Yang

"Ruby, what's the plan?" My words come just after I had to roll sideways to avoid the Deathstalker's stinger. I fire some long-range blasts at its face and am disappointed to notice it didn't seem to feel their effects.

"Short version?" Ruby replies, cleaving through the torso of a regular Beowolf. "Don't die."

"Really specific, there," I tell her, once more evading the stinger before slamming my fist into the face of a mutated Ursa. This clearly doesn't make it happy, but unfortunately it does cause the Ursa to release a gout of flame from its mouth. "Holy shit!" I yell, jumping backwards. I escape mostly unscathed, mainly due to my immunity to fire, but my left boot is melted by the heat. "You bitch," I tell the Ursa. The cocking of its head in response to my voice is almost comical, but I'm more concerned with the idea forming in my head. Truthfully, it's an awful idea, and incredibly dangerous, but I figure it might work.

"Is anyone gonna call backup?" Blake asks.

"If you have the luxury of using your scroll right now," Ruby replies, now locked in combat with a mutated Beowolf, "go ahead!"

"The emergency siren and plumes of smoke should be a pretty big tipoff, though," I point out. The Ursa I'm fighting swipes its ice-tipped claw at me, so I sidestep and grab its arm before bending it too far in the wrong direction. As it howls in pain, I grab a flame Dust shell out of my pocket and prepare to throw it. As soon as I see embers rising in the back of its throat, I toss the shell. The flames sprout right as the Dust lands in the beast's mouth, causing a large explosion. When the smoke clears, the freshly-decapitated Ursa lies at my feet, thankfully still. "They die if you can make their heads explode," I helpfully announce to my teammates.

"And if I cave them in?" a new voice behind me asks. "Of course, my grenade launcher could blow them up, but smashing is just so much more fun, isn't it?" Nora adds, rather quickly. She runs past me and swings Magnhild, in hammer form, into the face of the Deathstalker. It recoils at the impact before trying to grab Nora with its claws.

"Nice of you to swing by," I tell her, firing at the Deathstalker's stinger.

"Apparently being married hasn't improved your sense of humour," Jaune says, joining Nora, Blake, Ruby and I on the battlefield. "If we don't make it out of this, no puns in the afterlife."

"Can we focus on the situation at hand?" Pyrrha asks. I'm pleased to note that all of Team JNPR has arrived, though Ren hasn't spoken yet.

"No, please, continue this banter," one of the Grimm trainers says. I snap my head round to face him so fast I nearly give myself whiplash. "It'll be all the more amusing when you don't notice each other's deaths."

"Not gonna happen, buddy," I tell him. "Call this thing off and maybe we'll be lenient." Rather than waiting for a reply, I continue fighting. Unfortunately, the remaining Ursai don't seem to want to breathe any fire, so I can't figure out how to take them down.

"Any ideas?" Jaune yells, narrowly avoiding the claws of a Beowolf. Suddenly, I'm struck with inspiration.

"Cover me," I tell Pyrrha, who happens to be fighting a mutated Beowolf three feet to my left. She nods and I dive behind a nearby car, pulling out my scroll as I land. I quickly go through my contact list, looking for the person I think will be of huge help in my current situation, and call out triumphantly when I find Raven's name. I press the "call" button, hoping almost against hope she's not busy, but my scroll informs me that "the person you are a calling cannot be reached at this time. Please try again later." "Fuck!" I yell. Putting the device back in my pocket, I get out from my hiding spot to rejoin the battle.

I'm about to charge at an Ursa when an odd glint on a rooftop a few blocks down the street catches my eye. I pause, waiting to see if my vision is playing tricks on me. I spot it again, and just barely have time to think it might be a sniper before I see a flash and know exactly what I'm looking at.

I feel the bullet tear into my right shoulder before I hear it, but it doesn't hurt right away. Did I just get shot? I wonder. Why didn't my Aura stop it? Suddenly, the pain comes all at once and I cry out, just barely registering Pyrrha's yell of "sniper!"

With my good arm, I fire a blast in the shooter's direction while my friends dive into cover and my wife runs to my side. She drags me down a side street, away from the Grimm and the shooter's line of sight, and begins inspecting my shoulder.

"How?" Blake asks, voice full of concern. "Was your Aura activated?"

"Of course," I reply, teeth gritted from the pain.

"I'll go after him," she tells me. "You call for backup and get yourself to an emergency room. You're no good to anyone like that."

"I can kick ass with one arm, you know," I say, secretly agreeing with her.

"I don't care." She sets her jaw in a way that tells me not to argue. She then kisses me and scales the nearest building, presumably to chase the sniper. I start heading to Vale General Hospital while getting out my scroll to contact anyone who might be able to help, though I have trouble assuring myself that a victory is actually possible here. As I walk, I try to use my Aura to close my wound, or at least slow the bleeding, but I find that I can't. If anything, it's speeding up.

After several blocks, and only being able to think of Weiss to call, I begin to feel woozy. Chalking it up to the blood loss, I decide to put pressure on the wound with my good hand. I grit my teeth again and continue walking, but the wooziness only increases. I figure I'm about ten minutes away from the hospital when I get so dizzy I stop to lean against a wall. Suddenly, blackness creeps into the edge of my vision, and I soon feel myself falling.

I wake up to a bright white light over my head and the comforting feel of Blake's hands wrapped around one of mine. There's a dull pain in my shoulder, but it's far more bearable than before. I have vague memories of drifting in and out of consciousness while being loaded into an ambulance and driven to the hospital, where I assume I am now. I grunt as my eyes adjust to the light.

"Yang!" Blake cries out. "You're okay!"

"Of course I am," I reply, still a bit woozy. "What happened?"

"I found the sniper." Blake's unusually curt tone made me think there was something else.

"And?"

"He won't be using his fingers," Blake tells me. "He should be awaiting trial now."

"And the attack?" I ask. "Did we win?"

"Weiss had arrived when I got back, but..."

"Blake. Is everything okay?" I'm now immensely concerned.

"Everyone had surrendered. The enemy were cuffing them and putting bags over their heads. Ruby saw me on the roof before they got to her and mouthed at me to run."

"Fuck. We have to save them," I say.

"I know, babe," Blake tells me. "But right now there's nothing we can do. We don't know where they are." Our conversation is halted when a doctor makes his way over to my bed. His clean-shaven face is twisted into a frown as he reads the chart at the end of the bed.

"Ms Belladonna, I presume?" he asks Blake, sitting down in the empty chair next to her. When she nods, he continues, "as the patient's spouse, you may stay. Now, Ms Xiao Long..."

"Will there be any permanent damage?" I blurt out, worried that I may lose function in my dominant arm.

"It's unclear," the doctor says. "Your collarbone is broken, but that should heal normally. Physically, we think you'll make a full recovery, but… The surgeon who removed the bullet, as well as the paramedics who brought you here, said your Aura doesn't seem to be working at the site of the wound."

"I noticed that when I tried to walk here," I say. "I couldn't close it, but I knew my Aura hadn't been depleted."

"In that case, we're not sure why the shot wasn't deflected, or at least slowed down."

"I tracked down the shooter and brought him in," Blake says. "His gun seemed pretty high-tech. Almost experimental."

"Are you saying someone's invented a gun that bypasses Aura?" I ask.

"It certainly seems that way," Blake replies. "I brought it in for analysis."

"In any case," the doctor cuts in, "I'm prescribing you painkillers and a drug which should help your Aura work properly again. You'll also need to change the bandage on your shoulder every day, and come back in a week for a check-up."

"All right," I say. "Am I cleared to leave?"

"Yes," the doctor says. "Just avoid strenuous activity."

"I'll make sure she does," Blake tells him. "Well, Yang, if you're up for it, we should go home. I'll go pick up your prescription later."

"Yeah. Okay," I agree, climbing out of bed without using my right arm. I follow Blake out of the hospital and back to our apartment, where I immediately sit down on the couch and turn on the TV. Meanwhile, Blake is being uncharacteristically fussy over me, asking if I need anything to eat or drink, if I need a blanket or anything like that. I tell her I'm fine, and she joins me on the couch.

We decide to avoid the news, neither of us wishing for a reminder of the attack. Instead, we watch a sitcom about a slightly insane family with weird accents dealing with life in their own bizarre way, while the matriarch, Agnes, swears at everyone and everything. One episode in particular drives my thoughts to an idea I've been toying with for a few weeks now.

"Blake, I've been thinking."

"That doesn't seem concerning in the least," Blake replies, once more demonstrating her infamous dry wit. I choose to ignore it.

"I figured since there's nothing we can really do right now, this might be a good time to talk to you about something that's been on my mind for a while... You'll probably think I'm crazy though..."

"What is it, honey?" The sarcasm is gone from Blake's voice, replaced by genuine interest.

"Blake... I wanna have kids." My wife is speechless for a while, and I wonder what's going through her head.

"Yang..." This doesn't sound good... I think to myself. "I do too, but are you familiar with basic biology?"

"I– wait, what?" Her answer has confused me to no end.

"At this point, I think we know each other's bodies well enough to know that we can't have kids," she says ruefully.

"I... I know," I say. "But surely we could adopt, or find a donor, or something, right?"

"Well... That's something we'll just have to think about, isn't it?"

"Yeah," I agree. "Yeah, we will."

As Blake gets up, announcing her plans to make dinner, I smile at the prospect of raising a child with the woman I love.

A/N: Quickest update to any of my stories in ages. My interest in this fic has been rekindled since I randomly had the idea about kids, but I don't know exactly how everything's gonna pan out yet. I do have names for the kids though, and they follow the colour naming rule.

Anyway, that's about it, so leave a review and follow/favourite if you wish.