I saw many a reference on this day
Like the lord of health Ralphie may
And maybe just a smidge
Of your favourite show Hellsing Abridged
You don't put baby in a corner
So we're the words of a giant stoner
I just really can't help myself. Most all of it is pretty subtle, in the background. I do a lot of world building based off of Disco Elysium because that game was such an inspiration to how I view worlds and politics within them.
But here, in a more light-hearted setting, I was just filled with these kind of dumb jokes. If I ever get a page on TV tropes, I'm going to have need an entire article just for all of the shout outs in references I make. They're pretty constant. Jaune especially, for obvious reasons.
Chapter 10: Wise Words from the Uninformed "But women are cringepilled. No woman will ever be able to understand how I feel about life."
— 19 —
Every city had a scent to it once you got down in the mud. Even the districts within it had a different smell, often unpleasant compared to what you were accustomed to ignoring. It was something you could only notice when you left your room. Weiss couldn't recall what Atlas was to her nose, but she could remember Mantle, and the district the locals affectionately knew only as the Gash. She'd thought they were just unclean places at the time.
It hadn't really clicked until she'd really left home. She could have gone straight to Vale on an airship, but her family had a lot of influence over those. Radio traffic control was a job explicitly for the Atlesian Air Force, where her father had an undeclared influence due to some interservice rivalry with the Atlesian Army. Long story short, it was just another subtle act of rebellion to take a ship. A pleasure cruise, to be exact, because what use was Schnee money if you weren't going to spend it?
Argus had the quaint smell of snow and sweat. It was the city that once conquered all of Mistral and placed the Argead dynasty on the Mistrali throne. And before that, pioneers from its people had settled Solitas with colonists from Vale. Then there was the industrial fortress of Byzantion, the northern heart of the Mistrali war machine once upon a time, with the smell of ash and songs on the wind. The air of Lastlight on the island of Vytal had tasted of despair, the region never recovering from a massive war with the Grimm and a faunus worker uprising nearly a decade ago. Then was her last stop before Beacon, the city of Five Wives, capital of Patch. Named after its legendary founding by three husbands and five wives in the semi-mythical age of the Final Empire, it was from whence the former ruling dynasty had ruled before conquering Vale and bringing with it its aristocracy and language to the mainland, the same language Weiss now spoke as her first. It had smelled of barley and the same kind of Scotch her father had drank near exclusively.
And finally, Vale. It was a… big city. Atlas and Mantle were vertical places, the most efficient way to manage heat and power lines. Only Vale's commercial heart stretched into the sky, its captain of industry reaching higher than Atlas itself. The rest of it just extended up into the mountains, lousy with districts. From Damecrown, center of the government, to Les Jardins, where people like the Schnees maintained a mansion. All the way down to the urban sprawl of Catchfire, whose industry alone was greater than Atlas' and had the odious reputation as the birthplace of the twin poisons of republicanism and communism both. Or socialism or materialism or whatever they branded themselves today, it was all the same drivel.
It was hard to imagine such a place existed out across the water from where Weiss was standing, looking out across the mouth of the great Valean Riviera. Behind her, the better part of downtown was preparing for the Vytal Festival. And her team. Thursday had been a good choice to go out on the town with her team, she had to give Jaune credit for that. Mostly because it meant he must have known the week's scheduling for class. Thursday and Friday weren't class days exactly. Students were encouraged to go out into the town to help with the Vytal Festival preparation. Getting a first hand look at the new students coming into the city, complete with a dose of community service to Beacon's patron city. Really getting their presence out there to remind people that the Huntsmen were here for the common folk.
Aside from that? Well, Weiss supposed she could try getting along with her team. They were all together by the Riviera, after all.
She took a breath. "And thus, this is your card!" she said, forcing a huge smile.
Shamrock gave her a flat look. "No."
Weiss felt her face fall. "What? But I did the trick you showed me! You picked the card, and so I knew what it was. I turned around to make sure I could shuffle them and pull out the one I specifically tricked you into picking! How did I ever get it wrong?"
Shamrock shrugged his shoulders. "Dunno. Anything's possible when you lie."
Weiss stammered. "You tricked me!"
"You were trying to pull off a card trick," he said with a wink. "Turnabout's fair play."
"Yeah, well—!" Weiss folded her arms and pouted. It didn't get any better when Shamrock smiled at her. "We shouldn't be playing cards. We have to get ready for the Vytal festival."
"Smooth save there, Weiss," Jaune said, approaching the railings near her and leading out, his eyes to the harbor. Once again, the boy had changed up his outfit. The jeans were still there, but now he was wearing some kind of light brown jacket with an open face, exposing just enough of his bare chest to show the long scar running down his chest. He had done away with some of his armor, just wearing a couple pads. She had to admit, it did look stylish. She'd seen more than a few girls staring.
She very, very consciously ignored his jab. She wasn't going to let Shamrock get to her, and she sure as heck wasn't going to let Jaune ruin her mood, like she always let him do. "I know, right? I can't believe we get to help with this. Did you know that there'll be dances, parades, and finally the tournament? It's only the biggest event of the year, and we get to take part—celebrating the cultures of the world!"
"I wouldn't have pegged you for someone who cared about the culture of the world," Blake said mildly from beside Jaune. It seemed like the two of them had been attached at the hip all day. The whole week, really. She'd seen the way they'd killed those two ursae back in the Forever Fall Forest a couple days back, fighting together like a real pair of Huntsmen.
Weiss gave a kind of sideways motion of the head, somewhere between a nod and a shrug. "I mean, some cultures are clearly better than others. My Father used to say that culture was like a smog. 'To experience it is to breathe it in, and inevitably become contaminated.' And there was a lot of smog in Mantle, though not as much as across the harbor there in Catchfire."
Jaune squinted, looking out across the Riviera. Out past where the great river Espérance emptied out through the commercial heart of Remnant, le Delta. "What's with all the cargo ships just sitting in the water?"
"The Débardeurs' Union is on strike," Shamrock said, making a hand gesture that Weiss recognized as Vaudou. "They're refusing to take any foreign ships into the harbor."
"Débardeur?" Jaune asked. "Idn't that a kind of shirt, like a wifebeater?"
"It's a local word for, like, longshoremen or dock workers," Blake said, cringing at the incredibly outdated word wifebeater. "A lot of the locals, especially Union-Labor, like using the endemic terms."
"Unions," Weiss said, rolling her eyes. "Sure. Just stop working. Expect people to care about your pet cause. What are they even trying to do?"
Blake was giving Weiss a look, making her feel oddly self-conscious. "Protesting the Vytal Festival."
"Why would anyone want to do that? The amount of planning that goes into an event like this is utterly breathtaking. If things start going wrong, it'll collapse. Don't those idiots know what they're doing?"
"That's exactly what they're trying to do," Shamrock said, adjusting the collar of his red fighting suit. Now that Weiss thought about it, it did have a slight resemblance to a playing card in colors. She wondered if that was the point.
Weiss shook her head in disgust and started walking. Trying to get away from the scene. Find something productive that her team could do to help the festival. Or, at least catch sight of incoming new students, and learn how they ticked so the team could eventually kick their butts in the tournament.
After Jaune shrugged and went after her, the rest of the team followed. "I'm not sure I see why people are upset about the festival."
"Exactly, thank you!" Weiss said, feeling her scar itch from having just thanked Jaune for anything.
"I found one of their newspapers in the library, Las Vêpres," Blake said, hands behind her back as she walked with the group. She didn't exactly pronounce the old Valean R correctly, and the word came out sounding a little bit too much like flipper to be taken seriously. "Union-Labor thinks all of the money spent on this festival and tournament would be better spent on welfare programs or something. They feel the resources that went into building Amity Colosseum and getting it airborne were a huge waste."
Shamrock looked off to the side, holding his hat in his hands. "It's been one of their party platforms ever since the Council voted to unban socialists and let them run in the elections. If you go out near Catchfire, it resonates a lot with people."
"It's like they've never watched any of the parades or the Vytal Tournament itself," Weiss huffed. "If they did, they'd know why it's so important to the entire world, everyone in Remnant equally. Places like Vacuo are a wreck and even they care about it. What makes some people in Vale so special?"
He kept tapping his fingers on his hat, drumming them to some invisible beat. "Lots of folks can't even afford a TV license to watch the tournaments or anything in the first place. It's just needless to them." He made another Vaudou gesture towards the harbor.
Weiss made a distasteful noise. Looking up at a banner across the street celebrating the Vytal Festival and welcoming foreign students, she said, "Yeah, well." She sucked on her lips, unhappily. "The mere fact that they're selling a newspaper is proof they've lost. The Vytal Festival is happening and that's that."
"How does trying to reach people with a paper mean they've lost?" Blake asked.
"Is the paper free?" she asked mockingly.
Blake frowned, shaking her head.
"Then there you have it," she said with a gesture, finding a sense of control again. She could actually make a point here instead of grasping at straws of frustration. "Selling their work means they're already operating from a point of failure. Like it always does, capital has subsumed its enemies and forced them to work within its own confines in order to resist it, tacitly acknowledging its complete victory." She folded her arms and smiled, feeling smug.
Jaune whistled. "That's a pretty heavy assessment with some pretty big words."
She tsked. "If they want to use big words to sound smart about being idiots who don't know how to run a civilization, then I can use big words too. I'm actually educated, remember? Meanwhile, they forget that they had an entire revolution about this and it failed hilariously."
The boy frowned, not really looking like he knew how to reply to that. Or maybe just thinking better about trying to argue politics at this hour. So instead, he turned to his partner and said, "Kind of weird you're reading a newspaper. I thought the only thing you read was porn."
"What did I tell you about that?!" Blake snapped, punching him in the arm.
"Oh, my mistake, you only read hentai, because it's art."
"I don't read anything the Kipts put out."
"Who?"
"Kipts. Mistrali. The entire country is trash."
Kipts? Whoa! Even Weiss had to cringe at that. It was an incredibly outdated racial slur for people from Mistral. The only place it was still in common parlance was Vacuo because they just didn't care for politically correct language and, she believed, Menagerie, because the faunus had long memories and even longer grudges against Mistrali. Their equivalent term for people from Atlas was Jonie (the J was pronounced like a Y like in a lot of older Atlesian words) or, amusingly, Schnit, a kind of portmanteau between Schnee and shit that always struck Weiss more like playground bullying than an actual slur. The word had never really bothered Weiss, since you couldn't exactly use language to hurt people in a stronger position than you. It was why words like bourgeoisie would never make anybody with money cringe and cry for human resources.
Still, she hadn't exactly pegged Blake for coming from Vacuo. But then again, neither had she guessed that was where Shamrock was from. She wondered if maybe she should pay more attention to the details of her teammates. In a real sense, she didn't even know where Jaune was from, despite his incredibly old Valean name.
Jaune gave Blake a significant look. "What you got against Mistrali?"
She returned his expression with a kind of disbelieving, one armed shrug. As though he shouldn't be this stupid and not understand it, but he continued steadfastly not understanding. But to be frank, Weiss didn't really understand where she was coming from either. Well, no, she did. Mistrali high culture always had some weird nostalgic tinge of a more glorious past that wasn't ever real in the first place. Idealizing a time of honorable warriors and when women were seldom seen and never heard that only existed in their fantasies.
Still. That didn't mean what was currently out there wasn't worth being explored. Atlas might have gotten things right, but that didn't make other places any less interesting. Take Vale, for instance. Once the center of the entire world, now just holding dominion over culture and finance. And as the ships currently stuck out in the harbor proved, even that probably wasn't going to last forever. Only a handful of them seemed to be able to get to port, although even she couldn't ascertain why those were allowed and others weren't.
"Whoa, hold it. Check that out," Jaune said, interrupting whatever conversation she and Jaune were having. Blake blinked, following his finger.
"Ooh, a fish. Didn't notice you there!" Blake said. To Weiss' mild discomfort, the girl hunkered down and grabbed a fish that was just kind of crawling on the ground exactly like fish weren't supposed to do.
"What are you doing?" Weiss asked. "Why is there a fish crawling all over the place?"
"It's a mudskipper," Blake said. Then her eyes narrowed: "They're horrid creatures that don't know they missed the boat to evolve a million years ago."
Even though Jaune was her partner and pretty much the person she talked to most in the world, he didn't exactly seem to be paying attention. He was looking out at the docks to one boat, watching someone run off of it. A blond boy wearing a white shirt undone in the same style as he was wearing.
"If they're awful, why are you touching it?"
"I have to push it back into its filthy water to teach it a lesson," she said. The fish she was holding flailed around. Blake gave it an underhand throw back towards the water, only for it to hit someone on the pier below.
"Ah!" a boy screamed, followed by a splash as he and the fish landed in the water.
"Oh, crap—sorry!" she said, rushing over to the railing.
The boy she hit on the pier looked dazed as his head poked out from the water, trying to figure out what had just happened to him. He looked up and met Blake's eyes, his faunus tail coming out from the water and curling into the shape of a question mark. Right before the two men who looked like police officers that had been chasing him caught up to him.
The boy made a gesture, touching at his forehead with his tail that Weiss recognized as extremely obscene, before he ducked under the water and swam for all he was worth. The police gave chase, but they could only go left or right on the piers, and the boy was swimming out and around them.
Blake watched with a slow sense of horror. "He'll be fine. He's fine, right? I didn't just nearly get some faunus boy arrested."
Jaune looked lost and confused. At first he started counting something off his fingers. Only to look over his shoulder down the street, looking like was doing some serious visual calculus. Towards what Weiss had originally missed, but was clearly a police line closing off a broken Dust store. Another team of freshmen students were over that way, though Weiss couldn't place them at this distance.
He was giving the direction this weird look, before his face contorted in a kind of pained expression.
"Jaune, no," Weiss said. "We are not getting involved in another crime fighting spree."
He blinked, looking surprised to find her there all the sudden. He rubbed his eyes before speaking. "Ugh, yeah, no, agreed. Smart call. I just see team CRDL over there."
CRDL? Oh. Them. Cardin Winchester and his partner, the silent and perpetually uncomfortable Lie Ren. Sky Lark and someone else, Dovetail something or other. She only really knew their leader, Cardin. A complete jerkwad who had asked her out no less than three times. Not the kind of boy who seemed to take no for an answer.
"You know them?" she asked.
"Cardin and I spot each other at the gym as of late. His cardio sucks, though. He's convinced it'll ruin his gains and oh Jesus they're walking off to the left down that street." He inhaled sharply as the biggest of the students waved at him and shot off a pair of finger guns.
Jaune waved back, teeth grit. "I just destroyed the world and it is not my problem. But, y'know, to fuck around is human, to find out is divine. And I ain't nobody's personal Jesus."
"You want to try to put that in words people can understand?"
"Uh, yeah. Sorry, Penny. But, let's just say we are not going down the same way they are."
"Agreed," Weiss said, shivering at the thought of that big idiot leader of theirs hitting on her again. He wasn't as bad as Jaune, but at least Jaune had given up after the first pass back during their first night at Beacon. As for everything else, it was just Jaune being Jaune. Lots of nonsense he probably thought was funny or quirky, but wasn't.
Blake was still frowning and watching the police trying and failing to figure out how to catch the swimming faunus. Shamrock of all people tapped on her shoulder. "I'm sure he'll be fine," he told her. "See that weapon on his back? Looks like a Huntsman and not a local. You can apologize to him later at school."
She stepped back, folding her arms. "I, I guess."
Jaune was rubbing his eyes again. When they came away, his eyes were glowing again with that faint hint of Aura that Weiss didn't like. His fingers went to his nose and he squinted. His fingers were clean. "Guess over sushi," he said, and sniffed. "Not far from here."
"Maybe," she said, and hissed as soon as she realized her mistake. "No! Don't you dare say it, Jaune!"
"…is a baby who always says yes," he said very quickly under his breath, his eyes issuing her a challenge.
Blake rolled her eyes hard enough her body moved with it. "Oh my god I hate you."
"It's a classic!" he whined.
"So is me strangling you!"
Weiss sighed, shaking her head. She ran a hand through her hair, adjusting her ponytail. It was going to be a long day.
— 20 —
"Since when could you do that?" Weiss asked, staring at the Blake just standing there at the front counter.
Beside her, the real Blake shrugged. "Since always? It's really useful to just set one up the night before some big book release or whatever and go collect in the morning. Skips the whole line."
Part of Weiss marveled. The sushi bar that Jaune had wanted to take the team to was actually rather crowded at this hour of day. Seemed to be a popular spot to be. To her amazement, it was one of those places where sushi traveled around by means of a conveyor belt to all of your tables. They charged by the plates after the fact instead of ordering upfront. She hadn't actually thought places like this really existed, for whatever reason. They just seemed conceptually too out there for her. It might have contributed to why people stayed here for so long, nibbling on sushi that came by their way for hours. It made sense to her. But that also meant the line was long to get a table. And if you sat down by the chairs offered to relax, you weren't in the line, and so you were forfeiting your opportunity to eat by relaxing. Either stand for like half an hour like an idiot, or sit down and lose your place in line.
Blake's Semblance solved that issue in the weirdest way possible. She called it her Shadow, this ability to leave a kind of still clone of herself. It didn't do anything or fight, and if you tried hitting it it would just evaporate into dust. But Blake had just plopped one down and let it hold their place in line for them, occasionally picking it up and moving it when things started to get going. It meant the rest of the team could just relax the offered chairs, watching the aquariums in the sushi bar. She wondered if they were going to eat the fish that they were watching play in the water. A mantis shrimp looked out at her placatingly, and all Weiss could do was shrug.
"Gonna be real," Jaune said, opening and closing his mouth to mimic a little eel he was squaring off against in the tank. "Literally all of my thoughts for a permanent Shadow clone are weird. Because here I was, thinking it was just a combat tool."
Blake shrugged. "Most of the uses I can think of it are pretty stupid, yeah. Like if I'm out in the field and need to take a bath, I can just use my clone as a towel rack and keep my clothes dry on it. So long as I don't need to make another clone for whatever reason, they'll pretty much just stick around if I forget about them."
Weiss glanced at Shamrock, a thought hitting her. "I bet it would be pretty killer in a card game."
Shamrock seemed to sense Weiss was doing. She adjusted her top hat. "Put on one face, set up your clone, use the motion to hide. Permanent poker face." She nodded approvingly at Weiss.
Blake considered. Until the line moved and she had to go readjust her clone. That's how they got to the front of the line.
Weiss stood up and made her way to the front counter. A faunus boy was manning the register, and a couple other people by the counter. Collecting plates and calculating tabs.
"Hey, garçon," she said with her friendliest smile, using the colloquial term to sound more hip. "There was an empty table over there and we're ready to take it."
The boy's cat tail bobbed. "Don't call me that," he said, and then pointedly ignored her to continue on with his duties.
Weiss frowned deeply. "But there's a table right there and it's free, and we're in line and first."
The boy set a bill on the table for a couple that was just leaving. He would have continued to ignore Weiss, except for Blake evaporating her shadow clone, and the sudden motion startling him. The cat boy reappraised Weiss, giving her this kind of disbelieving look.
"Yes," she supplied primly. "We're Huntresses, and our manservant, Jaune."
"I heard that!" Jaune said, tearing his eyes away from the eel he was harassing.
"Weiss Schnee," the cat boy said dubiously.
Her scar itched. "I see my reputation precedes me. Good! The sooner we can eat and leave, the sooner we can get back to assisting the Vytal Festival. Now, please seat us?"
The boy gave her a level look. "If the table is free, seat yourself. It's not some fancy restaurant where you need me to guide you in like an airship."
"Oh." Weiss blinked. Add this to her list of firsts for her. She had never before been to a seat yourself restaurant. Suddenly, getting Blake to use her Shadow clone felt really dumb.
Shamrock was giving her an oblique look, like she had just embarrassed her somehow. Jaune, on the other hand, was giving her a smug little look, smiling at himself like he knew exactly what hadi just happened. She froze her spine and gave an indifferent shrug.
In the next few moments, the entirety of team BASS had a table, chopsticks, and some soy sauce. Most of it had already been prepared for whoever took up arms at the table.
And that's pretty much where all of the steam ran out. The pairs of partners sat across from each other at the little table, taking bits of sushi that interested them from the conveyor belt. It was actually a fairly novel experience. An endless parade of raw fish and rice. For some reason, it reminded Weiss of an old song she'd once heard as a child. Robot parade, robot parade, robots obey what the children say.
That was kind of the problem. After arguing politics, fish, and discussing how Blake's special ability worked, Weiss had kind of figured that the team was learning how to talk to each other. It wasn't exactly easy, not when you had someone like Jaune. And Blake seemed clearly sympathetic to the kinds of people Weiss did not like. They had just almost seemed human for a moment. But sitting down across from each other like this, looking at each other, all they could really do was eat in awkward silence.
She wanted to say something, but she had no real topics in mind. Nothing that wouldn't sound forced in her mind. She looked around at her teammates, trying to figure out something to say. Maybe someone was doing something stupid and she could make a joke. Maybe they'd like to learn card tricks? She wasn't very good at them yet, but she was learning, and the best way to reinforce what you learn is by trying to teach others. But the longer the silence went on between them, just the clacking of wooden chopsticks, the harder it became to break. The quiet became a barrier in and of itself to conversation. The first person who spoke would receive three sets of expectant eyes waiting for them to say something interesting and spark a conversation to life.
Weiss imagined it, and suddenly she found it very hard to eat. She couldn't help but think that she had a raw fish in her mouth all of a sudden. Raw fish and cold, sticky rice wrapped in seaweed. It wasn't exactly that it tasted bad, not exactly. But thinking of trying to break this silence poisoned her tongue. She had a sudden, overpowering urge to spit everything out. But if she did that, the eyes would be back on her, just staring at her, expecting her to make some excuse for what she was doing and feeling. Against her will, she tried chewing the fish. All she could do was stare at her little plate with the tuna rolls on it, growing more and more conscious of the fact that her teammates appeared to be eating fine. That there was raw fish unchewed in her mouth, resting on her tongue like a weight.
What was wrong with her? This was as much her idea as Jaune's. She had gone out on a limb to get Shamrock out here. It had been easy to talk on the way here, about this and that and nothing and everything. But now that they were finally at their goal, all she could do was stare unhungrily at the food she had been waiting for all day. Not even talk, just stare. She looked up at Shamrock, chewing her food and twirling her chopsticks, her eyes looking out the window. Blake had at least three plates of sushi in front of her and seemed content.
And Jaune? She looked into his eyes and the faint glow within them, and swallowed. Down went the sushi she had been unable to eat before. It didn't go down easily. It got stuck in her throat, a lukewarm mass of half-masticated sludge. She couldn't even breathe. Not as it crawled down her throat. Raw fish and cold, sticky rice wrapped in seaweed.
She kept thinking about her rigid diet back home under her father's watch. Strictly controlled portions. Strictly controlled diet. Strictly controlled fitness training. It wouldn't do to let his daughter look like anything but the best. The most presentable heiress to the Schnee Dust Company possible. Poor people and the sick-minded ate whatever they wanted. Poor people and the sick-minded got fat and ugly and everything a Schnee couldn't be. She was choosing her own meals now. Choosing how to spend her life. Choosing on her own to eat—
Raw fish and cold, sticky rice wrapped in seaweed.
Jaune was staring at her, as if expecting her to say something. She opened her mouth and then closed it quickly, worried that maybe she still had something uneaten in her mouth. That he'd see how she couldn't chew. Couldn't even swallow properly.
She looked away, her eyes pleading with the cat-boy waiter as he passed by. She wanted to say something, to ask for a refill of water. But that would mean being the first person to talk. Breaking the silence and bringing everyone's attention to her and her inability to eat. Then she would either need to force it all down her mouth and pretend everything was normal, or… or something worse. She didn't know. She'd throw it up, maybe. And everyone would see. Everyone would know.
"Thanks for taking a chance and coming out here with us, Weiss," Jaune said. And just like she feared what happened to her, three sets of eyes went to him for daring to break the silence. He didn't seem to mind. He never seemed to mind anything.
She reminded herself to breathe.
Weiss made her face curve into a smile. She licked her lips. Then she realized it was probably the wrong order of events. It looked weird. And worrying about just how weird it was stopped her from replying.
Jaune continued. "I know your idea of fun is something like, I don't know, good posture and good manners, but it was pretty cool of you to show up here."
She tried not to overthink that, and failed. But instead of letting the thoughts overcome her, she just said them out loud, "One of my old tutors used to make me practice those for fun. I'd have to balance a book on my head all day, even through dance lessons."
It felt so awkward to say. She wanted to tell him it was wrong. She totally knew how to have fun like a normal person. By the way he looked at her, it made her shiver. The way he just seemed to know things about her. Like her relationship with her father, how she could sing, and how practicing good manners and posture was at least once upon a time her idea of fun. Things she would never have told him before, but he just seemed to intuitively grasp. It gave her the sense that she and him had had several heart-to-hearts before, but that she had simply forgotten them all.
Shamrock interjected, tapping her chopsticks on her little plate of sushi like a drummer. "I never really got the point of manners. It just seemed like some fancy high Valean stuff to me. What's the point of having seventeen types of forks when they all do the stabbing stuff equally?"
Looking at Shamrock gave Weiss the excuse to stop looking at Jaune. "There's not seventeen types of forks," she said slowly, trying to get her thoughts off the food and towards her team, "there's only about fourteen common forks, but only twelve in the practical sense." She folded her arms unhappily. "Legally speaking, sporks and disposable forks don't count."
Blake gave her a flat-eyed look. "You really do know how to make boring things sound exciting."
Weiss scoffed. "Well, sor-ry for trying to spell out the difference in forks. You wouldn't want to use an oyster fork to eat grapes."
Jaune's eyes were glazing over like donuts. "Dude, do I look like the kind of boy who can afford oysters?"
"I don't believe they're that expensive," Weiss said, poking at her sushi with one chopstick. She still couldn't bring herself to eat it, not anymore. Not yet. "Best paired with a sauvignon blanc. They're a potent aphrodisiac, I hear."
That got the boy's attention. "I'll keep that in mind whenever I want to seduce a girl with raw shellfish instead of my raw masculine features."
Blake laughed. "Please. I'm pretty sure I'm more manly than you." She held up her arms, flexing them at him. There really wasn't much muscle there. "You want a piece of this, bitch boy?"
Jaune puffed his chest at her, squaring up against her. "The only piece you got is cake. And I don't do that high carb shit."
Weiss sucked in a breath through a grimace. "Y'know," she said slowly, hesitantly, "I guess you two do make a cute couple."
Blake blinked hard, cheeks going red. She dropped her act with her partner to hold up her hands placatingly towards Weiss. "No no no, we're not—he and I are partners, not partners. Don't, I mean—"
It was such an awful job of faking it that Weiss actually laughed. She got halfway through the noise before she noticed Jaune looking a lot more gloomy. The humor died in her throat.
"She's not exactly my kind of Mississippi moonshine," he drawled. He shrugged one hand, using the other to try to pick up the sushi with the chopsticks. Of the four of them, he was noticeably the worst with them. Able to use them, but not quite right. Having all the grace of a child.
Of all things, that seemed to offend Blake. Wrinkling her cheeks, she asked, "What's that supposed to mean?"
Jaune gave her a flat look. "You want the serious answer or the answer I'm actually going to give you?"
Weiss frowned. "So, speaking for real here, you two aren't actually dating? Because it looked so obvious to me." She had this feeling like she had misspoken again. It was almost like that time she made a joke in the card game room, and instead of it landing, it had flopped, and now was about to create some kind of argument. She looked to Shamrock for support, and the girl in the top hat actually returned a slight smile.
"I ain't interested me none in girls I can't afford to lose," he said with a compressed sigh. "Haven't had a fling with a girl that wasn't toxic. Love that wasn't the killing kind. That didn't go from I love you to never talk to me again in about a month. I actually kinda care about Blake, no homo."
"What," Blake deadpanned.
"You too, Weiss, Shamrock," he said. "And even if legally speaking, I'm not the team leader, we haven't really figured out someone to replace me, and all of you still came here at my urging. That means I'm still in a leadership kind of role. Any relationship would inherently be a one-sided abuse of power. I'm too old for this shit. I don't want that."
To her surprise, Shamrock spoke next. "Yeah. I guess I kind of know what you mean." She held the chopsticks in her hands, idly bending them just until they would have broken but stopping at the last second.
"Yeah, I'm way too whiny and needy," Jaune said flippantly. "Into the rough stuff, too, due to a few exes of mine. Couldn't do that with someone I actually liked." He winked.
Blake was suddenly giving Jaune this weird look whose meaning Weiss couldn't place.
"That, I don't know. And not exactly the leadership thing, either." Shamrock hesitated. "Bad romance stuff. I hear lots of teams break up after their four years at a Huntsman Academy because of love gone wrong. Lots of hormonal kids and life or death situations together, they get together, and then they figure out it was a mistake and have to live with it until they're legally allowed to separate. People I've been with, y'know, I know I wouldn't want to spend four years with."
Blake made a noise in her throat, low and unhappy. "I feel the same. I, I don't know. Used to love someone too not very long ago." She made a pained expression. "I know how it can hurt. I'm not really interested in poking at those wounds before they've even scarred over. The heart wound, I mean. In a way, it's just good to have, you know, just a friend you can rely on. Haven't really had many of those before who weren't trying to get into my pants."
Shamrock snorted. "Most people get intimidated thinking about what's in mine. Hard to maintain a relationship when you're not even sure you're attracted to the other person a hundred percent of the time."
Blake gave a kind of sideways smile. "Find someone who loves you for you?"
"You and I both know romance starts physically," she said with a sigh, her body morphing until he looked a bit more gruff and masculine under his burgundy suit.
"Yeah," Jaune said, sipping at his water. "I guess no love story ever began with the words 'Damn, androgynous individual, I sure do appreciate your personality'."
Shamrock threw his chopsticks at Jaune, laughing this laugh that had just a smidgen of real humor to it. "Shut up, dude. You suck."
He held up his hands to deflect. "I suck so hard that one time my dad was the one who swallowed."
"Gross!" Blake said with a chuckle, punching her partner right in the ribs.
The mood of the conversation was difficult to understand. It was as if everybody but Weiss just revealed something about themselves. Weiss looked down, feeling the weight of the conversation on her shoulders. They had just been having a normal chit chat, and then somehow it had come to this. She had expected this to somehow turn things super awkward and worse than it was when it was silent. Instead, everyone was just giving each other crap over it. They had bared their souls, and no one had taken it seriously from anybody else.
"I, uh," she said, and floundered. "I guess I once had a crush on some boy but then that was it. Pretty tragic, huh?"
Suddenly Blake laughed. "Oh my God, Weiss, you sure do know how to ruin a conversation."
"What?!" Weiss protested. "What did I do?"
"You got us on to some sad story and that's the best you can come up with?" Jaune asked, handing Shamrock a fresh pair of chopsticks in a little paper sheath.
Weiss huffed. "Everyone must have been thinking it, about you and Blake. You go from hating each other one day to suddenly becoming best friends. It's not my fault everyone decided to take that and just become so serious."
Shamrock held up his chopstick packet to his mouth. He blew into it, sending the little tube of paper right into Weiss's eye.
"Ow, what the heck, you jerk!"
Everyone laughed. But it wasn't like they were laughing at her. They were just kind of, and she knew it sounded cliché, but laughing with her. It was hard to make sense of, hard to put words to. But for this weird little moment, it felt like she belonged with these people. The moody Blake, the often unsettling Jaune, and the incredibly confusing Shamrock. They were her team. She didn't really understand them as people, hardly got them at all, but right now, they were all laughing. Even she couldn't help herself, not totally.
It was dumb. It was completely illogical. Incredibly childish.
I like to think that's one of my strengths when it comes to writing. I'm pretty good at these kinds of brakes. This kind of worries and panic attacks and making them feel real.
I got a lot of help from the people on my Discord. A lot of the internal issues and traumas that Weiss feels and expresses are the direct result of being workshopping with friends who have these kind of issues to make them feel more real. To ensure they hit home. Whether it be horrifying social anxiety in the card game, or nearly having a panic attack over just sushi—The only way forward is to make it feel real. So that you can feel what Weiss is feeling.
Volume 4: Ça Ira "Are we doing this? Are we actually becoming friends in the worst way possible?"
Chapter 1: Winter Hiatus "We're all puppets, my friend. I'm just a puppet that can see the strings."
— 1 —
Of all the places I thought I'd find myself, sitting in the back seat just inches away from Yang wasn't really one of them. And it wasn't like I could turn away. I could, but she was still staring at me, and it made it difficult not to stare back at her. Her eyes remained that same purple lilac color, her expression was kind of stunned blank like she couldn't believe I was there. Her body had this defensive tilt to it, the way she angled herself to me. As usual, I was the only one off-duty fully armed. Neither Ruby in the front passenger seat nor the drunk driver at the wheel, Qrow, were packing heat. Yang seemed somehow smaller when unarmed, a total wristlet without her gauntlets, dressed in a varsity jacket and jeans. Maybe she had toned down the vaguely sexualized look because of her uncle, or maybe she was just buttoning up from all the snow outside.
I recalled the first I'd ever seen snow, really seen snow. I'd been twenty-four, stationed up by the capital, where the Army cancelled literally any work at the first sign of real winter. Snow was a myth in the Florida I'd come from. Global warming meant all I saw during my winter in Knoxville had been ice and sleet. And ruck marching up through the snowy mountains of the Afghanistan-adjacent Fort Huachuca didn't count, since the white stuff never reached down far enough to where I barracked. I didn't know how to dress for the cold. Even now, weapons aside, I was just wearing some tight, overly-pocketed black khakis and an open faced jacket Coco had insisted would look really hot as hell on me; her words, not mine. Like a low-burn of amphetamine, just a touch of active Aura protected you enough from the cold that I could probably go naked outside and not notice it, and I wasn't running anything but the comforting touch I never liked to go long without. Been that way ever since Blake turned mine on.
Weiss had insisted cumbersome furs or Aura were the only way to survive out in Solitas where she was from.
"You should go," Weiss had told me, wearing a white winter coat that made her look kind of like a ruffled hen.
I had jumped, putting my scroll face down on the bed. The guitar I was holding in my lap and practicing Old Town Road with made a protesting noise. "Since when we been comfy enough to get close enough for you to spy on my texts?"
Weiss had looked away. "Your sister, right? If you have a family to go back to, you should go."
"And what will the rest of you do without me to ruin your lives?"
It got the barest hint of a smile from her. Proof of just how far I'd managed to come with her, into the nebulous realm of vague tolerance instead of outright hatred. "We'll manage. Maybe I can take up a hobby without you ruining my day, like vacuuming. Finally figure out how to use the food room."
"Kitchen. It's called the kitchen." I shook my head.
The fact was, I was the only member of my team who actually had somewhere to go home for the holidays, the little winter break between the first and second semesters of freshman year. Blake didn't have anywhere. Shamrock was from way too far away and didn't seem interested in family. Weiss apparently had property out in the city, but didn't want to be anywhere her family owned. It meant they would be staying together for the couple weeks without class during the winter.
So I broke, and asked Indigo to send me my parents' address.
I wasn't sure how, but Ruby had figured out what I was doing. One of the little black spots in Jaune's backstory was exactly where he was from. Plotting the coordinates into my map app on my scroll, I figured out it was apparently on the island of Patch; same place Ruby came from. It was interesting seeing how it was all cartographic, no satellite images. But I supposed that made sense, given that Remnant didn't have even a semblance of a space program. I think Dust didn't work once you got into the high atmosphere or something.
Long story short, she and her sister were going home for the holidays. And since where I apparently lived before becoming a Huntsman was just a little past where they were from, she invited me along for the ride. One over-enthusiastic airship ride down to the city and one meeting with her alcoholic uncle later, and here I was, awkwardly engaged in a staring contest with Yang.
I was winning, naturally. Yang didn't seem able to hold my gaze for long comfortably. Some completely random side effect of using your Aura like I was meant you didn't really have to blink very much, a completely useless bit of trivia unless you were up against an SCP, but there it was. Ruby and her uncle were excitedly talking in the front seats, something about the pop song on the radio. It wasn't really my jam.
At some point, I expected Yang or I to break the awkward silence and get to talking. Finally get things straight between us. Get down to the inevitable heart to heart like I had had with Blake that solves all of our problems with empathy and mutual understanding. But that never happened. We never really talked at all. Just stared at each other with distrust, occasionally looking out at the city. Neither of us had any words to say to the other, only occasionally voicing opinions when Ruby or her uncle asked us a question.
The best I managed to do was ask her, "So. Want to talk about stuff? Work through our issues?"
Yang gave me this look and said in a voice low enough so only I would hear it, "I'd honestly prefer if you contorted yourself into a human dildo and fucked right on out of here."
And then it was back to not talking. It was like that all the way to the harbor.
I expected some kind of fancy cyberpunk science fiction way across the bay to the island out in the distance. Maybe an airship or one of those flying cars I'd seen downtown. Those looked cool. But instead, we just took a car ferry. It felt bizarrely down to earth in a way I just didn't imagine would happen here.
Mercifully, I found myself alone out on the ferry, looking over the ice and snow in the harbor, and at all of the foreign ships still stuck out there on the water due to some labor dispute. I made the universal gesture for a cigarette at one of the passengers, who at first gave me a look and asked how old I was, before his friend pointed out that I was obviously a Huntsman. It seemed like everyone in this country smoked. Lighting one up helped me pass the time alone, leaning against the railing as the city faded into the distance.
The storm of roses that materialized as a fifteen-year-old girl sitting on the railings begged to differ with my plans.
"Hmm, no," Ruby said, plucking the cigarette from my mouth and tossing it over the side.
"Hey, what the fuck! I was enjoying my brooding!"
She held onto the railing, idly kicking her feet. She looked weird in that hoodie and sweatpants, somehow frumpy. "You and Yang have been brooding this entire trip. Do you know how awkward it is trying to talk when you two are both staring murder at each other?"
"For your information, she wouldn't have to stare murder at me to get the point across," I said. "Me and my cigarettes is perfectly capable of committing suicide on my own."
She punched me in the arm. "Go be sad on your own time. This is Ruby time. You're not allowed to be sad on Ruby time."
I tried punching her back, but she just evaporated into a cloud and reappeared on the other side of me, still sitting on the railing. Giving me this intensely smug smile, just to rub it in.
"It's all the snow, right?" she asked. "I used to get pretty down when it got cold, too. Seasonal depression or something. My dad said it was pretty common. He still gets pretty bummed out during the first couple days of summer."
I tried to process that for a moment. "Because of your mom?"
She nodded seriously. "Her and my dad, they were teammates. Huntsmen." Ruby leaned back far enough that I was afraid she might fall, opening her mouth to catch a snowflake on her tongue. "I hope someone misses me like that if I ever die. But I guess it's kind of like the old saying, y'know? We're all meat for the Butcher in the end. Especially super cool Huntresses like me."
I folded my arms uncomfortably under the weight of the sideways smile she was giving me. "I can't tell if that's deep, or deeply worrying."
Ruby laughed. "That's what you sound like."
"I haven't said anything at all this trip!"
The girl smiled. "Yeah, but I can hear your thoughts. They're all mopey and downer-y. Total Grimm bait. Talk to me. What's up? Keeping things bottled up inside is how you spiral into bad places. I have a lot of experience."
"Bottling things up inside?"
Ruby snorted. "Nah. Dealing with people who can't talk about stuff. That was your problem when you first got to Beacon, right?"
I stepped away from the railing. My gut instinct was to tell her to screw off. I wasn't about to talk about this. In a very real sense, I didn't even want to think about it. Not dealing with my problems was my number one solution to dealing with my problems. Ignore them until they go away. Tell everyone everything's fine. If you lie long enough, it eventually becomes true.
I ran my hand through my little beard, neatly trimmed and manly. It had come surprisingly far for a boy my age. And it helped deal with the cold like my very own fur coat.
Coco's words ran through my head, telling me that I was treating things too seriously. Looking at Ruby and the expression she was making, suddenly I couldn't help but laugh. That somehow seemed to upset her. She pouted at me angrily.
"Don't make fun of me!" she said, hopping to her feet. "I'm full of big sister energy! I can be all cool and help deal with adult problems."
I put my hand on the top of her head, and then moved it myself, physically demonstrating how short she was compared to me. "Ain't a world out there where you're a big sister to anybody, short round."
She blew a lock of hair out of her eyes, hands on hips. "I'd be taller if I could wear lady stilts. But every time I try, all I do is wind up making friends with the floor. I will cut your legs off to teach you a lesson about being taller than people!"
"With what weapon?"
"Crescent Rose is in the trunk of my uncle's car! I'll do it. One-vs-one me, right here, right now."
I laughed, pushing her away. "What did I tell you my rule was about fighting girls in training bras?"
She huffed, cheeks red. "I don't wear those! I shop at the adult store with Yang!"
"Thanks. I miss five seconds ago when I didn't know that."
"That's not what I meant and you know it!" Ruby folded her arms protectively. "And you're the one that keeps talking about it, jerk," she grumbled.
"If I'm such a jerk, why did you invite me out here?"
"Because, well! Because jerked chicken can still taste good!"
I snorted in laughter. "What the hell does that even mean!"
She threw her hands up. "It sounded like a really clever metaphor until I said it, shut up!" She shoved me forwards.
I stumbled, still laughing. "You really need to rethink this whole therapy angle. You're not good at it. Stick to killing giant monsters."
Ruby glared, putting on a victorious kind of grin that felt like she was forcing it on to her face. "You're not sad anymore, so I think it worked."
I brought my fingers to the corners of my lips and pulled them down into an impossibly deep frown. "You're right. I'm not sad. Now I'm just depressed!"
She mirrored my expression, pulling even further down on her face. "Depression fight—one, two, three, go!"
"The only person in my family I like is my big sister, nyegh!"
"My big sister sucks at giving gifts, nyegh!"
I pulled down even further, exposing my gums. "I have to face my abusive father, nyegh!"
"My mom's dead, nyegh!"
"I don't even know my family at this point anymore and feel like an imposter they won't love because I'm a fraud, nyegh! Nyegh nyegh nyegh!"
Ruby blinked. "Wait, hold up. Is that why you're feeling like crap? You feel like you're not good enough and, like, they won't love you? The same family you're visiting for winter?"
"No, you hold up, did you just trick me into admitting what's bothering me?"
She returned a toothy expression that somehow impossibly straddled the line between sheepish and wolfish at the same time. "I mean, you kind of just walked into that one."
"What the hell is going on here?" Yang demanded, walking up a little staircase to our corner of the deck.
I realized I was still pulling my face down. Letting it go, I put my hands in my pockets and shrugged. "I was kicking your sister's ass in a depression fight."
"Yang, go away!" Ruby whined. "Dr. Ruby was just making a breakthrough! It was going to be the pinnacle of my medical career."
Her sister somewhat awkwardly tugged on her varsity jacket. She thumbed over her shoulder. "Yeah. Well. Uncle Qrow started a fire to cook up some hot dogs and I needed help to stop him."
Ruby groaned. "Uncle Qrow, not in the boat again!" She spun to me, holding up one finger. "This isn't over. If they're your family, they'll love you for who you are, no matter who you become. You're still their Jaune, Jaune."
"And what if I'm not Jaune?" I asked with all the force of wind leaving a sail. The words just tumbled out. But by that point, she had already evaporated into a storm of rose petals and zoomed off to the deck with all the cars.
Yang spared me just enough time to give me one last dirty look before chasing after her sister.
— 2 —
The ferry docked in the biggest city on the island, some little place called Five Wives. It didn't look like much. Some kind of sports stadium and an academy that Ruby claimed was Signal, also not in session for the winter break. Not that we got to see much of town. Qrow kind of just shuttled us into the car as fast as possible and then sped off before anyone could stick him with the bill for starting a fire on the deck. At least the hot dogs were good.
After that, it was just more awkward staring with Yang in the backseat. I could feel her sucking away my good vibes with every moment that passed. Until I was back in a funk all over again. And while Ruby did occasionally give me vaguely anxious glances in the rearview mirror, she had at least had that common decency not to dig up my dirty laundry in public like this.
Qrow drove us further inland until we could more easily see the massive mountain at the center of Patch. Ruby claimed the mountain made land navigation on Patch hard, since it was so magnetic it affected local compasses and nearly made her fail the first year final field test at Signal. We passed through a lowland known as Caedwun's Scar, whose claim to fame was a tourist trap built around a giant shard of the moon that fell to Remnant. That didn't sound like a thing that could actually happen, but I did suppose the giant crystalline spire rock thing looked kind of moon-like. Reminded me more of aedra from Pillars of Eternity, only white. Apparently there was a pretty kick-ass moon themed diner in the area.
All the while, the snow kept falling from on high. But even with the holidays here, it seemed snow ploughs were keeping the highway clear.
A couple hours went by and Qrow pulled up to a house set apart from a nearby town. Like a lot of the places I'd seen so far on the island, it had an obsequiously English name, such as Leeds, Birmingham, Lincolnshire, and most bizarrely of all Boston. That last one was apparently where Ruby was from by proxy. I didn't like that on a conceptual level. My mother had been a proud Staten Island working class girl and my entire family on that side, as a rule, hated anyone from Boston or Massachusetts. Fuck the Red Sox.
The house itself was surprisingly big. Two stories with a lot of square footage. Definitely more house than anything I'd ever lived in. This place probably even had a basement, an unthinkable concept to a Florida boy like myself. But then again, so was the fact that snow actually crunched under my boots. For some reason, that had never quite struck me as realistic. Qrow popped open the trunk, and I began putting everyone's bags over my shoulders.
"I can carry my own things," Yang said, grabbing her bag from my hands and clutching it almost protectively.
I gave her an even look, the best I could manage. "But if I don't carry things, how am I going to prove I go to the gym? Without bags, I'll just have to resort to my old school tactic of stacking girls and lifting them!"
"Nah, it's cool," Ruby said, materializing at my side. "I've always wanted a manservant. Your new name is Claude."
I gave Yang a well there you have it gesture. It wasn't that I intended to stay here long and get comfy. My own destination was a little further inland. Close enough that part of me wondered if Ruby and Jaune had ever met as little kids.
"Tai isn't in right now," Qrow said, unlocking the front door. "Think he's out trying to fetch dinner or something. Make yourself at home, kid."
"Wait, what about driving me to the town over?" I asked, still shouldering Ruby's bags.
"I've been drinking. I can't drink and drive. That'd be irresponsible!" He gave me a hint of a smile, before suffocating it with a pull of whiskey that I really wished I could have. "Besides, looks we got a snowstorm coming in. I don't want to drive in this. You'll be there for the Long Night tomorrow."
I sighed from the back of my throat.
Long Night, though? Long night of what? Of solace? Or maybe it was the name of the holiday happening tomorrow. The problem with not being a native to this world, was that everyone just assumed I knew what the Christmas equivalent here would be, their nondescript winter celebration. People just inferred it was Christmas from context. And unlike Earth, where Christmas was just one of the holidays at the time, this was just the Holiday. It had gotten so colloquial to the point that I couldn't even ask what the hell it was called, without revealing I was– well, I guess it wouldn't reveal anything, it would just be hella weird. It would be like a grown ass man coming up to you, pointing at a dog, and sincerely asking What's this thing called? You probably wouldn't assume he was an alien or a body snatcher from an alternate dimension, but you would assume he was insane or probably high.
The living room was a lot more like a den than I would have imagined. They had an honest-to-god fireplace. The whole thing was decorated in what I had to assume was the holiday aesthetic, but I couldn't place any of the symbols. Some of them vaguely reminded me of Weiss' glyphs. A couple I thought were just abstract representations of snowflakes and other wintery scenes. Hanging above the door was what looked like prayer beads with bits of paper taped to them, instead of a mistletoe or something. Bits of hot wax were pressed up against the fireplace, melted there and bright red, with symbols that I felt vaguely sure represented Ruby and Yang and I guess Qrow and Taiyang, the name of the girls' father.
It all had this vaguely alien feeling to me. When I was a kid, I had been over eagerly trick-or-treating for Halloween. Rushing on ahead, I had rung the doorbell of a house that had its lights off, a complete faux pas. But I was too young and high on sugar to notice. The girl who answered the door was my age, black, and looked completely terrified of me, like I was some monster out of, well, out of whatever monster movie that I was dressed like.
"We don't celebrate Halloween," she had told me, the interior of her house somehow looking completely foreign despite just being an average house. All wrong for the season and the holiday. Everything in there I could name and place, but it just felt wrong somehow. There was probably some childhood racism in that perspective, if I'm being honest. I suspected in hindsight she was probably Muslim. Yet, I just gave her this baffled look like she was the one in the wrong, not me.
It was one of those memories that always made me cringe to remember. But as I held Ruby's bags over my shoulders, looking around at the completely alien decoration with a vague wintry feeling, that was just the sense I got. I was an invader in this world. And not the cool one that was going to anally probe you and steal your cow. The kind who got hopped up on painkillers and alcohol to cope with the culture shock and the new flesh.
Yang set herself down on the couch with a heavy enough sigh that it took me from my reveries. After fishing around between the sofa cushions, she found the remote to operate the plasma screen. She was completely ignoring me as if hoping that by pretending I wasn't existing and keeping me in the corners of her eyes, I would eventually vanish.
"Zwei!" Ruby called out. "Zwei, where are you, boy!" She huffed. "Guess maybe Dad took him."
"Hey, kid, where'm I putting your stuff?" I asked.
"Oh, that. Just put them in my room. Which, never mind, you don't know where that is. Be really weird if you did."
And so I followed her up the stairs. I dropped off Ruby's bags in front of her door.
Ruby made a face at me. "My bed's like just five feet away, dude."
"I can still feel Yang's eyes on the back of my soul," I said. "Miss me with that going into a fifteen-year-old girl's room for any reason shit."
She rolled her eyes, mouth opening to accentuate the gesture. "You're such a baby, Jaune."
"My name's not maybe."
"What?"
"The only baby I know is maybe, and because I'm not maybe, therefore I'm not a baby. Dig?"
She just stared at me skeptically. "Wow. That was so funny I forgot to laugh."
I didn't reply. Just looked back down the hall.
Ruby punched me. Or tried to in any case. I just passively pulled back my arm and had her hit my scabbard. I was convinced my reaction speed was faster than it would have been a couple months ago, without all of the training with Blake.
"Ow!" she whined, rubbing her hand. "That hurt! Not supposed to do that to me in my own home! Only I get to punch you, if you're being a downer again. That's the rule. I would know because I just made it up."
I rolled my shoulders, hefting my own bag. "It doesn't have to be physical. I can hurt you in other ways. How would you like to be emotionally traumatized?"
She waved her hand at me. "Nah, I already got some. It's the perfect amount."
"Show me where I can put my own stuff down, or I'll do it! It's the trauma conga line from here on till morning!"
She gasped theatrically, slapping her hands to her cheeks. "No, anything but that! Anymore and I'll just get all sad and emo instead of just damaged enough to be kinda quirky!"
I sensed that there was a lot more self-deprecation in that than she was letting on. Like when she told me earlier that she hoped someone would miss her when she died like she missed her mom. Nevertheless, after making an expansive gesture towards a hallway, she did reluctantly bring me somewhere to put my stuff down.
And it was a guest room. An honest-to-god guest room the kind which I only knew from the legends of people who could afford to own property. The whole room looked kind of old and unused, dust on a lot of the services, and smelled vaguely like moths. Ruby didn't seem to want to enter the room, just standing there with her hands behind her back like some girlish version of parade rest.
"You want something?" I asked, putting my bag on the bed.
She blinked at me like she was expecting a whole different line of question. "Oh, uh, no. Let me know if you see a Corgi running around here somewhere. I'm gonna go not be here. Ciao!"
She turned into a cloud of roses and just vanished. I was left standing there, feeling like something was really wrong. I tried looking around to figure out what it was, that nagging sensation. The first thing to catch my mind were the carvings in the door frame, only really visible from within.
Ruby — 1
Yang — 3
Ruby — 2
Yang — 4
It was a way of marking height by age. It ended approximately when Ruby turned five or thereabouts. I walked over to examine the little markings, and shut the door while I was there. I didn't really like snooping around a guest room with an open door.
It didn't particularly mean much to me. Raised more questions than it answered. Just like the weird color of the sheets, which looked color-coded to someone's tastes: white and black, which somehow reminded me of an old checkered suit. I tried to remember whose colors it represented, since that was a big theme here on Remnant. Qrow? That was broadly the color of his outfit. Didn't feel right. Something about this place struck me as feminine, I didn't know why. Summer Rose? But why would she have her own room?
There was nothing on the desk in the room. The chair was old wood, no brand stickers, and had the distinct impression that someone had made it by hand from several cuts on it. There were little grooves on the floor from where someone had been pushing and pulling it into the desk for a long time. No Ethernet outlet anywhere to be found in the room. And from my vague knowledge of American power outlet standards, there were a few too many outlets here. One of them even looked crooked.
Ignoring the closet for now, I decided to poke through the old drawers. One time, when I was being moved to a new base, I was stuck in a quarantine barracks for two weeks straight. The person who had the room before me had been a Marine, and had left a lot of their paperwork in the desk. I had gone through their rank structure, their personal diary, and other miscellaneous details in between bouts of being completely fucking wasted to help pass the time.
I found a literal rat's nest in the bottom right drawer. Lots of torn up paper and receipts, though no signs of old shit or piss. I once let a wild snake live in my car over the summer because I had problems with mice in the glove box and was too busy being in the Army to get my car. I miss you, snake bro. Your skin was a treasure.
I poked through the little nest, until I found a piece of harder paper. It looked like a Polaroid, complete with a couple of notes on the one side. Feeling like some kind of RPG adventurer trying to solve a mystery murder, I sat back on the bed and examined the picture.
Team STRQ, '32, read the flowery script. That was, what, nineteen years ago? Or was it closer to twenty, since this was going to be the eve of year '52. Summer Rose, Taiyang, Raven & Qrow Branwen. I had the distinct impression I wasn't supposed to see whatever was on the front, but that had never stopped me before.
That's how I walked in on my parents fucking that one time, and I was only mildly horribly scarred for life as a result of that.
The picture looked to be from outside the house, except the house was still under construction. Poorly planned and still mostly made of logs and frames. A woman who looked like a checkerboard Ruby was front and center, jumping into the air and splaying her limbs out. To the side was a woman who looked like Yang (Raven), just wearing red and with black hair, looking like she was trying really hard to pretend like she totally wasn't having fun right now, you guys. The next one had to be Qrow, making a dumb face and wearing a disco-ass blazer; he was looking really clean shaven and handsome as a young man, a couple of decades without the damage of vodka and whiskey. The last was the man on the ground, who had apparently been shoved to the ground by the Ruby lookalike who had to be Summer, before jumping back up. I suppose that must have been Ruby's father, Taiyang.
There was graffiti on the picture. Someone had drawn exaggerated angry eyebrows and stink lines coming from Raven. There was a little heart around Taiyang and a label that simply read The Boy. Several cartoon flowers decorated Qrow's outfit, with a speech bubble that said "Disco, baby!" Lastly were little lines of motion and exploding stars surrounded Summer herself.
"I get the feeling you shouldn't be looking at that," Qrow said, his voice muffled by the door.
I jumped, and instinctively sat on the polaroid. "How do you know what I'm doing?"
He knocked on the knob. "I've seen glory holes smaller than this door lock."
"I feel sorry for any woman you fucked through such a small glory hole," I said, making a teensy-weensy measurement between my fingers.
Qrow laughed, just up and opening the door. He just walked in, hands in his pockets. He struck me as being all together far too casual, like he was forcing it. "I guess a couple of her old things keep turning up in this room. Used to be Ruby's mom's, Summer."
"What are you doing here?" I asked, standing up.
The man shrugged. "Tai's apparently coming home with a turkey or something. Ruby was trying to get me to find her, and I quote, 'my Claude' to help her make mashed potatoes. Which I was going to recommend you do quickly, because she's already set the water on fire." He brought his hand from his pocket and made a circular gesture. "But then I figured out that picture you're looking at, and probably should explain it."
"Wait, hold that thought. So you were just looking for me, and were staring through the door lock? What if I'd been jerking off?"
"I would have knocked. Ball's in your corner. What would you have done?"
"I would have stared you down through the door and finished like the man I am."
Qrow laughed. "How the fuck are you the girl's friend?"
"I insisted she needed to brush her teeth and ruined her day by making broccoli," I said flatly. "Genuinely don't know why she tolerates me. But." My hand went up to my little cross necklace, the one she had given me. That I hadn't taken off since. "She's one of the few who do. Kind of means something, I guess."
He nodded, and then pointed to the photo I had left on the bed. "She ever tell you about her mom?"
I folded my arms uncomfortably, taking a step back towards the desk. "Yeah. Summer Rose. I know she's dead. Ruby's talked about it a bit. Told me that she wishes someone would miss her when she dies as much as she misses her mom."
That actually seemed to catch Qrow off guard. "She told you what?"
I made a so-so gesture. "She was being fatalistic. I think she was just trying to mock me because I was in a bad mood."
Qrow shook his head. Running his hand through a stubble, he said, "No, I—I just saw you looking at the old picture of Summer. Had to spend like two minutes trying to think of something dramatic to introduce her with. I didn't actually think Ruby would tell you about her. Kid's usually pretty close-lipped on that."
"So you were staring at me for two damn minutes through the fucking door?"
"In my defense, most of the time was spent drinking." He made a face. "Man, kid, Jaune, would you stop harping that point? I'm trying to actually be a responsible adult for once in my life."
"I'm going to put, like, duct tape on the door so you can't watch me!"
"You know, that's both clever and pretty obvious." Qrow rubbed his chin thoughtfully "Glad Summer never did. She used to sleep naked and—" He shrugged.
"You watched your own goddamn sister be naked?"
He just looked confused. "Wha'?"
"I mean, I'm pretty sure that's how that works. Ruby seems to look up to you a lot, kind of dresses like you, so I figured her mom was probably your sister?"
Qrow threw his head back laughing. "Gods, kid. That's a good one, but no. Yang's my biological niece. Ruby I just kind of adopted like one because, well, she's a good kid. And I figured having two dads was probably the least bad outcome for her after her mom died."
He sat down on the bed, still laughing at himself, rubbing his face. "You know, Jaune, no, fuck it. I actually came here to try to gently inform you of the whole thing with Summer and Ruby's mom. Figured it'd probably hurt the girl if you just up and asked who this chick in the photo was. You look like you were about to do something stupid like that. I was going to bring up how Ruby's father actually built this house, adding rooms and places for the family as we all grew. Summer used to just be one of his friends, his team leader, and this was her room. Moved into the bedroom after Raven left and the two of them got married. It was going to be this whole thing I was planning. I'm a veritable encyclopedia of useless knowledge like that.
"But at this point, I don't even know what the hell we're talking about. Seriously, What's going on anymore? And more to the point, what the hell did you do to Ruby to get her to open up about her mom to you?"
I shrugged, honestly. "I know a doctor at the school brought her up briefly; Summer, I mean. She kind of just told me on her own going from that."
"You sure you two really aren't a thing? Girl really seems to like you."
"My entire goal in life is to make people who used to hate me like me," I said with a sigh. Once again I found my hand on my necklace, the gift she'd given me. "Today Ruby, tomorrow my father. Neither of whom I'm trying to fuck by making them like me."
"Be pretty sketchy if you were trying to fuck your dad," he said mildly. His face said he still had doubt, not about my father, but about Ruby in some way. At least I hoped it was about Ruby and not my dad.
"I got a policy against sleeping with people I know and like," I said flatly, just trying to throw him off with that. And vaguely reassure him about Ruby. "And even if we ignored the fact that she's fifteen and the frankly freaky fact everyone seems to forget that, I don't like Ruby or any other girl I've met at Beacon enough to let her be the girl who fucks my life up."
Instead of anything reasonable, Qrow just nodded. "Ah, so you're at that phase of romantic cynicism. Makes sense. Been there too. It's a fun phase, though I was a lot older than you when I stumbled into that headspace. But inevitably getting syphilis treatment really sucks. Just saying. Not that I'd know."
"Your advice scares me."
"I mean, just the mano-a-mano type," he said. "I sorta dig doing it, really. If you need some advice from an actual pretend father figure, we got a couple hours in the car tomorrow between here and there. I'd be happy to see how good I am at giving advice to a young man instead of a terrifying murder machine pretending to be a young girl."
I sighed. "This conversation somehow feels like I've lost a couple of brain cells. Am I the only one?"
"Zug zug," Qrow said, opening his mouth and giving me the dumbest look possible. He shook his head and the expression away. "Anyhow, since your new name is apparently Claude and you are Ruby's manservant, want to help around with the chores and dinner?"
"If maids get sexy outfits, what kind of outfit do I get for being a sexy manservant?"
"I usually just take off my shirt and let my body do the talking."
"I'll get that in mind once I beat into Ruby exactly how to make mashed potatoes. Y'all get any garlic?"
Qrow shrugged, standing up. "Figure it out yourself. I just occasionally visit here to bum a couple of Lien from time to time."
— 3 —
Taiyang elbowed the door of his '29 Fuselier supercharger shut, jostling the fuzzy disco ball hanging from the rear view mirror, after making sure that the dog, Zwei, got out safely. The car had been one of the first things he bought with the check he got from his first mission ever as a Huntsman. Able to go from rear wheel drive to all wheel drive for that offroading drag racing, and with enough horsepower to rival the entire Royal Valean Dragoons at their height, it was pretty much his first child. Or, well, technically speaking, maybe his second child? Yang was the third, obviously. But the first version of this car, he'd kind of completely fucking annihilated on a mission to the Ivory Mountains, ramping the ride up to two hundred MPH and driving straight off the cliff into the dragon's mouth to save Raven.
Team STRQ had needed to walk back home to Vale. But all four letters had survived, if bloodied. Carrying Raven on her broken leg, she'd smiled at him and held up the only object she'd been able to recover from Taiyang's previous car. It was the super tacky fuzzy disco ball he'd hung from the rearview mirror because Qrow thought it'd be badass and get the two of them hella babes. It was the only part of the car they'd been able to recover. It was what made him realize Qrow's plan had worked, and it had got him the only babe he cared about.
Once upon a time, at least. Once upon a different lifetime. Before she left and Summer confessed to him and…
Oh, and before that great insurance payoff. "Killing Grimm" was actually covered by that. Funny how that worked. Enabled him to get a whole new Fusilier.
The little Patch corgi, Zwei, barked up at him. Somehow sarcastically.
Carrying the turkey and a pack of beers, Taiyang rolled his eyes. His boots crushed the soft, fresh-fallen snow. "Yeah, boy. You can have one of the legs. But you gotta behave. Ruby apparently has some friend over. Remember the last time she had a guest?"
Zwei tilted his head, before shaking the white snow off his black-furred back. He barked and raced off to the door.
Taiyang sighed and opened the door. Instantly the smells of butter, milk, and garlic assaulted his nose. Someone was making potatoes? He had a hard time figuring out which of his family had learned to cook. Then he wondered if it was Ruby's guest. She hadn't brought over a friend for the Long Night just to enslave them to make dinner again, had she?
The dog stormed into the house before Tai could get in.
"ZWEI!" Ruby screamed from the kitchen, out of view from the living room. "YANG, JAUNE, ZWEI'S HERE! DIS MY DOG, ZWEI, AND HE IS THE BEST!"
A boy screamed. A boy. Not a man like Qrow. A boy. Jaune? "Damnit, Ruby, watch the pot!"
"Don't swear at my sister!" Yang called back.
"I'm covered in gravy, thank you very much, Yang," he said. "I know I'm delicious and nutritious, but not this way. Ugh, bordel de merde!"
"No swearing in fancy around Ruby, either!"
"I'm sorry, Jaune!" Ruby said. "Does that hurt?"
"Gravy is a harsh mistress, yes! Where's your bathroom?"
Taiyang had thought it'd be some girl from Beacon or something. But in hindsight, everyone had been kind of vague about it, avoiding pronouns and gender. Oh shit. Taiyang entered defense mode.
Qrow stepped past Tai, closing the door behind him and snatching his beers in a solid motion. The man who might as well be Tai's brother didn't look too bothered, just faintly amused.
"Yeah," he said around the can of beer. "Boy's name is Jaune. Surprise!"
Taiyang grit his teeth. "Qrow, I thought we had a plan for whenever Ruby brings home boys." He grabbed Qrow and shook him. "A plan."
"Why does Ruby get a plan and not Yang?" he asked, sipping beer.
"Because you don't need a plan to deal with Yang breaking a boy's legs," he hissed, shoving his turkey at Qrow. "We just need to help her bury the body when it happens."
Qrow laughed. "She still might kill Jaune all the same. You want in?"
"What did I tell you about trying to involve me in conspiracy to commit murder?" Taiyang pushed away from Qrow, rolling his eyes hard enough his whole body shook with it. He just grabbed his turkey and, he didn't know, supposed he'd at least try to meet Ruby's friend, who was a boy.
He found Ruby in the kitchen, rolling around on the ground with Zwei. Yang was desperately trying to get a hold of a boiling pot of potatoes and another of gravy.
"Dad!" Ruby called out. "Look, I found a dog. He's mine now. Get your own."
Tai felt a lot of his worry fade away as he looked at Ruby and her smile. And then he reminded himself what lengths he went to as a dad to protect that smile. "Nah, I licked him, so that means I own him."
"What if he licks me?" she asked. "Does that mean I'll be his and so have to take him back with me?"
"Maybe. If a bunch of big scary Huntresses really need Zwei." He winks. "But we both know the only thing Zwei licks are his nuts."
"Dad, ew!" Ruby laughed.
His happy thoughts were cut off when Yang yelled.
"Dad, help!"
Tai put the turkey and a couple cans in bags on the kitchen table and rushed over to help his sunny little dragon. He'd give her a hug or something, but from the way she was panicking at the pot of potatoes, now probably wasn't the time. She'd probably flail and punch him.
"How'd you even get here, Yang?" he asked, pushing her aside by her shoulder. He quickly adjusted the burners and stirred away the bubbling foam. Safe at last using his expert dad skills.
"Iunno," Yang said, hands going through his hair. Straightening out her messy ponytail. "Jaune was trying to teach Ruby how to cook, since, y'know." She nodded to the third pot on the stove. It looked like it'd been the site of a bum's tire fire.
Tai sighed. "Yep. Another Holiday, another pot lost. Some things never change."
"I'm sorry!" Ruby said, standing up and wearing Zwei as a hat. "But if it means anything, then I got you a new pot for the Holiday."
"Ah. Preplanned arson and ruining my surprise gift. Awesome." He smiled and tousled her hair. "Love ya too, kid."
Yang rolled eyes, so he tousled hers too. Even harder. As if his sunny little dragon was too old for this. Not a chance!
Which is when he remembered. "Who's Jaune, exactly?"
"Some asshole," Yang said as Ruby happily replied, "My manservant!"
The two girls looked at each other, and despite themselves laughed. Still resting on Ruby's head, Zwei barked happily. Yang dragged the dog off her sister and gave him a nose kiss.
"Hey, boy. Missed you too," Yang said.
Taiyang rubbed his cold hands together. He grabbed a towel from the oven. "Oh, yeah. There's no towels in the bathroom. That's where he went, right? Lemme just, y'know, get him something to dry himself."
They both made agreeable noises, and were just a pair of happy siblings together with the world's best dog.
Qrow met Tai on the other end of the kitchen, drinking his second can of beer and leaning against the door. "Just, be careful."
"Of what?" Tai asked.
"The boy, I guess. Don't know. I think he likes to pretend and act like he's way older than he is. Him and Yang are the same age. I'd call him super edgy, but." Qrow shrugged. "Don't just kill the kid, I guess. Unless you can make it really funny. You do that, I'm all for it." He pulled his head back to drink, before walking into the kitchen. "Zwei–"
Zwei barked.
"You sonuvabitch!"
The dog launched from the girls' grasp and lunged for Qrow, his paw meeting Qrow's hand in a manly full-arm hand-paw clasp.
Tai shook his head, wiping his hands on the dry oven towel, following the sound of the running sink. For some reason, trying to reassure Tai about the boy had only made him more nervous. If the boy was just some friend or whatever, Qrow wouldn't have needed to try to warn Tai. To preemptively reassure him. It was a really bad omen.
But then again, maybe the kid was just a little edgy. Gods know that Ruby looked edgy if you took her outfit out of context when she went off to Beacon. Gothic fashion, the harvest scythe, the crosses, but then the girl wearing it all is Ruby Rose, a complete doll. He would know. He raised the girl as best he could on his own, with only the occasionally awful influence of Qrow. It really was a miracle she had come up so nice and not, well, the female version of himself.
Jaune. That was his name. He wouldn't technically be the first boy Ruby had brought home. Most of them had been classmates to some degree. She was a weird mix of incredibly social and yet really bad with people. The way that seemingly half the kids were these days with their internet and their scrolls. But none of the boys she had brought over had really been a threat, and most had just been study buddies in the earnest sense of the word. Pimply and frumpy and just a painful reminder that he had once looked like that too.
Besides, the boy had apparently tried teaching Ruby how to cook. What kind of dangerous bad boy teaches a girl how to cook in her own home? Honestly, the boy was probably gay. That was the thing some girls liked to do, right? Have a cool friend like in that one musical that Ruby liked to watch as a kid, Glad! or something.
Jaune was probably just some really friendly kid or some loser who would never have a chance. There was no reason to think of him as any kind of threat. Taiyang just found himself getting more and more embarrassed by the idea that he was so worried for his daughter. She was almost an adult, and out there at Beacon she probably was an adult. Living on her own and slaughtering monsters. As her father, he should respect her judgment more.
At least that was the objective feeling. Subjectively, he was always going to be her dad. And the least her dad can do is give her frumpy, possibly gay male friend a warm welcome to their house for the Holidays.
The door to the bathroom was partially open, with steam coming out from the sink.
Taiyang opened it up and froze.
The boy was maybe 6'2". With short and messy blond hair. And the honest to god neatly trimmed makings of a beard that made him look at least twenty. With horror, Taiyang understood why Qrow had to reassure him that Jaune was the same age as Yang. Having removed his shirt to wash off the gravy, he was all there. Lean.
No, not lean. Cut. No stranger to the gym. Not quite ripped but getting there. He looked a little bigger than Taiyang. Almost like he could take the veteran in a fight right here, right now. He reminded Taiyang of himself in the very prime of his young life as a Hunter. But, seriously. The abs. What kind of fucking seventeen-year-old had abs?
He had scars all over his body, a massive claw mark running down from his heart to his groin, shrapnel on his right knuckle, a number of burn scars scattered around his chest, including one that made it look like someone had put out a cigarette on his left breast, like he was tortured. His entire left arm had the outline of a sleeve tattoo in progress, the mixing of black ink in an artistic manner drawing in the eye. Or maybe the framework was the tattoo, making him look somehow mechanical.
Jaune looked like a Huntsman.
He looked up from the sink, over his shoulder at Taiyang. "Mr Xiao Long?" he said in a gruff accent.
Taiyang opened his mouth, and the sheer dread slipped out. He couldn't help himself. His thoughts bubbled to his tongue as he white knuckled the towel.
It's a bromance for the ages. And we haven't even gotten to the best part, where Jaune and Tai go that extra mile just to make breakfast and ruin Yang's life
And then Indigo shows up and, bam! Whole family of homewreckers.
But that's a chapter for next thursday. This sunday we got a whole different mess to get into
It is also by complete random chance that this and the other chapter with Taiyang happened to get posted during pride month. Didn't intend for that to have any, but that's what happens. Let us celebrate by seducing Yang's dad just to flex on her. Yang was worried I was going to try to do something creepy with her sister, but the fool should have learned I'm really interested in her dad!
It's just that time of month. D'Orléans says trans rights, bro
Yang: dad. I know i said before that maybe re-marrying will help. But this literally the worst possible way to take that.
Taiyang: what do you mean?
Jaune: hon, shes just jealous she cant get a relationship like ours. (In a southern accent cause god help me i dont know the syntax for that)
Yang: shut.
Yang: dad. I know i said before that maybe re-marrying will help. But this literally the worst possible way to take that.
Taiyang: what do you mean?
Jaune: hon, shes just jealous she cant get a relationship like ours. (In a southern accent cause god help me i dont know the syntax for that)
Yang: shut.
Ruby: does this mean jaune is also our dad? If so can i use him as a taster for my cookie experiments?
Jaune: hon, just think of me as a really weird mother.
Taiyang and qrow: I am beyond uncomfortable with the energy we made in the house today.
Ruby: does this mean jaune is also our dad? If so can i use him as a taster for my cookie experiments?
Jaune: hon, just think of me as a really weird mother.
Taiyang and qrow: I am beyond uncomfortable with the energy we made in the house today.
Once Qrow realizes that Jaune is basically like a miniature younger version of himself. And he was trying to set him up with Ruby, who is a younger version of the girl he once had feelings for.
It's a fucking horrifying revelation he has. Loaded with unfortunate implications
Chapter 2: Consider Phlebas "I like the sound of that. They'll likely name this maneuver after you, so let's hope it works. No one wants their name attributed to a hilarious disaster."
— 4 —
Ozpin woke up, and for the first time in a long while, didn't hear it. The chords of that eternal song echoing at the fringes of his awareness as he sat up and shook the sleep from his head. That fucking song.
Winter Break had started at Beacon. The Holiday was upon the world. And while Beacon did serve students from across Remnant, most of its stock hailed from Vale and Atlas, where the Long Night was celebrated. It meant most of campus was empty. Fewer students around meant fewer problems. He could let himself relax, if only just.
He felt the stubble on his face as he stared at his floor, his eyes lazily looking at the scars across his arm. He'd built Beacon, in another lifetime. The Headmaster had his very own luxury apartment here on campus, with all bills coming out of the school budget. Just like any other dorm. Just, one with exceptional floorspace. He'd had more than enough time in his fifteen years as Headmaster to fill the room with clutter, from the record player to the wall-mounted TV to the radiocomputer terminal. Most of them were novelties from this life. New inventions to make life easier, lazier, because the happier the masses, the more starved the Grimm were. The entire room smelled like him, a hint of cherries and mustard buried under human musk.
Ozpin stared back at him from the bathroom mirror. No Ozma or any other faces of the Infinite Man. People had been a bit shorter when Beacon was built. A man his height needed to bend forwards to get a good look over the mirror. Brush his teeth. Use the straight razor to clean his face. Electric razors never suited him. They always reminded him too much of sleekly modern sports cars. He half-imagined himself one of the last men in the world who knew how to drive stick. He'd ordered his own personal '48 Kazinczy built with one just for that reason.
The record player outside clicked. And that fucking song started to play.
Of course it was that one. That fucking song kept showing up. In his dreams. And in the minds of artists from the Old World and this one. The same basic notes he'd once used to court a woman he once loved named Salem so long ago he sometimes doubted it ever happened. The lyrics changed from language to language as tongues evolved, but the meaning always kept. One version was currently charting #3 on the airwaves.
Go to hell, Salem, he thought to himself, before washing them away with his whiskers down the drain.
He found Glynda in his apartment, looking over his old records. Some overly clever student had hooked up his record player to stereo speakers Ozpin could control from his scroll. Technology called Gaptooth or something. Things he'd probably never understand until he died and his new host could explain it to him like the old man he was.
Glynda looked over at him, wearing the blue blouse and dark pencil skirt she just seemed to like, on or off duty. She folded her arms, cocking a brow. "You're naked. Am I intruding too early?" Her eyes pointedly flicked to the window. The sun was shining and snow was coming down in force.
Ozpin sighed, rolling his eyes. "Nothing you haven't seen before, Glynda."
She gave the barest hint of a smile with just a few too many teeth. "No, I suppose not."
Once upon a time, the two of them had been Huntsmen partners. You learned a lot about the other person out in the field. A lot of social mores had to go to be an efficient Hunter; among them modesty. He could still accurately pinpoint that mole she had on her left buttcheek, and never let her forget he knew it was there. Like she could name where he got most of his scars, and recite the tattoos he had on his body, over his arm and back. Like the exact number on his arm, not that she knew what it meant. No one did. It was better that way.
"I wanted to talk about the student population, or lack thereof," she said as Ozpin slid on his underwear. "And an update on the Jaune situation."
Ozpin rubbed his wrists. "Don't tell me we had another incident while I was asleep."
Glynda gave the smallest species of laugh. "No, nothing like that. Neither he nor Team BASS have done anything to warrant suspicion. They've been performing exceptionally adequately. I've even let them take part in a combat spar, to non-cheating results. And the soldiers in the towers apparently think Jaune's useful."
"So basically a perfectly normal group of students."
"Yes. Nothing to suggest anything untowards anymore."
"Then?" he asked, putting on a shirt. He went over to his dresser and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. The breed he saved for when the students were gone and he could drink without consequence.
"He's left for the Holiday," she said.
Maybe that was why he didn't wake up hearing that fucking song. If so, Ozpin wasn't complaining.
"Mm," he grunted, pouring himself a shot into a crystal tumbler. Once upon a time, he had a taste for beer and wine. But a couple centuries ago, somebody had figured out how to make alcohol even stronger in a monastery somewhere. Figures it'd be the bored religious types to figure out how to get completely hammered.
Bourbon held a certain appeal ever since it was invented. Just like cocaine briefly had upon its invention, when people thought it was still medicinal. Those had been fun days. Unproductive, but fun. Nowadays, he mostly stuck with coffee strong enough to kill a boarbatusk. He likes to lie and say it was simply hot cocoa, which people like Coco Adel still somehow believed.
Bourbon was the drink of kings. He still remembered the taste of it on his tongue as the self-administered poison melted his organs. King Ozymandias falling to his knees and choking blood, finally killing the age of kings once and for all. The sensation of decades passing in moments before his soul found a host in Ozpin.
"So that's one problem we won't have to deal with for a couple weeks, at least." Ozpin paused. "I hope."
"He left with Qrow," she said.
Ozpin paused. Before deciding to fill the tumbler up to the brim with bourbon. He knew he probably shouldn't. But, Qrow. Ironic that he was handling this turmoil with alcohol. Ozpin knew he'd been the one to introduce Qrow to the stuff, back when Ozpin was merely a highly respected Huntsman and professor, and Qrow just one of the rising stars of Team STRQ. He'd offered Qrow a drink to celebrate one of the deadly missions they'd gone out together while he was their teacher.
"Does he know?" Ozpin asked.
Glynda slowly shook her head. "Not unless he learned on his own somehow. Near as I can tell, it was Ruby Rose who invited Jaune with them. He lives on Patch and her house was along the way."
Ozpin drank. The first drink of the day, burning. As always they did. He held out the glass to Glynda, who actually took it and sipped. From the implacable expression on her face, she handed the liquor better than he did. She'd been the heavy drinking A+ student of their old Huntsmen team once upon a time.
Funny, how that worked. Soldiers and Huntsmen of all ages were always heavy drinkers. It was a culture of functioning alcoholics. No one could fault them. Killers of men and monsters needed ways to cope. Especially when therapy was still frowned upon as a sign of weakness, despite all he was doing to change that among the recent crop of students.
Ozpin let out a breath. "If anything comes up with that, let me know. Until then?" He sat down on his bed. "I'm not sure how comfortable I am with him being friends with our silver-eyed warrior out there. When the new semester starts, see to it that they are not together for any combat lessons. And any missions they go on aren't in the same area."
"And Qrow?" she asked.
"If that dusty old crow learns anything, I'm sure he'll tell us first. He knows about as much as I do, if just a little less to ensure he doesn't go beyond the mountains."
Glynda sighed. "So that just leaves our problem with what to do for the sophomore, junior, and senior teams, and preparations for the Vytal Festival."
Ah, yes, that. There were a lot more problems in the world than one particularly worrisome student. He was, after all, the Headmaster of the school. They had a couple of hundred precocious murder machines to train and handle out there. He only occasionally had opportunities to work with the fun and interesting ones, like Ruby or Coco. Most of his time was spent with everyone else, ensuring that nothing went wrong. Minimizing student deaths out there in this dangerous world. His raison d'être as far as anyone in the world was truly concerned.
The rest of his job often involved dealing with politicians, the lowest form of human existence. This year, the entire cause célèbre was Union-Labor and its opposition to the Vytal Festival. Once upon a time, men like the leader of Union-Labor, Twinred Sokolov, were just weirdos who followed some bizarre book by some outcast named Kara Mazov. "Scientific communism" and all its bastard descendants. And then the moment King Ozymandias steps down, the moment his perfect new world order is established, the Commune of Vale rises up to force a more just world into existence. As they sang Ça Ira and La Valéaise, the remnants of the royal government had come at them with fire and sword.
These days, the socialists had only been unbanned and allowed to operate as a legal political movement at his urging. He figured having to deal with electoral politics would defang them. But to everyone's surprise, the Sokolov brothers had turned them quite quickly into the principal and incredibly successful enemy of Martin Gladstone's Tories. Next thing anyone knew, what many thought was a fringe movement had become the primary opposition party, displacing the Liberal Democrat party. They were a thorn in his side just as much as they were in the Council's. It wasn't that Ozpin opposed the socialists on principle, they were just incredibly annoying and non-compliant. Especially when it came to his allies in Damecrown, like the Prime Minister, Martin Gladstone, who on paper was the most powerful man in the world. Ozpin had influence like that down in Damecrown, seat of the governing Council of Vale, but his new world order was just a madman's conspiracy theory outside of it. He'd only managed to get his claws into Atlas by the sheer luck of James Ironwood.
Politics.
Ozpin patted the spot next to him, sighing. He was too old to deal with bigger politicians and hormonal murderous teenagers at the same time anymore. Not that he had any choice. He compulsively threw himself into these kinds of situations.
She cocked an eyebrow. "Headmaster Ozpin, are you trying to invite me to bed?" she asked scathingly.
He allowed himself a smile. "We both know how that would turn out."
She looked away, self-consciously adjusting her glasses.
"I was just asking for you to bring over my bourbon," he said conversationally, painfully so. Just to further tease her. "We have weeks before we have to figure out what to do. There's no sense making preliminary plans while sober."
She walked over to him and handed his glass back. "You never change, Ozpin."
If you only knew, Glynda. If only anyone knew.
"And would you please turn off that fucking song so we can get to work?" he asked, handing her back the glass.
And so the two of them spent the rest of the morning nursing glasses of bourbon together. Figuring out what to do just like they used to in the old days.
— 5 —
Blake watched the snow fall outside the window. And felt like a voyeur after having watched Jaune hauling his bags and leaving the school with Ruby. It was a weird feeling. This, well, what to call it? She felt oddly bitter that her partner, her friend, was leaving with some other girl to go back home, to his sisters and parents. It was like the feeling of wanting her mother, her father.
She propped her head on her elbow. She wanted to blame him, but couldn't do it. Valeans and Atlesians celebrated this time of year around the winter solstice. The longest night of the year was coming soon. It was a bit different in Menagerie. Snow didn't exist there except some of the inland mountains. Right now, it was the summer down there. She could go back, but, no. She couldn't. How was she supposed to face her parents and tell them she was wrong, and they were right, about the White Fang. About trying to change the wider world. She didn't have anywhere to go for the Long Night, not in any real terms. Beacon was her home until she graduated and had to figure out what to do and where to go from there.
In her mind's eyes, she imagined a world in which Jaune was faunus and she'd met him and not Adam. She wondered how stupid that world would be. Gods, she'd hated Jaune until, well, she wasn't sure when exactly it changed. But they'd practically always been together since his Aura, since they knocked out everyone in the school. It was just, like, just weird not having him to bounce thoughts off.
So much of her day had included her partner. Going to class. Training with him in the gym or sparring. Trying to figure out something dumb to do for the day together. She basically needed to figure out how to do without one of her daily constants.
"Saudade," Shamrock said, idly playing a game of solitaire on his bed.
Blake's eyes fluttered. "What?"
"Old Voortrekker word from Vacuo," he said, and frowned at the cards he was drawing. "It's all over your face. Nostalgic missing of a person. Vacuans have lots of words for obscure sorrows. One of our hobbies is finding new things to be miserable about."
She sat on her bed, laughing awkwardly. "Am I that obvious?"
Jet Shamrock looked over at her. With a flick of the wrist he produced a joker from his sleeve. "I mean, you're always brooding about something. The window just made it easier to guess."
Blake thought for a moment, trying to reach for the right words. "I'm not brooding. I'm just, what's the word, a drôle d'oiseau, as they say here."
Shamrock gave her a look. "They? I thought you were Valean."
"I'm from the northwest," Blake said by rote, an old faunus phrase. The Northwest was a vague direction, with a continent lacking any major kingdoms. It was a wild land. To those in the know, it signified you were faunus. To everybody else, it was just a random yet satisfactory explanation for any idiosyncrasies in your word choice or personality.
She knew about the place mostly from Adam. He had spoken at length of training there under a man called the Wolf who, according to him, "was more beast than man." To her, that just meant he was one of those rare faunus whose animalistic traits were incredibly pronounced. The entire head of a wolf instead of just the ears. Blake had been pretty sure those were just a myth too. But Adam claimed to have met two in his life, theWolf and, briefly, someone he only would refer to as the Smiling Man. Blake thought it was just an excuse to add a the to your name.
In any case, Adam said the Northwest was haunted. Cities filled with ghosts; the people annihilated in the Great War whose shadows remained when their bodies turned to ash. He had called the place Misery. She'd always thought he had been embellishing, but talking to him later did reveal he genuinely believed in ghosts and the supernatural. Whenever you pushed him on odd topics, Adam always seemed to have a particularly strange perspective that made him fascinating to talk to over campfires. It had been part of the reason she had grown close to him, just listening to his stories about wendigos and skinwalkers.
She thought back to the faces she had seen when she activated Jaune's Aura. The fact that every now and again, his eyes looked like they belonged to an older man. It still gave her shivers.
A card hit her in the face.
"Ow!"
"Brooding," Shamrock admonished simply.
Blake stood up in a huff. "I don't have to take this from you."
"If we're not taking things from each other, can you give me my card back?"
Blake tried throwing the playing card, but all it did was circle in the air and land right back down at her feet. Suddenly trying to avoid looking stupid, she grabbed the card and gave it to Shamrock. But at the rate she was going, it would have been way too awkward to just turn around and go back to bed. So lacking any really good options right now, she just kept walking forward until at the door.
And then she was in the hallway. Where she had no idea what she was doing. At least she felt better about herself. No, not just better, she had totally stood up for herself!
But now she really wanted to go back to bed. It would just be too weird to go back in there right now. Trying to stand there and calculate the exact amount of time it would take for it to no longer be awkward to go back to the room was a bit of a waste of time. So, maybe she would just go down to the vending machine and get a drink and figure it out over some soda.
It would have been a really good plan, had she not found Weiss doing something in the kitchen. Weiss looked like she didn't belong there. She was using her scroll for reference, taking down notes on a piece of paper, occasionally mumbling to herself before bending over to look into the oven.
Weiss was probably her least favorite person in the world ever since she managed to get along with Jaune, excluding Adam for obvious reasons. Watching her work something in the oven, Blake kept thinking about a couple weeks back in the sushi bar. The way that everyone had almost been getting along. In truth, she wasn't sure how that had happened. She had absolutely zero faith that inviting the girl out to a dinner-lunch thing with them would solve anything. Jaune had somehow worked his witchcraft on that. And while the team wasn't exactly all friends right now, they could at least be civil.
In this kind of situation, Blake… kind of felt like the right thing to do was to talk to her.
"You're breaking my concentration, just staring at me like that," Weiss said, looking up. She was wearing some kind of loose silk camisole beneath an apron. It looked somehow wrong on her, without one of those pristine dresses she usually wore. More like a rich girl sneaking out at night to steal something from the cookie jar then anything else.
Blake swallowed. "I thought I smelled something cooking," she lied.
Weiss turned around, resting her elbows on the little island in the kitchen. "It's a cake."
"I didn't know you baked."
"I don't."
"Then?" She let the word hang there.
"There's no reason I can't learn to use a, uh, kitchen." She shrugged indifferently.
"How's that going for you?"
Weiss stared back at her with a blank expression. "It's not."
"Oh."
Oh was right. Just trying to talk to Weiss like this felt like some kind of interrogation, in the laziest possible way. Blake actually had been genuinely interrogated before, back when she was with the White Fang on the Sanus frontier. She had been lucky that she was rescued before anything got beyond the preliminary questions. You really didn't want to be in the custody of the infamous Colonel Bind, Torture, Kill Kornilov. He had a way of getting answers and rooting out insurgencies.
Soldiers still gave Blake goosebumps.
The two girls just kept staring at each other, as if waiting for the other person to say something profound. Give them something to bounce a conversation off. It was mutually expectant in the worst possible way.
The oven rumbled. At first, Blake was happy for the distraction. Until Weiss started backing away.
"Uh, that wasn't supposed to happen," she said.
Before the oven just flat out exploded. Blake used a Shadow clone to throw herself behind the island for cover. Weiss used her own Semblance to summon a glyph in the air, deflecting the burning projectile spewing from the oven. It bounced off and landed in the drapes.
Which immediately caught fire.
"Oh God, it's happening again!" Weiss screamed. "Why are drapes flammable? Who designed this!"
Weiss produced a kitchen knife and slashed at the curtains until the burning bits fell off into the sink. "Ow, hot!" she hissed, before turning on the sink. The water turned the burning drapes into a cloud of steam and smoke.
"Weiss, are you okay?" Blake asked, poking her head up over the island.
The girl was holding her hand, hissing in breaths. "I'm going to sue whoever designed these drapes. They keep catching fire."
"How? How do they keep catching fire?"
Weiss waived her scroll around. "I told you I'm not a very good cook, all right!?"
Blake hesitated, before coming around the island. "Here, give me your hand. Let me see."
She retracted her hand, making a face at Blake. "I can handle this, okay?"
"I've got some field medic experience," Blake said. "Stop being a bitch and let me help, okay?"
"I'm not—I said I can do this!"
"You can't even make a cake without starting a fire! If your hand is badly burned, either let me help or I'll drag you to the infirmary."
"Just let me use my aura for an hour or so and I'll be fine!"
"Weiss!"
"Blake!"
"Stop being a brat!"
"What did I tell you about calling me that, Blake!"
"Well, I, you—just let me be a good teammate, alright?"
Weiss glared at Blake for a very long moment. She was holding her hand like it was hurt, glowing softly with her Aura. After a tense little standoff, she slowly exhaled and held out her hand.
"Fine. But be quick," Weiss said, refusing to look at Blake as she took her hand and examined it. "If this cake was a mistake, I need to try to figure out something else I can cook. But I've kind of run out of stuff to cook with. Most stores are closing down for the Holiday."
The hand actually didn't look too bad. Some minor first degree burns from touching something hot quickly. It reminded her of her first time ever getting her hands on a microwave as a little girl, when it had been a relatively recent addition to Menagerie. As short as she had been, the angle she approached the microwave meant she couldn't read the display. She just kept pressing the six button for like a minute straight until giving up and pressing start, and was amazed it worked. Then she forgot about it until the microwave started to smoke. She'd burned her hand trying to get the leftovers out, because for some reason she was too panicked to realize she probably should have used a plate or a spoon or something.
Mostly, she was just looking at Weiss' acrylic nails. Blake had never had those. And it was kind of bizarre seeing them up close. They featured occasionally in her books, but for some reason she had always figured them to be fake. Just like how in the movies, every desert has cacti.
"All right, maybe I was overreacting," Blake said, returning the hand.
"I know," Weiss said, putting one of her singed fingers into her mouth. A moment later she seemed to realize what she was doing and quickly withdrew her hand, folding her arms together over her pristine white apron. "I know a lot of things. Just, cooking isn't one of them. Not yet."
"You're acting like it's a pretty important thing."
Weiss looked into the sink, at the waterlogged and formerly burning bits of drapes. And the thing that Blake supposed might have been a cake in another universe.
"I never really had the chance to cook on my own," Weiss said. "We always had professional chefs and bakers do it for us. And even then, I barely got to enjoy it. When you're at the top, you have to carefully manage every aspect of your appearance, and that especially includes what you put into yourself."
She made a gesture to the army of measuring equipment on the kitchen counter. Holding up her notebook, she said, "If the recipe had been right, it would have come up to 342 calories in a single slice of cake. That's before I try to add frosting. But I was focused mostly on just making sure the bread was right."
Blake scrunched her eyes. "Is that a lot?"
"You don't know?" Weiss asked dubiously, like she wasn't really sure she heard that right.
Somewhat self-consciously, Blake shrugged. "I never really paid attention to that. I just kind of ate what I had on hand."
Weiss shook her head. "I can't really imagine that. I tried eating a lot one time when I was a little girl. I think that was the first time I was ever really full. That feeling in your stomach like you can't put anything more inside." She rubbed her wrists. "My father found out and had me whipped until I threw it all up."
"Oh my God, that's terrible!"
Weiss looked around the kitchen, before her shoulders slumped and she sighed. "I don't know. In some ways, I think it was a necessary evil. If I just eat like some animal, then I'm not really a Schnee. It's people with no self-control that get fat and lazy, and someone of my family can't do that."
Blake suppressed a scowl. Of course the girl had to drop in some casual racism. You couldn't just have a normal conversation with her, could you? But she had to keep that down. She was on a team with this girl. An unpalatable bitch though she might be, Blake had to work with it.
"I could always help you?" she offered.
Weiss put her hands on her hips skeptically. "I think I've got this covered."
"Says the girl who burned the drapes."
"It's called learning, Blake! Try it sometime."
Blake's eye twitched. She thought back to the way Jaune had somehow convinced this girl to go out with them to a sushi dinner. Blake had abandoned the idea as a lost cause the moment he had suggested it. But then there he went, just somehow making it work. Just like he had clawed himself out from his alcoholic pit and become an actual person in her eyes. Jaune didn't quit, even when things looked stupid and nothing would come of them.
And he somehow made it work.
If he could do it, so could she. And do it far better. Even if she couldn't figure out his witchcraft people-fu.
"There's no shame in asking for help," Blake said.
"It's just some simple recipe," Weiss said, walking over to the oven. She examined it with a frown. "I can do this without help. You don't have to be condescending."
"But I'm not!" Blake said, following her. "If you're not good with something, ask someone who is. I mean, you're trying to bake a cake."
"I said I'm good! Stop being so pushy about this."
"Why do you have to be so defiant?"
"Because if I can't figure out something so stupid on my own, what good am I?" Weiss snapped.
Blake tried her hardest not to growl in irritation. "Just a girl raised with more money than sense. Literally. Someone once calculated the value of the SDC fortune. You will literally have more cents then you do brain cells, girl."
"Ha!" It was a bitter, mocking sound. "My family is a part of me, but it doesn't define me."
"Does it? Because if it doesn't, then let me help. Be a teammate. Jaune said I had cake, so whatever that means, I'm pretty sure I can figure out how to put some batter in an oven and turn it into food." She put on her best smile and it felt fake.
Weiss made a face. "I'm pretty sure he was talking about your butt."
With a startled expression, Blake looked over at her bottom. "I don't even see how that makes any sense."
"I don't either, but we both know how he talks." She folded her arms as if she had won the conversation. As if winning and losing was something you did when talking to somebody.
"Look, get off my dick. I'm just trying to help. Because that's what a good teammate does, in my very limited experience."
Weiss mouth the word she had just said, disbelieving. "Get off your what? You don't even have those parts. Not unless you're like Shamrock."
Blake waved her hand as if getting rid of a bad smell. Kind of like the smell of the burnt cake waterlogged in the sink. "I don't know, just something I picked up from Jaune."
"And just like him, maybe you should learn when to leave well enough alone. I can do this by myself, Blake. I don't need you. I don't need anybody."
That distinctly did not sound like Jaune. He kind of just pushed and did his own thing until it eventually worked. A talent she was still trying to figure out how to work. She supposed it was something she was vaguely envious of.
"You don't want anybody. There's a big difference. You need us. You need me, Shamrock, and Jaune."
Weiss scoffed. "Why do you always bring him up?"
"Because he's my best friend and partner, I don't know?" Blake said with a mocking edge.
"Gee, if you like the boy so much, why don't you just marry him?"
"Because it's not like that between us. How many times have we told you this?"
"Enough that methinks the lady doth protest too much."
Blake threw up her hands "What does that even mean?"
"It means you two are always attached at the hip, always talking about each other, always talking like each other," Weiss said sufferingly, closing the oven door. "Denial might just be a river in Vacuo, but it doesn't flow through here."
"And common sense doesn't flow through your head!" she shot back with. She pulled up her scroll and brought up a recipe for cakes. Showing it to Weiss, she said, "Look, you and me, we can do this together. Bond over cooking or something stupid. Jaune and I—"
"Stop bringing him into everything. Stop trying to be him. He's the worst with only the occasional spot of decency." She gave Blake a scathing look. "Even if I wanted help, which I don't, I'd want it from Blake, not from Jaune. And certainly not Blake pretending to be him. You're your own person. Be her."
Despite herself, Blake winced. She wasn't doing that, was she? Adam used to—and she stopped herself mid-thought. Adam. Jaune. Blake did do that a lot, didn't she? Often thinking her thoughts using the words of the boy she was very close to in her life. Often learning how to view the world from how they spoke, how they perceived it. That was just because she was learning from them. It wasn't like they had any special influence over her. She was her own person. She wasn't trying to be anybody else.
I wanted to kill Cardin because that's what Adam would have done. And I left him because I was afraid I was becoming him.
Blake took a step back. It was a ridiculous thought. Blake had always been her own girl. Always forging her own path through life. Never letting anyone else's burdens become her own.
Except the burdens of her people. And look at how she had screwed that up. She couldn't even figure out how to talk to Velvet about the very thing she was most passionate about. And here she was, trying to reach out and extend an olive branch to Weiss because that was exactly what Jaune would do, and she was failing miserably.
No, she wasn't doing this for Jaune. Just like how she wasn't dedicated to the faunus cause because of Adam.
Blake was doing this because she was Blake, because this was the right thing to do, and that was what she felt in her gut.
Weiss had already turned away, and was going back to her measuring devices. Looking at her notepad and occasionally scribbling things down as she tried to figure out how to rebuild the cake.
Blake could do this on her own. She could reach out to her bitch of a teammate and make friends. In the exact same way she couldn't do with Velvet. Without any help. Just being herself.
She reached out to take Weiss' notepad. "Here, let me see what you're doing."
"Give that back!" Weiss said, whirling on her and reaching out.
Blake made a shadow clone to duck back and away. She tried her best to speed read the pad, and was at first distracted by how neat and pretty the handwriting was. It was downright miniscule and perfect.
"Hold on, I think I know what you're doing. I think your measurements are in the wrong system. What website are you taking the mixture from?"
"I said, give it back, Blake!"
Blake turned away from the girl, not letting her grab the notepad. Ducking away to ensure she could keep reading it and talk. She had a unique opinion on this and could totally fix everything.
"A cup means something different between Vale and Atlas," Blake said. "One of your ounces is like an ounce and a half here in Vale. Like how a mile in Menagerie is one point six Valean miles."
Blake brushed Weiss' hand away. "Look, I've solved it. I figured it all out."
Weiss kept grabbing at Blake. But turned away as she was, it made it hard to grab at the notes. "Shut up, I can do this on my own!" Unable to get the book, her hand started grabbing other places. Her arm, her back, and finally towards her hair. Weiss hand grabbed Blake's bow and pulled.
The black hair bow came off in her hand.
And her ears poked up.
"Wait, what the hell!" Weiss exclaimed.
Blake whirled on Weiss, throwing the notebook to the side so she could free her hand to snatch the bow back. "Don't touch that!" she said, but it was already too late, too useless.
Weiss' blue eyes were wide, staring up at Blake's ears. Blake very quickly put it back on her head, tying it together. But too little, too late.
"You're… you're one of them," Weiss said, saying them almost like a slur. Like one would say talking about something distasteful.
For the briefest moments, Blake allowed herself to feel a spark of hope. Maybe Weiss would see and she wouldn't judge. Maybe she would be different, knowing that her teammate and the person that tried to help her right now was faunus. Maybe they could bond over this, a shared secret together, like she and Jaune had the night in the hospital, and then again trying to figure out how to deal with Cardin.
And then her heart sank into her stomach, and then straight down into her ovaries, impregnating her with a feeling of intense dread as Weiss' startled, surprised face turned into a harsh glare.
"Is that why you were so sympathetic to the White Fang?" Weiss accused. "Oh my God, it all makes so much sense now! You actually empathize with those animals and terrorists!"
Blake could only stare, and think panicked thoughts. How the hell do you handle something like this? When it had happened with Jaune, he apparently had already known, already figured it out, and had already accepted her for it.
But she really didn't have any frame of reference for someone who wouldn't accept it. The exact thing she was terrified of. The kind of bullying shit she was afraid of if found out, and so she hid that part away from other people. Everybody but her best friend. Somebody who would see it, and judge her, and be disgusted.
She thought of Jaune. The way he had dealt with that racist bastard Cardin, before the two of them had somehow bonded and become friends over that. Respectful violence. Understanding and being willing to deal with someone with a radically different worldview than yours. The kind of thing she had watched happen and still couldn't understand.
That was how almost everything Jaune did worked. She had failed connecting with Weiss over cooking and other girly stuff. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she was going about those the entirely wrong way. Maybe she really did need to think like Jaune.
Before she knew what was happening, Blake was cocking her fist back. And then she punched Weiss straight across the face, over the scar on her eye. She expected Weiss to be surprised, maybe pull up her aura and then the two of them to talk about what just happened to figure it out. Instead, the blow seemed to take Weiss entirely off guard. The girl went stumbling backwards, her head hitting the edge of the counter. She screamed in angry pain.
She stepped over to try to grab Weiss, but she slapped her hand away. When she stood up, the girl was furious, a nasty gash on her forehead bleeding all across her face.
"What did you do! Why did you do that, you, you wild animal!"
Blake felt her ears flattening, and she didn't know what to do. Why wasn't this working? Why couldn't she just pick Weiss off the ground, brush themselves off, and then talk about this and become friends?
"I—can we talk about this?" Blake asked, taking a step towards her.
Weiss brandished her knife at Blake, forcing her back. "Get away from me, you bitch!"
It was the first time Blake had ever heard Weiss swear, and it was terrifying.
Shamrock walked into the kitchen, holding a bag of chips. She tossed one into the air, and then noticed what was going on. The chip hit her on the top hat and bounced onto the floor.
"Uh, Weiss, Blake, are you two okay?" Shamrock asked nervously. "I heard shouting—what's going on?"
When Weiss turned her furious attention towards Blake, still brandishing the knife, Blake just… she just…
She evaporated into the shadows and ran away, like she always did. Like she always fucking did when things fucked up. Because she was a colossal fuck up who couldn't do anything fucking right.
It was all she was good for. The only thing she could do. She could run. She could hurt people.
She could cry.
a/n Blake punching Weiss was originally going to happen at the climax of vol 3. But we decided to cut the fight scene that would have resulted in that. So witness it happening now, without Jaune to act as a mediating team leader figure.
He's actually a character from A More Flawed Gem, that more OC-centric RWBY fic I don't think I've posted here. Some of the characters are shared between I, Jaune and A More Flawed Gem, like Cielo, Cards, and Indigo Jack. They're sort of stock side characters i just know really well how to write.
In Gem, the Smiling Man was sort of Cielo's mentor. You know, that guy who showed up a few chapters ago, knowing exactly where Yang is at any given moment just to be able to avoid her. Sort of like the Judge from Blood Meridian but more lackadaisical and amused. Had a thing for Raven. A bit like Abridged Alucard, really.
From that bit
"But seriously, the priests have better self-cont—o-oh. Nai. Nai, she's dead." Fire-red light flooded Cielo's vision and engulfed the room in its warmth. It didn't stop the chill from settling over his sweat-slicked body. Staring down at him was a man. A smiling man.
And this Smiling Man. Gods, it—he was like.... he was hard to describe. It was like whenever Cielo tried to look at the man, drink in his appearance, that smile—that hateful smile—intruded. Those teeth. He wore a black leather coat, almost a duster. Those teeth were like fangs. A pair of goggles strapped atop his wide-brimmed hat. It was like his mouth were something primeval, something poking at Cielo's lizard brain. Two massive pistols strapped to his hips. Those teeth are meant for people, meant for me.
A demon's grin that stretched from ear to ear. Bigger than his head should have allowed it to be. Fangs like a—like a beowolf. Like something birthed from the Whore of the Forest Clearing. His eyes were shadow black and skin was pale white, almost like a blood-drained corpse.
Until finally, the sounds between the clinging of bone and fang formed words. And to Cielo, they almost sounded like, "So, little morsel, whatcha got there?"
Chapter 3: The Gay One "Go, boys, go, they'll time your every breath. Cuz every day you're in this place, you're two days nearer death."
— 6 —
Waking up early was the easy part. The hard part was having no idea where you were. This happened to me even back in the Army. If ever I awoke from a good sleep, I came to disoriented, briefly convinced I was back home until reality reasserted itself.
My first clue that I wasn't back at Beacon was when I sat up and didn't see Blake sprawled across her bed unladylike. Then I remembered I was at Ruby's house, sleeping in her mother's old bed, on the morning of Christmas or whatever the hell it was called in this world.
Not being able to bother my partner and accidentally wake her up during my morning ritual felt like a downer. I had to wonder what she was doing, how she was handling on her own. But knowing her, she and the rest of the team were getting on fine without me, probably even better. There really wasn't any reason to worry about them. They had been fine before I came along, and then not fine when I was there, and then finally approaching a semblance of okay when I had left.
According to my scroll, it was too damn early. The sun wasn't even showing, not that it would be showing for very long today, winter solstice and all. I stumbled around in the dark, eventually figured out where the bathroom was, and then returned to find it was still way too early to do anything. Eventually, I realized that just pacing back and forth wouldn't get rid of my energy to see my family. So why not resolve myself to killing that with intermittent reps of push-ups and sit-ups? Work until one muscle group was sore, and then do the other, using Summer's bed to anchor my toes down. A hundred here, a hundred there, what was it to me? Recovery was a lot easier when you could pump Aura into yourself. It could make you feel fresh even when you know you should be exhausted. Morning calisthenics had been my ritual even before I was Jaune, dating back to just before I was Greg. This might not be my original body, but that didn't mean I couldn't put it through the rigors just for funsies.
I only gave up when the sweat started seeping into my eyes. I don't think it helped too much with my anxiety, even though I had tired myself out something awful. Maybe a shower would be the trick.
As I got the hot water running, I used my trimmers to ensure my little beard was neat and tidy. I wasn't going for a wild mountain-man look. More a kind of professional, I suppose. Looking at my face always felt odd. I remembered one day coming back from a fifteen kilometer run, when I was trying to lose a lot of weight after our quarantines during the plague. Lots of running, lots of time in the gym. I remember just staring at my sweaty self in the mirror, looking at my face, and realizing I didn't recognize myself. I looked too lean for the face I'd gotten used to.
I could count five separate occasions when that happened to me. And only two of them were related to Jaune and Greg. The rest were all home-grown fitness or fits of alcohol.
Not six minutes into locking the bathroom door behind me and someone was already knocking.
"Hey, asshole, it's too early to do this," Yang shouted in the kind of whisper yell you did when you wanted to be loud but didn't want to wake somebody else up. Very good for dramatic effect. "Stop taking so long in there; I have to piss!"
With effort, I washed the last bit of soap from my hair and half heartedly put on a towel before opening the door.
Yang was scowling at me, wearing sweatpants and what I was going to charitably call a small crop top. Dripping wet, I looked down at her, and she just looked up at me, her eyes roving across my chest as if sizing me up. The awkward moment of silence lasted forever.
Until she rallied herself into an unhappy expression. "Oh, hey, you're actually capable of being half naked around someone who isn't a child. Bravo."
"I'm a free spirit like that," I said evenly, running my hand across my wet forehead. "Now are you just going to ogle me or are you going to say something."
"You take loud showers and you woke me up," she said, not even missing a beat to be flustered or anything. She was way too collected, even though she was angry. "Now get out. There's only one bathroom in this hall."
I closed the door on her.
"Get out of there!" Yang said, forcing the door open before I could lock it.
"Yeah, if you don't leave me alone to dry off, I'm going to seduce your father so you have no choice but to call me Daddy."
Yang gagged. "You stay away from him."
"What are you gonna do, Yang? He knows I'm hot stuff. Go ahead and call the police. They can't un-intercourse your dad." I waggled my brow.
The gag intensified. "Fucking creep." She shook her messy bed head. "Whatever! We're the only ones up for like half an hour anyways. So stop being a creep and trying to ruin the morning, Jaune."
"I tried having a heart-to-heart with you. Get off my dick."
"Yeah, no. No touching my heart. Or your dick. The only part of us that's going to touch is my fist and your balls."
"Well, I've had worse hand jobs than that."
She scoffed angrily, stepping back. "Just be quick, man. I really have to go."
I dried myself off at my leisure, relishing the fact that she was getting closer and closer to pissing herself the longer I purposely kept the sink on, though eventually I had to leave. She rushed in the moment I opened the door, barely giving me enough time to flip her off. Bitch.
But now I found myself too worked up to go back to bed or anything. And if she was right, everybody was going to be getting up in about half an hour or so. Gave me one of those evil little ideas of mine. Which eventually led me down the stairs into the kitchen, to raid the fridge and the pantries.
Eggs, vegetables, potatoes, garlic, and bacon. Plus some flapjack batter. There really was a lot here, but that was to be expected for a family Christmas. I started buttering up the skillet and chopping shallots and parsley.
Ruby's father, Taiyang, eventually walked in, his eyes sleepy. Man was wearing cargo shorts, an undershirt, and an apron. "What are you doing?" he asked.
"It's called breakfast," I said. "The most forgotten meal of the day."
He sniffed, looking pleasantly surprised by the scent. "Huh. Well, damn. Here you go stealing my thunder. I'm the one who usually makes Short Morning's breakfast. I got my apron on and everything."
"Do you know what Ruby or Yang like to eat? I'm kind of just going with the generic full American here."
"You actually know how to cook?"
I scoffed. "Please. I went through this whole phase when I was younger where when I got stressed out, I took to cooking to fix it. Wasn't very good for my stomach, but was good for everything else."
Taiyang whistled. "Damn. You really are a catch. I'm almost kind of impressed."
"I can also sing and play guitar. I can't expect cute girls to call me daddy for nothing, man," I said, gesturing my whisk at him.
He laughed, a snorting noise despite himself, like he didn't expect that. "Holy crap, you really are me but younger. I hate it. I hate you. No wonder Yang does too." He came over to me, taking off his apron. "But, screw it. I'm all for being lazy and letting the woman of the house make my breakfast."
I considered the apron. It was girly as shit. It looked like a younger Ruby had tried drawing on it and embossing it with various designs and unicorns and roses and it just looked atrocious. I loved it.
"Mind tying that around the back for me?" I asked, thumbing over my shoulder.
"I guess. Here, hold still." He put the apron over my shoulders, and I shrugged my arms through it. He reached his arms around me to bring the little cords around, making sure they were snug and tight, before getting them tied. They tied around the side, instead of the back, reminding me more like some kind of sexy maid apron or whatever. The kind that half naked girls in movies like to wear.
Someone gasped like their life depended on it. Yang was standing there at the entrance of the kitchen, her eyes wide. She dropped the plastic cup of water she'd been carrying, and it splashed all over the floor. Tai paused, his arms around me as I flipped over the omelet I was making.
"Dad, what the fuck!" she shouted.
Taiyang finished tying the knot by my hip, and looked up at her. "What's wrong, little dragon?"
Yang ran up to her father and pulled him away. Before shouting at me, "I didn't think I'd really need to tell you stop trying to sleep with my dad."
Oh. I suppose from a certain point of view, that kind of would look like it was happening. She just walked in on two men looking like they're hugging each other from behind over breakfast.
Fuck it.
I reached under the apron and managed to take off my shirt. Until all I was wearing were my jeans and the apron. "What's wrong, Yang?" I said, tossing my shirt to her father, who caught it. "You've never seen two strong, muscly men perfectly secure in their heterosexuality before, in close proximity making breakfast?"
"I wouldn't really say that," Taiyang said, looking at the shirt he was holding. "I mean, the muscle part. I haven't been at the gym in a while. But the heterosexual part is totally true."
"Dad!" Yang shouted.
"Don't let her get to you, babe," I said chastisingly.
Taiyang squinted at me before he seemed to understand what was going on here, and nodded slowly. "Yeah, babe. That's what the kids call their friends these days, right?"
Yang stomped her foot. "No we don't, Dad!" She went over to grab me, causing me to drop my knife. The edge poked my finger.
"Be careful what you grab with that arm," I said evenly. "Never know when you might lose it. Like to a kitchen accident." I held up the pinprick of blood on my finger to show her.
Tai came over to me, shouldering his daughter out of the way just slightly. "Hold on, you're bleeding."
"It's nothing. My heart gushes worse everyday," I said.
He took my hand and made as if to bring my finger to his mouth. He wasn't hiding his shit-eating grin very well. "Here, let me."
Yang grabbed her father by the collar and practically threw him into the dining table. "No! I can't handle this much homosexual energy in one house!"
"I think when you use the full word like that instead of gay, you make the term disparaging," I told her, clicking my tongue.
"I thought I raised you better than to judge people for things like that," Tai said, rubbing his shoulder as he stood up. It looked like it had been a surprisingly nasty throw. It dampened his façade of looking cool enough to screw with Yang.
"She just doesn't know the life of a real Huntsman, us soldiers against the darkness," I said, shaking my head at her sadly. "Some people have never played gay chicken with your fellow dudebros just to prove how straight you are before going out heterosexually cruising for bitches, and it shows."
Yang put her hands over her mouth and screamed.
Taiyang looked around awkwardly. "Little less comfortable with calling women bitches around my daughter, otherwise, yeah, I've been there. Ask Qrow."
"Mmm, someone say my name?" Qrow said, stumbling into the room. Practically sliding along his feet. "Because I smell breakfast and I'm hungry. Me want."
Taiyang and I exchanged looks, and then exchanged a pair of finger guns. .45 caliber finger gun, the manliest caliber. Yang just sort of collapsed against the wall, and slid down until she was in the fetal position.
It wasn't long before Ruby followed after her uncle. Pretty much floating in the air. But given that her body looked like it was half rose petals, I suppose that made sense. She just kind of hovered in the air, following her nose all the way to the dinner table. "Food! Dad, what'd you make? And why is Yang curled up in the corner crying?"
Using all of my most heterosexual energy, I whisked the last of the eggs I was preparing, shaking my hips side to side to an invisible beat. "Breakfast today in casa de la Xiao Long is courtesy of ya boy. Bacon, eggs, ham, home fries, toast, and flapjacks. Scrambled and omelette options available, for her pleasure."
"Ooh, so no beans this time?" Ruby asked.
I playfully bopped her on the head with my spatula, before sitting down a generously full plate in front of her. "This is an American household. We don't do the full English here unless you want to go straight to hell."
"Oh my gosh, strawberry pancakes!" she said, giddily clapping her hands. She didn't even wait for me to grab anyone else a plate before digging in. And then tried talking around a mouthful of food and a full face smile. "Duuude, shoo good! How are you this awesome at cooking when you unironically like eating broccoli? You know what, screw that, I forgive you for broccoli and the brussel sprouts. I'm kidnapping you next year for breakfast now!"
"And that's how you wind up with three dads," I said.
"Deal! The more dads, the more breakfast!"
I gave Ruby's father a sly smile. "You hear that, Taiyang? Your daughter calls me Daddy too."
Yang whimpered, a sound halfway towards a sob. Suck a dick, bitch.
Taiyang grabbed his ball of a daughter from the corner and dragged her over to the table. In no time flat, everyone had breakfast before them, and it was more than they could handle. And for good measure, mostly for the karma, I gave the dog a very meaty omelet right into his food bowl.
The corgi looked up at me and nodded appreciatively. He and I could get along, he must have decided.
I myself made do with a modest omelet and some bacon. Someone had gotten the terribly un-American idea into my head that pancakes were a dessert, and I could never look at them the same way for breakfast. It was the same way I had a vague moral objection to eating cereal full stop. Not that I typically ate a breakfast in any case. I was always too worried about the caloric and other dietary impact it would have on me. Which made it kind of amazing to watch people like Ruby just shovel food down and be able to maintain her figure. But maybe that made a lot more sense than I had originally realized.
After I got my Aura, I had gone to the Beacon infirmary to sort of get an estimation of my physical health, one of the many options available for students looking to live better or whatever. Those kinds of services were free of charge. They had told me I needed a frankly astounding amount of calories to maintain my current weight, and I wasn't that heavy. I couldn't tell if human bodies were just able to process more calories without putting on the pounds in this world, or if it had something to do with Aura and being a Huntsman. It could have been a mixture of both, explaining why I'd only seen so much as one pudgy Huntsman. Or how a man like Qrow could literally drink alcohol for all three of his meals and still have a relatively flat stomach.
Speaking of which.
"Hey, kid, when do you want to head out to your folks' place?" Qrow asked, drinking piping hot coffee.
I put a fork full of omelet in my mouth, really wishing that this household had some hot sauce. Apparently Tabasco sauce was a rare luxury, but not mushroom ketchup, which they actually had, and that freaked me out. "No need, old man. I was texting my sister and she's going to come get me. I figured it was probably the option least likely to get me killed. I've done enough drunk driving to not want to risk it anymore."
"Oh. Guess I don't have to drink in moderation anymore." He drank his coffee all in one pull, before taking out a carton of eggnog and filling the coffee cup all the way to the rim. Then he shrugged, and just decided to start chugging the eggnog.
Taiyang looked at me, from where before he had been opening Yang's mouth and just kind of spooning food in for her as she just kind of laid there face down on the table. "Damn. I figured I could put you to work on dinner as well."
"No dice, hombre," I said with a laugh. "I got my own personal demons to deal with today. I can go play house when I'm forty years old and married."
Still chewing an uncomfortable mixture of food that she kept shoveling into her mouth, Ruby said, "Ish cool. I'll make him cook for me back at Beacon."
"Yeah, you and what army?" I scoffed. "As soon as I'm back home, it's back to lean meat and broccoli."
She narrowed her eyes at me. "You help me make good food, and I'll help you, uh… ooh, I know! We can work in the Fishery together and make your sword even cooler. Or make you better clothes. I'm a total genius at this kind of stuff." She patted her breast proudly.
"Stop offering to spend time around him," Yang groaned, mouth full of the unchewed food her dad was trying to make her eat.
Well, that settled it. "You know what, Ruby? It's a deal. We get us back from winter break, and we's finna make us some stupid weapons together and cause massive collateral damage."
Ruby poked her sister. "You hear that, Yang? Collateral damage! That's the best kind of damage."
My scroll buzzed twice in quick succession. After setting my food aside, I went for the text. I could never find the UI for scrolls to be comfortable. It always just looks somehow designed to be inconvenient and hard to manage, compared to my old Google Pixel. Although I had to wonder if my scroll spied on me like my phone did. That was why I used a mobile VPN in any case. I poked around until I got to the last text, which was a single one from Indigo.
Indigo: almost they're
You: You literally had to use the apostrophe there in the wrong way on purpose.
Indigo: dont text me im driving
Indigo: saffron says hi 2 shes with me
Saffron? I believed Indigo had mentioned as a sister who ran away from home or something. Indigo had promised she would be here for the holiday, and lo, she was. Another face who knew me though I couldn't place anything about her.
I forgot the business of breakfast and whatever the other text was. Outside the window, into the snowy wonderland beyond, the light somehow seemed sluggish. Made it feel like it was the afternoon. The thick clouds pouring down white hell were probably part of that. It wasn't quite a blizzard, but then again, if it was a blizzard, I probably wouldn't be able to recognize it.
I needed to get my bags and probably get dressed before Indigo showed up. It'd be weird to meet her at the door wearing a shirtless apron. I asked Taiyang for my shirt back, and briefly changed there in the kitchen. It only got a couple of looks, before I went back up to the bedroom. As was my habit, the place was clean, the bed made. I just got my bag and took it to the front door. By the time I got there, someone was knocking.
I took one last sprint to the kitchen to grab something before opening the door.
Looking like some puffy species of bird in her jacket, Indigo stared up at me. Frowning and looking angry like she typically did. "Yo, what's up, dipshit? C'mere." She tried stepping towards me with a hug, but I held up a heaping plate in front of her to stop.
"Nuh-uh," I said, smiling. "No hugs or you'll ruin the breakfast I made for you."
She looked at the plate skeptically. "Since when could you cook?"
"I'm a boy of many talents, some of them even appropriate in public," I said smoothly, looking past her to the car, already starting to get buried under the snowfall. There was a blonde woman in the passenger seat, who waved at me. I waved back, gesturing for her to get out and come join us. "Hey, I made enough for Saffron too. Get her set up with some wholesome fixin's while I put this in your trunk."
For a moment, I waited for her to correct me. For me to have somehow gotten the name wrong, and this not to be Saffron Arc. It's not like I knew what any of my supposed sisters look like besides Indigo here.
"Ooh, Jaune's got sisters!" Ruby called out from the kitchen.
I pushed past Indigo to get to the car. Saffron was already getting out by the time I was loading up the trunk.
"Jaune!" she cried out, wrapping her arms around from behind. I nearly elbowed her in the face with a flinch. "God, you feel so firm. What are they feeding you at Beacon?"
"He's been cooking for himself!" Indigo yelled back. "Come try some."
I just kind of awkwardly smiled at Saffron. Another blonde girl with blue eyes. Looking a lot like Indigo but, just, I don't know, somehow different. "Sup, little sister?"
Saffron pouted. "I'm still way older than you, kid." But then, smiling and reaching up to tousle my hair, she said, "Happy Long Night, Jaune."
I stood out there in the snow, feeling the cold in my lungs as I watched her go into the house. I didn't know what to say to her. Indigo I had developed a kind of rapport with. I broadly knew our jokes and how to handle her. But if I was right, I had like six other sisters to deal with. None of whose names I knew for sure. From the contacts in my phone, I can only guess Hazel and Twin #1 and Twin A. I began regretting more and more my decision to let Indigo talk me into coming home for the Holiday.
But when I had a fresh layer of snow on my shoulders, I decided I had done enough standing.
"Yeah, well, I've never seen so many Huntsmen in one place," Indigo was saying to Qrow. "Just my father, but he never really talked about it. And now Jaune."
He smiled at her in a way that felt somehow sleazy. "Well, if you stuck around, you could see a lot more from a real Huntsman. I'm sure I've got a trick or two to impress you."
Indigo sucked on her lips, looking at her feet. "Yeah. I could see myself doing that. Qrow, was it?"
"Qrow Branwen. Professional Huntsman. I teach classes at Signal."
"Huntsman and a teacher? That's got to be really hard!"
"I deal with hard things all the time. Stick around and you'll find out."
Indigo was gripping her fork tightly. "Maybe next time in Five Wives you could show me around. But, for now, y'know," She looked up at him, smiling back. "I've got this idiot brother to take care of. He'd pretty much forget how to breathe without me around."
Qrow brought his plate to the sink, and slicked back his black hair. "I can respect that. Responsibility and all."
Saffron flicked Indigo on the butt, and she screamed. "Stop flirting with the teacher!"
"I'm not!" Indigo protested loudly, as Saffron laughed around her breakfast. "I'm—Jaune!"
"That's my name," I said mildly, meeting the tired, pained eyes of Yang. She looked like she wanted to kill herself.
Indigo grabbed my jacket collar and pulled me over. "What's this I hear about you having tattoos now! How long has this been going on in secret?"
I blinked. "Ugh, about a month. Full sleeves are expensive and take a lot of time. I don't have it completed yet. My friend Coco and I—"
She didn't let me finish, instead grabbing my arm and pulling it up into the air for her to inspect. Her eyes went wide and she gasped in sisterly horror.
The sleeve tattoo wasn't done yet, not by a long shot. I only had the middle section up around the bicep completed. Coco had suggested the tattoos would complete my look, and after some back and forth, we found her favorite artist in the city and she hooked me up with a deal. The tattoo artist was an artiste in every single word. A brief kind of interview and a lot of sketching to make sure I had the entire thing I wanted down. Something I felt would be appropriately symbolic, curve with the contours of my new muscles, and mean something to me. It was still mostly just outlines right now.
The one part that worked was the expressionless, six-winged angel on the bicep. The Simurgh, floating there and wearing Void Cowboy's bandana around her neck. Her wings covered her almost coyly, for she was naked. Her right hand was held up, the fingers making the gesture for the sign of the cross, spelling out and symbolizing Jesus Christ in the old Greek fashion. Her left hand hung down, holding the wooden cross and strings of a marionette, which was meant to go across the rest of the tattoo. Behind her head was a halo, at the center of which stood the Dog Star and Polaris, the brightest star in the night sky of Earth and the star used by navigators to find their way home.
And naturally, words. G.O.M.D. by one side of the Simurgh. The other, Jeremiah 51:20, a reference to my favorite verse in the Bible, and a perfect metaphor for what I was to Simone. Besides, no good tattoo was complete without a Bible quote. As if I didn't simp hard enough on my knees for another dude, even if He was God.
"Oh, Mom is going to lose her shit over this!" Saffron said as she finished eating.
Indigo shook her head in despair. "Dad's going to laugh his ass off."
"No, Dad's gonna beat Jaune's ass for it," Saffron said, looking at the floor. She swallowed uncomfortably.
"Why is there a naked angel on your arm?"
I shrugged my arm out of Indigo's grip. "It's a totally cool and badass Huntsman symbol."
Qrow elbowed Taiyang and snerked.
Ruby was busy going for the last of the pancakes. "Tattoos are cool and adult-like."
I nodded towards her thankfully. "Yeah, what my friend Ruby said."
"Stop surrounding yourself with cute girls who tell you exactly what you want to hear," Indigo hissed.
I held up my hands, compressing a breath in my throat. "Look, it's whatever. The rest of the family can gawk and point and laugh or do whatever when we get home."
My sisters looked at me skeptically. Saffron just shrugged, and Indigo threw up her hands. The two of them did some customary greetings and goodbyes to Ruby's family. I joined in with them, more for appearances than anything else. Yang was still glaring. Ruby made sure I didn't forget that I'd help cook her something back at Beacon. Nothing particularly interesting.
Until my sisters were out the door and I felt a tug on my sleeve. I turned to face Ruby. "You're Jaune," she said.
"That's my name," I said dumbly
"So don't worry about it, alright?" She smiled. "Your family's gonna love you for who you are. Just because you changed doesn't mean you're not you. You act all distant and mean, but deep down, I think you do really care. You just suck at it."
I half-sighed, half-laughed. "You got a way with words, girl."
Ruby rolled her eyes, before giving me a quick hug. I just held my arms up, too surprised to hug back. "Hug back," she urged quietly, teeth grit. "Don't make this weird. If you make this weird, I'm gonna tell Yang you were weird with me when we were alone."
"I hate you," I breathed, allowing myself to hug the girl back. It was a small thing. Something quick and oddly warm. Meaningful. A physical gesture from someone who, for whatever reason, actually liked me. I could name the people who thought that on one hand.
Ruby broke the hug and pushed me outside. "Now scram and have a happy Long Night. Next time you better not beat me at the depression fight, Jaune! I will be the saddest and edgiest Huntress around!"
She stuck her tongue out and closed the door.
And just like that, me and my sisters were off on the road. And I just sat in the back of a car like I had on the ride here with Yang, not really sure what to say. Letting my sisters do most of the talking.
"So, how's the rest of the family doing?" I asked awkwardly, and got a curious look from Sarron. "I don't really talk to anyone besides Indigo these days. I don't wanna be surprised."
"Dad's still mad you left, and I guess so's Mom," Saffron said. "But when is Dad ever happy about anything? He's still pissed I brought my girlfriend with me." She blew air through her lips, leaning against the window.
Oh, so Saffron was gay and brought her partner? That was something I could probably pretend to know about. Unless Jaune was supposed to know her girlfriend's name. Which I didn't. And it was just another name and face I had to act like I knew this whole time.
Indigo seemed to sense a vague mood shift and picked up, setting the windshield wipers to what I could only describe as panic mode. She herself acted casual as ever. "Oh, I'm not sure. I only call them occasionally, which is more than you. I think the twins are trying to dress in opposite colors and keep swapping outfits to mess with people. Hazel, according to her, and you know how bad she is with the truth, says…"
The list of names just started to slip me. I stared ahead, nodding appropriately at the right times to act like this was all well and good. But I couldn't keep track of the names or what they were doing. It made me feel stupid, like when someone explains something complex to you that you feel you should understand, but don't, and feel retarded.
Saffron and Indigo started laughing about one girl. But apparently Saffron hadn't seen the family in a hot minute herself. Indigo, well. I don't know. The two of them were just talking about a bunch of random strangers, for all it felt to me.
I shrunk back in my seat, feeling way smaller than I was. The hell were you supposed to do in a situation like this? Part of me hoped I could just avoid any names and act like Jaune well enough to pass muster, but I doubted that. My heart sank into my stomach as I imagined trying to pretend to know and love a group of complete strangers and hope none of them figured me out for the bodyjacking basketcase fraud I was.
Fuck you, Indigo. How the hell did I let you guilt trip me into agreeing to this?
I checked my phone, mostly for the time, before noticing I had an alert. Blake had texted me maybe half an hour ago and I had forgotten it with a whole Indigo situation.
Blake: Hey, what are you supposed to do when you screw up? Like, really screw up?
I sighed, somewhat glad that Blake was in trouble and I could do something besides focus on just how fucked I was. It was going to be a really long car ride, but I knew it was going to end way too quickly.
— 7 —
"I'm going to miss breakfast from now on," Ruby said, sulking at her empty plate where once the riches of strawberry pancakes had flowed.
"I got to admit," Dad said, "you do have good choice in friends. Still not sure how a kid that age has a beard."
Yang looked over at them. They were distracting her from watching Jaune and his sisters leave, pulling up the driveway. It had been bad enough with Jaune and her father. But then that Indigo girl had showed up, and had started talking to her uncle.
It made Yang seethe.
Ruby elbowed. "Hey, Yang, What's wrong with you? You've been dead all morning."
She kept staring out the window to make sure the Arcs were gone, well and truly and for real gone. All she could do was shake her head at her sister. The girl was too young to understand, probably. Too oblivious to what was going on minutes ago.
