Kell of Twilight
Walker of Twilight
- Pronouns
- Eliksni
You jævel stop giving me cliffhangers damnit. Good chapter by the way I would say 10/10 would read again.
I, Jaune: Or, Underpowered Alcoholic Makes Huntsman School Noticeably Worse [RWBY]
- Thread starter Eric d'Orléans
- Start date
pingas plight
-Most cunning scientific fuck-up in all of Mobius
Cthulhu: Okay, uh, guys, what the fuck is this?
Jaune: Incomprehensible chimeric speech of 18 different dialects
Nyarlothotep: What in the goddamn-
Shoggoth: OH SHIT, that experiment was successful!?
Cthulhu: God damnit- What the fuck do you mean experiment!
THIS! I feel like if someone implemented this into some kind of romantic drama, it would be leagues better that the others. Why? RATIONALITY. The ability for a character to recognize "This shit wouldn't work" and keep it from becoming anathema to the joy they had between each other.
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Eric d'Orléans
Bog Monster, Take the Wheel!
- Location
- Way Down South in Dixie
no
Honestly, Jaune has some Simurgh somewhere in his character DNA. So you're not far off.
Which Jaune is. Because boy fuck would this not be a working relationship. It only functions as a friendship because of how codependant on each other they are. They're toxic for each other, but they also can't really be without each other. It's not a healthy place at all. Blake is a kid and her romanitc worldview is all books and teen romance novels; Jaune is older (another reason why this is creepy af), and is willing to put forth the fact that he seems all the red flags. It's why he thinks it wouldn't work, and why Blake is confused and angry.
pingas plight
-Most cunning scientific fuck-up in all of Mobius
Yeah, you know someone's view on romance is fucked when over 80% of their knowledge on it is from books made to pander to the hrony nature of teens. Plus, remnant might even have weird laws on the age of dating. Under no circumstance should someone still in school be what blake is considering.
Orion Ultor
Everything’s Got A Price.
- Location
- East Coast
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I was imaging the White Fang as running the dating scene like the Yakuza do in Tokyo.
Eric d'Orléans
Bog Monster, Take the Wheel!
- Location
- Way Down South in Dixie
I don't know what that is, but if feels like it'd he human trafficking somehow.
It's because Blake's still a kid. She might legally but an adult, but as Ruby points out back in the start of V5, what separates adults from children is a lot more complex than paper. Age of consent exists for a reason, as does our general skeeviness towards vastly different age gaps between partners. There's a gap in experience and knowledge of just being around people that you only get through age, by doing it for years and years. Jaune might still be a bit of an immature ass, but he's got the experiences from being older than Blake just doesn't, and there'd be a big, unsettling gap between them if he did date her. There's almost no way, given all of the red flags they have between them, for it to ever be happy and safe and non at all creepy. Hell, Blake's relationships have been with an older guy who was a terrorist, and the rest of her experiences have been lots of young adult romance stories that have affected her perception; Jaune's perceptions are from a long line of actual relationships, all of which have ended in a horrible mess that went from "I love you, Eric" to "never talk to me again, you heartless bastard", and it's hard to really intimate that gap between them and make it work in a healthy manner. It'd end up a toxic mess that would make them both miserable and it'd be horrible, and Jaune desperately wants to avoid that.
In conclusion, do not date the cat girl. Ever
Volume 7, Chapter 1
Eric d'Orléans
Bog Monster, Take the Wheel!
- Location
- Way Down South in Dixie
Volume 7: Thirty Seconds Till Midnight
"You too can be a monster. It pays handsomely."
"You too can be a monster. It pays handsomely."
Chapter 1: Full-Bodied
"Uh-oh, guys! I don't know if we can gaslight gatekeep girlboss our way out of this one!"
— 1 —
"Uh-oh, guys! I don't know if we can gaslight gatekeep girlboss our way out of this one!"
— 1 —
Yoga pants made Weiss feel like a man trying to score a hot date at a battered women's shelter. Conceptually, if you squinted really hard, it almost made sense. But it completely fell apart with just the barest hint of self-awareness. She pulled on the elastic waistband, and didn't like the way it snapped back. It was like she couldn't quite get it comfortable, like it was trying to leave an imprint on her hips that made her think of stretch marks and the expensive, often invasive ways women in Atlas would try to cover up and remove them.
But when you wanted to go running, you needed to dress for the occasion. And she didn't think it would be smart to go for a morning jog in a skirt. It didn't help shake the feeling that these pants were never designed for fitness, and were in fact a scheme by some man in the clothing industry to make her butt stand out like some kind of baboon.
If Weiss was going to be a baboon, then she was going to be the best baboon!
Wait, no, scratch that. Scratch literally every single bit of that thought. She grabbed her head, forcing air through her teeth to make the mental image go away. Her breath misted in the January morning.
Jaune made a noise in his throat, looking up from where he had been bent over stretching. He had an expression like he needed a moment to process that it was actually her. "What's good, Weiss?"
She tried not to fidget with her waistband again. "Nothing. I live in a constant state of despair."
He pointed to his head. "Well, obviously. Because you're clearly not in a current state of des-hair."
Weiss stared at him. "What?"
Jaune made an inarticulate series of gestures. Behind him and above, someone opened up one of the windows in the Beacon dormitory. "It was a pun. A joke."
She blinked. "No, it wasn't. Jokes are funny. That was the opposite of a joke. You should kill yourself to preserve your family's honor."
He laughed. "Okay, okay. I see you, fierce, independent Weiss with the tomboy haircut."
Aaaand there it was. On the plus side, self-consciously running her fingers through her newly shortened haircut distracted her from constantly fidgeting with her overly tight waistband. Her long hair had gotten filthy and matted through days of tunnel crawling and urban combat. Shamrock had put the idea in her head, and it had kept bouncing in there. When she couldn't wash out all the filth and make her hair look right again, she decided to try to cut it. Go for something sporty. But it still felt alien to have hair that barely went down to her neck.
The weirdest thing about it was that she felt off balance. For the longest time, she had worn her hair with a ponytail on one side. A subtle act of asymmetry. Her hair had been long, almost luxurious. But she hadn't been able to keep it like that once rubber met the road and filth met the tail. Without the nearly imperceptible weight of the ponytail on one side, it just felt like something was missing.
On the other hand, her hair dried itself after mere minutes getting out. That was a new experience.
She fooled her arms. "As much as I usually like talking about my favorite subject, me, can we not?"
He leaned against a raised flower bed, eying her up and down. His gaze settled on her running shoes, far newer and less worn down than the old pair he was wearing. "Well what am I going to talk about, myself? You know it's always a bad idea to get two narcissists in a room together."
Weiss gestured at the sky. "Lucky you, we're not in a room. We're outside our dorms at Beacon. And this is one of your morning runs."
Jaune made a rolling gesture with his hand. "Which brings me to my second point."
She frowned. "Because you basically threatened to drag me along on one of your runs way back when we were fleeing the Grimm with Coco. We've got a couple hours until class begins, and, you know, until the sun actually rises. I figured I'd show up on my own terms before you remembered and dragged me out on yours."
He looked impressed, which somehow offended her. "Explains the weird wardrobe."
Weiss scowled. "According to my research, yoga pants pants are perfectly acceptable for running. Look at you, you're wearing sweatpants!"
"The difference is—"
She stabbed a finger directly into his face. "Don't you dare. If you actually finish that sentence about my butt, I'm going to kill you. And that's not a threat. A Schnee doesn't make threats. We make promises."
The smile was smug and toothy, and she hated him for it. "I was going to say the difference is, I can pull these off without my underwear showing. At least it would if you were wearing any."
Weiss hissed in a breath, acting without thinking. Moving her hands to the crease below her bottom. "Compression shorts! I'm wearing compression shorts like I do under my combat skirt. They go down pretty far. Stop staring. Stop giving me that look, you creep!"
Jaune laughed. "Okay, chill. You have to learn the first rule of running. It's basically advanced leg day. And just like leg day, the purpose is to have an ass you can show off." He stepped past her, giving her a hard pat on the back. "Stick with me and my frankly unhealthy psychological obsession with fitness, and you'll be the envy of all the models on the runway."
Her upper lip contorted. "I don't want to be a model. Do you know what models actually eat?"
"Nothing?"
She threw her hands up. "Ah, yes, how can I have forgotten? It's the same thing you eat!"
Jaune put his hand to his chest. The sheathed sword he was still carrying on his arm rattled slightly. "I, for one, am touched you think I look as good as a model. I think that's the nicest thing you ever said to me. It makes me want to say something nice to you in return!"
"Jaune!" she warned. "I came out here under the banner of truce because I thought it would be good for both of us. Do not make a mockery of my good will."
He shrugged helplessly. "Your new haircut looks nice, no cap. And I'm genuinely touched and excited to have a running partner."
"I—" Her voice hitched. Weiss sighed, slumping her shoulders. "Now why did you do that?"
"Be supportive of something I think is actually really cool?"
"Tch! Yes. I was enjoying my anger. It's the only thing keeping me warm in this thin material." She rubbed her arms, sticking her nose up.
He pulled out his scroll, opening up a map application. "Shame. But I can only tease you for so long before I start getting worried you're going to take it personally."
Weiss made a so-so gesture. "Less than a week ago I was trapped in an alternate dimension with a version of you who wanted to hurt me and make it personal. When you do it these days, I can tell the difference. Took me a while to realize it, but hey, I'm capable of learning how people operate. It's kind of fun."
"I do wish I were capable of character development," he said off-handedly, thumbing through his scroll.
But really, the alternate dimension thing was only half of her problems. Technically, it didn't even really do anything. Everyone had agreed that nothing had really changed, and they were all still together. Sure, Jaune apparently got to have a moment of growth, again, but it was what happened afterwards that mattered. Not the nearly two days of fighting and running and trying to survive. Not some weird background political stuff that this seemed to have caused for the country. Or even how her hair had gotten so matted and filthy she had to shear it off until she had this cut.
And it was just exhausting. Like, mentally. Jaune and Blake nearly killed each other before Weiss dragged them kicking and screaming into admitting they had feelings for each other. They had come dangerously close to something before that White Fang woman had appeared, claiming that somebody up in their hierarchy was looking out for their team. Then, on the eventual airship ride back to Beacon, suddenly Jaune and Blake not only weren't talking, they were also not even looking at each other. As if pretending the other didn't exist.
Weiss was tempted to try smacking them both for being idiots. But the problem was, she knew the two of them. She could count the number of people she actually considered friends on one hand. Sometimes those friends just happened to be completely stupid, leaving Weiss the only sane one left.
Like she said, she knew Blake and Jaune. The boy especially, if you just directly confronted him with a problem, was just going to shut down. And if Weiss had any doubt that something really bad had happened, the fact that Jaune hadn't been eating these past couple of days since they returned from Montluçon pretty much sealed the deal. He had the most suicidal ways of coping with stress.
Jaune turned his scroll around to her, showing a route around campus. "This is about a two mile loop. If we stick together you'll probably have it memorized after that."
"Okay," she said, trying to commit the route to memory. "But why do you run the weird complicated route instead of just using the track in the gym?"
He shook his head. "I get bored and lose interest. This here route got enough little twists and turns and interesting things to look at that you won't even realize you've gone the distance until you're done. I find that makes it easier."
Jaune sat down suddenly. For a puzzled moment, Weiss watched the way he stretched his legs. At first sitting down in a vaguely butterfly position, and then doing something with his knees to stretch out his thighs. She wasn't even entirely sure he was stretching for its own sake. His clothes were tight enough he might actually look less indecent if he was naked. From the way it hugged his chest and drew eyes to his abdomen, to the way it made his back stand out. The sweatpants were loose on the legs, but got tight again around his rear, only made more prominent by whatever weird way he was stretching. She doubted that shirt was the best to run with; she distinctly and uncomfortably remembered him claiming trying to run a marathon had chafed his nipples raw. The veins on his arms still looked a little unpleasant.
Not really knowing what else to do, Weiss just copied him. She just hoped it was for a good reason, not just to try to get her to show her own body off. Performing the motions, she got a sense of the muscles he was trying to stretch out without needing it explained. Part of her training growing up and staying in shape involved knowing how to stretch. It was about making sure the muscles that you were going to use were limbered up to prevent injury. And getting injured would be the worst thing possible. It meant you had failed somehow. You didn't understand the limits of what you could do and, like the tallest blade of grass, were cut down.
But more importantly, getting injured would take you out of commission. You needed a little extra food to ensure a smooth recovery, during which you couldn't work out or do anything. And extra food without exercise to burn the calories off meant you would get fat. And getting fat would smear her family's image of physical perfection and—
Weiss blinked hard. Bad poorly repressed childhood trauma. She had talked about it that one time with Blake and Shamrock, which meant she was completely over it. It both couldn't hurt her nor would it leave any further lasting mental scars. Dangit, she would not collapse into a dread spiral.
"Hey, may I ask a favor?" Weiss asked.
Jaune looked over, nearly lying face down on the ground with one leg curled up and across himself. "As long as it doesn't involve me facing the consequences of my actions, yes," he said candidly.
She tried not to be annoyed. Failed, but tried. "I know this is a run, but can you avoid wearing earbuds or anything? I'd like to be able to talk. Maybe give me advice or other things as we run."
He stood up, putting his hands on his hips. Weiss felt an intense urge to look away and grimace as he said, "Wow. Since when have you been able to look me in the eyes and ask for advice?"
She got to her feet, matching his posture. "Need I remind you that there is a considerable reward for whomever can locate my missing pride?"
"Ooh, what do I get if I find it?"
She looked around before shrugging. "My undying love and admiration?"
He snorted. "I thought you said it was a reward, not a punishment."
Folding her arms, Weiss sighed. "Look, can you run without earbuds or not?"
"Yeah, sure. I don't even bring them when I run in the first place."
"Really? That's surprising," she said. "I thought everyone liked to run with music."
He looked down the campus road, slightly grimacing. "This is finna sound stupid, but I'm awful at keeping a consistent pace. When I listen to music, I go too fast, too slow, depending on what I'm listening to, and it ruins my flow. I prefer to just pick a direction and get lost in my thoughts."
"What do you think about?" she asked, realizing she was unconsciously adjusting the waistband for pants again. The elastic made a slight snapping sound as she released it.
He shrugged, looking away.
"About us? Beacon?" She hesitated. "Past lives?"
Jaune blinked. He raised a hand as if to wave her question away, but paused halfway through the gesture. In the end, he let it fall to his side and said, "Nothing interesting back then. Quit jawin', get joggin'. I'm not feeling like going too fast so hopefully we'll keep pace."
And there it was again. She knew she'd touched a nerve there, which was why he was deflecting and ignoring. Jaune did this.
She wasn't sure she was sufficiently stretched out, but she ran after him. It felt like a sprint catching up to him. He noticed her, and seemed to slow down. He was so tall that what felt like a quick pace to her made him look like he was just shuffling in place.
"You call this being slow?" she asked.
"Yeah. Like I said, I'm not really feeling like I can get too fast today."
Her eyes narrowed. "Because you haven't been eating."
Jaune made the kind of face he always made when someone did this to him. It was an expression that tried to convey that he didn't care, that he wasn't about to change, yet it somehow conveyed that he didn't disagree. She remembered him doing it the last time when she forced him to eat.
"Jaune!" she said.
"I was eating like crap on all of our cave rations and then the day or two in the hospital," he said. "I'm just doing a detox."
"Detox of what?" she scoffed.
"I don't know. Sugar?"
"Jaune, don't be stupid. Because you can be really stupid, but you're not. You know you don't have an excuse. And you know it's killing you."
"I'll be fine; how do you think I lost all that baby and alcohol fat so fast? I mean, would you really rather me look like that skinny fat bastard wearing my face?"
"You're avoiding the issue."
"Because there isn't an issue. I'm gucci, mane."
"Is it because of Blake?"
He stared ahead aggressively and sped up. It wasn't hard to realize he was probably getting particularly lost in thought. Weiss knew she had probably fired too quickly. Jaune could sometimes go on completely stupid rants about any topic once you got him sufficiently riled up. Sometimes you could force him into telling you what was wrong. Other times it required a little bit of finesse before the floodgates opened.
And right now, it looked like it would take running really fast and killing herself.
"Stop flailing your arms; you're running like a girl," he said calmly when she managed to catch back up to him.
She let out a quick breath. "It's comfortable."
"You look like you're late to a date with a fancy rich boy. You're going to hurt your back like that. Remember what I said back in the caves?"
"Something about minimizing blood flow to anywhere but your legs," she said, already feeling her heart kicking up a storm. The chill air made her lungs feel dry.
He reached out a hand towards her. She tensed up. Jaune seemed to realize, and then asked, "Actually, it'll be easier if I do it like this. Can I touch you?"
"Sure," she said, frowning.
Weiss had no idea how he was able to keep that pace while turning his body towards her, almost running sideways. She made a noise in her throat as he put one hand on her stomach, the other hand on her upper back and pushed her shoulders forward. He made a gesture with one hand, shaking it until Weiss was miming it.
"There," he said, turning towards the route. They passed by a fountain currently frozen over. "Some people find it easier if it's almost like you're falling down continuously and just barely catching yourself. I prefer to keep my trunk steady enough, but your hands are like pinching pennies, but they're loose. The way you swing your arms helps keep your momentum forward and constant."
"I know," she huffed.
"Did you run before?"
She inhaled deeply. "Some cardio, not much. Lots of opera and ballet and dieting. There aren't many places to run when you live in a flying city."
"You lived in a flying city?" he asked, turning a corner. He did it quickly, as if he just suddenly jumped to change directions.
Weiss had to stop and pivot to turn as quickly as he did. "Atlas."
"Shrugged."
"What?"
"Atlas Shrugged. It's a book with a really cool title, but then you read it, and it's just dunking on poor people. What was that about a flying city?"
"Atlas flies. Hovers over Mantle. Everyone knows this except you."
"How does it even work, logistically? Can you breathe up there?"
She wiped her forehead, already covered in sweat. It probably would have been way worse if it wasn't so cold out. "A little. Up to a mile high, before you get into the skyscrapers. I grew up there. I have great lungs."
"You seem close to panting now."
"Singing opera and growing up really high doesn't mean I'm good at running. Can we slow down?"
"Do you want to stop?"
"No, it's only been a couple minutes."
He made a face, and then of all things sped up. It once again felt like sprinting to keep up with him.
"Stop. That!" she said. "One of your steps is like two of mine."
"Two of your very loud steps."
"What?" Weiss snapped.
Jaune stopped. It was only a couple steps from high speed to just standing there. Weiss felt like she nearly had to skid to a halt.
They had stopped somewhere near the center of campus. From here, she could make out the major avenues, from the dorms, to the airship docks, all the way to the CCTS Tower. Normally, this place would be packed, but the sun wasn't even up yet. Reasonable human beings were still asleep. Everything was bathed in sodium light, giving everything an eerie quality. Mostly in the fact that it made all of the snow look like someone had urinated in it just mildly.
"Your feet are hitting the ground weird," he said.
Weiss tried to get her breathing back under control. "What's that supposed to mean?"
He frowned thoughtfully. "Did you use those running shoes often?"
"A little bit for sports day in combat class. Why?"
"Don't get the wrong idea, but can I see your feet? Your soles I mean."
She reared her head back in a kind of suppressed scoff. "So exactly what kind of idea am I supposed to get except some weird fetish?"
"Don't flatter yourself; you're not my type."
Weiss eyed him skeptically. "I distinctly remember another version of you telling me that I was very pretty. He went out of his way during our big team moment to hit on me."
Jaune grimaced, hands in his pockets. "Yeah. But then I got to know you. Nipped that little opinion right in the bud."
She scowled at him in silence.
"What?" he asked, almost sounding hurt. "Take it as a compliment. I respect you so much that now I don't want you naked anywhere near me."
"No, it's just—I was expecting something funnier."
His expression sank. "Well, excuse me, princess. You're interrupting me during my most important part of the day. The hour or so I spend running every morning is when I take the time to think of all the ways I'm going to creatively insult you, or demean Shamrock's religion, or send mixed signals to Blake."
There! He actually mentioned Blake all on his own. That was the sign that she was getting through to him, in typically obscure and stupid Jaune fashion. It probably wouldn't take too much of just going along with things until he was so invested in this that he wouldn't be able to shut down.
Weiss sat down on a bench, holding one knee to her chest. "Obviously. Because you're really letting me down this morning. I've been relying on my ever-burning hatred towards you to keep me warm in this weather. If you let me down now, I'll freeze!"
He sat down beside her. "Don't tempt me. There's nothing that gets my rocks off faster than letting a woman down."
"And apparently examining her feet," she said.
He gestured for her shoe, and she reluctantly allowed him to touch it. It felt weird watching him hold it up, examining the sole.
"Your hand looks better," she said. "From where you broke it trying to kill your other self. Doesn't look as gnarled."
"Mm, a bit. Doc Croaker set it and used his Semblance after we got back. Still stings a bit, but doesn't look as fucked up. Wouldn't be able to run without some super medical work. Anyhow."
"Anyhow?"
"Anyhow, I think I'm right about your shoes," he said, gesturing at her foot. "You typically run in your high heels, right? You fight in 'em."
"I do, yes."
He tapped the upper part of the shoe. "You can actually see a little bit more wear and tear here by the balls of the foot. I think that's why your feet kept slapping the ground when you were running with me. I'm not really an expert in foot striking, but do know me that I be a midfoot runner. That's where the wear and tear is on my shoes because I have proper form. Your form isn't very good, so you're expending a bit too much energy, hitting the ground weird, and it's going to impact you. You basically need to unlearn how to run and then try it again. Probably with more specific running shoes."
He let her foot go, and she put it back in the ground. "You know that for a fact?" she asked, genuinely curious.
"Pfft. I'm only assuming biology even works here right," he said. "Ain't nobody could run in high heels like you do where I'm from. For all I know, most people here somehow get away with running like this."
She blinked in surprise. "You don't usually talk about that kind of stuff."
He nodded his head to the side slowly. "Used to be just stuff I thought about. We all decided it didn't matter, but every now and again I still have questions. Like flying cities."
"Like a flying city," Weiss said with emphasis. "There's only one in the world, Atlas."
"And everyone knows about it but me, yeah, I know, I know. Most of the time I just have to use an internet search engine to get this information." He ran a hand through his hair. "Do you know how embarrassing it is to look at children's websites for basic information?"
Weiss put her hands in her lap. "Was it difficult coming here?"
He made a so-so gesture. "I've got a couple extra years of memories and baggage, but I'm Jaune through and through. The wetware comes pre-equipped to just accept the most confusing thing. Everything else you can kind of follow along through context clues or just pretending."
"What do you mean wetware? What's that supposed to mean?"
Standing up, he said, "Biologic stuff. If I were to step back and think about it, really think about it, it's the subtle things that really stood out. I showed up to this place with a foreign culture, an altered language, unfamiliar fashion and religion, entirely different supernatural powers than I was used to, an alien sky—hell, even the gravity is different." He laughed. "I knew jack shit. So, naturally, my first reaction was to get wasted and try to kill myself. That's how I learned that gravity here is a little more forgiving."
She looked at the palms of her hands. As her eyes traced the lines off her palms, she slowly said, "I learned a lot of pretty world shattering stuff too that I think I'm still processing. That you might be a reincarnating soul parasite, that there might be somebody involved with controlling Grimm, and that maybe Dust is tied to things you really can't understand. Some kind of sorcery that's beyond me."
"Oh, I can understand it," he said off-handedly. "I'm just blasé. None of it particularly changes the conditions of my parole, so to speak. Dust is people? Cool, most people still need to fill up their cars with it every morning. There might be a demon that controls the Grimm? Whatever, I'll still be a Huntsman to protect people from them. My fate-twisting ex-girlfriend might have come back from the dead just to fuck with me? So long as she stays away from me and my friends and doesn't ask for nudes, we can be cool. I'm pretty good at not thinking about things that bother me if they're not immediately causing a problem."
Weiss nodded. But again, he was making light of something that was a problem. "Are you familiar with cosmic horror as a genre? I mean, did it exist where you're from?"
Jaune sucked on his lower lip as if he was surprised. "Only insofar at learning what not to name my cat."
She shook her head, presuming that meant he was familiar. "It's a popular genre in Atlas. The idea is that you learn a horrible truth about the nature of your reality, and it drives you mad. That there are great elder Gods who don't care about us. Or perhaps aliens visit Remnant, and the trash they leave behind from their equivalent of a picnic is to us a smorgasbord of wonders and horrors. That we humans are perhaps simply a cosmic accident. I feel like I'm in that position, where for a moment I saw behind the veil, and I don't feel any less sane. I mean," she laughed, "look at whatever you are. By definition you are a cosmic horror the likes of which I don't think I can really comprehend."
"Thanks, I feel the same way about women in general," he said dryly.
"And instead of panicking about that, hiding under my covers with the knowledge that maybe everything I know is somehow wrong, I feel like it had the opposite effect. Seeing demons or magic or whatever we went through, it just made me glad for whom I have in my life. I don't know how to explain it. I thought that by now I would be going insane from the revelations, but instead the only thing I'm thinking about are the people around me, my friends, and even my siblings back home. That's why I came out to run with you. It's not really my thing, but I thought it might be good for you, for me, us as part of a team. Because somehow something so small and stupid just feels like it matters more than ever."
He looked away, up towards the CCTS tower. If Weiss looked closely, she could just barely see the lights in the headmaster's office way up high.
"For creatures as small as we," Jaune said softly, almost hypnotically, "the vastness is bearable only through love."
Weiss touched her hand to her breast. "That was beautiful. I—I think that gets it. I think that's what I mean. Everything I saw and went through, just reinforces that basic fact about human existence. Or faunus too. You know what I mean. That was a good thought, Jaune." She gave him a half cocked smile. "Who'd you steal it from?"
He gave her the same smile back. "The advantage of having been on three worlds is I have the histories and philosophies of three different planets to steal from and pass off as my own."
"Now that is some advanced level plagiarism!"
"Idn't it, though?"
She balled her fist in her lap, scrunching up her yoga pants. "So what happened with you and Blake?"
He pursed his lips. "Are you really doing this to me?"
"Yes!" she snapped. "It's hard not to notice that something obviously happened. It doesn't just affect you. You can't just get lost in your own feelings and not think it won't hurt the rest of us. Shamrock might be too scared to bring it up, but I'm not afraid. Someone has to pull your ear and drag you kicking and screaming towards dealing with your problems. Aren't you supposed to be some kind of ancient immortal adult thing?"
"I don't know how old I am but definitely not ancient and probably not even an adult," he said hesitantly.
"Stop trying to make a joke out of this."
Jaune ran the complete gamut of emotions. She saw it on his face. It looked like the stages of grief. Anger and denial and all those less than savory emotions. He looked like he wanted to run. Then like he was just going to laugh it off. At one point, he looked like he was about to explode on Weiss. It took just a couple of seconds for him to get through it all, before he simply sighed and slumped his shoulders.
"I told her I loved her," he said.
"Because you do," she said simply.
"And she agreed."
"Because you're both so painfully obvious about it."
He pinched the bridge of his nose, screwing his eyes shut. "But I told her that we don't love each other the same way. I'm not in love with her."
"…oh."
Jaune looked down at her with a smile that was on the edges of madness. It made her skin crawl. "Ever seen a grown woman cry because of something you did? Ever seen someone you love have a breakdown because you couldn't lie to them? Watch them try to just end the conversation and slink away, because they know they can't hold themselves together if you're staring at them?"
Weiss jumped to her feet. "Why on Remnant would you do that?!"
"Because you brought it up and we had to talk about it!"
"There's literally a million better ways you could have handled that, I guarantee it, and you didn't!"
"She kissed me and I didn't kiss her back—what else are you supposed to say when she pulls back from that, looking terrified and betrayed?"
"You—you—"
He threw one hand up flippantly. "It's like I said, once I got to know you, I didn't have the hots for you no more. Doesn't mean I don't love you. Not like as siblings or daughters or anything like that. Don't know what to call it. I don't do people I actually know. I don't do people I can't afford to lose."
Weiss made a noise that was equal parts scoff and laughter. "What kind of insane backward logic is that? How are you supposed to have any kind of relationship with that policy? Do you only 'do' one night stands?"
"Maybe I don't define myself in terms of needing a relationship?" he said back, as if this was an actual argument.
"We just had an entire emotional moment about relationships and love!"
"Why are you getting mad at me about this?" he asked, taking a step back. "Why is it so hard to understand that maybe I can love someone without wanting to bend her over a couch?!"
"Ugh!" Weiss groaned, running her hand down her face, pulling at her eyelids. "I can't tell what's worse. The fact that you obviously handled this in the worst way possible, or the way I can clearly hear you making up excuses as you go to justify yourself."
He threw up one hand. "What, so I'm obligated to date someone just because they want me to?"
"Don't be ridiculous. Of course that's not what I'm saying," she said, sighing extra hard. "Honestly, I thought the problem with Blake was maybe you already had a girlfriend on the side. Like you and Coco."
"She and I are just friends, nothing more," he said. "I can be friends with multiple women without wanting to fuck 'em. Perfectly doable without being gay, y'know. In any case, didn't you just a moment ago think I was some kind of immortal reincarnating cosmic horror monster? In what world is any kind of romantic relationship with me healthy and not toxic? I'm the good guy here!"
"You are dumb," Weiss said, holding her hand over her mouth. "You are the dumb guy here. All you know how to do is lift weights, refuse to eat food for days, and fail to read the room. Dumb."
"Yeah, well!" Jaune sputtered. "All girls these days know how to do is eat fast food, charge they scroll, twerk, be bisexual, and—"
"No!" Weiss snapped, putting her finger to his lips. "Don't you finish that sentence, Jaune. There is absolutely no good way that is going to end if you complete that line of thought. And in any case, you're doing that thing again where you completely shut down, get ridiculous, and refuse to actually address the problem. That's not a solution, it's not funny, and it's a pathetic avoidance tactic!"
"But—"
"Jaune!"
He stared her down, as if trying to use his presence alone to make her back down. She saw the Aura burning behind his eyes, in the irises, a color she couldn't describe, and that made her want to blink. She froze her spine solid and met his gaze, refusing to let him win. Even if he was a foot bigger than her and who knew how many pounds above her. If he was angry and irrational and possibly immortal. It didn't matter to Weiss. She just put her hands on her hips and squared herself with a frozen spine.
Because that was the thing with Jaune. He liked to shut down and avoid problems. But if you had him cornered on something he knew he was wrong on, all you needed to do was be stronger than him. Face him down and he'd inevitably break first. But doing it felt like the mouse charging the lion.
Jaune let out the world's longest sigh, breaking eye contact. "Fine. Fuck. What? What idea could you possibly have to make this better other than just waiting for the feelings to settle down on their own?" He kept staring somewhere else. When he spoke, he sounded lost more than anything, the fight seeping out with every syllable. "Because I really don't want any kind of relationship drama or anything. I just—I just want my friend back. I want her to be happy. I want us all to just be happy and be able to be idiots together. And right now, I don't know how."
She let herself relax, to smile just slightly. "Remind me again how you can be a passable team leader but the worst when it comes to people at the same time?"
Jaune made a motion, reaching as if for a cigarette. Only to pause when he realized he wasn't carrying anything in his sweatpants. Looking sheepish, he said, "Oh, I'm great with people."
"Uh-huh."
"It's matters of the heart. Complicated stuff I still haven't worked out. What I want versus what others want, and not wanting to hurt the people I care about. Even the ice queen you are has to understand what it's like to have what feels like a gun aimed at your heart."
"My heart?" Weiss said, leaning forwards, hands primly behind her back. "Why, Jaune, that is my least vulnerable spot."
Jaune looked at her for a long thoughtful moment. Before he broke out into a smile, laughing. "Hey, total one-eighty here, but I'm glad you decided to come out on this run with me. I still don't really know how to handle it, don't really know how to proceed, but I think I'm glad."
Her expression didn't change terribly. "I think you'll be more glad once you can think straight. Which, as everyone knows, you can't do on an empty stomach."
He frowned. "Weiss…"
"Uh-uh-uh!" she said, waggling her finger at him. "No buts. Unfortunately, I don't have any food on hand, so we're just going to have to get breakfast ourselves."
He gestured at one of the sodium lamp posts. "Nothing's open."
"But they will be after we finish our morning run. It'll give me time to think how to solve your mess," she said with a wink. "Let's hit up the bagel place in the student center. My treat, no objections. I'll pay for it and guilt you into shoveling it into your mouth if I have to."
He took a step to the side. "You'll have to catch me first!"
"Oh, don't think that I can't, Jaune!"
— 2 —
"I don't think that I can, Jaune!" she panted, and coughed.
They had been running for nearly an hour and a half along a two mile loop. Long enough that now the sun was starting to poke over the mountains and other students had begun mosing out for the morning before class began. Jaune had insisted five laps would be easiest. According to his insane logic, around the third lap you were at the halfway point, meaning that basically you only had five more miles to go, and you might as well just finish it, meaning going ten miles was easier than six or less.
The first mile had been doable. The second mile, she was feeling it. On the third mile, she couldn't quite keep up the pace. And right now, as she looked at the doors of the student center, which was approximately the ten mile marker, the edges of her vision were fading, and she couldn't breathe.
"What happened to all of your spunk from earlier?" he laughed, stopping just to run a circle around her and then keep going.
"There's a crude sexual joke in here somewhere that I can't—" She coughed. "Oh my god, I see the light. How do you do this every morning!"
It would have been doable if she had used her Aura. She tended to do that during her most painful exercises and regiments back home. It had been her ace in the hole. Recuperate on the move with Aura. Or use it to go faster with the enhanced strength it gave you.
Jaune didn't do that while running. And in fact, he yelled at her when she did, and that really didn't make her feel very good.
"By just doing it!" he said.
"Agh!" she yelled, trying to speed up to keep pace with him. He didn't even look out of breath. He was still occasionally breathing through his nose.
"There's a certain line between mental illness and healthy relationship with fitness that any good runner has to eventually cross."
"I'm going to kill you! How did you talk me into this?"
"Because at this point, the fastest way to stop running is to reach the goal. It's simple math!"
"You failed math class!"
"I told you that information in confidence!"
Weiss tripped, stumbling over herself. Jaune reached out to catch her. And then, with a mocking kind of laugh, just picked her up under his arm like a suitcase.
"Hey, put me down!" she screamed. And then coughed again. She was so sweaty and gross it was amazing he could actually keep a grip on her.
Instead of letting her go, he tightened his grip on her, leaned forward, and broke out sprinting towards the student center. "Finish strong. Finish together! Finish so that I can mooch off your endless bank account for food!"
Despite the distance they had run, he somehow managed to go even faster than before. It was like it didn't bother him. He got fast enough that he actually began breathing quickly, sucking in air, his free hand moving like a knife through the air.
"Door!" she said. "Jaune, You're moving faster than the automatic doors!"
"Then we'll break through them!" he shouted.
"Door!" Weiss screamed.
They barely had enough time to register he was approaching and start open before he was there. He angled his body to the side and jumped through the opening. The wave of room temperature air conditioning hit her like a brick to the face as he kept running, his shoes squeaking on the tile floor. He darted through the early morning crowds with their backpacks, some of them in uniform, but most not, before turning sharply towards the little bagel store.
For some reason known only to idiots, Jaune jumped the last steps, sailing over nothing until his feet made contact with a bit of carpet that marked the bagel store. With a triumphant yell, he set her on her feet, and she nearly collapsed.
"Woo! Check it out, we made it!" He pulled out his scroll, fumbling with it in his sweaty fingers. "My pace app says we managed to just break below nine minutes per mile with that last sprint. You really need to step up your game. My sandbag lazy running pace is at least eight minutes."
Weiss put her hand on his chest, leaning against him, trying to catch her breath. She tried to say something snappy to put him in his place, but all that came out was a garbled mix of syllables. It didn't make any sense how he could do all that running and not be out of breath! She needed to redouble her efforts to gain control over her lungs and—
And that's when she noticed the crowds of people sitting at tables all around the store, the ones waiting in line, and the not insubstantial amount of people who had noticed and were staring at them. A lot of them looked messy, fresh out of bed looking for breakfast, but none of them were like her. None of them were soaked to the bone in tight clothing, smelling disgusting, and barely able to breathe. She felt a hot rush of embarrassment creep over her cheeks, and coughed.
Jaune bathed in the moment of attention, waving. "Hey, y'all! We're runners now. Cardio does not kill gains! Right, Weiss!"
"Agafagar," she sputtered, unable to make words happen. She desperately wanted to double over or sit down and try to collect her breath, but she couldn't do it with so many people watching her. They had gone from pretty much being alone on the run to being surrounded by people, and oh god it was horrible.
Her one point of solace was that people had really low attention spans. Most of them who had glanced at their rather showy entrance went back to ignoring them, checking their scrolls, or just chatting over breakfast. But Weiss didn't miss that a couple groups of people found a new topic of conversation with their arrival.
So did Jaune.
"Hey, that Jaune and Weiss?" "Yeah, guys from the TV." "Cool! I thought they died or something." "Welcome back, guys! Save some Grimm for the rest of us next time, huh?"
Jaune elbowed Weiss. "Why are we suddenly famous?"
She had sucked in enough oxygen to be able to speak again. "Montluçon is still the biggest news in the world right now, and we were front and center on all the news."
"Huh," he said, fishing beneath his shirt and pulling out his little crucifix necklace that had been jingling all throughout the run. "Cool. Last time I was on TV was for accidental domestic terrorism against the federal government. Do you think they actually know any details?"
She wiped her forehead, and then was immediately conscious that she had just flicked dozens of droplets of sweat under the floor. "Don't know. I know the headmaster was apparently holding the after-action interviews with Team CFVY today. I'm sure he'll be asking us next. So all they probably saw was us fighting Grimm and trying not to die horribly for several hours."
Jaune grinned. "Yeah, we survived and now we're back on that sigma grindset! Go Team BASS!" he called out. "Make of that what you will, so long as what you will is us being awesome."
Weiss put her hands up to her eyes like blinders, as if she could use a force alone to make the embarrassment stop. "I do not know this man. I have been kidnapped and am being held against my will. Stranger danger!"
He gave her a pat on the back as he walked past her, and she coughed. "It's true. I'm forcing her to buy me food. I'm the most tyrannical and yet sexy badass team leader on campus. C'mon, Weiss. Or are you just going to stand there and give me an excuse to not eat for another day?"
"Ugh!" she groaned. Every step she took forward made her feel like her knees were about to break. A Huntress wasn't supposed to just run like this without her Aura.
Which was why a couple of steps in she nearly stumbled headfirst into a pair of boys, a blond faunus with a monkey tail and some loser who thought he could actually pull off blue hair. He looked like he was trying too hard to look cool, and the faunus seemed like shopped at the same reveal-all-your-chest pornstar store Jaune did.
The blue haired guy stepped forwards to catch her. "Oh, hey, you're—uh, you're one of those really cool, famous people now, right?"
The boy next to him made a face. "Neptune, I don't know if she's really famous. I think she was just working with Team CFVY and things went wrong. They're the famous ones." He squinted at her. "Have we met before? You seem familiar."
"Huh?" Weiss asked, pushing herself away from Neptune. She didn't miss the drops of sweat she had left on his gloves.
Neptune, with an odd Mistrali style of dress and a pair of goggles cinched up onto his forehead, looked Weiss up and down appreciably. "Dig the style, though. Yoga pants look nice on you! I'm Neptune, by the way. This is my partner, Sun. We're temporary transfer students here for the Vytal Festival."
For some reason, the friendly attitude put her in a sour mood. "Are you hitting on me?"
"Uh, yes? No?" Neptune looked at his partner. "What's the correct answer here? Should I try to play it cool and pretend I'm looking for a partner in the upcoming dance?"
Weiss sighed, and needed to suppress a cough from her ragged throat. "I'm flattered, but now is really not the time. I'm already dealing with enough morons on my plate. Aaand it looks like I've already lost him. Great!"
Sun whistled. "Wow. Harsh. You really are the ice queen they say you are, huh? That's kind of awesome! I respect balls like that on a woman."
She scowled. "Please forward any and all compliments, marriage requests, and unwanted sexual comments to my secretary."
Jaune appeared beside Weiss and took her hand. "Nope!" he said, popping the P. "Not dealing with this. Not dealing with you two. Not dealing with the existential dread!"
"Hey, what?" she asked as Jaune dragged her away deeper into the lair of the Lightsong Bros. Bagels.
Still leading her towards the line for the front counter, he leaned in and whispered, "One of those guys had a skinwalker illusion clone thing in that reality marble whose fingers I bit off and freaked Blake out because of."
She pulled her hand away from his, remarkably easy given how sweaty they both were. "Wait, biting someone's fingers off wasn't just some kind of weird metaphor? Why?"
"The real question is why I did that and Blake still chose to kiss me. I'd had severed fingers in my mouth!"
Weiss… ugh. Weiss just shook her head. She ran her fingers through her short hair, feeling how wet it was. The interior of the student center had good air conditioning, not hot enough that it felt stuffy, but not cold enough that they were freezing with all the sweat.
"You know what?" she asked. "I don't care. I do not care. Categorically, not my problem. That's something for you and Blake to work out once I figure out how to fix your mess."
They got in line.
"Did running them ten miles help you think about that?" he asked, looking the menu over.
She tried to tuck her hair behind her ears, and then found that with this new haircut, she didn't really have enough hair to do that. It was subtly distressing. "I was mostly thinking about dying."
"Understandable," he said blankly.
"But—" Weiss paused, looking around all of the students sitting around and in line. They really couldn't have a private conversation here. And she felt like this wasn't a topic for the open air. Granted, coming here was her idea, but she was mostly just trying to address the symptomatic issue of Jaune stressing himself out to the point of starvation, as he was wont to do.
She glanced over her shoulder at Neptune and Sun as they argued over picking somewhere to sit.
"One of those guys mentioned the school dance was coming up," she said.
Jaune gave her a weird look. "Is your suggestion about the problem of me not wanting to date Blake, to take Blake on a date and go dancing?"
She scowled at him, moving forwards in line. Reaching for her scroll so she could pay for their order with the QR code, she said, "Stop making it sound so hostile. It's a big thing for a lot of people. And maybe it might be a nice gesture. It would prove that even if things aren't what you both wanted, you're still capable of being friends, doing the goofy things you probably would have done. I mean, let's be honest, knowing you, if you hadn't confessed your feelings, you two would have probably both wound up at the dance together anyways."
"I don't think that's true," he said, frowning.
She gave him a level look. "I was convinced you two were sleeping together from the moment after that whole microwave radio burst incident thing that apparently you two somehow caused together. You're basically unhealthily codependent. It's honestly not surprising that you're both falling apart right now, since you two currently aren't attached at the hip. You would have wound up going together as a date one way or the other."
"I'm still really not sure if you're trying to fix our friendship or set us up together," he said.
She shrugged with one hand. "I'm not convinced there's a difference."
And suddenly, they got to the front of the line. Bagel sandwiches and side items, specifically fine-tuned for breakfast. Which meant bagels, eggs, breakfast, and all the beige potato products you could wave a baton at. Honestly, the biggest reason she wanted to go here was to try their bagels, and figure out their secrets so that she could reverse engineer it for her own recipe.
Weiss was the bagelmaster. Commercially mass produced bagels would have nothing on her superior artisan craftsmanship. But the first rule of corporate espionage was to get your hands on your rival's products. The second rule typically had to do with undercutting the market by subsidizing your reduced cost product with your other profitable assets, and then selling at a loss to drive your opponent out of business before ramping up prices to recoup the economic damage.
She was going to set up her first batch with her friends and use them as free guinea pigs for her experiments.
So the two of them basically got pretty much everything on the menu.
The boy working the cashier looked to be a student trying to make some extra money on the side. There was apparently lots of student employment, like the campus café. And with a certain sense of smug satisfaction, Weiss could see the economic fear in his eyes as he had to prepare their massive order. Soon he would be out of a job, or perhaps would find new management as part of the greater SDC Bagel Branch of operations.
"Why do you look like you're about to start laughing maniacally?" Jaune said, taking a nervous step away from her.
"Because while I'm helping you with one hand, I'm plotting the destruction of my enemies with the other," she said primly.
He and the cashier exchanged nervous glances.
Weiss held up her scroll to scan the little QR code on the register. It was a direct link to her bank account, just processing the payment here. The worst part about it was people in Vale expected a tip for their service. That had never sat right with Weiss. It was like they demanded extra money for doing their job.
The register made a beep.
"Uh," the cashier said. "I think your card just got declined."
Weiss blinked. "Is… is this going to be a machine issue?"
"I—I don't know," he said, eyes wide.
Weiss fished into the uncomfortably tight pockets of her yoga pants. Even though she could pay with her scroll, she also had a tight little metal wallet with her actual cards in it, from ways to buy things to her various IDs and passport. Things she never left home without.
Almost frantically, she thrust her card forwards towards the register and slid her card through. It made the same beeping noise. So instead, she inserted it into the chip reader and waited.
The same result.
She and the cashier locked eyes. A dawning sense of horror began to creep up upon both of them. Something about this was intensely wrong. A basic payment that had never failed before in her life was suddenly refusing. And now both of them, her and the cashier, had to deal with the reality that she had ordered food, and now couldn't pay for it, and neither of them knew how to handle this eventuality.
"That's impossible," she said, feeling her heart start to palpitate. The sweat that it only just began drying came back in full force. "I mean, look at me, I'm not broke. I bought these sweatpants like a day ago!"
"Weiss?" Jaune asked, looking from her to the cashier with confusion instead of the appropriate amount of panic that this situation called for.
She tried the QR code again. Then her card, both ways. No new results. Weiss felt her breath hitch and her chest. The edges of her vision started to flutter.
"I have money!" she said. "You know who I am. I'm Weiss Schnee. You know I can't be broke. Stop looking at me like that!"
The cashier held up his hands. "I—I'm not!"
"Then why is it declining my card!" she most certainly did not scream in a panic, because that would be most unladylike and definitely not civilized or proper for a girl like her.
"Weiss?" Jaune tried again, putting a hand on her shoulder as if to reassure her.
"Look, right now I am very invested in this team relationship drama problem, but also now I'm dealing with a new existential threat to my very being. Please let me solve this so that I can get back to calling you an idiot and shoving you towards the obvious solution you probably should have seen miles before this even began. Okay? Okay!"
The cashier suddenly tilted his head. "Wait, are you, uh, from Atlas? Use Atlas banking?"
She scoffed. "What part of Weiss Schnee isn't clear to you?"
He pointed. She followed his eyes to one of the TVs around the bagel shop.
It was a press statement by this kingdom's newest prime minister, Monsieur Kieran LaChance, who up until a couple of days ago was just a politician and her technical former employer as a Huntress. The labyrinthine and unstable politics of the kingdom had somehow allowed a colonial representative to become the leader of the Conservative Party via some kind of election, which somehow meant he was in charge of the country now. This kingdom's government didn't make any sense to her.
But it didn't need to make sense. Because the word scrolling across the bottom of the screen spelled it out for her. Beneath the captions of his current speech from the city of Montluçon, she saw the words, "…PM LaChance has requested payment processors in Vale to cease processing payments from Atlesian banks across the kingdom pending an investigation into General Ironwood's role in the January 18th Riots and subsequent unilateral and illegal actions in Montluçon airspace."
Meanwhile, according to the captions, the prime Minister was saying, "We cannot overlook that the Grimm attacks on my home, the most important source for weapons manufacturing in the kingdom outside Graad, and which saw the senseless slaughter of nearly a thousand Valean citizens, including members of our sovereign government—that those Grimm originated from the Dust rich caverns that the Schnee Dust Company had exploration and excavation rights to. We have a duty to protect our democracy and sovereign nationhood against all threats, foreign and domestic, be they White Fang or white as snow."
She just stared, feeling her already shaky legs get worse. "Those… those idiots just made it illegal for my family to pay for anything in Vale. Rent, our employees, bagels. And they're blaming us! Oh my God, this is economic warfare, and I'm left high and dry."
Jaune was reading the news scroll, and it slowly looked like even he was grasping what was going on. "Weiss? Are you going to be okay? If you need me to pay for this, I have some loose change laying around. It's no biggie; we can get through some dumb politics together."
"No," she said hoarsely. "This is a complete biggie. And I'm not okay."
"Weiss?"
She turned to look him in the eyes and felt herself shiver. "Because I need to call my father."
a/n That's right! I made GirlBoss Tomboy Yoga Pants Weiss real! She can hurt you! Posting this because due to Army reasons, I suspect I won't be able to post this coming Thursday like normal.
pingas plight
-Most cunning scientific fuck-up in all of Mobius
"Yep. That's me. Weiss, trillion-dollar Lien heiress, carried like a briefcase by a effigy of stubbornness & impossibility through automatic doors that somehow haven't opened yet. I bet you're wondering how I got here. I'm trying to remember that myself."
"Oh, shit, are we doing movie intros now?! Pog!"
"Butt out, Jaune, this isn't your tragic backstory!"
Eric d'Orléans
Bog Monster, Take the Wheel!
- Location
- Way Down South in Dixie
I do not like the record scratch/freeze frame Weiss. No I do not.
pingas plight
-Most cunning scientific fuck-up in all of Mobius
Well, ain't that just Ice Cold of you to say.
Anacromacia
"It's not gay, it's magecraft!"
- Pronouns
- He
Should be weiss cold eyyyyyyyy
pingas plight
-Most cunning scientific fuck-up in all of Mobius
Please, hell will Freeze Over before I go for such low-hanging fruit.
esseresse
R'lyth Power Make-up
- Location
- divorceville, state of depression
- Pronouns
- They/Her
You are now picturing Wiess make snow and ice puns a la a Arnold' mr freeze from Batman and Robin
pingas plight
-Most cunning scientific fuck-up in all of Mobius
Weiss, doing a drug bust: FREEZE, SCUM!
Jaune, the tag-a-long sidekick: Yes. Let the one-liners flow through you.
Volume 7, Chapter 2
Eric d'Orléans
Bog Monster, Take the Wheel!
- Location
- Way Down South in Dixie
Chapter 2: We Don't Operate on Jars of Spaghetti Sauce
"God gave me depression, because had my ambitions gone unchecked, I would have bested him in hand to hand by the age of sixteen."
— 3 —
"God gave me depression, because had my ambitions gone unchecked, I would have bested him in hand to hand by the age of sixteen."
— 3 —
Blake was alone.
And it was all her fault.
Waking up in her own bed in the dorms gave her a weird sense of dysmorphia. It felt like a lifetime since she was here, instead of in some kind of alternate reality, or in the caves, or somewhere in a war-torn city. Or a hotel, head on her partner's chest. She stared at the ceiling, trying to parse out exactly where she was until it all hit her.
Usually, Jaune would wake her up. She knew he had a scroll alarm set, but he'd always woken up before it. Blake would hear the dim jingle of his necklace as left the covers and made his bed. She'd glare murder at him for daring to wake her up as he stretched, did calisthenics like push-ups, and eventually dressed himself to go out for a morning run. By the time he left, she had typically woken herself up and decided to just roll with being awake.
This morning, that had happened. And she'd just tried her best to ignore him and go back to sleep. She rolled over, facing the wall, screwing her eyes shut in the hopes that maybe she could drown out the sounds of clothing rustling against his body or the faint noises from his necklace.
She heard Weiss get up too, and tried not to think about it. She simply forced herself back to sleep until her alarm eventually got her. Blake had grown so used to getting it before it went off and preemptively snoozing it, that she was almost surprised she still had an alarm set for the morning.
Blake set up, blinking the sleep from her eyes, and looked around at just how empty the room was. For a moment, she imagined herself back on the night she punched Weiss, how she had slunk away to hide in one of the empty rooms now being occupied by the foreign students here for the Vytal Festival. As the last vestiges of sleep left her, she almost imagined the past month had just been a dream. That she hadn't told Jaune she loved him. Hadn't been so stupid as to kiss him. And hadn't tried her hardest not to cry what he pushed her away.
Shamrock came out of the bathroom, her hair a messy red mop. She almost didn't seem like she could see Blake, just carrying on like a zombie as she got onto her knees and started fishing under her bed for her backpack. That being the only thing really moving in the room, Blake watched with blank eyes.
"I can feel you staring, Blake," she said, pulling out her shoes and a crumpled school uniform in the boy's fashion. Shamrock gave it a sniff and seemed to find it acceptable.
Blake blanked. "Ugh, what? No!"
Shamrock sat under bed, slouching forward so she could rest her chin on her hand. "One of these days I'm going to be the one having an emotional crisis, and you're not going to know what to do because I'm the only one of us who is mentally stable."
"You're not even physically stable!" Blake said, and then briefly wondered if she had gone too far. She was about to suck in a breath and apologize, when Shamrock brushed her face and freckles appeared on her cheek.
"Says the girl who still wears a bow to hide her ears," Shamrock said without any heat.
Blake looked away, feeling her ears flatten. She hadn't worn the hairbow in Team BASS' room since last Long Night. "It's for personal reasons."
Shamrock kept her chin on her hand, nodding. "Look, I'm only like maybe thirty-percent awake right now? The doctor is only in after drinking a nearly lethal dose of morning coffee. So if I'm going to offer you some help, I can't legally be held responsible for medical malpractice. Even if the malpractice is really funny."
Blake stood up, feeling oddly clammy in her pajamas. The dorms didn't have the best heating. She suspected the school presupposed if you really were cold, you could use your aura, but she had no proof it just wasn't shitty HVAC. "What's funny? There's nothing funny going on. Just a perfectly normal morning."
"So you're not blue due to painfully obvious boy trouble?"
Blake made a noise in her throat. "No!"
"Ah. Trauma over your ex?"
"Stop it!"
Shamrock seemed to think it over for a moment. "Lingering results of a strained relationship with your dead parents?"
"They're both alive and I have a great relationship with my mom and dad, thank you very much!"
That seemed to catch Shamrock off guard. "Huh. Really?"
"Yes!"
"Weird. I'm pretty sure over half of the kids on campus will break down into their tragic backstory at the mere suggestion of their parents."
Blake considered. "Actually, yeah, that is kind of weird. It's like almost everyone here has the same dark tragic secret but it's also painfully obvious."
Shamrock shrugged with one hand. "I think it's the superpowered equivalent of girls who grow up without their fathers becoming strippers, or boys who grow up without their fathers also growing up into being girls who become strippers. Just toss in an Aura into that mix and you get us."
Blake didn't really know what to make of that. "Uh, what? Are you—are you trying to tell me something? You okay?"
Shamrock tilted her head, and with one brush of her hand over her face, suddenly he was smiling. "No. What on Restavec would ever make you think that about me, Blake?"
Blake rubbed her arms. "You know what, this conversation is getting weird. I'm not sure if you're making a joke or—I'm just kind of uncomfortable."
"Oh, look at the girl who has both living parents who love her, being uncomfortable," Shamrock said with a friendly laugh, removing his nightshirt to put his official uniform undershirt on. "I bet you call them every night and they tell you how proud they are of you."
Part of Blake wanted to be offended, but Shamrock's tone was clearly not meant to hurt her. He was just, for lack of a better word, screwing with her. Which, although not exactly hitting the mark, did somewhat bring her out of her morning funk. Enough to remember to use the bathroom and her teeth, giving her time to collect her thoughts.
When she got out, Shamrock was fidgeting with the buttons of his suit jacket.
"Y'know," Blake said, trying to find her own uniform. She hadn't really had the chance to wear it in a month. "I haven't really talked to my parents in maybe a year."
"That bother you?" he asked, tying a bow tie around his hands so he could adjust it around his neck later.
"I don't know. I guess it kind of does. I've never really had the occasion. They have half an idea of where I went, but they don't know I'm at Beacon." She shrugged, trying to put on her uniform skirt, remembering the story Coco told her of the girl who went commando in order to make a point about their short length. "They live pretty far away. A good few time zones up. Whereas we've got some time before the cafeteria opens for breakfast, and they're probably out already enjoying lunch."
"You should give them a ring," he said simply.
"Huh?"
Shamrock made a circular gesture with his hand. "If you're willing to skip breakfast, you can probably get an hour or so of time to chat. We're kind of located at the base of the CCTS tower, which can literally call almost anywhere in the world. Montluçon looks like it was pretty big international news. There's a good chance your parents saw you out there and are worried."
Blake froze midway through buttoning her blouse. She remembered the way the Humming Lady had made pretty clear implications Adam had seen her on TV and that was the reason he had ordered her and the local White Fang to help her team out. The idea that he had been watching her from somewhere far away, and had gone out of his way to try to affect her life, gave her uncomfortable goosebumps. But the idea that people like her parents had seen her, and had no way to contact her, because they didn't even know where she was, and—
"I mean," Shamrock laughed, "if my own mom didn't consider me legally dead for Vacuan tax credits, I might have called her up. I don't really get this relationship crap, but maybe this will be one more little worry off your belt so you can focus on what's really giving you this embarrassingly obvious saudade."
Which was how Blake ended up skipping breakfast in order to go to the communication rooms in the CCTS Tower. It wasn't exactly the most coherent idea. Just a bunch of vague feelings of guilt pushing her forward, and a desire not to run into Jaune at breakfast. It was an ursa she was going to have to face one way or the other when class began, but putting it off, the necessity of being shoulder to shoulder with him until she had no choice due to mission or dorming, helped put her mind at ease. Teams typically sat together when they ate. Assuming Jaune was even going to eat breakfast at all, which he seemed to forget to do a lot.
The communications room was located pretty high up in the CCTS Tower. This early, the only people who seemed to be here were a rare handful of students who weren't wearing regular uniforms. She assumed they were Mistrali students trying to call home at a reasonable hour. Same reason she was here; Menagerie shared a time zone with one of Mistral's.
Of course, figuring out how to make a long distance call to Kuo Kuana wasn't the easiest task. The capital of Menagerie didn't have a major tower like this; it was more or less a communications spoke of the main tower in Mistral Prime. Calling someone who operated off the same CCTS tower was simple enough. You just needed their basic number. But calling outside your location region required knowing prefixes to the right tower, which went to another tower, And then dialing the prefix to get through that tower. You needed a map to understand which prefixes to call and a lot of power. If she just dialed her father's number currently in her own scroll, the result of a data transfer from her old model to the one that Beacon provided her, it would just dial some random person in Vale who happened to have the same number. That was the nature of a long-distance call.
Blake had to consult a map of CCTS towers and their communication relays before dialing in through the radio computer.
Blake sat at the visual screen, before the camera, and dialed 00—the two numbers indicating you were dialing out of region. If she wasn't doing this from within the CCTS tower itself, her scroll bill would be enormous. It was more efficient and cost-effective to make these kinds of things from the tower itself.
Her eyes followed the map on screen, which handily gave instructions for the direction she wanted to make her call. Jumping from tower to tower across mountains, plains, and oceans via the endless elysium of airwaves.
00-14-14-44-71-11-73-61-45. And then finally, when she had dialed into Kuo Kuana, she rang her father up at 16-74-51-451.
Her heart pounded with anxiety. Fears that this wasn't the correct number and that instead she was accidentally calling some little granny in the backwater end of Solitas. Or that maybe her father would see this was an incredibly long-distance call, and decline to answer. Or just that this was a terrible idea, because they weren't worried about her at all and hadn't seen the news and giving them a ring would only ruin their day. She hadn't left under the best circumstances.
The windup was long. Slowly crossing wireless communications over an entire planet, long before it was even able to get the first call to her father. She sat there and waited, hugging herself, slowly rocking back and forth as she waited for it to connect in the first place.
The elevator to the communications room opened. Blake paid it no mind, rubbing her arms in her private little call booth until she heard familiar voices. Under her hair bow, whatever ears went erect. She poked her head up over the wall.
Weiss walked with the determination of a ballerina about to perform her seminal work, fists bald, and eyes dead set ahead. She walked with a very slight limp, softly glowing white with her Aura to compensate. But by god, what was she wearing? And that tomboy haircut! Blake wasn't even sure it was Weiss, but the scars on her face meant it couldn't be anybody else.
But walking beside her—
Blake ducked back down, hiding in her booth. Jaune. Of all the rooms in the world he could have walked into, and he walked into hers. She didn't want to think of why he was with Weiss, or why he was wearing almost matching sports attire, or the way they were both covered in sweat, or—
She forced her palm into her eye, willing the mental image away. The very moment she had them, she realized how ridiculous and petty she was being, and a wave of nauseous embarrassment crept over her. It wasn't a rational thought. It was a spinning hamster wheel in her head going to impossibly bad conclusions for its own painful sake.
Blake looked at her monitor again. The call was still routing through the entire world.
"But international calls are kind of expensive, yeah?" Jaune said. "Is this even going to be worth it?"
Weiss sighed. "Look, I don't have any better options. All of my banking is done through home. The last person I want to call is my father, but I'm not sure what else I can do."
"We can help support you?" he offered.
She scoffed. "With what money? You spend everything you have on not wearing clothes, and make up the difference by not eating food."
Blake listened as they walked past her booth towards one of the other call terminals. Once they were far enough, she poked her head up to watch.
Jaune made an expansive gesture with one hand. "Okay, fair point. But it still feels like we're rushing to an obvious conclusion. Besides, this call is expensive."
She gave him an annoyed look. "But they're a lot cheaper and economical if you do it here in the CCTS core instead of an ancillary tower, or God forbid a personal device."
The boy shook his head. "No, I mean, if the point is that neither of us have any money, how are we going to make a call in the first place?"
Weiss froze as soon as she got to one of the call terminals. "I… oh. That's… huh."
"That was what I was getting at," he said with a sign.
Standing there with a blank expression as she idly fingered her short hair, Weiss said, "I've… never actually considered a possibility where I couldn't buy my way through a thing. This is…" Weiss laughed awkwardly, cheeks suddenly going red. "This is actually kind of, aha!"
He put his hands on his hips, staring down at the monitor within the booth. "Hey, hold on. I think I have an idea." He vanished into the little cubby as Weiss stood outside, watching him and playing with her hands like she didn't know what to do with them.
"What?" she asked.
Blake just kept staring at Weiss' back. The little white sweater and those comically tight yoga pants made her look entirely wrong. Like she was trying to imitate the kind of fitness influencer that Blake hated as a rule. She scowled as she caught a girl passing by also staring at both their asses.
"Remember how I worked detention on the weekends here?" he asked. "I have network admin credentials. I think if I log in here, I might be able to jury rig a free call."
Weiss looked like she was trying really hard not to bite her fingernails. "It says access denied. Why can't you log in?"
A pause.
"I can read it too, Weiss," he said, puzzled. "Maybe the card reader isn't working. Wait, what? I can log in with student credentials, but I can't log in as an admin. Did my certs expire?"
"Search for what?"
He stepped out of the booth, shaking his head. "Cert, certification. All of our student IDs use a PIV system. It lets you plug them into a card reader and log in as yourself. Kind of a security risk that you can actually install multiple certificates for different login permissions onto one card, but whatever."
She stared at him. "You have officially lost me."
Tilting his head to the side, and looking out through the window, he said, "Lost the battle, maybe not the war. I got one last Hail Mary to play…" He took out his scroll, and after a moment of looking through his contacts—at least Blake thought it was; She wasn't the best at reading words backwards through the other side of a scroll—he dialed someone up.
Weiss looked like a little girl who had just lost her mother in a crowded store and didn't know how to cry. She kept shifting her weight from foot to foot, adjusting her hair as if she still had the hair to push around.
"Yo, Lance Sergeant Ozrick!" he said loudly. "Did I wake you up? Good, fuck you! Listen, I need a solid."
Jaune pressed a button, and the voice on the other end spoke through the speaker.
"Kid," the groggy, sleepy voice on the other end said. "Eat a dick. In fact, eat several kinds of dick. I'll bring in my favorite ranch and cheese sauces next time I see you at work so you can try them all out. I was happily asleep!"
Ozrick. The name rang an uncomfortable bell of familiarity to Blake. She'd once met a soldier with the First Cavalry by that name before the Army had blown the walls to the town she had been in and let the Grimm in. He had actually tried to warn her. But the voice on the other end of the scroll was uncanny. Sure, small world and all, but it couldn't possibly be him, and he couldn't possibly somehow be friends with Jaune.
"Okay," Jaune said happily as Weiss gave him a disbelieving expression. "But you're castrating the dicks to bring. But for real, I need your help. Trying to log in with my admin credentials and it says access denied. Not expired or anything. Specifically denied. You know anything about that?"
The sergeant grunted. "If I did, why would I tell you? You woke me up. I don't work the day shift and this is Ozrick time."
Jaune snapped fingers. "Because if you don't, I'll tell Eschweiler that lance sergeant isn't a real NCO rank. It's a double lateral promotion from E-4 due to a technicality, and that means he's actually your ranking superior."
"Bitch," the soldier hissed, but without any heat. He sounded too exhausted to be angry. "But for real, I wouldn't know. If it's denied, that means someone did it on purpose because you still have the PIV on your card. I didn't do it nor did the Atlesian nerd; he's got his own concerns about being deported alongside Ironwood. If anyone did it, it was the day shift boys. You can probably go talk to them and ask, if you still have swipe."
"Nah. Would take too long and I have class."
"Right. Fine. I'll look into it when I get to work tonight. I'll text you something. I'll know for sure when we see you Friday for your shift." He paused. "Oh, and I guess good job for not dying in Montluçon. Did you get to say hi to my old colonel?"
"Yeah, actually. I'll tell you all about it when I'm chewing those dicks like bubble gum."
The soldier laughed. "Sweet. Bye, bitch."
Click.
Jaune ran his hand down his face, sighing. "Okay. Well. That was a bust and now I'm just left with a lot more crippling problems."
"So now what do we do?" Weiss asked, throwing a hand up. It was uncomfortably close to her losing all of her cool.
"I don't know!" he said. "If we can't afford the call, then we can't do it."
"Then what am I supposed to do?"
"What are you asking me for?"
She looked at him like he was stupid. "I mean, technically, you're supposed to be our team leader who has answers and ideas to these kinds of things."
"Like half an hour ago you were berating me on my terrible people skills as a leader."
"I said you were passable as a leader, but subpar as a human being. Big difference."
Blake looked at her own monitor while the two argued and tried to work things out. Calls back home took forever, and she was going through several, several towers and routes. And that was before it even got to her father's number. And assuming he accepted the call, which was far from guaranteed.
She closed her eyes and let out a breath. Then she felt out with her Aura, bringing to life a shadow clone of herself to hold down the booth. It was supposed to be a perfect copy of her, and at least her last actions. But the girl she was staring at, her reflection, looked like she was about to break at just the slightest touch. It left Blake uncomfortable. And further spurred her to approach her teammates.
"Hi!" Blake said, staring aggressively at her feet or to the side, keeping Jaune barely a ghost in a peripheral vision.
The two stopped arguing.
"Oh. Uh," Jaune tried. "Blake. Fancy seeing you here."
Blake swallowed. "Look, Weiss, you need to make a call back home? It sounds important. Is it?"
Weiss looked at her with wide eyes, and then rolled her eyes at Jaune. "I do. Complicated political reasons mean I don't have any money right now and need to call home and try to figure out how I'm going to avoid starving to death."
Jaune's shoulders were bunched up, but he still tried to roll them in a kind of shrug. "You could join me in not eating?"
"Jaune, have you seen me?" she asked. "I can't afford to miss a meal. If I don't eat just once, then poof! I wither away and die. Is that what you want from me, Jaune?"
Blake continued trying not to look at the boy. Grimacing, she said, "I… don't really know what's going on at all, but if you need money to call home, I have some Lien lying around. I could spot this one time, I guess, y'know?"
Weiss looked completely frazzled. In a toneless voice she said, "Is this really what my life has come to? Begging my friends for money just to make a simple call?"
"Huh," Jaune said, perking up. "Hey, Weiss, I think Blake found your pride. I think you owe her your unending love and admiration now!"
Rubbing the scar on her forehead that Blake had given her, Weiss said in that same voice, "Yes. You are right, Jaune. Blake, please accept this humble request for marriage and to bear my children."
"Uh, hard pass?" Blake said, taking a step back.
"You're right," Weiss said. "I don't need any more children. I'm already this team's thankless single mom, and all my kids are ungrateful brats."
"I'm not ungrateful," Blake said, folding her arms. "You're my friend, Weiss. And, y'know, it's whatever. I know you're making a joke, but I'm really trying to help. I've got a little money saved up from here and there. Please don't make this awkward."
Weiss inhaled deeply. With a slightly manic edge, she said, "You know what? Deal. Blake, it would really mean a lot to me if you could lend me some money to make this call. In exchange, I'll make double sure that the birthday cake I'm planning to make you in secret will be the best you've ever had. And I'll force Jaune to help me make it. Deal?"
Blake blinked. "D-deal?"
"I'm game," Jaune mumbled. "Sounds fun."
Blake tried to get past Jaune into the booth. He didn't step to the side, and she felt goosebumps on her flesh where she slid past him. Weiss was already logging into the radio computer with her student idea. As Blake scanned her own ID to pay for the call, she said, "Look, don't make a big deal about it. Whenever the pay gets through from the mission, you can comp me."
"If I can even access any bank to pay with," Weiss said, sitting down. She dialed 00 before looking through the directory to find the numbers she needed to call home.
"What mission payment?" Jaune asked.
Blake looked over and met his blue eyes, and averted her gaze. "We're Hunters; even as students, we get something for taking mission contracts."
Jaune made a face. "Wait, we do?"
Weiss stopped dialing just to stare at him. "Yes! My god, did you somehow not know this? We have to eat somehow, fighting Grimm! The free market can figure it out in the real world, but if they come through Beacon the school pays us a sort of commission. Remember that night we spent looking over the contract? The pay was right there, and really good, because it was deemed pretty dangerous."
The boy blinked. "Oops."
"Jaune!" Weiss snapped.
He shrugged helplessly.
Weiss shook her head, grumbling under her breath as she kept dialing.
Blake didn't have anything to say to that. She really didn't know where to bring this conversation. She tried to say something, only to remember Jaune was there. With a hot flush to her cheeks and something less than comfortable in her guts, she shut her mouth and watched Weiss work.
The one time she looked at Jaune, he was just standing there, hand half-raised like he wanted to do something. He looked suddenly ashamed and stopped. All he could do was awkwardly shuffling in place like he wanted to leave, but had nowhere to go. Picks at his fingers seemed the most interesting thing in the world to him.
Under her bow, one of her cat ears twitched, listening for her own call. The booths were designed to give callers some privacy, but whoever had designed this place must have been human and didn't account for how well some faunus could hear. She looked over her shoulder, the one that didn't force her to pass her eyes over Jaune, and did nothing.
She looked back to see Weiss glaring at Blake's reflection in the monitor.
"Don't you have something to do?" Weiss asked.
"I don't know," Blake said.
"I think she meant me?" Jaune suggested.
"I, uh, yeah, maybe," Blake said. Then she cringed, expecting Jaune to say the thing. About maybe and the baby. But he didn't, and for some reason she couldn't explain, that kind of hurt. She felt part of her heart sinking.
"Both of you," Weiss said sufferingly, turning around. "You're both making it really hard to concentrate. In fact, leave. Both of you. Right now. It's going to be awkward enough calling my dad wearing this. I don't want you two making it even more complicated."
"What am I supposed to be doing?" Jaune asked.
Weiss shoved at both Jaune and Blake. "I don't know. Not my problem right now. Go ask her to the school dance like we planned."
"The dance? What?" Blake asked. "Me and him?"
Weiss ignored her. "Just stop awkwardly standing behind me and actually talk or something. I can't focus like this!"
She ejected Jaune and Blake out of the little cubby. Then, with one final glare, returned to her radio computer.
Blake stared up at Jaune. From the little scar on his cheek to the hints of the healing burns on his arm from when Weiss and Coco set him on fire. Neither of them could directly look at each other. And oh god, this was awkward. They hadn't really talked since she kissed him, and, well, yeah. Stuff. Bad stuff. Lots of running away, only to get an airship ride back to campus and sleep in the same room again. It was really hard to avoid looking at or talking with someone you had to be so close to every day as a matter of course.
And then she heard it. The little click of a calling connected. Her cat ears twitched and felt hot.
"Ghira Belladonna speaking," her father said dubiously yet professionally. His voice was just a little tinny from the far end of Remnant. "To whom am I—my god, Blake? Blake, is that you?"
Her shadow! "Oh my gods!" she hissed in panic. Blake spun from Jaune, thankful for the excuse, and sprinted. A moment later she was sliding into her booth, hitting her stationary clone and dispersing it to shadows.
"Dad!" she said.
Ghira. The Lion of Belladonna. The former leader of the White Fang. Elected representative of the Faunus people of Menagerie. Her father. He looked so different from the last time she'd seen him. Sitting in front of a desk to take the call in the office she had spent countless hours in as a girl, wearing reading glasses and robes that served the same role as a suit here in Vale or Atlas. He had lines around his eyes that she didn't remember, and his black hair was flecked with the barest hints of salt and pepper. But even with glasses and scrunched over a desk, she could tell he was still the imposing man who had always been there for her growing up, who tried to teach her right from wrong, and who failed to stop her from leaving home to follow Adam.
She tried to speak, only to find a lump in her throat. She choked something out, smiling an expression that was mostly teeth. Her cheeks felt hot, and she was suddenly incredibly conscious of the weight of her hair bow on her head covering her ears. She could only imagine what Dad thought of her, seeing her as an adult in this school uniform, on a call that must have just said it was coming from Vale.
Blake looked into his eyes, and for a moment thought she saw a flicker of something angry. She thought her father might scream and yell, ask why she left, how she could do something like that to her parents, and why she hadn't even tried contacting until now.
Instead, he calmly removed his glasses and folded them up, with just the barest hint of shake and his hands. With a smile, he said, "Look what the cat dragged home!"
She snorted. "It's been over a year—can you please find new material? That joke wasn't funny in the first place."
Dad laughed. "Your mom still laughs at it."
"Yeah," she said, rolling her eyes. "But Mom has the worst sense of humor in the world."
He nodded seriously. "Yeah, I'll say. She married a joke like me."
Blake couldn't keep the smile off her face, even though she tried to hide it beneath her hand. "God, Dad, I love you. I missed you so much. I—I don't know. I'm sorry I never called. I haven't really been able to for so long. And now."
"Ghira!" she heard her mom call from off screen. "Are you going to be long?"
Her father stood up suddenly. "Kali, Kali! Come here. You're never going to believe it! Kali, quick!"
Seeing her father get so excited and giddy made Blake laugh. It just seemed so unlike her dad. As if he had suddenly gotten thirty years younger.
Mom pushed the door open with her hips, walking in backwards as she carried a bag of something. "Please don't remind me of our first time together," she teased, only for the noise to stop as she saw Blake.
She dropped her bag and sprinted towards the screen. Nearly knocking Dad's office chair over, she said so quickly it was hard to understand, "Blake! Oh my gods, Blake! Are you hurt? Are you alright? Someone said they thought they saw you on the news from Vale, but I didn't believe them! Why are you wearing that bow? What's with the school girl outfit? Have you been eating right; you look thin. Oh my gosh, we missed your eighteenth birthday! Blake!"
Shaking her head, Blake waved. "Hi, mom. I just—" She swallowed another lump in her throat. "Gods, I don't know. I don't know anything. But I'm fine. I'm in Vale now. I kind of forgot it was my birthday already."
Her mother's eyes went wide. She looked too excited for her age, and she already looked really good. Blake wished she would age that gracefully. "Wait, you're in Vale? With humans?" Suddenly lowering her voice, she asked, "Do you need help? Ghira, we can get her out and help her, right? I swear to God, if anyone hurt my little girl—"
Blake held up her hands. "Mom, Dad, I'm fine! Really! I mean, the most part. Things have been rough recently. But I'm managing, and for the most part, I think things are going good. You don't have to worry about me; I can take care of myself."
Her father tried to get control of the camera again, but Mom kept him pushed to the side. "Are you sure?" she asked. "I mean, Blake it's been so long, and we were so worried, but we always thought you could handle yourself, but I'm still your mother, and now you're in Vale, and you look weird, and who is that human boy behind you and why can I see his nipples?"
A length of ice shot through Blake's heart. She had been so focused on the conversation, seeing her parents, that she had utterly forgotten Jaune. She turned around slowly, trying not to look terrified as she realized that he must have just followed her here.
And yeah, you could see Jaune's nipples poking through his obscenely tight shirt.
Jaune looked a little startled to be called out. "Oh, uh, me?"
Blake shook her head rapidly, making a cutting motion across her throat that he didn't seem to notice.
"I'm basically Blake's human thermometer. She judges based on my nipples whether or not she should wear a coat outside." He adjusted his chest like a dial. "It is currently thirty-eight degrees. Solid sweater weather."
Blake tried to speak, but nothing came out. Her throat was dry. She could feel her stomach falling into a black hole. Despite the vague chill, she realized she was sweating bullets. All she could do was make half coherent gestures, trying to implore him to do anything but talk to her parents.
Jaune had a similar expression, but less desperate. More confused. Someone who had no idea what he was doing, but didn't know how to back out in any case. "Uh, Blake? Who is—I mean, is she—like, I didn't know you had a sister."
Mom scowled. "Her mother, actually."
He blinked. "Oh. Well. Huh. I didn't really intend to get dragged into this, but at this point I'm too invested in the conversation to just leave, and I don't know how to gracefully exit in any case."
Her legs feeling numb, she managed to stand up and start trying to push him. "Jaune, please!" she said.
Jaune twitched, deflecting her hand. And suddenly she remembered being back in the reality marble, trying to punch him, and the way he shoved her against the wall with his hand on her neck. But instead of going on the attack, he just stepped back, hands raised in almost playful defense.
"Whoa, Blake, whoa!" he said. "Now's not the time to get physical. Your mom is right there!"
Dad finally managed to get back onto screen, his face nearly pressed up against Mom's. "Blake, who's this?"
Both of them stopped trying to wrestle each other and looked at the screen.
"Wait, if she's your mom, then that means he's…" Jaune said.
Blake put her hands together as if in prayer, or begging. "Jaune, no. Jaune, no!"
"Because your daughter and I were talking, and realized we had something we wanted to tell you."
And instantly she knew exactly where he was going. She tried to grab him and force him out of the booth, but he was bigger and heavier than she was, and she couldn't make him budge.
A shadow fell over Dad's face. "Blake, human boy, what is it you both wanted to tell us? Why are you acting like it's some big secret? Blake, are you okay? Sweetie?"
Mom looked like she would probably be strangling Jaune if only she could get her hands on the boy. She kept flexing her hands, powerlessly, glaring.
"Jaune, please, don't you dare!" she begged, practically falling on top of him.
Her parents exchanged glances, and Blake could read all of the thoughts they were having. Was their daughter in danger? Was she here against her will? Was she lying to them, and really did need help? Or, worst of all as their faces darkened, was Blake pregnant? With a human child?
"Boy," Dad said dangerously, leaning over his desk. "What did you do?"
Jaune held his hands up so as not to touch Blake. Looking awkwardly at her parents, he said, "Oh, uh, I mean, nothing, Mr. Belladonna, it's more—well, fact is, you see… we realized that we both think you're gay and your wife has the right to know."
"What?!" her parents said in mortified unison.
Blake felt her entire body shudder. Every single nerve was on fire. She could practically feel herself internally bleeding below her cheeks. Her muscles practically gave in, barely able to keep her standing. Jaune actually had to catch her, holding her softly in his calloused hands. She tried to speak, but all that came out was an incoherent slurry of sounds.
"Blake?" Jaune asked with genuine concern. Still holding her, he gently let her down into the chair before the radio computer. "Wait, you all right? Did you have a stroke? Do you smell toast?"
"Yes," she mumbled pathetically. "Me."
Somewhere in the background of her mind, she could hear her parents screaming and yelling.
Jaune continued touching her with care. When he was sure she wouldn't fall over or anything, he let her go, and for some reason a part of her was almost annoyed he had. He stared at the monitor for a long moment, before saying, "Y'know what, I only followed because you ran off and I was worried. But, uh, yeah."
"You were worried about me?" she asked dubiously.
"I thought you were in trouble," he said awkwardly. "Got scared for you. But I kind of think I made things worse."
"Yeah…" Blake said, slumping.
He reached his hand out towards her, and then stopped as he watched her parents scream and yell at him. "I'll see you in class, yeah? Sorry."
And then, mostly, after making things as bad as he possibly could, Jaune just left. And what was left of Blake was just a hot, sweaty, deeply embarrassed mess. She couldn't even bring herself to look at the monitor. She just covered her eyes with her hands, sighing deeply into it. Even as her parents asked her if he was okay, and ran through the litany of concerns they had, she couldn't really address them. Not until she got her wherewithal back.
After everything that had happened, with just the slightest implication of trouble, Jaune had apparently panicked and ran after her to make sure she was okay. After everything that happened, and it was almost like he was still thinking of her like, well, like he always had. In his stupid, idiotic, boyish, zero-long-term-planning way. He had just rushed headlong into the unknown for her sake, and then proceeded to ruin everything by acting exactly like he always did.
Like nothing had really changed between them. Sure, they had changed, but it was like he wasn't acting that way. As if who they both were, what they meant to each other, was the same as it ever was.
Which naturally meant he was going to horribly embarrass her in front of people, and only realize too late what he had done. With absolutely no malice intended, just plain idiocy.
She didn't know what would happen tomorrow, or even later today at class. But some weird part of her thought that maybe things would be okay, in a completely lopsided way. That somehow, they could figure their problems out and deal with them, or all walk away equally traumatized for trying. It was the only way things had ever been for her friends, her team, the people she loved.
It bubbled up from her guts. A quick rush of air that slowly turned from a rumble into laughter. Until the hands she had been holding her eyes back with had to go down to her stomach as she doubled over, unable to contain herself. Until her eyes were wet and her stomach hurt. She gasped for breath, and that only made it funnier, the suffering, the look on her parents' faces.
"Blake? Sweetie!" Mom asked, eyes frantic. "Honey, are you alright?"
"No," Blake said, trying her best to breathe. To get her rosy cheeks and shuddering lungs under control. "No, I'm not. Things are freakin' awful. But I don't think I'd change it for the world. Mom, Dad, I love you guys. It's been a terrible year, and there's some things you should probably know."
"You're not pregnant, are you?" Mom asked, biting her fingernails.
"Kali!" Ghira snapped. "But—you aren't pregnant or anything, right? Just between us, I mean."
And Blake completely lost it all over again.
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Kell of Twilight
Walker of Twilight
- Pronouns
- Eliksni
I feel you should know that you are very underrated. Good job man solid kapittel Stor fyr.
GrindingV2
Azir is beyond awful holy christ
- Location
- Canada
Absolute banger of a chapter. Imo best one since Christmas with the Arcs
Seduce the Lion Eric *poke* *poke* c'mon..... you know ya wanna do it
Eric d'Orléans
Bog Monster, Take the Wheel!
- Location
- Way Down South in Dixie
One day people will know me. I'm comfy just knowing I'm able to affect a few people, though. I still dream of getting and I, Jaune TVTropes pages. That's when you know you've made it big!
And to thing! All I had to do was leave everyone broken and traumatizing and wham!
This volume so far is a lot more slice-of-life comedy than the past experiments with psychological trauma and adventure. I like changing the flavor as life goes on. Lets me explore people as people better.
Mmm. DILF threesome with Tai and Ghira. Qrow can come too. We must come together to cuck Raven and Kali. Jaune is trying to get major DILF daddy energy with the way he lifts and is a loveable dumbass.
pingas plight
-Most cunning scientific fuck-up in all of Mobius
Please. He will not simply "Seduce" the Lion. He will entrance it, become the very earth which it walks upon, be the foundation upon which it knows joy, and leave, making it painstakingly obvious just how much they took Eric for granted.
Eric d'Orléans
Bog Monster, Take the Wheel!
- Location
- Way Down South in Dixie
Cuckquean Kali gets her life and marriage ruined by lovable HIMBO her daughter is in love with! White Fang in shambles. Adam in shambles. Jaune establishes the power of DILF supremacy.
pingas plight
-Most cunning scientific fuck-up in all of Mobius
Ruby extends her manipulating tentacles as she instates a kingdom-in-appearance, queendom-in-functionality with jaune as a figurehead leader and herself as the mind behind the puppet.
Ozpin begins fearing for his life, unsure of what the fuck jaune even is at this point.
Salem is just pondering whether or not she should roll around on the floor laughing or try out that new mortal method of dealing with stress they call "Drinking addiction".
Volume 7, Chapter 3
Eric d'Orléans
Bog Monster, Take the Wheel!
- Location
- Way Down South in Dixie
Chapter 3: Like Sandpaper
"Damn girl, how thicc are your legs? Because you're carrying a stupid amount of emotional baggage."
— 4 —
"Damn girl, how thicc are your legs? Because you're carrying a stupid amount of emotional baggage."
— 4 —
Blake was alone.
And honestly, this time it was Jaune's fault.
Not even in a bitter, hyperbolic sense. It was literally entirely his fault. After calling her parents, letting them know that she was a Huntress, and crying her eyes out and wishing she could hug her parents for several minutes afterwards, she had washed her face up and gone to class.
The problem was, apparently Team BASS was "on recovery" from their mission. This was apparently standard procedure for teams that went through a hard mission within their allotted time frame. They were excused from class anywhere from a day or two to a couple of weeks. BASS had the entire week off to recover, spiritually and physically and whatever else.
But no one had told Blake that. She had just presumed that her time off was fully used up getting medical care these last few days. The team leader should have known. Which meant Jaune should have known. But given that just this morning Jaune had been talking to Weiss about needing to go to class later after a long range call, it was obvious he didn't know. The boy didn't even know they actually got a monetary reward for the dangerous mission they had just spent the better part of a week or two on.
Really, Jaune kind of sucked. Like on almost every conceivable level. But then again, that was almost part of his charm. Which made her realize that there was a frankly startling overlap between Jaune's complete failure as a human being and the reason she was in love with him. Some psychologist would have a field day with her, she just knew it.
So then, all alone without the rest of the team in class, she had texted Jaune. Because what else was she supposed to do? It wasn't like Blake had any actual friends at Beacon besides her team. And after she had broken down laughing the last time they had talked, she almost kind of felt like just aggressively pretending things were okay might actually be the way forwards.
Until she actually texted him.
You: hee can we talk??
The Boy: Yeah, but later. Up to no good this week but it's for a good cause. How's about we do something this weekend? If you are late, I'll light my emergency cigarette so you can find me.
The Boy: Smoke signal.
Jaune had even included a full stop period at the end of the text. End of discussion. Nothing more to follow.
Blake hugged her knees to her chest, screwing her eyes shut. Which only made it worse, because she knew she looked ridiculous. She was in her full school uniform, hair bow and everything, with her knees up to her chest in a corner booth in the campus café. She had retreated here thinking she could read the newest book from Felicia LeBleau.
She forced herself to breathe and open her eyes. Back to her book, Bayou Bonds. Blake suspected the more risqué scenes would be interesting, not that they were the draw for the book. She was here for the characters. As she waited for someone from the staff to come over and take her order, she turned to the first page and read.
The story was about a preacher man for the Saints, the dominant and socially accepted religion of western Vale. He was a former frontier veteran taken from his home as a conscript, and wound up finding religion during his tussles with the Grimm. Now in his forties, he was a handsome and charming preacher man in the voodoo dominated bayous far south of Vale. He had fallen in love with a girl in her twenties who just happened to be a witch who loved him back, but didn't know he was a holy man.
Blake was reading the part where the witch was hanging a voodoo charm from his motor carriage's rear view mirror to mark him as her property and under her protection, when somebody cleared their throat.
"That book is terribly inaccurate," Shamrock said. "I'm talking, like, offensively inaccurate. Witchcraft and Vaudou are two entirely separate religions."
Blake slammed the book shut and gasped. "Shamrock, what are you—"
"I work here," Shamrock said. And true enough, with the exception of her top hat, she was wearing the uniform of one of the waitresses. She even had a little pencil and notepad for taking orders. Also, she was a girl today. "Need to find a way to support my gambling addiction somehow."
Blake stared, mouth open. "You have a campus job? How come you never told me!"
"Sometimes details slip between friends; their current employment, their species, whether or not they were a former terrorist."
"Hey, hey, quiet!" Blake hissed, putting a finger to her lips.
Shamrock adjusted her hat and shouted, "WHAT?! I can't hear you over the fact that you never ask me any questions!"
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" Blake said, waving her hands at Shamrock. She grabbed the menu and held it up, forcing a smile as she pretended to read it over. "I, uh, y'know, well, I'm thirsty and I want—I mean, sure is a feminine day outside, right? Eh heh ha?"
Taking the seat across from Blake, Shamrock frowned. "The café gig is easier as a girl. You get way better tips. In fact, a lot of student employment on campus seems to favor girls."
"That seems weirdly sexist."
"Eh. A lot of the boys seem to prefer doing stuff in the fishery for Professor Maseryk. Forging and crafting and generally getting sweaty in uncomfortable places that I'd rather not." She shrugged. "It only really gets kind of sexist during the café's monthly maid theme night, because pretty much the entire staff that works the floor are girls. But that's also when we get the best tips, so you win some, you get sexually harassed some."
"That's awful!"
Shamrock looked around the café. She licked her finger and opened her notebook. "So are you going to order something, or just claim it's a free country and sit around? I came into work today because my hours are flexible, I don't have class, and I have debts to settle with that bastard Jack. The special this week is sushi, believe it or not. Alarmingly affordable. Just up your alley. Can I get you a drink with extra milk?"
Blake glared. "My enjoyment for those things has nothing to do with my ears."
Shamrock gave her a mild expression. "Didn't say it did. I just know you." She reached across the table and bopped Blake over the head with her pen. "Stop being difficult or I'm adding a mandatory twenty-percent gratuity to your bill."
"Is that even legal?" Blake scoffed.
"Do you want to get into a very public argument with the cashier girl about that?"
Beneath her bow, Blake felt her ears go flat. "No…"
"So what will it be?"
Blake sighed extra hard. "Is the sushi tuna?"
Shamrock gave the menu a glance. "The special is rainbow toa-ahi with parrot egg. The fish is from just down the coast, and the eggs are sourced locally from the infestation that haunts campus. Extremely fresh and local, which I'm told are the two most important things about sushi."
Blake folded her arms on the table. "You don't know about sushi?"
"I'm from a desert," Shamrock said, making a circular gesture with one hand. "The first time I ever ate fish in my life was this past year. Can't really stand the smell or how people like you enjoy it."
"It's not because I'm—" Blake stopped, realizing she was speaking way too loud. But none of the other lunch patrons seem to pay her much mind. In a lower voice, she said, "It's not because I'm, you know, faunus. I'm from Menagerie."
"Oh cool, a tautology."
"Yeah, haha, ten lien word," Blake said dryly. "It was way easier to catch and eat fish than it was to raise meat livestock. And faunus are overwhelmingly lactose tolerant, which is, believe it or not, actually pretty uncommon amongst humans."
Shamrock tapped her pen against her notebook. "Meaning?"
Blake ran her hand down her face. "Meaning I'll take the sushi special and a chai latte, extra cream," she said, sulking.
Standing up, Shamrock rolled her eyes. "I expect a good tip for being forced to listen to your life story when I'm on the clock."
Blake just sat there, face in her hand. She kept rubbing her forehead and occasionally groaning at herself. She couldn't even really get back into the book. She just had a feeling at the moment she opened the page, Shamrock would return, and judge her for reading culturally insensitive romance. But, like, it wasn't a bad story!
The book was actually kind of sweet, in a creepy, possessive sort of way. The witch was just marking her territory, protecting him from other witches who actually might seek to hurt him for his religion. She didn't even actually know the dark secret that he was actually a preacher, unlike Blake, who knew Jaune maybe couldn't die and was secretly way more immature than her. That already meant that what she had with her boy was better than the one the witch had.
Blake wondered what marking her territory would look like in her case. Maybe biting Jaune on the neck. Like, really biting him. As if she was that skinwalker that attacked Fox. Maybe by the time he got out of the hospital for that throat injury, he'd stop being so stupid and paranoid and would actually kiss her back and—
She let her head fall to the table. It made a sound like an empty coconut. Because it was. As void and bottomless as her heart. Her stupid, stupid heart that only wanted her to suffer because it was funny. And leaving her head filled with stupid, frankly creepy thoughts. The possessiveness was kind of cute in the book, but she imagined doing it in real life would be like holding up a red flag and screaming "I AM SANE AND NORMAL." Maybe everything that was romantic on paper just didn't work like that in real life. Like the time in that fake little world where Jaune put his hand on her neck, and the only thing that she could do was have a complete panic attack and freeze without so much as a defiantly mocking, "Harder, daddy."
Oh God. Oh God, she just thought about saying that without any hint of irony.
She nearly had a spasm of pure cringe. All she could do was lift her head and inch just to bash it back against the table, hoping to destroy that part of her brain that was capable of creating that mental image.
Shamrock stopped by with the food and drink. Face still on the table, Blake limply reached out to take the chai. Shamrock sighed softly, rubbing her hand on Blake's shoulder.
"Look," she said, and stopped. Sighed. Made a left-handed gesture. "I know I'm not exactly your confidant, and I'm still on the clock, but if you need me, don't forget I exist and am a pretty good listener."
Blake looked up. "Pretty much all you do is listen. I think this is the most I've heard you talk in a long time."
Shamrock's expression soured. "I've come to accept that people appreciate me for my ears, not my mouth."
"Sounds awful," she said, lifting her head just high enough to take a sip of the latte. "Mm, this is good. Crème Valais hits different from the stuff made in Menagerie. I don't mean to get sidetracked, sorry."
Before she could reply, the door chimed as someone entered. Shamrock looked away. "Life sidetracks us all the time. Gotta go. I'll fill your mind with the existential horror that I go through on the regular when I'm not dealing with more customers. If you need a refill, I'll offer you one on the house. Deal?"
Blake smiled. "Deal."
— 5 —
But it hardly proved to be a deal she thought she could make use of. As soon as Shamrock left, Blake was alone with a drink and lunch. She broke her chopsticks and poked at the sushi.
Valean sushi looked wrong to her. The rice wrapped around the nigiri, instead of the other way around like it was in Mistral or Menagerie. From her experience, it tasted mostly okay, but they had different philosophies on how to make it. In Menagerie, a country with an abundance of fish off the coast, sushi was about the plate to table freshness. A lot of people didn't have refrigerators capable of storing it for long. In Vale, they seem to like weird novel versions. The parrot egg wrapped up in raw fish that made up the centerpiece was itself raw, much like you would find with quail egg. She gave the yoke a poke, watching with idle fascination as it broke and ran over the nagiri.
She picked around it. With one hand, she would occasionally take something to eat, and with the other hand she halfheartedly attempted to keep reading her book. Maybe mixing it up with a drink of chai. She found she wasn't nearly as hungry as she thought she was and doubted she could finish even something as small as this. And with all of her thoughts in a jumble, she found it difficult to read: she kept losing her attention and spacing out.
So, as she used her chopsticks to scrape off a bit of wasabi off one of the sushi rolls—she hated the stuff—Blake took her notebook out of her backpack. She had been carrying it since class had been aborted. With only half an idea of what she was doing, she opened to the latest page and took out a pen.
Blake's notes were only halfway decent. Some pages actually had things relevant to coursework. The rest were mostly her miscellaneous doodles. The only reason she didn't fail the more academic classes was because you could sort of crib off of Jaune and Weiss.
Before she realized it, the idle figure eight she was drawing started to look like eyes. She filled them in. They looked angry. Putting another piece of sushi in her mouth, she started drawing a mask over it like the person was sick, or maybe trying to keep their mouth warm during a Graadian winter. It let her avoid drawing a mouth. But before she knew it, she'd extended the mask up to the eyes. Until she realized she was trying a White Fang mask.
Adam's mask.
Blake nibbled on the wooden chopstick.
It wasn't the first time he appeared in her notebook for one reason or another. Usually when she was feeling more charitable. Strong bits of his jacket or his sword or his mask whenever she couldn't focus during a lecture. Adam had a way of making teaching fun. He was, after all, the reason she knew how to fight as well as she did. And taking those lessons to heart had won her a place at Beacon.
She rubbed her eyes and tried drawing something again. Just to keep her hand and mind occupied.
She started with a shield. Then added details until it was a tool that could collapse into a sheath. The way she drew it allowed her to neatly avoid drawing any hands. Blake knew who she was drawing even before she began working on the arm. Even before she started adding the straps of armor, and filling in from memory as best she could the tattoos. The six-winged angel and the stars. The symbols hidden neatly by the cuffs of his school uniform that almost looked like circuitry. A phoenix. And some generic squiggles for everything else she couldn't really remember.
Then the shoulder. And some upper chest for context. She found it hard to get the proportions for a head right unless she knew the shoulders and some of the chest. Not enough to be really detailed, but enough to get a reference for everything else.
Blake stopped herself as she got to Jaune's eyes. She kept looking at Adam's mask as if it could provide some reference point. Staring into Jaune's empty face, she wondered if she could just play with the shadows to obscure the eyes. To hide them like the hand so they wouldn't look at her.
That felt ridiculous and she knew it. So she tried drawing the eyes, getting the shadows right to pretend like they had depth and color. But it just wasn't coming out right. It lacked that certain je ne sais quoi they needed to look lively. What color even were his eyes again? Blue. Had to be. As blue as the color of his face got when she strangled him after he jumped with her off a rooftop.
She rubbed her forehead and nearly finished her chai. Maybe she should come back to the eyes. So she worked on his opposite arm until she came down to his hand. For reasons completely beyond Blake, hands were just the utter worst; She could never get them right in a way that felt like a person. More like the claws of a skinwalker or some kind of webbed man frog. Subtly incorrect proportions.
Blake tried just drawing hands all around Jaune, trying to get a design she liked. Something that didn't look like everyone had a coke nail on every finger. Maybe she needed to try just the fingers. Work until those looked right and fill in the hand around them.
Until she found herself drawing a finger between Jaune's grit teeth. Sun's finger. She stared at it, just as the drawing's half-completed eyes looked back at her. Accusatory. As if this was her fault. She was the reason he had severed fingers in his mouth.
Blake scratched out Jaune's eyes with the pen.
Until she had torn holes in the page.
"Hey, are you gonna finish that?" a boy asked, sitting down in front of Blake. She made a high pitched squeak in her throat, jumping back. And then only tried to bury herself deeper into the booth as she saw Sun sitting across from her.
On the other side of the café, Shamrock paused what she was doing to stare at her. But her expression darkened as soon as she saw the monkey boy. She put her notepad in her belt and started walking over protectively in Blake's direction, until Blake held up a finger to stop her.
Sun frowned. "Just one? You've been picking at that thing for like ten minutes and you've barely touched it. I'm Sun Wukong, by the way. We've met before; you threw a fish in my face that one time." He angled his head toward her, smiling. "But I'll let that water go beneath the bridge for your leftovers."
Shamrock continued glowering in the background.
Blake tried to find her tongue and failed. She kept pressing her back into the seat, staring ahead at Sun as if she had seen a ghost. And really, she had. She had seen the boy she loved nearly cave his face in and cover himself in Sun's blood. Of course, it wasn't really Sun. It was just a skinwalker thing from the little reality marble, drawn up of people they had met. She dimly recalled accidentally throwing a mudskipper back into the water a long time ago in order to prevent it from evolving, and hitting a passing monkey faunus boy in the face. Blake had never made that connection until just this moment, and it made her feel… weird.
But she also remembered getting along with that thing wearing his face. It was almost like they were on a date. He was even flirting with her, if she recalled correctly, before Jaune showed up and freaked everyone out. Blake suddenly had a sick feeling that Sun was only put there to try to look like he was dating her solely to agitate Jaune, as she was no more window dressing than Sun.
The boy made a face. "Yo. Remnant to Blake. Are you okay? I get that you're all alone in a café, but no one's that shy."
"How do you know my name?" she whispered.
He shrugged, arching his tail to help complete the gesture. "I watch the news. You're pretty famous around campus. You're actually the second member of your team I've met today, after the ice queen."
"Weiss?"
Sun waved a hand dismissively. "It's rude to talk about another girl to a girl's face."
"But it's not rude to just show up and try to take my leftovers?" she asked skeptically.
He shook his head. "Nope. That's called advanced frugality. And also, I'll be real with you, I didn't know any other way to charmingly open up and say hi. Figured I'd just go full on kamikaze and see what happened! How'm I doing?"
Blake blinked. He was acting a lot like the fake one she met. It was kind of uncanny how the thing wearing his face was so good at pretending to be him, especially given that no one on her team had ever met this boy before.
"I take it you're just impressed speechless, and not just trying to ignore me, right?" he asked, shooting her a pair of finger guns. "I'm going to assume so. My partner, Neptune, tells me that if I ever say something that just results in a moment of stunned silence, it means my God, what have you done and isn't typically an invitation to continue. But when have I ever listened to him?"
She looked down at her notebook and closed it sharply. Steadying her breath, Blake asked, "Why are you talking to me?"
His eyes lingered on her hairbow uncomfortably. Sun smiled and said, "I saw a pretty girl looking lonely. I like your eyeliner, by the way. Super stylish. Anyways, so I'm thinking to myself: either I make her smile, or I ruin her day so thoroughly that there's nowhere to go but up. I'm cool with either option!"
Blake gave him a disbelieving expression. She wondered if other girls actually found this charming, or if they rightly found him annoying. Would she have found this charming if the situation was different? If she hadn't nearly lost herself drawing pictures of his severed fingers.
She hoped that wasn't the case. Because as it stood, she was vaguely offended he thought saying something like that would actually work on her.
"What if I don't feel anything?" she asked.
"Talk to a therapist. They prescribe pills for that kind of thing."
She finished her chai. "I'm good."
Sun curled the tip of his tail into a question mark. "Wow! I never knew I was so good at telling when people were lying!"
She scowled. "And who are you to tell me how I feel?"
He didn't seem bothered. "I could go get you a mirror if you wanted a second opinion."
Blake's free hand balled into a fist on the table. "I don't need a second opinion, Sun, was it?"
"Would rather be Sun than Daddy, yes," he said mildly, still smiling.
"I'm just really trying to work through some issues and enjoy this subpar Valean sushi. In peace. Thank you."
He leaned back, as if trying to show off his open face shirt and his admittedly cut abs. For a moment they looked off to her, until she realized that the deep furrow of a scar didn't run between and across them like on Jaune, who was her most common point of reference for this kind of thing. The boy merely shrugged, but his eyes were again on her bow. She felt a vague shiver that almost made her cat ears twitch.
"'Valean' sushi. Hmm. Thought so. You're not from around here either, I bet. I'm from Mistral myself, Haven Academy. I had a bet I could get to Beacon faster than them. We were all supposed to show up for this year's Vytal Festival. Last year, Team CFVY from Beacon did pretty good when they stayed at Haven for our last Vytal. Saw you working with them. Was pretty badass."
Blake felt goosebumps. "Where are you going with this?"
Sun rudely put his elbows on the table, hands clasped before his face. "Kindred spirits, us. Oddballs far from home. Only difference between us is…" He snatched and ate a piece of sushi with his tail. "I'm a social ape and you're still alone."
"Monkeys and apes are two different things," Blake said uncomfortably. "Apes don't have long tails. You should actually know what kind of faunus you are before saying stuff."
He gave her a knowing look. "Know a lot about faunus, huh? Vale's a lot cooler to us than Mistral or Atlas. Vacuo is probably better, but only because it's mostly just a geographic expression instead of a real country."
"There's also Menagerie." She swallowed.
"Yeah, but that's for faunus who don't want to be with other people. Who dipped into the shallow sea and still hate the humans who didn't join."
"That's not even remotely true. And you're using a fairy tale metaphor. The people in Menagerie aren't xenophobic; they just want to be left alone."
Sun was giving her that look again. "Point is, I understand what's up, Blake. Figured you could use a vent, y'know?"
The way he kept examining her bow made it impossible not to grit her teeth. Talking about faunus, asking if she knew a lot about them, implying he understood her. She remembered the fake Sun commenting on that creepy Cards girl, deducing she was a faunus in disguise. A lot of faunus could see through disguises people like her used as a sort of truism in a way that humans just failed to do. Did Sun think that was enough reason for them to talk in bond; for him to show up, eat one of her sushi, and expect for her to open up to him?
"You don't know the first thing about me!" she said, dragging her fingers on the table. She wished she had claws like her father instead of ears like Mom.
Sun frowned, a thoughtful expression. "No, I've seen it before."
Her eyes narrowed. "Seen what?"
"You just came back from a dangerous mission. I bet you saw a lot of stuff out there. A lot of bad stuff. And now you're alone. Instead of working through it with your teammates, you've decided to abandon them and just sulk after everything that happened. I've seen it before in some of the more senior teams in Haven. Some people have unhealthy ways of coping with trauma. And, I think, sometimes all they need is someone willing to point it out and be willing to listen."
Sun shrugged. "I can just look you over and get the idea. And I hate seeing a pretty girl sad. Hate seeing a badass that I just spent the better part of a couple days watching on TV kicking ass out there, come home and also be sad."
She sneered. "So what, this is some kind of charity? Your version of a pity party? Mixed with a whole bunch of really awkward flirting?"
Shamrock once again looked over from where she was taking someone's order. She spun her pen through her fingers, staring.
Sun smiled uncomfortably. "One time when I was feeling down, some person I didn't know approached me. She was just walking past, and stopped to tell me that I looked really good, and then went on her way. And I've never forgotten that moment. It always stuck out as just a really happy little thing. I try to pay it forwards whenever I get the chance. So, if you're pretty and I like your eyeliner and think you've got a really cool sense of fashion, I'm gonna say it, Blake."
"Stop that, stop using my name like you know me! Like you think it's going to win you points." Blake growled in the back of her throat. "Leave me alone! I'm really not in the headspace for this kind of conversation."
"Y'know, you're kind of cute when you're annoyed, Blake. Just sayin'."
"Gods! It's like you expect me to just flutter my eyes and act demure when you act like that after I tell you to screw off. As if I'm going to go, 'Oh no, boy with abs and doesn't know how to wear a shirt, that might be my name, but you should really be calling me trash can.'"
He looked around as if afraid people were going to start watching them. He averted his eyes the moment he realized Shamrock was staring.
"Why would I call you that?"
Blake leaned forward, fluttering her eyelashes as though she was having a stroke. "'Because I want your litter inside me!'"
Sun blinked. "What the hell?"
"That's you. That's what you sound like you expect. Just being nice to the girl who looks sad, being all flirty and expecting—whatever! That's not how people work in real life, kid."
He looked like he had no idea how to reply to that. "I mean, I was just being nice. I'm still going to be nice. It sounds like you've got a lot of demons there."
"Stop. That. Stop pretending like you understand and can emphasize and know me, Sun. Just leave me alone, please?"
He took another sushi roll, chewing thoughtfully. "Yeah, but that was your problem to begin with. Like I said, something's going up. I might not exactly know you, but I know the signs. I'm not trying to be rude or anything. Just—y'know?"
"Stop stealing my oxygen and nabbing my sushi. It's not funny, it's not charming, and it's pretty much the opposite of arousing. There's a difference between when someone is sad and lonely, and when someone just wants to be left the hell alone." She rapped her knuckles against her head. "Can you get that through your thick noggin?"
Blake didn't know why she kept seeing red the longer and longer he just sat there. Red like the time Jaune smashed Sun's face in. She kept thinking about the way in that false reality, she almost liked Sun. The twisted way that place tore her emotions up inside until she tried to murder her partner. It was like this boy represented everything that was wrong and fucked up that she didn't want to confront. Not in a goddamn public café of all things, at least!
He looked down at his lap, playing with his fingers. "I mean, if that's what you think you have to say, go for it. Let it out. Doesn't change the fact that something is clearly bothering you and also that you're cute. I don't mean that in a creepy way. I'm just—I hate seeing people hurting that I can't do anything for, y'know?"
"Oh, oh! Yeah, you're doing something for me. In the worst way possible. I don't know why you seem to think you're so charming and cute and funny just because you have a chronic inability to read the room. Because I thought Jaune's humor was a turn off. But this? This? This pity party himbo shtick to try to flirt with me and make nice? Let me make one thing clear to you, Sun. Okay?"
Blake cupped her chin, sickly sweet and friendly of expression. "My pussy literally ashes at the thought of you! That cracking, sandpaper-rubbing-together you hear when I shift my legs? You did that. Leave. Me. Alone!"
Sun just sat there, slack jawed. He kept trying to move his mouth, gesture with his hands, but he just kept failing. It was like he had never heard something like that in his entire life, and his entire self-image as a man had just died. Brutally murdered on the altar of Beacon's Cafe. Sun coughed as if his entire respiratory system had gotten dry.
Slowly, he put his hands up to his eyes like blunders on a racing horse. This entire face and very visible chest had gone red. He blinked hard again, unable to close his mouth.
"I… fuck, what the fuck, Blake?" he whispered. "I wasn't trying to be sexual or—fuck. What the hell am I supposed to say to that?"
Trying to get control of her breathing, she fooled her arms as tight as able to go. "Leave."
Still red as an arthritic joint, Sun just sort of sat there. Stunned silent. Until he was able to find his voice again. "Gods, Velvet was right. You and your team are assholes. I thought Weiss was just—but, shit."
"You talked to that fake faunus bitch?" she snapped.
"She's not—I mean—at least she was nice when I tried to talk to her!" He threw his hands up. "What's your problem?"
Before Blake could scream at him one last time to just fuck off, Shamrock appeared behind Sun.
She grabbed the boy by the collar and gave him a yank to his feet. He didn't manage to get his legs beneath him and just wound up on his ass, Shamrock still holding the collar of a shirt in an iron grip.
"The seats are for paying customers only," Shamrock hissed. "You keep talking to her, and she's going to bite your fingers off. Shit, maybe you deserve it."
"What?" he asked almost in a panic.
Shamrock hauled him out of the café. She didn't care if she made a scene. She didn't care if people asked questions or took pictures. Shamrock just dragged him to the front door and threw him outside.
"Jackass!" she hissed, closing the door. She looked around at all of the people watching her, and a couple of scrolls out to record. Shamrock simply squared her hat and said, "If someone looks like they want to be left alone, leave them alone. And right now, she'd really like to be left alone, gotcha?"
Everyone quickly pretended like they had more important things to do like eat or drink or just act like Shamrock wasn't there. Which made it all the easier for them to ignore Blake, as she curled up in her little corner booth and tried not to cry.
"Hey," Shamrock said softly, sitting next to Blake. She put her arm around Blake's shoulder and hugged her. "You're not alright; I'm not gonna ask."
Blake kept hissing in breaths. Everything you should do to prevent tears. Just shoving her fingers into her tear ducts, pressing her palms into her eyes. Almost hyperventilating. Made worse by the fact that she knew she was still in a public place.
"You knew who he was, didn't you?" she asked.
"Yeah. I thought maybe it'd help to talk to him."
"It didn't!" she said, not sobbing. Not sobbing. Not in the least bit. "Back then, the me in that place, I don't know how to describe it—I thought I did have feelings for him. But they weren't real, and he wasn't real, and it was just the entire place screwing with me. And then Jaune comes along and—"
Shamrock shushed her. "I know. I saw. You don't need to relive it."
"I'm not some shrinking violet who can't handle a painful memory!" she snapped.
"I don't think the pain matters," Shamrock said. "It's the fact that you can't make sense of it."
Blake laughed, and noise without any humor. "He bit his fingers off in a fit of jealousy. Jaune was jealous I was being sweet with someone else. He said it was because he knew Sun wasn't real, but I don't know anymore. And then after that, I realize nothing about how I feel changed at all. If anything, it got worse. And then—"
Shamrock simply hugged harder. "Stop."
"Why?"
"You're supposed to be the cool, aloof girl. What would people think if they saw you cry in public?" Shamrock winked.
Blake choked. "I used to think I had things figured out. The world made sense. I put the pieces into order and worked it out from there. I felt that I could trust my own judgment. But, I don't know anymore. I just don't know. And I can't just talk it out, I don't know how to work through it, and I don't know anything anymore."
Pulling out a handkerchief from a pocket, Shamrock gave it to Blake. She wiped her eyes with it. It took away her eyeliner in gross little smears.
"Yeah," Shamrock said.
Blake snorted. "Yeah?"
Shamrock shrug. "Yeah-yeah-yeah?"
She didn't know why, but Blake laughed. "I just—I think part of me was expecting you to have some kind of life shattering insight about that. I don't know. I'm so used to these emotional conversations just going somewhere."
Shamrock pretended to be offended. "My unlicensed therapy job begins at five. Wait till I finish my shift and then we'll talk?"
Blake playfully punched Shamrock. "How much do I have to tip my therapist?"
"Hoo!" Shamrock said, blowing out a puff of air. "They even tip the doctors in Vale? No wonder the doctors in this country always seem to hate me!"
Blake covered her eyes, but this time she couldn't hold back a smile. "Doctors in general, or just your OBGYN?"
"A what?"
"Gynecologist."
Shamrock gave Blake a dubious expression. "Not something I usually need. Unlike you. If your vagina is literally ashing, you really should see a doctor about that!"
Blake tried to suppress the laughter, but couldn't. It was just this choking little giggle. "Did I go too far? I just—I feel as though I kind of snapped. Should I go find him and apologize?"
"Pfft. No. What kind of douchebag keeps talking to a girl after they tell him they want to be left alone?"
"Someone with a room temperature IQ?" she guessed.
"Nah. Even Jaune knows when to stop talking. Usually." Shamrock gave Blake a little squeeze, as if things might get serious again.
Blake let out a long breath, rubbing her eyes. "I think… I think I don't know shit anymore. I sure know how I feel, and that sucks."
Shamrock shrugged. "Yeah, I heard Weiss basically ripped Jaune a new asshole over that."
"She did?" Blake gasped. And then: "Damn, I wanted to see him suffer. Do you have any idea how cathartic that would have been?"
"He probably cried like a little bitch," Shamrock said, nodding. She sat up a little straighter, leaning against Blake.
"Was there popcorn available?"
"Eh, it was a bring your own beer kind of event."
Blake snapped her fingers. "Damn."
The two of them just looked at each other, and laughed.
"So now what?" Blake asked.
Shamrock took out her scroll and examined the clock. "Well, this has been a distraction, but I can probably play it off as me comforting a customer. I might even get praised for doing a good job. But I don't have much time left. What's your plans for the evening?"
Blake thought. "I think I was going to finally confront Jaune and, y'know. Either die of heartbreak or jump his bones. You know how it goes." She waved her hand, trying to play it off cool.
Shamrock stared. "Hmm. Well. If you're not doing anything but hiding around campus all day like you used to do before we started to come together as a team, maybe hold off on your personal vendetta for a hot minute? Not that it doesn't matter; we're gonna be doing something this Saturday evening. Or maybe Friday? Details are vague, but I know it matters to Jaune and Weiss and it's about you. It'll be in the dorms common area."
"Why?" Blake asked skeptically. "That's a whole week away. Am I supposed to just be troubled by myself all week?"
"I mean, we need to move some pieces. Trust me, please?"
"And even then!" Blake said. "My day's barely begun and now you just want to keep waiting around, doing errands, and being alone with my own thoughts? That's how I die, Jetty!"
Seeming genuinely intrigued, Shamrock said, "Huh. Y'know, for some reason I've always considered the day kind of over after noon. Like, it's not worth going anywhere because I won't have enough time if I want to get a full night's sleep, unless I've already planned it out beforehand."
"What kind of insane world do you live in?"
"Vacuo, the sun, and all of the monsters haunting the sands really did a number on my psychology growing up."
"Huh. S'pose that's fair."
"So in any case, don't exactly blow off our big dramatic day, but just play to our timetable, okay?"
"'Our?' Whose plan is this exactly, again?"
"I have said nothing!" Shamrock said with a wink. She stood up. "It's either going to be a disaster, or a disaster. I have high hopes. Sound good?"
"Mm, I guess?" Blake said dubiously.
"Sweet! My part in our evil scheme is done." She reached forward to hug Blake one last time. "Oh, and don't think just because you had a dramatic event means you're getting the meal comped. I have to earn my tips somehow!"
Blake laughed. "I hate you, Shamrock."
"Luh yuh too, babe," Shamrock said, waving her fingers at Blake.
"No one talks like that!" Blake called back.
"Suck my dick," Shamrock said playfully.
"You don't have one of those right now."
"It's an invitation for later."
Blake smiled. "I think I'll be busy."
Shamrock let out a puff of breath. "Yeah, me too, sister. But I believe in this nefarious, unlabeled scheme I'm not going to tell you about. But for real, see you there?"
"Yeah, yeah."
With one final wink, Shamrock left to continue her shift. Blake somehow managed to get the rest of her food down and left. She washed her face in the bathroom and didn't bother putting on new eyeliner.
Despite the cold out, the day was still kind of beautiful. She could almost get lost in it, exploring the winter, maybe heading down to Vale for some reason. Or more realistically, just finding somewhere actually private to finish her book and do some more doodles.
Plus, she apparently had to look forward to some nefarious secret going-on this weekend.
Even despite everything that had just happened, from today, the last couple of evenings, to just the insanity inside her own heart, Blake still found some illogical little kernel within her that let her smile.
That gave her a feeling that maybe things would just be alright. That she could do this. And Blake could come out whole again.
But first, she needed to meet with Headmaster Ozpin for an after-action review of the mission.
a/n Sun Wukong, better known by his scientific name, Himbo Generis, is actually mostly unrelated to Jaune d'Arc, the Himbo Moronis, despite their similar appearances.
This time, for sure I won't be here next week. Gotta spend Thanksgiving with my blood. Thus, this chapter.
GrindingV2
Azir is beyond awful holy christ
- Location
- Canada
Best interpretation of Sun I've ever read
Eric d'Orléans
Bog Monster, Take the Wheel!
- Location
- Way Down South in Dixie
Never forget, in canon, Sun did the same thing to Blake. He sort of just stuck around and bothered her until she gave up and accepted him. He did the same in V4, which seriously pissed Blake off, but in both cases she warmed up to him and he was allowed to stick around.Best interpretation of Sun I've ever read
But here?
Nah, Blake just isn't in the headspace at all to want to need Sun trying to be the best, most nicest himbo around. All it does is piss Blake off and make Sun look stupid. A lot of things are only stupid if they don't work, but are brilliant and inspired when they do. This is one of those cases. And Sun failed, the poor baby.