James shook his head. Stubborn idiot. “It doesn’t matter, Qrow,” he croaked, gaze still so heavy, so far away. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me.” Qrow hated how sincere it sounded, how completely he knew James believed it; had always believed it. Even now, there wasn’t so much as a crack in that conviction. Qrow swallowed the bitterness that rose in his throat and risked leaning over a little more, trying to catch James’ eye. “It matters to me.” Soft. Slow. Deliberate. It worked. For the first time since he’d set his weapon down, James looked at him. Qrow tried not to take the surprise personally; he hadn’t exactly made much of an effort to prove it, recently. He continued before he lost the opening. “You’re not some necessary sacrifice in all this, James. You never have been.”
Just finished a fuck of a fourth year of University, so I decided to give myself a late night to draw something completely unrelated to my studies or current projects. The fic is called “waiting for the dawn” and is stuck in the purgatory of my AO3 drafts.