how different our fates could have been ...

janus fortuna, for canon / oc ship week run by @rwbyocanonshipweek ! day 1 ; fated thread.

honestly, it’s less of a well thought au & more just a bunch of ideas thrown together but it’s quickly become like my lil nugget child tbh lmao. so here’s the lil tidbits i can gather together from my 3am madness.

qrow is blake’s biological father, her biological mother is a northern mistrali woman by the name of melania belladonna, a cat faunus. this in turn makes blake half human, half faunus which plays into a lot of her behaviour & secrecy later.

neither qrow nor blake know of their relationship until v4, though qrow had suspicions when he met her in v3.

melania & qrow were a small affair that burnt out quickly ; he was looking to forget his troubles & she wasn’t looking for anymore that came with having a relationship with a human. she was a runaway from the white fang, it would’ve been a death sentence to the rest hanging over her head.

in this au, blake has the trademark red eyes of the branwens. it was the first thing to tip qrow off, as well as her startling resemblance to not only melania, but a younger raven.

melanie died when blake was 8, under orders from sienna, a former close friend & something more. blake was taken into the white fang two weeks later & raised by them, coming to see sienna as a mentor & mother figure.

no one knows of blake’s half faunus nature, she presents as a full blooded faunus & was warned by her mother to never let anyone know. that they would kill her for it.

this led to blake overcompensating for a lot in the white fang, wanting to fit in & not draw any suspicion on herself but also, to prove she cared as much for their cause as anyone else did. more so. for a long time, blake hated the human half of herself, & her unknown human father. she hated melania too, though the guilt would always make her feel worse once the anger faded.

blake doesn’t go to menagerie with sun in this au, seeing no use to it as the white fang now use the island as a stronghold & she’s trying to evade them after adam & sienna issued the kill order on her after their conflict in the fall of beacon. instead she returns to northern mistral, finding her old apartment & then coming across rnjr + qrow. having gone through some of her arc with sun on healing her emotional wounds as they travelled through mistral, this is the chance for blake to finish this journey herself & stay, prove everyone wrong.

she & qrow find out about her parentage when she sneaks out to go back to the apartment, only to find qrow in it. when confronted with who her mother is, the timeline and “just his type of luck” ; it’s confirmed to both they’re father & daughter. blake takes it horribly, qrow tries his best but lbr it’s qrow.

ruby finds out before yang does ; ruby’s cautiously optimistic, yang is well. furious. another secret kept even if they didn’t know, another family member that left. she, in her anger, tells blake that she’ll never be her family. not again.

“ are you trying to get us both killed ?! just leave me alone already ! ”

their first meeting.

how qrow & melania first met ; qrow thinking she was the one he was supposed to arrest & melania thinking he was coming to take her back to the white fang. funny how life works out.

melania’s italian & both she & qrow are tied with gods. janus is the god of two faces, signifying change, transitions, beginnings, times between war & peace ; signifing her time in the white fang & her decision to leave. fortuna is the roman goddess of luck, both good & bad & she is often drawn as being veiled & blind, tying into how qrow even while being ozpin’s eye, is blind to a lot of goings on in remnant.

we all have battle scars. suck it up & built a brace for yours.