RWBY: Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens

Chapter Seven: The World Turned Upside Down

The next few seconds were a blur.

Any sense of order was lost among desperate screams. White Fang members had flooded the hall. Blake reacted instantly, grabbing Yang and pushing the blonde behind her, taking a few steps back, away from the back wall, where the bullet sound had come from. A faint high pitched, long, sustained beep, not unlike a computer monitor, rung in her ears.

She did a quick scan of the room - Yang was shaking, her eyes glowing with fear and rage. Ruby was on the opposite side of the room, her heels discarded on the floor, looking calmer than Blake expected, ready to run. That was good.

That was all good, good, good, except...

Oh shit where the fuck is Weiss.

She heard a loud, incoherent shout, and then more gunshots started. She didn't know who was firing them. She didn't know where they were coming from. She grabbed Yang's wrist: "We're getting out of here."

Yang was silent for a few moments. Processing. "Not without Ruby."

"Yang, I don't think we can get across the room-"

Then the lights started to snap out. Glass showered from the ceiling. In one more fluid, instinctive motion, Blake knocked Yang to the ground, and curled herself over Yang's upper body, hoping to protect her from the glass, sliding them both under a table with the momentum of their fall. The blonde's eyes flashed with protest. "You don't have to-"

The faunus's head snapped around, her amber eyes in slits. "Shut up. I know what I'm doing. This isn't a first for me."

Yang's chest tightened, but she said nothing. Then, with a slight smirk, "Y'know, I never really thought of you as a top-"

Blake bit her tongue, turning some obscene shade of scarlet. If there wasn't the chance that they were about to die, she might've shot back a vaguely seductive, there's a lot of things you don't know about me, or something equally ridiculous, but considering there was a chance that they were going to die, and innuendos were the last thing on anyone's mind except Yang's, so she left it, scrambling off her girlfriend. "Sorry. Just - shhh, dammit. Did you see Weiss?"

Yang's face grew serious as she adjusted her dress. "No, I didn't. She headed over towards Winter, though."

"Fuck. Okay. That's where we want to go - the shot came from the opposite wall, and- wait, you can't see anything, can you?"

"Nope."

"Alright. Take my hand, you're going to have to trust me."

Yang nodded, and when she grabbed Blake's hand, she gave it a reassuring squeeze. "Good thing I'm quicker to trust than you are. You've got this."

"That's an understatement, but whatever," she muttered, and slid out from under the table, reaching up to grab the empty stainless steel punch bowl, ripping her bow off her ears, and using the ribbon to tie her arm to one handle while she held the other in her hand, doing her best to create a shield. God knew how much good it would do. Probably none. Nevermind.

She shouldered her way through the panicking crowd, Yang right behind her, eyes in slits, flashing with unease and determination. Bullets were literally flying past them - not aimed at them, necessarily. God knew what they were aimed at. Whose guns they belonged to. The police, or the white fang. Her blood ran cold, her muscles numbing as she caught a familiar face across the room.