CHAPTER FIVE: Jaunedice and Forever Fall
Part I - The Weight of a Name
Location: Beacon Academy Gymnasium | Combat Class
The gymnasium was not a forgiving room.
It was designed to be otherwise - the lighting calibrated for visibility, the floor laid with materials that absorbed impact without being soft enough to matter, the observation seats arranged so that every student present could see exactly what was happening to the student in front of them. It was a room that believed in transparency. In object lessons. In the specific educational value of watching someone struggle.
Jaune Arc was struggling.
He'd been struggling for several minutes now, which was long enough that the watching students had moved through the early stages of concern and arrived at the uncomfortable territory of not knowing where to look. He had a sword and he knew roughly what to do with it, in the way that someone who has read extensively about swimming knows roughly what to do with it before they enter the water. The gap between the knowing and the doing was where Cardin Winchester lived, and he was making himself very comfortable there.
The orange-haired boy moved with the practiced ease of someone who had been large and powerful since early adolescence and had organized his entire personality around the fact. His mace was not an elegant weapon - it was not supposed to be. It was a statement of intent, and the intent was blunt.
Jaune went down. Got up. Charged again with the kind of stubborn commitment that would have been impressive in a different context. His sword connected with Cardin's defense twice, which was two more times than the previous exchange, and then the mace caught his shield and sent it skidding across the floor and the geometry of the fight simplified itself considerably.
Cardin looked at the disarmed, off-balance boy in front of him with the expression of someone who has already decided what happens next and is just waiting for the formality of it.
"This," he said pleasantly, "is the part where you lose."
"Over my dead-"
The knee to the gut cut the rest of the sentence off at the roots. Jaune went down in the way that people go down when the wind has been taken from them completely - not a fall, exactly, more a return to the ground at the body's insistence. His sword landed beside him. Cardin raised the mace with the unhurried motion of someone completing a task.
"Cardin."
Glynda Goodwitch's voice did not need to be loud to stop a room. It had a quality - something between authority and the particular patience of someone who has been disappointed before and has developed a relationship with it - that arrived before the volume did.
The buzzer sounded. The lights came back up.
Cardin scoffed, looked at the mace in his hand with the expression of someone who has been interrupted mid-sentence, and walked off the floor without particular hurry.
Goodwitch descended to the floor and tapped her scroll. A display materialized above the fallen student - a readout, a number, a blinking red indicator that communicated its message with flat efficiency.
She looked at it for a moment longer than she needed to.
"Mr. Arc." The words carried something that was not quite sympathy and not quite frustration but sat in the terrain between them. "It's been several weeks. Please make a habit of consulting your scroll during combat - your aura level is not an abstraction. It tells you when to press the attack and, perhaps more importantly, when pressing the attack is the wrong answer entirely." She paused. "We would prefer not to send any of you home in pieces."
From somewhere in the upper seats, Cardin's voice arrived.
"Speak for yourself."
The room went very still.
Goodwitch turned.
"Mr. Winchester." The name came out in two precise syllables, both of them load-bearing. "That will be quite enough. Are we understood?"
Cardin didn't look at her. "Sure," he said, and walked out.
In the observation seats, three different expressions of reaction happened almost simultaneously. Yang punched her fists together with the expression of someone who has been waiting for a sparring opportunity to present itself. Weiss had both hands balled at her sides, jaw tight, radiating the specific energy of someone who considers sportsmanship a core value and has just watched it be violated at close range. Ruby was vibrating very slightly in place in a way that suggested she was containing something.
Goodwitch turned back to the room.
"The Vytal Festival is approaching faster than most of you are preparing for it," she said, with the briskness of someone putting sentiment aside in favor of logistics. "Students from the other kingdoms will be arriving in Vale within months. Those who choose to represent this school in the combat tournament will be representing all of us." She let that land. "I suggest everyone consider what that means for how they're spending their training hours."
The bell rang.
Students moved. The floor cleared.
Jaune Arc sat in the middle of it, his sword on the floor beside him, and didn't move with them.
Pyrrha had been watching him from her seat with the expression of someone who has been trying to find the right moment for several weeks and keeps finding reasons why this isn't quite it yet. Beside her, Scarlett Reinhardt was watching Cardin's retreating back with a quality of attention that suggested she was cataloguing something.
She stood up.
"I'll get him," she said.
"Scarlett, you don't have to-"
"Two seconds," Scarlett said, and was already moving down the steps.
Pyrrha watched her reach the floor, cross to the seated Jaune, and grab him by the arm with the unceremonious efficiency of someone who considers the feelings of furniture when moving it. He came upright involuntarily.
"Up," Scarlett said.
He didn't respond. Still looking at the floor. Still somewhere in the aftermath of the fight, in that particular interior space where you replay what happened and find no version of it where you make different choices.
"Up, I said." Scarlett's voice sharpened slightly. "Come on, we're getting off this floor."
"Why should I?" The words were flat, colorless. "What's the point."
Pyrrha went pale.
She knew Scarlett - had known her for long enough to understand the specific topography of her patience, and the specific geography of what lay beyond its edges. She'd heard that tone in Jaune's voice and was already calculating the outcome.
"Jaune," she said, with the urgency of someone trying to warn a person about a step they haven't seen yet, "I'd really strongly suggest-"
"What did you just say to me?"
Scarlett's voice had gone quiet in the specific way that things go quiet before they become very loud. The temperature of the room seemed to change slightly. A vein appeared in her forehead that had not been there ten seconds ago, and her knuckles cracked without her appearing to make any deliberate effort.
"When I tell you to get up," she said, and her voice was very, very controlled, "you get up."
What followed was brief, technically qualified as assault, and left Jaune draped over Scarlett's forearm with his eyes pointing in slightly different directions.
Scarlett looked at the result of her intervention.
"Hm," she said. "Too hard?"
Pyrrha laughed the laugh of someone experiencing several emotions at high velocity and choosing the least complicated one. "A little," she managed. "Maybe slightly."
"I'll recalibrate," Scarlett said, and sighed, and looked at the unconscious blonde with the expression of someone who has created a problem they now need to address.
Part II - Cafeteria Stories
Location: Beacon Academy Cafeteria | Later That Day
Nora Valkyrie was, in the judgment of most people who encountered her, a force of nature that had been assigned a human body as a temporary measure and was making the most of it.
She had the cafeteria's attention - or rather, the attention of the specific table around which teams RWBY, JNPR, and NDTSA had distributed themselves for lunch - and she was doing something with it that could generously be called storytelling. Her eyes were very large and very bright and the story had clearly grown since its previous telling.
"So there we were," she said. "In the dead of night-"
"It was midday," Ren said, from behind his coffee mug.
"-surrounded by Ursai-"
"Beowolves." He took a sip. "Two of them."
"Dozens."
"Two," he confirmed, in the tone of someone who has had this conversation before and has made peace with having it indefinitely.
Blake was reading. Her book was open at a point roughly two-thirds through, and she had the focused stillness of someone who had decided, at some point, that the story she was reading was more interesting than the one being told and was declining to feel guilty about this.
Yang had her chin in both hands and was watching Nora with the expression of someone at a very entertaining theater performance who doesn't entirely care whether it's accurate.
Around the NDTSA section of the table, reactions varied. Turuk was listening with the mild, amused attention of someone watching a performance for the second time and finding that it holds up. Daikon had the expression of someone who considers embellishment a misdemeanor but has decided not to file a report. Aiko was watching Nora with wide eyes and occasional glances at Ren's corrections, apparently trying to triangulate the truth from the available data. Scarlett, with the freshly cleaned knuckles of someone who had recently addressed a situation physically, was listening with the particular enjoyment of someone who appreciates commitment in a storyteller.
"But they were no match for us," Nora concluded, raising her fork triumphantly, "and in the end, Ren and I not only defeated them but started an extremely profitable rug business with the proceeds."
"She keeps having this dream," Ren said, setting his mug down. "About a month now."
Nova had been in the process of eating and now put his fork down to compose himself. "That's..." he started. "That's quite a story, Nora." He cleared his throat. "Really vivid."
What kind of dream is that, he thought, with the private bewilderment of someone who has been briefed on the relevant facts and still cannot account for the outcome.
The table's attention shifted gradually, the way it shifts when the entertainment of one direction has run its course and something more serious has been waiting patiently at the periphery. Pyrrha's eyes had moved to Jaune again - had barely left him through the meal - and the expression on her face was the particular compound of worry and helplessness that comes from caring about someone who doesn't want to be helped.
Jaune was present at the table in the most technical sense of the word. His food was in front of him and he was sitting beside it, which was most of what could be said.
"Jaune." Pyrrha's voice was gentle, the way you speak to something that might startle. "Are you alright?"
He looked up with the performance of someone who has been practicing looking alright. "Huh? Yeah, totally. Why?" He smiled. It didn't reach the relevant anatomy.
"You seem like you're not," Ruby said, with the directness of someone who has not yet learned to soften observations and isn't sure she wants to.
"She's not wrong," Nova said.
The table's collective attention settled on Jaune with the quiet weight of genuine concern, which is a different thing entirely from being watched.
Jaune opened his mouth for another version of I'm fine.
That was when Cardin's laugh arrived from across the cafeteria.
It was the specific kind of laugh that carries - loud and performative, the laugh of someone who wants their audience to know they're laughing. Several people at several tables registered it. At Team NDTSA's end of the table, a different kind of attention sharpened.
The girl with the rabbit ears was a second-year student named Velvet Scarlatina, and she had the particular quality of someone who had made themselves small as a survival strategy and was discovering, today, that the strategy had limits. Cardin had her ear between his fingers - literally, the brown velveteen ear that marked her heritage - and was demonstrating its authenticity to his teammates with the casual cruelty of someone who doesn't consider what they're doing cruelty because they've never had to.
"Told you they were real," he said, laughing.
"What a freak," Russell added, with the enthusiasm of someone who has found a way to feel superior at someone else's expense and is not examining the mechanism.
At the NDTSA table, five tails moved simultaneously.
Ruby noticed it. She'd been learning to read Nova's team over the past weeks - the particular tells of people who were usually controlled but had specific triggers - and what she saw now in the synchronized tension of their tails and the quality of their stillness was something operating right at the edge of decision.
Nova's jaw was tight. His fork was on his tray. His eyes had gone to Cardin with a quality of attention that was not quite cold and not quite hot but sat in the register between them.
She opened her mouth.
She didn't need to.
Daikon moved first.
He was fast - not the combat-fast that turned heads in the gymnasium, but the fast of someone who has closed a distance before anyone registered they were closing it. His tail came out in a sharp, lateral motion that struck the back of Cardin's wrist with the specific force of someone who has calculated exactly how much force is required to communicate a point without starting something that needs to be finished.
Cardin's hand came away from the girl's ear with the indignant surprise of someone who expected their impunity and found, instead, a consequence.
"I think that's enough." Daikon's voice was flat, without heat - which was, somehow, more effective than anger. "Take your entertainment somewhere else, Winchester."
Cardin turned, and what he'd intended to say died somewhere in his throat when he found himself looking up - marginally, but noticeably - at Nova, who had arrived beside Daikon without appearing to have moved through the intervening space.
The rest of Team NDTSA had arranged itself in the background in a way that was technically just standing there but communicated something considerably more specific.
"Scram," Scarlett said, with the cheerful venom of someone who would genuinely enjoy the alternative. "Before someone has to explain to you why that was a terrible idea."
Cardin's eyes went to Nova again. There was something in the expression there - the particular calculus of a bully confronted with someone who is not performing confidence but simply has it - that worked its way into something like discretion.
"Ugh." He put his hands up in the gesture of someone who is leaving by choice and wants this understood. "Boring. Russel, Dove, Sky - let's go." He turned and walked, and the act of being walked away from had a quality to it that was not entirely dignified.
Nova watched him go. His features resettled into something approaching neutral, though the jaw stayed slightly tight for a moment longer.
Turuk looked at him.
"You called him Little Cardinal."
"I did."
"To his face."
"I'm aware."
The composure around the table lasted approximately two more seconds before Scarlett made a sound that was trying to be a cough and failing. Turuk pressed his lips together with the focused attention of someone fighting a losing battle. Daikon looked at the ceiling with the particular expression of someone who has decided that laughter is an involuntary response and therefore not his responsibility.
Nova raised an eyebrow. "Did I say something funny?"
"Little Cardinal," Scarlett managed, which was apparently sufficient to complete the sentence, because the table responded accordingly.
Ruby blinked at the scene. Yang had covered her mouth. Even Blake had lowered her book by an inch, which was the most dramatic reaction available to her.
The girl with the rabbit ears had been standing at the edge of this entire event with the expression of someone who has been rescued and is still processing the fact. She twisted her hands in front of her, ears turned slightly inward.
"Um," she said. "Thank you. For - for what you did just now."
Scarlett turned to her and the laughter settled into something warmer. She took the girl's hands and gave them a brief, matter-of-fact shake. "Don't mention it. Someone had to say something." She paused. "I'm Scarlett. This is my team."
"I'm Velvet," the girl said. "Velvet Scarlatina." She looked at all of them in turn with the slightly overwhelmed expression of someone not accustomed to being helped. "I really - thank you."
"You shouldn't have to thank people for being decent to you," Daikon said, which was as close to a comfort as his register allowed, and from the look on Velvet's face it landed about as well as something warmer might have. "But if Winchester gives you trouble again, find us."
She nodded. Bowed, briefly, and walked away.
The two tables - RWBY, JNPR, NDTSA - looked at each other in the particular silence of people who have all just witnessed the same thing and haven't decided yet what to do with it.
"Nobody," Pyrrha said slowly, "has ever made Cardin Winchester leave a room embarrassed before."
"He seemed pretty embarrassed," Yang observed.
"He was deeply embarrassed," Weiss confirmed.
"Little Cardinal," Turuk said again, and Scarlett put her face in her hands and Daikon made another ceiling assessment, and even Nova, after a moment, conceded a small exhale that was technically in the vicinity of a laugh.
When the noise settled, Ruby noticed the empty seat.
Jaune was gone.
Part III - What Jaune Knew
He'd slipped out during the commotion. Nobody had seen him go, which was what he'd intended - moving through a moment when everyone's attention was elsewhere, becoming absent before anyone thought to check.
He walked with his hands in his pockets and his head at the angle it occupied when he was thinking too hard, which was the same angle it had been at more or less continuously for several weeks.
Nova and his team are strong, he thought, watching the corridor pass around him. All of them. Even the new girl. They don't second-guess themselves, they don't hesitate. They just - move.
He thought about the gymnasium. About the floor.
And then there's me.
He balled his fist in his pocket, and the feeling that came with it was a specific variety of frustration - the kind that has no external target because the thing you're frustrated with is the thing you're also stuck inside.
He turned a corner and found the eastern corridor, which was quieter, and put more distance between himself and the cafeteria until the sounds of it were theory rather than fact.
Then he stopped walking and looked at his own reflection in the dark glass of a classroom window, and the reflection didn't have anything useful to offer him.
Why did you even come here?
The question had been getting louder.
He didn't have an answer that held up anymore.
Part IV - Professor Oobleck's History Lesson
Location: Classroom 6A | The Following Morning
Bartholomew Oobleck did not so much teach as he moved through teaching - present everywhere simultaneously, powered by coffee and conviction, the sentences arriving ahead of the breath that produced them. He was the kind of educator who had decided, at some point in his career, that stillness was the enemy of retention, and had accordingly eliminated it from his classroom entirely.
He was currently explaining the Faunus War with the focused intensity of a man who considers recent history a phrase that deserved to be taken literally.
"-humankind was quite, quite adamant about centralizing the Faunus population in Menagerie-" a blur of green and white and the sharp smell of coffee as he materialized at the map "-now, these events may feel distant to some of you, but they are not! The repercussions of the Faunus Rights Revolution reverberate to this day!" Another blur, another sip, another position. "Which of you has personally experienced discrimination as a result of your Faunus heritage?"
At the back of the room, hands went up.
Daikon's went up - not quickly, with a studied composure, but it went up. Beside him, Scarlett's followed. Velvet, after a moment's consideration, raised hers as well.
Oobleck looked at the hands and shook his head with the specific grief of a man who has known the answer to this question for years and still finds it depressing. "Dreadful," he said quietly. "Dreadful. Remember, students - ignorance is not innocent. It breeds." He took a long sip. "Now! Can someone tell me what many historians identify as the turning point in the War's third year?"
A hand.
"Miss Schnee?"
"The Battle at Fort Castle," Weiss said, with the precision of someone who has done the reading and would like this to be acknowledged.
"Precisely." He appeared to teleport to the other side of the room. "And the specific advantage the Faunus forces held over General Lagune's army?"
In the front row, Jaune Arc was asleep.
He had been asleep for approximately fourteen minutes, which was longer than Cardin Winchester - seated behind him - had apparently been willing to ignore. A paper football, carefully constructed and precisely aimed, struck the sleeping student in the ear.
"Hey!" Jaune came upright with the startled defensiveness of someone dreaming about something completely unrelated.
Oobleck materialized six inches from his nose.
"Mr. Arc! A contribution! What is the answer?"
Jaune's eyes moved rapidly to the room around him, cataloguing context clues. Behind Oobleck's focused expression, Pyrrha was performing a subtle gesture - two hands framing her eyes, which was the most obvious hint available without audible words.
"The advantage that the Faunus had..." Jaune processed the gesture. "Was... binoculars?"
The class laughed.
Cardin pounded his desk with the particular enthusiasm of someone who has invested in an outcome and is now collecting on it. The laughter would have continued, probably, escalated, possibly, had Scarlett Reinhardt not turned in her seat and directed at Cardin the specific quality of attention that she reserved for things she was prepared to address physically.
The laughter from Cardin's section stopped.
"Can it," Scarlett said, in the register she used when she meant it rather than when she was being theatrical about it, "carrot top."
Cardin stiffened. Found something interesting to look at on the wall.
"Mhm," Scarlett said, and faced forward again.
Oobleck, who had witnessed this, took a meditative sip of his coffee and turned to Cardin. "Perhaps you would like to share the correct answer, Mr. Winchester, since you appear to have thoughts?"
"It's a lot easier to train an animal than a soldier," Cardin said, with the casual assurance of someone who expects this kind of statement to go unchallenged.
The table nearest to him was very briefly absolutely silent.
"You're not exactly the most open-minded of individuals, are you, Cardin?" Pyrrha asked, with the particular disappointment of someone who had hoped the answer would be different.
"You got a problem?" Cardin squared up to the question, which was the closest he could get to squaring up to the person asking it.
"Pyrrha wasn't asking for your macho performance," Scarlett said. "She was making an observation about your character. Those are different things."
Several students made sounds that were technically laughter but were performing the function of moral support.
Pyrrha put a hand on Scarlett's arm - the I have this gesture - and Scarlett, after a moment, nodded and subsided.
"Night vision," Pyrrha said, turning back to the front. "Many Faunus species have significantly enhanced vision in low-light conditions. General Lagune's army was ambushed in the dark - a situation he had neither prepared for nor anticipated, because he had made the mistake of underestimating the people he was fighting." She glanced at Cardin with the composure of someone making a point without making a production of it. "Historically, that mistake tends not to go well for the person making it."
Blake had been following this from the far side of the room with the alert stillness of someone for whom this specific topic is not abstract. She spoke without raising her hand, which Oobleck did not appear to mind.
"General Lagune was inexperienced," she said. "He tried to ambush the Faunus in their encampment in the middle of the night and didn't account for the fact that darkness was not the equalizer he thought it was. He was outmaneuvered, outflanked, and ultimately captured." She paused. "Perhaps if he'd taken the time to learn something about the people he was fighting, history would have remembered him differently."
Cardin stood up.
Daikon, who had been tracking this with the patient attention of someone waiting for an expected event, did not stand up. He simply turned in his seat, reached out with his tail, and applied it to Cardin's shoulder with the deliberate force of someone returning something to where it belongs.
Cardin sat down.
"Professor said to sit," Daikon said, without apparent heat. He glanced at Oobleck and gave a brief, apologetic nod. "Sorry for the interruption."
Oobleck, whose coffee mug had not moved from its position throughout this entire exchange, regarded Daikon over the rim with the expression of a man who has seen worse and found this one instructive in its own way. He zoomed back to the front of the room.
"Moving on!" he announced. "Now - Mr. Arc! Since you and Mr. Winchester have both demonstrated a need for additional engagement with today's material-" he materialized beside Jaune's desk with the sudden intimacy of a close talker "-I'll expect both of you to see me after class for additional readings. Fifty-one through ninety-one. Essay format. On my desk before next session."
Jaune's shoulders descended approximately an inch and a half.
"Ohhh," he said, to no one in particular.
Part V - The Rooftop
The room emptied with the usual momentum of students who have somewhere to be. Nora and Ren filtered out, followed by Daikon, who paused to hold the door for Velvet with the particular awkward care of someone trying to be decent without making a thing of it.
Scarlett stopped at the doorway.
Pyrrha was still inside, collected at the edge of patience, watching the post-class talk happen to Jaune and Cardin through the window of the door. She looked like she had been waiting for three weeks rather than three minutes.
"Go ahead with the others," Pyrrha said. "I'll wait."
"I'll stay," Scarlett said.
"You don't have to."
"I know." Scarlett leaned against the wall beside the door with her arms crossed. "I want to."
Pyrrha looked at her for a moment - the look of someone who knows this person well enough to know when arguing is a waste of energy - and sighed the sigh of resignation that was also, underneath it, relief at not having to wait alone.
"He might be a while," Pyrrha said.
"I've got nowhere to be."
They settled into the quiet of the corridor, and Pyrrha looked at the closed door, and Scarlett looked at the ceiling, and eventually Pyrrha asked:
"Tell me about Aiko. How is she settling in?"
Scarlett's expression shifted - the particular way it shifted when her sister was the subject, a softening that she didn't usually advertise. "Better than I expected. She's still quiet around people she doesn't know, but she's good. She's got a head on her." A pause. "She's tougher than she looks, too. Not that she looks soft - she just presents soft, if you know what I mean. Inside she's..." Scarlett searched for the word. "Exact. That's probably the right word for it."
"I'd like to meet her properly," Pyrrha said. "Not just in passing."
"I'll arrange it. You'd like her - she's your kind of people." Scarlett glanced sideways at her friend. "Blake and Weiss too, I think. Different reasons for each of them, but they'd get on."
"Deal," Pyrrha said.
The door opened. Jaune came out first, moving with the particular posture of someone who has just been given homework as a consequence of their suffering and finds the mathematics of this unjust. Cardin emerged behind him, and the shoulder that caught Jaune as he passed was not an accident.
It produced an ow and a stumble, which produced a dark satisfaction on Cardin's face that lasted approximately one and a half seconds.
Scarlett's foot found the floor at precisely the right moment and with precisely the right angle, and Cardin's satisfaction completed its brief journey and arrived at the floor.
"What-!"
Scarlett looked at him with the expression of someone who has witnessed a puzzling event they cannot account for. "Cardin. Are you alright? You should really watch where you're going."
"You did that on purpose-"
"Did what?" She looked at him with absolute serenity. "I was just standing here." She tilted her head. "You've had a bit of a rough day. Maybe you need to sit down somewhere quiet."
He was on his feet and stepping toward her with the posture of someone who has forgotten the relevant recent history, and Scarlett was observing his approach with the calm of someone who has not, when Pyrrha caught him by the shoulder with her hand slightly glowing.
"I'd think carefully about what you're about to do," Pyrrha said pleasantly.
Cardin thought about it. Reached a conclusion. Left.
Scarlett watched him go. "Insensitive jerk," she said, to nobody in particular.
Jaune and Pyrrha both looked at her.
"What?" She shrugged. "Someone had to say it."
"I mean..." Pyrrha started, then stopped, then apparently decided she agreed with the assessment. "Fair."
She turned to Jaune, and the lightness fell out of her expression when she looked at him properly. He was standing the way people stand when they've absorbed too many consecutive things and the body has decided to cope by making itself very still.
"Come with me," she said. "I have an idea."
He looked like he wanted to argue. He didn't, and she took his arm, and she and Scarlett led him toward the upper building because Pyrrha had had something in mind for several days now and tonight felt like the moment it had been waiting for.
The rooftop had the quality that rooftops in old buildings often had - a sense of being slightly outside the ordinary rules of the place below, with a view that made the things happening at ground level feel navigable rather than overwhelming. The green lights of Beacon's central tower pulsed in the middle distance, slow and steady as a heartbeat.
Jaune leaned on the railing and looked at them.
"Pyrrha," he said, "I appreciate whatever this is, but I'm not that far gone. The roof isn't-"
"It's not that," Pyrrha said quickly, hands raised. "I promise you. That's not why we're here."
Scarlett looked at him from the other side. "You're clearly carrying something," she said, with the directness she used when the gentler approach felt dishonest. "Pyrrha's been trying to find a way to help you for weeks. Either let her, or tell us to back off - but this..." she gestured at his posture, his expression, the whole accumulated weight of the past several weeks "...isn't sustainable. You know that."
Jaune was quiet.
"I can always just be a farmer," he said, which was the worst thing he could have said in the presence of Pyrrha Nikos, whose reaction to it was essentially to take two steps forward and push him away from the railing with both hands.
"No," she said, with a vehemence slightly disproportionate to the farming.
He blinked. "I wasn't actually-"
"That is not-" She caught herself. Breathed. Started again. "That's not why I brought you up here."
She looked at him steadily, and the earnestness in her expression was the specific kind that doesn't argue with you, doesn't negotiate with you, doesn't accept the premise that you're allowed to be as discouraged as you've decided to be.
"I want to help you," she said. "We can train here after class. No audience, no pressure, no Cardin. Just working on it until it starts to work." She paused. "You made it to Beacon, Jaune. That's not something that happens to people who don't belong here."
"She's right," Scarlett said. "And for what it's worth, the fact that you're struggling doesn't mean you're failing. It means the work isn't finished yet. There's a difference."
Jaune looked at the green lights again.
"I wasn't really accepted," he said.
Pyrrha went still.
"What do you mean?" Scarlett's voice had the quiet of something carefully controlled.
What came out of him then was the kind of thing that has been compressed under pressure for long enough that its release, when it finally comes, is more exhaustion than confession. The fake transcripts. The father, the grandfather, the long line of warriors and the inheritance he'd wanted and hadn't been able to earn. The gap between who he was and who the name was supposed to mean.
When he was done, the rooftop was very quiet for a moment.
"Why?" Pyrrha asked. "Why would you-"
"Because it's all I've ever wanted." He turned away from both of them, and his voice had dropped into the register of someone who has finally said the thing out loud and is now facing it in the air between them. "Every man in my family has been a hero. My father, my grandfather, his father. I wanted to be that. I just... never was."
Pyrrha reached out. He stepped away from the touch.
"I don't want to be helped." The frustration came back into his voice like a tide. "I don't want to be the one everyone has to carry. I want to be the hero. I want to do something." He turned back, and his eyes were bright in the way that has nothing to do with happiness. "If I can't do this on my own - what good am I?"
"Jaune," Pyrrha said.
"Just leave me alone." He said it quietly, which was worse than anger. "Please."
A long moment.
"If that's what you need," Pyrrha said finally, and her voice was even but required effort to be even, "we'll respect that."
She walked to the exit. Her footsteps were the only sound.
Scarlett stayed a beat longer. She looked at Jaune with the expression she used when she was simultaneously frustrated and on his side, which was a combination she'd had a lot of practice with.
"You're an idiot," she said. "A well-intentioned one, but still." She moved toward the stairs. "We're not going anywhere. Neither offer expires."
She went down.
Jaune was alone on the rooftop with the lights of Beacon and his own thoughts, which were not currently good company.
That was when he heard the laugh from the window below.
He knew the voice before he turned around, which meant he knew what was coming and had to decide, in the one second he had to decide it, whether to run or to stay. His hands went cold in the way that they did when something he'd been dreading becomes actual.
Cardin climbed through the window with the ease of someone who considers the distinction between a window and a door mostly theoretical, and the smile on his face had the quality of a man who has been handed something valuable.
"Jaune," he said. "I couldn't help but overhear."
"Cardin-"
"Forged transcripts." He shook his head, not with disappointment, which would have been easier, but with the specific delight of someone who has found a tool and is already thinking about applications. "I never had you down as a rebel, Jauney boy. I'm impressed."
"Please," Jaune said, and hated how much the word cost him. "Please don't tell anyone. I'll-"
"Come on." Cardin spread his hands in the gesture of someone performing magnanimity. "I'd never rat on a friend like that." He stepped forward and folded Jaune into the headlock of someone who is making a point about physical superiority under the pretense of affection. "We're friends now. And friends do things for each other, right?"
He released him. Jaune braced himself against the railing.
"Those extra readings Oobleck assigned? I'm thinking a man with your academic dedication could probably handle those." Cardin patted him on the head with the cheerful condescension of someone who believes they've already won. "That's what friends are for." He moved back toward the window. "Don't worry, buddy. Your secret's safe with me."
He dropped back down to his room.
Jaune leaned on the railing and looked at his hands, and the green lights of Beacon pulsed their slow, steady pulse, and somewhere below him his team was eating dinner or getting ready for bed or wondering where their leader was.
He stayed on the roof for a long time.
Part VI - The Corridor at Night
Ruby had her pajamas on and was heading toward the water fountain at the end of the dormitory corridor when she found him.
Jaune was standing outside his room door with his scroll in his hand and the expression of someone who has been trying to work up to opening a door for several minutes and hasn't quite gotten there yet.
"Jaune! Hey." She fell into step beside him with the unconscious ease of someone who finds other people's proximity automatic. "Long time no see. Did you lock yourself out again?"
He laughed - a real one, slightly startled. "No, actually." He held up the scroll. "I've got it."
"Good. Small victories."
He was about to say something - the generic version of I'm fine, heading to bed, see you tomorrow - when a familiar voice came from the direction of the stairwell.
"Talking to yourself, Jaune?"
Nova came around the corner with the easy, unhurried walk of someone whose evening had apparently led him in this direction, which was a coincidence Ruby could appreciate. He looked at Jaune with the specific quality of attention he gave things when he was actually paying attention, and something in his expression went still in a way that meant he was reading the situation with more accuracy than Jaune had likely hoped for.
"Sit down," Nova said, in the tone that wasn't a command but was close enough that sitting down seemed like a reasonable response.
Jaune sat down in the corridor, which was where you sat when you needed to talk and the usual furniture wasn't where you were. Nova dropped beside him. Ruby settled on his other side without being asked.
"Scarlett told me," Nova said. "Not all of it - enough. And I know about Cardin." He said it plainly, without judgment in either direction. "I'm not going to tell you what to do. But I want you to hear something."
He paused, organizing it.
"Cardin has something on you," he said. "And right now you're giving it power by acting like the secret is the worst part. But the secret isn't the worst part. The worst part is what you're doing to yourself because of it - the way you're shutting out people who are on your side, the way you're letting one person's leverage make you smaller than you are." He looked at Jaune steadily. "That's the part you can actually fix."
Jaune was quiet.
"You know what I've noticed about you?" Ruby said. He looked at her. "You never give up. Even when Cardin knocks you down in the gym - even when everything's going wrong - you get back up. Every time." She had her knees pulled up and her arms around them and her silver eyes were very direct. "That's not nothing, Jaune. That's actually the most important thing."
"But I lied to get here," he said.
"Yeah." She didn't try to argue with it, which was its own form of respect. "And that's something you'll have to deal with eventually. But right now you have a team that needs you to show up for them, and friends who are choosing to show up for you." She looked at him. "You're a leader, Jaune. You might not feel like one yet - I definitely don't feel like one half the time - but that's not how it works. You don't feel your way into leadership. You choose it, and then you catch up to the choice."
Nova nodded once, which on him was the equivalent of a longer statement.
Jaune looked at both of them.
"You two are very annoying," he said. "In the best possible way."
Ruby beamed. "We try."
She was getting up when she remembered the thing she'd been meaning to ask Nova, and turned back to find him already looking at her with the patient attention of someone who had been waiting for whatever came next.
"Do you have a minute?" she asked.
"For you?" He said it with the same matter-of-fact quality that everything he said had, without the performance of sentiment. "Sure."
They walked toward the end of the corridor together, leaving Jaune at his door with the scroll in his hand and the expression of someone who has been given something to carry that is considerably lighter than what he was carrying before.
He looked at the door for a moment.
Then he heard his scroll chime.
He looked at it. Cardin's contact. A message about rapier wasps and large stingers and his buddy Cardin needing something done by morning.
He stared at it for a long time.
Then he closed the scroll, tucked it away, looked at his door, and made a decision.
He opened it and walked in.
Part VII - Forever Fall
Location: The Forest of Forever Fall | The Following Day
The forest was named for its coloring, which was the permanent amber-and-crimson of autumn rendered in trees that apparently had no interest in the conventional seasonal arrangement. It was beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when they're not trying to be - the light coming through the canopy in angles that were geometrically impractical but visually extraordinary, the air carrying the smell of something between woodsmoke and sugar.
Glynda Goodwitch did not appear to have opinions about this.
"The forest is beautiful," she said, with the tone of someone completing a necessary sentence before getting to the relevant ones. "We are not here to appreciate it. Professor Peach has requested samples from the trees in the inner forest. Each team collects one full jar of red sap. Be back at this point by four o'clock. Stay with your teams." She held up a sample jar. "The forest is active with grimm. Keep your eyes open."
She looked at the assembled students. Her gaze found Cardin, who had Jaune by the shoulder in the manner of someone who has made arrangements about the afternoon and is pleased with them. Her gaze found Jaune's expression, which confirmed something she had been filing under monitor this situation for several weeks.
She did not comment on it. Yet.
Beside Scarlett, Aiko had leaned close to her sister and said something very quietly, and whatever it was had produced a slight chill in several of the surrounding team members who were close enough to hear it but not close enough to catch the words. The affect was sufficient.
"You good?" Turuk asked his sister.
"Fine," Aiko said, with the small, precise smile of someone who has said everything they intended to say.
"Can I please-" Scarlett started.
"No," Nova said.
Scarlett exhaled through her nose.
"We let Jaune handle his own problem," Nova said, quietly, for his team's benefit only. "We're there if he needs us. But this is his."
Scarlett looked at Jaune walking away with Cardin's hand on his shoulder, and her expression had several things moving through it, and she chose the one that was patience.
"Fine," she said.
The sap collection was straightforward work - methodical, requiring attention rather than combat skill, the kind of task that occupied the hands while leaving the mind free to range.
Ren knelt at a tree's base and filled the first jar with the careful focus of someone who does most things carefully. Nora took the full jar, admired its color, and almost immediately had an empty jar.
Ren looked at it.
"Nora."
"It was an accident," she said, in the tone of someone for whom accidents are a broad category.
Ruby and Weiss had found a productive rhythm two trees over - Weiss filling the jars with precise, efficient taps of a gathering tool, Ruby managing the carrying case with the focused attention of someone trying to avoid a repeat of the dust incident from the week before.
The roar arrived from the north.
The saiyans heard it first - not dramatically, not in the way that made a scene, but their heads turned in the same direction at the same instant with the alert quality of people whose senses had been calibrated to register a slightly different range than the ones around them.
Ruby looked at Nova.
"That's Jaune," he said.
It wasn't a guess.
"Yang, Blake - go find Goodwitch." Ruby's voice had the quality it had in the bookshop, four months ago - decisive, without hesitation, knowing what needed doing and moving toward it. "Turuk, go with them. Ren, Nora-"
"We'll cover the perimeter," Pyrrha said, already moving, Scarlett beside her. "Go."
The three of them peeled off, and the seven who remained - Ruby, Weiss, Nova, Daikon, Aiko, Pyrrha, Scarlett - moved into the north of the forest at speed.
The grimm was an Ursa Major, which meant it was large and armored and had been alive long enough to be annoyed about it. It had found the smell of sap on Cardin's breastplate and was now making its interest in this known in the most direct available manner.
Team CRDL had made various decisions about how to handle this, all of which involved running in directions that were not toward the grimm.
Jaune was not running.
He was - against all reasonable expectation, against the accumulated evidence of the past several weeks, against what anyone who had watched him in the gymnasium would have predicted - standing between the Ursa Major and Cardin, who was on the ground, and holding his shield up.
The shield wasn't going to hold.
He knew it wasn't going to hold. His aura was already stripped from the previous engagement, and the Ursa was twice his size and built like a moving wall, and the math was extremely clear.
He held it anyway.
Beside the treeline, seven people arrived and stopped.
"Now," Pyrrha said.
"Wait," Daikon said, and held his arm out - not to stop her, but to hold the moment, to let it develop the way it needed to develop. "Watch."
Nova watched.
He watched Jaune get hit and get up, because that was what Jaune did. He watched him read the grimm's weight distribution and adjust, find a gap in its guard - there, a half-second window - and commit to it with the reckless, total investment of someone who has decided to stop calculating odds. He watched him lose his footing and recover. He watched the grimm move to capitalize on the recovery and watched Pyrrha's hand come up, dark red energy gathering at her fingertips, the polarity of Crocea Mors's guard shifting at the precise moment it needed to shift.
The grimm's strike met the shield.
Jaune used the resistance to push.
The blade came through in an arc that had the specific quality of a thing done correctly - not a fluke, not an accident, but the right motion at the right time, learned through enough repetition that the body did it before the mind caught up.
The Ursa Major fell.
The head hit the ground with a sound like a closed question, and the body came after it, and then the only sounds were the forest and everyone breathing.
"Huh," Nora said, from somewhere to the left.
"How did you-" Weiss started.
"Pyrrha's semblance," Daikon said, to her. "Polarity. She moved his guard for him at the last second." He looked at Pyrrha with the expression of someone filing information they find useful. "Neat."
"Magnets," Ruby said, with the reverence of someone who has discovered something wonderful.
"Oh my-" Weiss started.
"Magnets are really cool," Ruby insisted.
Nova made a sound that was a brief, contained, completely involuntary laugh. Ruby turned and found him with one hand over his mouth and his eyes bright in a way that she had not seen before and found, immediately, that she very much wanted to see again.
"Are you laughing at me?" she demanded.
"I'm not." He was. She could tell. "I'm genuinely impressed by your perspective on applied physics."
"Nova."
He put his hand on her head and ruffled her hair with the calm efficiency of someone who has found this to be an effective Ruby-management tool, and she puffed her cheeks out at him, and Weiss watched this exchange with the expression of someone who is pretending to have opinions about something else.
Across the clearing, Jaune stood over where Cardin was getting himself back to his feet, and the dynamic between them had changed in the specific, irreversible way that dynamics change when one person has done something the other one didn't expect.
"Don't," Jaune said.
Cardin looked at him.
"Don't mess with my team. Don't mess with my friends. Don't mess with anyone here." He held Cardin's gaze with the steadiness of someone who has discovered where their line is and planted both feet on it. "We're done."
Cardin looked at him for a long moment.
He didn't say anything. He looked at the dissipating grimm, and at Jaune, and at the group of people standing at the tree line watching this, and something in his calculation shifted.
He nodded. Once. And walked.
Part VIII - Nightfall
Location: Beacon Academy Rooftop | That Evening
The green lights pulsed.
Pyrrha found him at the railing where she'd left him, which was where she'd expected to find him, and the view of Beacon spread out below them with the same unhurried patience it always had.
"No Cardin tonight?" she asked.
He turned, and the person looking back at her was the same person who'd been in the gymnasium and the cafeteria and the corridor outside his room, but sitting differently inside themselves - lighter in a way that was hard to quantify and easy to recognize.
"Pyrrha. I owe you an apology."
"You don't-"
"I do." He said it with the quiet directness of someone who has decided to stop negotiating with the difficult parts. "You were trying to help me and I turned it into something about my ego. That wasn't fair. You deserved better than that."
She looked at him for a moment, and the evenness in her expression was the kind that contains something underneath it but has decided to let the moment be what it is.
"Your team misses their leader," she said. "Ren made pancakes."
He smiled. "No syrup, I'm guessing."
"Nora." A single word that explained everything.
He started toward the exit. Then stopped.
"Pyrrha." She turned back. The sheepish quality was still there, but it was honest now rather than deflective. "I know I don't deserve it. But - would you still be willing to help me? Train with me, I mean. Up here, after class. The way you offered."
She turned back around.
The smile she allowed herself was brief, and she made sure her back was to him when it arrived, because it was larger than the moment required and she preferred to be in control of what she showed.
She turned around with the evaluation in her eyes instead.
"Your stance," she said, crossing to him, "is wrong. You need more width, lower center of gravity." She put her hand on his shoulder and pushed, gently but precisely, until he stumbled back two steps. "Like that."
"Hey-"
She offered him her hand.
He took it, and she pulled him back up, and neither of them let go immediately, and somewhere above them the night sky over Beacon was very clear and completely indifferent to whatever was beginning on the roof below it.
"Let's try that again," she said.
★ END OF CHAPTER FOUR ★
Whew! That was probably the longest chapter I've written yet! But it's finally done! Next chapter will be a little bit of a lighter... writing wise chapter. You'll notice how I changed some things from the cannon of episodes 11-14 of volume 1 of RWBY. Kinda had to since there's an extra team a part of the main cast. So what did you guys think? Like it? Hate it? Just.. meh? Let me know! Also I'm going to put a poll below for shipping purposes.
Should Daikon x Weiss be thing?
1. Yes
2. No
3. Wait and see how it develops
Who should Scarlett be paired with?
1. Jaune
2. Yatsuhashi
3. Neptune
4. Mercury (reformed/good)
5. Other (suggestion/write in)
Anyways that's all for now.
Next: Chapter Six - "The Stray"