Blah-blah-blah, Monty Oum owns RWBY. Here's something to tide you over while I work stuff out. One man sieges are strange things to write, tell you hwat.
Happy New Year!
Daylight streamed through the window and Jaune Arc, Huntsman and Professor of Beacon Academy, first woke up to a splitting headache and the taste of an ashtray in his mouth.
He and his friends had hit downtown Vale the other night. Jaune had complained all the way, from getting dressed to starting the car to driving to the first of many clubs. All he wanted was to stay at home, maybe relax with his guitar. There was a cooking show doing amazing things with stirfry and shallots that he was curious about. But Yang and Nora were insistent. Which meant that he had no choice in the matter. So, with a sigh and a straight back, Jaune accompanied his friends to the strip of light and throbbing sound that was the city's entertainment district.
It wasn't a bad night, all things considered. The Strip would always remember how, no matter the years that passed, JNPR could still dance like a well-oiled machine made for dancing and take on any and all comers. Of course, it was somewhat spoiled by the fact that Nora still couldn't hold her liquor and somehow blew out all the windows of Geoff's Wild Times. That might explain why my mouth tastes like ash and ceramics.
Then there was the block-wide brawl Weiss somehow started because someone made a pass at Ruby... All I saw was her whisper in some guy's ear. I think his name was... Porch?
Too much to think about. Sitting up in his bed and blinking at the sunlight, Jaune only sighed and ran a hand through his messy blonde hair. He turned to the form bundled up under their thick sheets and smiled. He reached for the covers' edge and started to pull it away.
A little while later, he also realized he woke up to horror.
It wasn't as if he'd been a stranger to it. Entering Beacon with falsified documents meant that fear had ridden on his shoulder in those first days, especially when Cardin Winchester used that knowledge against him. And beyond that, he'd confronted the very horrors Hunters had faced since the dawn of time. Hordes of ravening Grimm that stretched far and beyond the horizon. A host of juvenile nightmares and real fears that kept him up at some nights.
None of it compared to the thing taking the form of his beloved wife.
Her pale skin was smeared with her favored green eyeshadow and a host of other esoteric compounds he recognized from living with women for all his life. Her usually well-kept fall of red hair was tangled and sticking out in strange directions. There was a line of drool from the corner of her lips. Her mouth was wide open and her chest rose and fell with her inelegant snores. And what on Remnant was that smell?
A strangled cry escaped Jaune. With a snort, Pyrrha's green eyes blinked open. Slowly, blearily. "Buh?" she slurred in a raspy voice that was very different from the soft cultured tone that everyone was used to. Pyrrha put her hands underneath her and slowly tried to get up. Wiping her eyes, she tried again. "Good morning, Jaune. Wha-" She caught the frozen fear on her husband's face. Her mind seemed to have trouble getting in one direction.
With the impulse of certain people who wake up in strange places (Yang came into mind), she reached over to her handbag and fumbled for a compact mirror. Blindly groping, she'd almost fallen off the bed a few times before her hand clasped the little item. Bringing it up to her face and lipping it open, her mind was having trouble comprehending what she was seeing. It took almost 3 minutes for her to realize that the mess in the mirror, which resembled certain characters in a children's puppet show, was also former 4-time Mistral Champion, 2-time Vytal Champion, and Huntress Pyrrha Nikos-Arc. Green eyes blinked rapidly, switching from mirror to husband back to mirror back to husband.
A switch went off and her mind finally got into gear. If people in the surrounding neighborhood were still asleep, they must have been awake now, given the piercing quality of the sound that ripped out of Mrs. Nikos-Arc's throat. Following her lizard brain, Pyrrha grabbed the sheets and buried herself in their depths, like a child from shadows of toys which normally made up the monster in the closet.
He gathered his courage. Arcs know no fear! He crawled forward and gently poked at the mound that was the most beautiful woman in his world (withstanding the resultant protest from his mother and sisters had cemented his place in the family history). Jaune could feel her curl tighter. "Pyrrha?" He softly called her name. "Pyrrha, come out. I'm sorry... You startled me, that's all." His fingers again grasped the edge of the bedcover and pulled it up.
There was a bit of a struggle. Pyrrha, known for her strength, was not making it easy. Eventually, he was able to find his wife, clad in her favored brass-colored nightgown and covering her face with her hands. Her wild tangle of hair also helped in that regard, while reinforcing his earlier comparison to the fuzzy puppets.
"Don't look at me," Muffled by her hands, there was a whine in her voice that made his heart skip. Jaune could see her curling her tall and graceful figure tighter. "'m hideous."
"Pyrrha." He called her name, drawing out the exotic vowels of her name in a loving whisper. He reached and pulled her hands away from her features and looked deep into her emerald eyes. There were the beginnings of tears at their corners which threatened to make the smears worse. He turned her palms upward and bent his head low to kiss them, feeling the light calluses that even Aura couldn't smooth and writing a declaration upon them.
"Pyrrha." He took her hands in his and the tips of their noses had bumped when he met his wife's eyes. The flush on her skin got deeper as he leaned closer, his lips closing with hers. The kiss Jaune gave her, that light contact of lips, was just enough to rout and break the shreds of hangover and sleep still camped firmly on her mind. It was then Pyrrha was reminded of why she'd loved Jaune. Okay, maybe the hangover was suing for an accord and making her wax lyrical.
The love in his blue eyes, that simple fearsome love that burned as brightly as his Aura, had never dimmed. Jaune wasn't the sharpest spear on the rack. It took him until the end of their freshman year to confront his feelings, even longer to confess them. There were times when he tried too hard to impress her, make himself worthy of her attention when all he needed to do was be the goof who caught her eye on that very first day.
She could see it in their deep blue depths during their first kiss on Beacon's rooftops and the day after when they finally debuted as a couple (Nora and Yang had to be restrained from launching fireworks indoors by their respective partners, the mess hall could not take another food fight). His face had been as red as her hair as their friends celebrated and danced around them, even as his grip tightened around her long fingers.
She could see the love in that first night she opened her heart and body to him, feel it in the way his hands caressed her, in the softness of his lips on her body and as they joined as one (as her mother put it, much to Pyrrha's mortification). During that discussion, sitting around the Nikos kitchen table on a bright Mistral morning, Jaune's cheeks were flushing their customary red, even as his fingers twined around hers under the table groaning with her family's typical breakfast fare.
It was there on the day they'd exchanged vows in front of the altar and presented themselves to the world as husband and wife. Tall and dashing in a beautifully-tailored suit (Weiss would rather have died than let her friends get married in off-the-rack rentals), his cheeks only had the lightest blush even as the ceremony concluded. They walked into the reception, facing their friends and family as they always did, hand-in-hand, their rings (Jaune's was set with an emerald, Pyrrha's a sapphire) glinting in a glittering starfall of camera light.
Her hands cupped the sides of Jaune's face, wanting the little moment to last for as long as she could. When they finally broke away, his hands were covering hers and he couldn't help the goofy little smile that always made her titter. She touched her forehead to his and looked into ocean blue eyes she could just drown in. Sure enough, that all-abiding love was there. The first thing she saw in the morning, the last thing she saw before she fell asleep in his embrace. Her heart would not allow any other idea of heaven.
His smile took on a twitch of mischief. She supposed he had picked it up from Nora. His arms wrapped around her waist, Jaune hauled Pyrrha on top of him, their eyes level and her brilliant red hair forming a cage around them, shielding and hiding them from the world. Her bright green eyes looked at him through messy fair skin and framed by the crimson canopy.
"The Nikos," Jaune began. If their guide through Menagerie a few missions ago had heard him, he probably would have vomited in apoplexy. "Is a shy creacha."
Since she wasn't a Menagerie bushranger, all her husband's impression did was make her snort-laugh. It was among the sweetest sounds Jaune had ever heard.
"Don't let their shyness fool ya," he continued, as if he was stalking through that windswept plain. "They're fierce predatohs, magnificent huntahs with the most stahrtlin green eyes I've seen anywhere in nature. So beautiful that when she catches you in her gaze, like this amahzin specimen before me now," The kiss he gave the tip of her nose had a touch of impudence. "There's no escape."
Pyrrha couldn't help herself. With a playful growl, the former Mistralian champion pounced on him, driving him back into their soft mattress and planting smudgy kisses all over his face. Their bedroom echoed with laughter and Jaune reeling from his pretend-mauling. It didn't take long for her lips to find their way from his face down his neck. It took a little longer, but not that long, for Jaune to realize that as much as the way her nightie set off his wife's legs and fired his imagination, he was in the mood to see what she looked like without it...
It was a little past ten. The nightie, along with his light t-shirt and shorts, were somewhere on the floor by the bed. Both were tangled in each other's limbs while their limbs were tangled in the sheets, panting softly and covered in a thin film of sweat and old make-up. Jaune, brush in hand, was trying lazily to coax his wife's hair back into obedience while Pyrrha, lost and dopey in her afterglow, dozed to the sound of his heartbeat. Sunlight laid everything bare and dawn chased away the fear. He reached and squeezed her hand. She brought it close to her lips and kissed it.
There was a rumble that brought Pyrrha back from the brink of sleep. It came from the area most popularly referred to as the stomach, demanding its usual intake of food. She blushed as Jaune sat up. Her mother had sent him a few breakfast recipes he'd been dying to try out.
Not to mention there were now sheets to change.
To lonely people in need of a break, tomorrow always comes.