never have been, through all of this, all of the times they’ve orbited around each other and collided, over and over, again and again. It’s slow and it’s soft and it catches in Blake’s chest, the way Yang burns under her hands and the way Yang holds her so carefully, not like she’ll break but like she’s worth being careful with.
“Yang!” Weiss yells over the comms, loud enough that they both jerk back, slamming into their respective seats. “Stop making out with Blake and go !”
Outside the car, thirty feet away, barely visible in the dark, a silhouette sprints out of the building, stumbling in knee-deep snow. Yang doesn’t hesitate, already out the door and leaving Blake in the car, bounding through the snow like it’s not even there, and catches up immediately. She launches forward in a flying tackle and catches him around the shoulders, flinging him down into the snow, and Blake watches from her spot in the car, chest still aching and the echoes of Yang’s hands still burning on her body.
four
The footsteps in the stairwell fade away, and Blake peers out from the corner she’d been hiding behind with Yang, looking up and down the empty hallway.
“Okay,” she says quietly. “Let’s go.”
Yang follows, footsteps irritatingly silent behind Blake, and they’re halfway to the stairwell when Ilia’s voice sounds over the comms just before the clatter of more footsteps sounds from around the corner. Blake reaches back and yanks blindly at Yang’s wrist, flinging a door open and shoving Yang in and following, shutting the door silently behind her.
“They’re running foot patrols,” Ilia says. “Ruby and Weiss are fine, their covers are still intact.”
“Lovely,” Blake mutters. She leans back against the door and drops her head back against it. “How long?”
“Give them twenty,” Ilia says. “They need to set this hook properly, and she’s smart. Can’t rush her into it.”
“If we’re not rushing it then why are there foot patrols running all over the research floors?” Yang says with a frown, her nose wrinkling, and Blake bites down on the inside of her cheek to stop herself from finding it cute.
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because some random lady punched one of their VPs for hitting on the intern?” Blake says flatly.
“Look,” Yang starts to say heatedly.
“I was going to do the same thing,” Blake says quietly. “He deserved it.”
“Oh,” Yang says after a moment. “Right.” She glances down at her hands, flexing into fists and then loosening, over and over.
Blake pushes off of the door and steps closer in the too-small closet full of office supplies. Her hands move of their own volition, reaching gently for Yang’s, thumbs sweeping over her knuckles softly. This close Yang is burning like always, breathing as level as it always is and eyes sharp, so sharp, always calculating and always assessing, and Blake pulls her earpiece out and pushes up on her toes and presses a kiss to the corner of Yang’s mouth.
Yang pulls back sharply, mouth pressing into a thin line, and Blake stares steadily at her, unmoving, unwavering, letting Yang stare back at her for long seconds until she finally moves. She pulls her earbud free and sets it on a shelf, and Blake follows suit, and then curls her fists into Yang’s collar and yanks, turning until she can shove Yang back into the bank of shelves behind her.
She’s burning under Blake’s hands, heat curling off her skin and around Blake, intoxicating and overwhelming, and she bites too heavily at Yang’s lip, pushes hard enough against her damaged shoulder that she winces. Her whole body goes tight under Blake’s hands, her forever steady breaths finally coming sharper and more raggedly, and Blake watches Yang shatter around her fingers and curls her free hand into the hair at the back of Yang’s head, holding tight and pushing closer.
She drops her forehead down onto Yang’s shoulder, unreasonably steady for how much Blake feels like something massive just shifted, like there must have been an earthquake that changed everything, and measures her breaths against the way Yang’s are slowing back down, one hand still gripping at the back of Yang’s head and the other curling into her shirt lazily.
The door opens with a crack and Blake leaps back, one fist already rearing back, Yang somehow already between her and the door, and--
“Are you serious? ” Weiss snaps out, fingertips pressed against her jaw, and she’s normally intimidating enough but here, now, in the business suit she wore like a second skin and corporate power rolling off of her, even if it’s manufactured for the job, she’s downright terrifying. “Can’t you just figure your shit out so you can stop screwing on the job?”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” Yang says cheerfully, slipping into her usual calm even as she pops her earbud back in and buttons her jeans, and Blake wishes, desperately, that the floor would swallow her up forever.
Yang disappears down the hallway, to where Ruby’s visible, and Blake clears her throat and looks down at her shoes.
“Blake,” Weiss says quietly, hand still pressed to her jaw. “You have to talk about this. You can’t keep--”
“It’s fine,” Blake says, too loudly, and she avoids Weiss’s eyes, focusing on retrieving her own earbud and shoving it back into place. “It’s fine. We’re set?”
“Yeah,” Weiss says eventually, pulling her hand away. “We’re set. We can walk you out of here.” She grips at Blake’s elbow, holding her in place, not letting her by, and fixes a sharp stare on her. She doesn’t say anything, unwavering when Blake does her best to glare back, and doesn’t let go until Blake’s the first one to blink.
one
Yang’s room is quiet. It’s on the alley side of the building, so there’s less road noise than Blake’s towering view out across the rooftops on the other side of the apartment, but it’s also quietly decorated. There’s a desk with a computer and stacks of magazines, a bookshelf filled to bursting with neatly ordered books, but no artwork on the walls, no flashes of color. The windows let in bright sunlight, filling the room and brightening it and the warm hardwood and the hospital corners in Yang’s sheets, but there’s little color.
Blake rolls over and curls on her side, facing Yang and the way she’s sprawled like a starfish across the mattress, limbs reaching towards each of the corners. Her hair’s a mass of tangles, a mess leftover from going to sleep with it wet after everything that had happened yesterday and left them all exhausted, but she’s clean, as if she hadn’t been buried alive less than 24 hours ago. There are shadows under her eyes and a faint bruise on her jaw, a tender spot on the back of her skull where the butt of a gun had been smashed against it, but no concussion, no lasting damage. Yang is here , whole and safe, breathing evenly like she always does, even in her sleep.
Blake curls one hand around the wrist closest to her, fingers pressing over Yang’s heartbeat, slow and steady, and curls around Yang’s sprawling arm, carefully keeping her grip away from the scars covering Yang’s skin.
She’s nearly back asleep, lulled back in spite of the sunlight by Yang’s pulse and breathing, when Yang stirs.
“Hey,” she says, gravelly, eyes bleary and unfocused for the first time that Blake can ever remember.
“Hey,” Blake echoes. “How’re you feeling?”
“I’m not the one with cracked ribs, you know,” Yang mumbles out. Her arm twitches in Blake’s hold, and Blake pulls back, an apology building in her chest because Yang has so few boundaries with them but her arm has always been one of them--
“It’s okay,” Yang says, still sprawled out, watching Blake sleepily. She doesn’t pull her arm back, watching lazily as Blake’s fingers hover over the remnants of damage and loss and so many surgeries, tracing without touching. “Are we finally going to talk?”
“What?” It startles Blake out of her silence, and her hand drops down without meaning to, falling against Yang’s skin.
“This,” Yang says, rolling over onto her side and mirroring Blake’s posture. “Us.”
“Us?”
“Blake,” Yang says thinly, jaw setting visibly. It makes the bruise on her face even more prominent and Blake sucks in a deep breath because Yang almost died yesterday, because Yang let herself be taken to protect Blake, because she spent the night in Yang’s bed awake late into the night and thinking of all the ways she almost lost someone she hadn’t even realized she needed more than anyone else.
Blake pushes closer, knees bumping against Yang’s and hand curling along her jaw gently, and presses a slow kiss to her mouth.
“Blake,” Yang says again, still close enough that Blake can taste it, can feel the way her voice shakes, so uncharacteristic and unexpected. “What is this?”
Blake kisses her again, and again, hand finding her hip and holding tight. “We’re--something,” she says. “And it’s ours. Just ours.”
She doesn’t push back when Yang’s hand finds her shoulder and pushes her onto her back, hands dancing along her damaged ribs carefully and mouth soft against hers, fingertips skidding along skin that’s familiar and new at the same time, because they’ve done this before, they’ve done this so many times, but never at home and never without pretense and never with Blake holding tight to Yang and refusing to let go of her, because Yang is hers .
“You’re sure?” Yang says suddenly, breath coming heavy and shoulders shuddering under Blake’s fingernails, hovering over her with wide eyes and an uncertain set to her mouth.
“Yeah,” Blake says, hitching a leg around her waist and a hand careful around the back of her neck and pulling until she can kiss her again. “I’m sure.”