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Blake decided to leave him five times.
The first was just two months after she'd run away, two months after they'd started having sex, two months of roaming around Vale and pretending she didn't miss her parents. Two of the most stressful months of her life so far.
He was under a lot of stress, too. That was probably why it even happened. They were both stressed, and getting on each others' nerves. He wouldn't stop complaining about the missions Sienna was setting them. They were too easy, or they were pointless, or else they were exactly the same sort of thing Blake's dad would've had them doing. Making contacts, and running recruitment. Setting up safehouses. Passing through mining towns, and seeding the idea of unions.
"They're never going to do it," Adam said flatly. "They're too scared of the boot on their backs to do anything except crawl around in the dirt."
Blake translated this to mean, "They're scared of what the SDC will do to them." And he wasn't wrong—the SDC was notorious for its union-busting tactics. Everything from mass firings, to hired thugs showing up at meetings and chasing everyone away, to just... refusing to sell Dust to local stores until the miners gave up, or the towns they lived in withered away into nothing.
But it was also true that the SDC would have nothing, if there weren't people willing to dig Dust out of the ground. The whole world would have nothing—their labor was the backbone of mankind's defense against the Grimm. One mine could be crushed without the SDC losing much in the process, but ten mines? Twenty? A hundred? A single success story could become the shining star, the example for all others to follow. If they could just band together...
Adam thought it was stupid to even try. He thought a lot of things were stupid to even try, and he kept going on and on about it, until Blake caught herself sleepwalking through the days, just waiting for them to end. Waiting for something to happen that didn't feel pointless.
Eventually, she started pulling out her book whenever she recognized a familiar rant, and just tuning him out. If picket lines were useless, if trying to unionize was naive, if recruitment and safehouse building were a waste of their skills, then what did that say about all the time they were spending sitting around and stewing in frustration and despair?
She wanted it to feel like it used to again. Not that she wanted them to be doing the exact same things they used to, because she agreed with Adam and Sienna that it hadn't been enough, she just—she wished it still made her hopeful. And that made her feel like a naive little girl, wanting to pretend like things were good even when they weren't.
(But she was. No matter how hard she tried not to be, she was just a stupid little girl who missed her parents.)
It was easier to read. She could hide for a while in some fantastical world, where problems were straightforward and the protagonist tied them all up in a neat little bow by the end. But if Adam hated wasting time on picketing, he hated wasting time on trashy books even more.
"Why do you keep reading that crap?" he asked one night. "They're not even for you. They're just some lonely human's fantasy about her perfect human boyfriend."
Blake shrugged. "I like them," she said, and kept reading. Even after he started in about how stupid it was that he had to take orders from Sienna, and how she kept wasting his time instead of letting him plan his own missions, Blake kept reading. She kept reading, until Adam snatched the book right out of her hands.
"Hey!"
"My dear Kitsu," he read aloud. "I only wish I didn't have to go, that I could stay by your side forever—"
"Give it back!" Blake made a grab for it, but he held it up out of her reach.
"Why? So you can go back to ignoring me?"
"I wasn't ignoring you, I just—I was reading. You're the one who interrupted me."
"Yeah. I interrupted you ignoring me."
"Adam!" Abandoning her dignity, she tried to jump for the book. Adam blocked her easily. Then his face got hard, and cold, and he drew his arm back.
They weren't in a tent, exactly. It was more of a tarp over their sleeping bags. They'd lost their real tents when their camp was attacked by Grimm on the road, and now they were having to make do until they got to the old mill they were supposed to turn into another safehouse. So when Adam threw the book, there was nothing to stop it from sailing straight out from under the tarp, and landing in a muddy puddle on the ground.
Blake ran after it. She scooped it up as quickly as she could, but it was too late—the pages were already glued together, ink running, paper stained a filthy yellow-brown.
She burst into tears. She hated herself for it, for how stupid she was being. It was just a book. A cheap paperback, and not even really that good. But her mom had bought it for her, at a used bookstore, and it would probably be the last book either of her parents ever bought for her.
"I didn't mean for it to land like that," Adam said, as she stormed back into the tent and picked up her sleeping bag. "I was aiming for the bushes. Blake, where are you going?"
She ran in a straight line, into the woods. She didn't know where she was going. Or rather, she didn't know what lay within a day's walk east of here—she just knew that east would eventually lead to the eastern coast of Sanus, which was where the ship she'd escaped from had been docked. She just...
She wanted to go home.
Adam chased after her. "Blake, come on, come back! It's going to rain tonight, you can't just—"
She broke into a run. She ignored the others calling after her, ignored the goosebumps racing up her arms as the autumn chill burrowed into her, ignored her aching lungs and the angry tears streaming down her cheeks. Ignored everything...
Until she heard the growl.
Blake froze. The only part of her body still able to move was her ears, twitching frantically to try and locate the source of the sound. Off to her left... and close. Very close. Then, a twig snapped. Blake dove sideways, and just avoided the Beowolf's outstretched claws.
Aunt Sienna had been teaching her katas since she was small. Ilia had shown her a little bit about using her whip. Adam had taken up her training more seriously, since the break from her parents, and he said she was making great strides. She'd even helped him kill Grimm before. But she'd never fought one all on her own.
She drew Gambol Shroud in its gun form, firing three shots at the Grimm's eyes. Two hit the muzzle and glanced off, but one found its mark. Snarling, it lunged at her again—and this time each of its long arms was fully extended, wicked claws poised to slash her to ribbons no matter which way she tried to jump. Blake fell backwards with a sharp scream, her eyes slamming shut.
When she opened them again, the Grimm was dead and Adam was standing over her, holding out a hand to help her to her feet.
Blake took it. She braced herself for him to yell—it all seemed so petty, now, scaled against the raging Beowolf. Surely he'd be mad at her for almost getting herself killed over such a stupid argument. But the moment she was upright again, he seized her in a tight, clinging hug.
"Gods, Blake," he croaked. "You scared the hell out of me."
"I'm sorry." She was still crying, she realized. Trying to stop only made her start hiccuping too. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I just—I just got so mad and I—"
"Shh." He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and began to guide her back towards the camp. "It's alright now. I'm just glad you're safe."
He didn't yell at her when they got back to the camp, either. Instead, he bundled her in a blanket, and sat with her all night rubbing her back and telling her how much he loved her. "I'm sorry," she kept saying, over and over, because every kind thing he did just made her feel worse.
She'd almost broken her promise. Almost lost this, lost him—all over some dumb book.
She was fourteen when he threw something again. Not her book, this time, but his scroll. It rebounded off a brick wall six inches from her face, and exploded into glass shrapnel.
Blake just... stood there. Paralyzed. Conflicting impulses screamed at her to duck, to run, to move! But it was like every muscle in her body had locked up, and all she could do was stand there like a statue and listen to the ringing in her ears.
"Fuck," Adam snarled, crouching down to rummage through the mess. Blake wasn't sure what he expected to salvage. It was a burner anyway, cheap and easily replaceable. If he'd thrown it on the ground, she'd have rolled her eyes and kept walking.
But he hadn't thrown it on the ground.
"Adam." Her own voice sounded muffled, as if there was water in her ears. "Adam, what the fuck."
"What?" he snapped.
"You just threw your scroll at me."
"I didn't throw it at you."
She turned her head, staring incredulously at the cracked brick. She had to cross her eyes a bit to focus on it. "You almost hit me! Glass went everywhere, you could have—!"
"I wasn't aiming at you! I'm not even mad at you, it's this stupid fucking bitch who thinks she can order me around whenever she wants!" (Given that the stupid fucking bitch in question had been put in charge of their cell by Sienna, Blake was pretty sure she could, actually.) But then he rounded on her, scowling. "Not everything is about you, Blake."
She dropped her eyes to the ground, blinking hard through the hot flush of shame. Light glittered. A flickering orange streetlamp, reflecting off the glass shards dusting the top of her boot.
She thought, I should keep my aura up when he talks to Savannah. Those could have cut me.
Then she thought, Why should I need to keep my aura up just because my boyfriend might get mad about a scroll call?
And then, she thought, What the hell am I doing here?
There was an eerie, calm clarity to each step in the sequence. Like climbing a staircase out of a thick fog—unable to see, but following the most natural and intuitive motion, trusting that each next step would be there. That eventually her head would break through into open sky, and let her look around with clear eyes. And the next obvious step...
Blake knew the route to the bus stop closest to the crumbling motel she and Adam were staying in, while they did recon on the nearby mine. He kept track of most of their money, of course, but she had some change in her pocket. Not enough for a boat ticket to Mistral to meet up with Aunt Sienna, but enough to get her to the safehouse where Savannah was. She could ask to be reassigned somewhere else. She could just... walk away. There was nothing stopping her.
Nothing, except for the promise she'd made. The promise she'd been been regretting for over a year now, occasional pangs becoming a dull and stubborn ache, ever since the last physical piece of her family she carried with her had landed in a puddle of mud.
She wanted to buy that bus ticket. Kept checking her pocket, reassuring herself that the coins were still there, all the way back to the motel. But she also wanted him to... to say something. To apologize. To hold her like he had the night he ruined her book, and tell her that it was alright, that he wanted her safe, that he'd never do anything like that again.
Some of that wanting must have leached into her frigid silence, because Adam grabbed her hand the moment he shut the door behind them. "I'm sorry if I scared you. I wasn't aiming at you, I swear."
Blake's eyes drifted to the dresser crammed awkwardly into the corner behind the door, to cover the neat round hole in the drywall. She said, "I know."
"I'm just frustrated is all. You know I hate being ordered around like that."
"I know."
He grimaced. "Don't do that. Don't... don't shut me out."
"I don't know what you want me to say." She crossed her arms, hugging herself. "Last night—I told you that wasn't okay. I told you not to do it again."
"I didn't!"
"Okay, so you smashed something against a wall instead of punching a hole through it!" Blake threw her hands up. "I guess that's fine then!"
"What's gotten into you lately?"
"Me?"
"Yes!" He reached for her, and she backed up. "Blake, come on. I wasn't aiming for you, and I didn't hit you. I didn't mean to scare you. You know how hard it is for me, to go back to being pushed around like that. I'm just trying to deal with it the best I can. What else do you want me to do?"
"I don't know! Something!"
His face fell. "I hate fighting so much all the time. I just... I don't know what you want, Blake. I'm trying so hard to be good enough for you."
"Adam, you know that's not what I—" She groaned, running a hand through her hair. "It's not that I don't think you're good enough."
"Yeah? Because it really fucking feels like it. Nothing I do is ever good enough, I'm always feeling my feelings wrong."
"That's not... I didn't mean to upset you, I just—you scared me, Adam."
"I didn't mean to! You always get mad at me, when I didn't even mean to! It feels like all we do now is fight. I'm scared, Blake. I'm scared you don't love me anymore. I'm scared you're going to abandon me over something I did, even if I couldn't help it, even if it wasn't about you."
Her pocket full of coins felt suddenly very heavy.
"I'm not," she promised. "I'm sorry, okay? I just—I can't help getting scared any more than you can help getting angry, right? So what are we supposed to do?"
This time, when he reached out, she sank into the embrace. He was warm, his heartbeat steady and strong beneath her ear. "I'll be more careful next time, okay? I'll make sure I don't hit you."
"Okay," she mumbled.
(Two months later, Blake cut her foot open on a shard of glass he'd missed, cleaning up after the beer bottle he'd smashed against the bathroom sink. But that was just an accident—he'd made sure he didn't hit her.)
She never told him she was going to leave until the day she watched him kill someone. The same day that she first saw him cry about it. Remorse, she wanted to think. (The tears started the moment she said, "I'm leaving.")
"No," was the first thing he said. "No, you can't. You promised."
"And you promised last year was an accident!" she burst out. "You promised six months ago was an accident, and you promised last month was self defense, and—!"
"It was! They were!"
Blake jabbed her finger at the plume of smoke rising above the treetops, the burning cottage in their wake, and screamed, "That was not an accident! That was not self defense!"
"He was trying to kill you!"
"Of course he was, I broke into his house!" Blake gestured at herself. "I'm fine, Adam. I was always going to be fine, because I have an active aura, and that man was a paralegal. He was holding the knife wrong! We needed his work pass, okay, I didn't like it but I thought he'd never even know we were there. And now an innocent man is dead because—because you didn't think to disarm him?!"
"I panicked, okay? I thought he was going to hurt you!"
"Don't. Don't you dare use me as an excuse for that."
"What do you want me to say?" It was half-pleading, half-angry. "And what do you mean, innocent? He worked for the Schnees' personal attack lawyers."
"As a paralegal!" Blake pressed her hands to her face, breathing hard, and turned away. "No. No, I can't—I can't do this anymore. I'm sorry."
He snagged her wrist before she could walk away, his fingers digging painfully into her skin. "Wait! Wait, please, just—!" He pulled her around to face him. His mask was in his other hand, his head twisted to the side so that all she could see was his profile, his good eye and the tears streaming down his cheek. "Blake, please. I'm sorry, I promise it won't happen again. I was just scared. I get so scared when I think I might lose you, but I'll do better. I'll be better, for you. You make me better."
"Adam, I..." Her mouth worked, struggling to form the word can't.
And then Adam was on his knees in front of her, grabbing her hand in both of his, head bowed like a supplicant. "I was only trying to protect you, I swear. I know I go too far sometimes, but I can change. I will change. Please, Blake, you have to let me try. You know I'd do anything for you."
What was she supposed to say? No? Don't change for me, just keep hurting people whenever you get scared, because I don't want to see you anymore.
It wasn't even true. She didn't want to never see him again. She loved him—even with his bloody knuckles, punching holes in the drywall, and even now that the blood on his hands wasn't his. She still loved him, and she hated herself for it.
There was no blood on his hands, the next time. Just henna. He'd let a little girl put it on for him, sitting patiently as she worked, unbothered by her crooked lines.
They were celebrating. Celebrating him, actually—he'd taken point on the White Fang's most dangerous operation yet. A direct attack on an SDC mine, collapsing the entrance in the dead of night when there was nobody inside.
Sienna had sent a small mountain of food with them, to help tide the townspeople over until the mine was reopened. (And it would be reopened—the idea was to make a point, and to disrupt the SDC's operations. Blake still worried most of that disruption would be passed down to the miners. Not everyone in town had welcomed them, even with the gift.) Then someone had suggested they throw a feast in Adam's honor, and he'd pretended to hate the idea for a few minutes before breaking into a broad grin.
It was... good. The whole day was good. For all that she had her concerns about this mission, they were purely practical ones, and the people surrounding her seemed happy to watch the SDC squirm for a few days. Maybe they were paid so badly that the extra food more or less balanced out the missed income. Maybe they were just glad to be having a better day than Jacques Schnee, for once. But the atmosphere was cheerful, and Adam himself was radiant, laughing and joking with everyone and letting a little girl use the backs of his hands as her canvas.
He ruffled her hair afterward, and sent her back to her parents with her dog's tail wagging happily. Her name was Rosie, and she was twelve years old—Blake knew this because it was how she'd introduced herself. She'd asked Adam half a million questions, and seemed disappointed when he told her Blake was his girlfriend.
"Cute kid," he said afterward, with a fond smile. "Reminds me a bit of you."
Blake hadn't realized, until that moment. Rosie was the same age she had been when they met. And since her birthday last January... she was the same age he'd been.
By the legal definition of an adult, she wasn't one yet. She and Rosie were both on the same side of that line, and it had never seemed so arbitrary as it did right now, telling her she was still a child when she'd fought and fucked and bled and watched a man die. But...
But Rosie was so small.
When they went to bed, late that night, Adam wanted to make love. That was how he phrased it. Blake couldn't—her mind was somewhere else, and all she could manage was passive acceptance. He didn't seem to notice.
They set out for the coast the following morning, because Sienna had asked Adam to return to their headquarters in Mistral after this mission. He thought she might be about to appoint him as the leader of his own cell, and couldn't stop grinning from ear to ear as they hiked down the wooded trail. He picked a bundle of wildflowers for her. And he was so completely, so vibrantly the boy she'd fallen in love with—the best parts of him, the parts that could be so sweet and loving and bold and vulnerable, they made the other parts seem like imaginary nightmares.
She'd traveled to the north of Anima once, with her parents. Near to Argus. They'd brought her to the edge of a large clearing in the woods, her dad's hands never once leaving her shoulders, and explained that land like this was called muskeg. It looked normal, even inviting. But the ground was so waterlogged, sometimes it would split open and swallow animals or even people. They made her promise not to go wandering off on her own. And that promise, at least, Blake had kept.
This felt like that. Like looking at this beautiful clearing spotted with wildflowers, and finally noticing the strange, stunted trees. The way the earth rippled as she tread on it. As if there was nothing solid underneath, just a chasm of dark, cold, muddy water to drown in.
Their relationship was an open secret, among the people they worked with from day to day. He told little Rosie about it without a care in the world. Most of the new recruits assumed Blake was older than she actually was, and she never bothered to correct them. Maybe they mentioned it to others, here and there, and maybe those others mentioned it to more people... but she was pretty sure it hadn't reached Aunt Sienna.
Blake hid in their tent that night, the sounds of continued celebration drifting in through the thin canvas, and wrote a letter confessing everything. The kiss when she was twelve. The ever-escalating more-than-kissing, the drinking, the sex, the drinking-and-sex...
She chewed on her pen. She chewed on her fingernails until they bled, and then she chewed on her hair instead. Outside, Adam said something she couldn't make out, and the whole raucous group broke into wild cheers. Blake reread her letter and realized she'd written the words, "I'm sorry," ten separate times. And wasn't she?
She kissed him. She told him, shyly, about that scene in one of her books. She hid it from her parents, and ran away from them to be with him. At every step of the way, she chose this. And he... he'd told her about his childhood that wasn't a childhood, doing backbreaking labor in a Dust mine, never interacting with anyone his own age—until her. Sometimes he didn't understand what was normal and what wasn't. Sometimes he needed someone to explain it to him, and usually that someone was Blake.
But she never explained her parents' concerns. She just ignored them.
What was she planning to do? Sail to Mistral in his victory parade, so that Sienna could throw another party in his honor and promote him to a cell leader, and then pull her aside afterwards to tell her she had... had participated in...
She got up early the next morning, and built the fire back up as the pre-dawn glow crept higher and higher above the horizon, its merry crackling and the first trills of birdsong the only sounds in those hushed grey hours. Then she took her letter out of her pocket, and burned it.
Blake lay awake, staring blankly at a canvas ceiling, listening to Adam's deep and steady breathing. Wondering what he'd do, if he knew she'd been thinking about another man during sex.
It was kind of funny when she phrased it like that. Like she'd been imagining Maize's scrawny chest, shirtless, instead of remembering the way his face had puffed up when Adam punched him. Like she'd been thinking about his lame jokes, and not that it would be her fault if her boyfriend killed him.
She'd... she'd really thought he might. Kill him. But he hadn't—he'd stopped, he'd calmed down.
He'd calmed down, because Blake had distracted him.
Sex used to make her nervous. Then for a while she'd liked it, because it made her feel close to him. Now, she liked it even more, because he was so much easier to live with afterward.
She couldn't go home. Not when her parents had tried so hard to protect her, and she'd spat on their love and called them cowards, only to turn around and prove them right. She didn't dare go to Sienna's headquarters in Mistral, not when he was all-but-officially her protege and successor. But she could just... run. Just get up out of the tent without waking him, and pick a direction, and run like she had when she was thirteen years old and still had enough life left in her to cry over petty cruelties like ruined books. She could handle much worse than Beowolves, now. She knew how to hunt. She might actually make it.
And then there would be nobody left to distract him, when he woke up alone tomorrow morning and took his anger out on somebody else.
Blake lay awake, and listened to him breathe, and watched that canvas ceiling until daybreak cast it in dappled shadow.
The day she finally did it, it didn't feel like a decision at all. There was no plan, no gathering of her courage, just those final words hanging in the air. "What about them?"
Impossible to call something so coldly premeditated an accident, or self defense, or even panic at the thought that Blake might get hurt. These people hadn't done him any wrong, real or imagined. They were just trainmen, engineers, a conductor—more fortunate than he had been, in working under the SDC to get by, but with no more control over what it did. They were just... in the way.
She'd known for a long time that he was angry. That he lashed out, threw things, hit people. Even killed people, in the heat of the moment. She'd known that... that there was something wrong between them, something lurking in the musky smell that always clung to their bedrolls, no matter how many times she tried to wash them clean. But she'd carried with her fragments of the boy he'd been—of the man he'd become. His laugh, his tears, his secret hurts that he'd entrusted to her. What little softness had survived a lifetime of cruel authorities doing their best to beat it out of him.
Blake had cradled that ember between her palms for years, and she'd given it all her hopes and dreams for kindling, going dizzy with the effort of breathing it back to life. Believing with a desperate, anguished longing that there was a wounded boy inside of him who cared about the people who suffered under human rule. A boy who wanted to save the kind of people the SDC would staff a train with, to drive through deadly Grimm territory, their only protection a small army of droids whose first priority would always be the cargo. And then he ordered her to kill them, and the ember winked out.
That boy wasn't real.
Or... maybe she kind of was.
It had been a long time since Blake felt like anybody's knight.
Decoupling the cars didn't feel like a choice—it felt like her only alternative to dying the way he had died, a very long time ago, maybe even before she ever met him. Becoming so indifferent to suffering that she wouldn't care who he killed, who she killed. Wouldn't care about right or wrong, or what he did to her, or making the world a better place.
He watched her disappear into the distance. And she watched him get smaller and smaller, her whole body trembling as it finally hit her, just what she'd done. Just what she was finally free of. Just what promise she'd broken.
She sank to her knees, the wind whipping her hair into a frenzy all around her, and shoved a fist into her mouth to muffle her sobs. Because this was the part of the train where the crew were, and she was irrationally terrified they'd hear her crying and come investigate the intruder on the roof. And then what? Somehow she didn't think they'd react well if she told them, "I just saved all your lives."
They certainly wouldn't understand if she told them, "I think you all just saved mine."