It was stormy out as Nora looked through the window in her dorm room. Knowing she was alone, she hopped out of the window, grabbing onto a tree branch. She lowered herself down, branch by branch, until she reached the bottom rung. Almost reaching the grassy dirt, she let go completely, dropping herself abruptly onto the ground on accident.
"Ow..." she whined to herself, a frown appearing on the face that so rarely holds one in the presence of others. She looked up at the sky through the leaves, watching the clouds float by, thinking about the events of that day's challenge match.
They had been in Port's class and he was making the team members fight each other.
"If you know how to defeat your own teammates, you can protect their weaknesses and help make them stronger," their stout professor had always said. Nora expected to be pitted against her whole team, but instead, Port started sectioning off pairs within the teams. She was to fight Ren, her best friend. She watched in class as Ren fought against Pyrrha and Jaune individually, though not before Pyrrha and Jaune fought each other. She knew she was to fight each of them next, but time ran out of class. She gripped her pink skirt and dug her nails into it as it bunched, visibly frowning as she heard her professor announce that she'd be fighting Ren next. She saw her teammates approaching her at the end of class but couldn't talk then. She walked briskly out of the room before they could stop her and ran all of the way to the dorms herself, dreading the next day.
After watching the clouds for a while and zoning out into her memories, Nora noticed the stormclouds had started to release their water. She looked around, seeing the water splash around her, but wondered why she wasn't wet herself. She then noticed Ren sitting behind her, holding an umbrella over the both of them, one of his arms out and ready to hug her. Instead of the hug tackle he was expecting, or even one of Nora's trademarked boops, he was surprised to see Nora holding her arms around her own torso, leaning into Ren's chest, crying softly. Without speaking, he wrapped his free hand around her and let her cry, all the while holding the umbrella over them both. They didn't need words. They both knew why she was crying.
They sat there for another 10 minutes undisturbed as Jaune and Pyrrha looked on through the window in their room. "Should we disturb them?" Pyrrha asked quietly. Jaune decided and yelled "YOU TWO LOVEBIRDS, GET A ROOM! OR AT LEAST GET INTO OUR ROOM. IT'S POURING OUT!" Pyrrha snickered quietly to herself at Jaune's action and watched as Ren picked up his best friend from childhood and carried her inside carefully, making sure no harm would come to her. How they would manage to fight each other the next day, neither had any idea.