When the door would finally be opened, it would only open slightly, and yet Jaune still saw the tear-stained face of Weiss, her shaking and shuddering.
"Weiss...?" Jaune's expression remained concerned, yet she shook her head.
"I'm sorry." Weiss said softly. "Did I... Wake you up?"
"Weiss, what happened?" Jaune asked her. "You were screaming."
He had never heard anyone scream so loudly, and she had done so with such abruptness that Jaune had a hard time reconciling just what had happened with what he recalled of her.
"It's... I just..."
She held her head, eyes downcast.
"... Are you... Having flashbacks?" Jaune asked her, unsure.
She looked up to him with questioning, and Jaune continued.
"Sometimes it happens to me. When I suddenly think back to worse times, and... I remember it a bit too well."
"What do you mean?" Weiss asked him. "By... worse times, I mean."
Jaune averted his gaze.
"The day when the Grimm flooded Vale and Beacon." He clarified, with audible difficulty. "I think about it a lot these days. While Ren, Nora and I traveled with Ruby, we came across a lot of barren villages. I didn't realize just how bad the situation was, when the Grimm came to Vale. I knew it was bad either way. But not just HOW bad. I do realize it in hindsight though. All those villages... They had people who had their whole lives ahead of them. And now they're gone. No traces of them anywhere. It's hard to swallow, but that's what happened to Vale that day. At least, that's what Cinder and the White Fang tried to do. I think back to that day, how many people died or got hurt, and... It gives me nightmares sometimes."
Weiss' gaze became down turned as he said this.
"I didn't know." Weiss said.
"Well, yeah. I try hiding it most of the time." Jaune said. "I don't wake up screaming or anything. But I still hate how twisted things can be. How anyone could ever WANT something like that to happen."
"That... explains some things then."
(Emerald thought back to his hate-filled rant to Cinder, how he showcased such a level of animosity to her specifically.
"Broken", he had called her.)
"So... It's okay if it hurts to think about. I think so at least." Jaune told her, before realizing his mistake in assuming. "I mean, if that's what you're going through. I don't want to assume."
Weiss frowned despite his words.
"I just..."
She seemed to be having trouble figuring out the right way to word it.
"I... I wish I did more." She told him. "All those people... They didn't deserve what happened to them. And in the end, I didn't..."
Jaune thought about it.
"Is it... Survivor guilt you're feeling?" Jaune asked her.
"... Maybe."
(It was a mixture of that and the sort of guilt that Emerald felt in general, she thought.)
"I know Ren gave the whole speech about it being a sign of growth," Jaune sighed, "but it's still hard not to think about the fact that you wished you could've helped more people, right?"
"You... I mean, we... We tried at least." Weiss said, as though trying to reason with him.
"I was mainly fighting the Grimm." Jaune said. "It doesn't make the guilt go away though."
She sighed gently.
"I wish I had done more for them. I wish... things could've been different."
(Thinking of the past, and acknowledging the guilt of conspiring to cause the deaths of so many innocent lives, Emerald understood that this was inherently different than the time she had killed those men in that alleyway.
There was truly no provocation or desperation to the Fall of Beacon.
There was only large scale destruction and slaughter, as casualties skyrocketed in minutes as the situation grew worse and worse.)
"You're here now." Jaune said. "You're helping to stop it now."
Weiss paused, falling silent.
"And, sure, you might not have been there always, but you were still sort of stuck in the situation at home, right?" Jaune asked her. "You didn't really have much choice."
"... I wish I could say that." She muttered.
"What do you mean?"
She crossed her arms.
"I mean... With my powers, maybe... I could have forced my way out, if need be."
She didn't seem truly convinced of herself, but said it regardless, and Jaune realized after a moment she was asking his opinion on her actions rather than taking a stance on her own.
"Maybe." Jaune said, playing along with her ruse. "But maybe you didn't realize you needed to at first. That's sort of the first step to making the right decision, right? Knowing there's one to make?"
He saw her eyes widen at what he said, her looking up at him speechlessly.
"... R-Right." She snapped her eyes away once she realized she was staring.
"And you made that decision." Jaune continued with a smile. "Even if you aren't at fault, I think that's sort of where the others went wrong. Raven and Professor Lionheart, I mean. They were given a chance, and... They didn't really take it. I don't know what happened, so I might be wrong. But you did."
"It might not be as simple as just making a decision though." She sighed.
"Well... Maybe." Jaune nodded. "I don't really know what else to say." He paused a moment to gather his thoughts. "If you're feeling bad about it, then you can try to make up for it by not letting more bad things happen, if you can."
"I see." She sighed heavily. "I'm sorry again, for waking you up."
"It's no problem." Jaune said.
"Could I ask you something though?" Weiss asked.
"What?"
"Are... You naked right now?"
"... Yeah." Jaune said with a level of embarrassment.
He had woken up to her screams, and hadn't wasted time trying to dress himself when she was probably hurting or worse.
"I'll be going out for a walk." Weiss told him. "To... Clear my head."
"Okay. Do you need to be alone?" Jaune asked.
"Yeah."
"I'll just... Get out of your way." Jaune slipped away from the door, and then Weiss came out and walked through the door, sighing gently.
"I'll see you later Jaune." She said as she left, and Jaune nodded, sighing as this happened.
As Emerald walked out of the hotel room, she sighed to herself as she pulled out Jaune's Scroll, looking inside at the contents.
At a purely surface level, what she'd found were a number of diary entries Jaune had been writing for some time.
What had brought her to the state she found herself in not long before was the fact that he was writing it in a letter format, all to the same person: Pyrrha Nikos.
As Jaune had said, he often carried himself with a façade that hid a much sadder person beneath it.
Many of his letters came out as though he was speaking to the girl in question, telling her of how his days went, though more often than not, Jaune would write of how greatly he missed her, how things had initially gone so wrong since Beacon fell, how it was so much harder just contacting his family and the others.
For a long time, Emerald had indulged herself with a mindset that she had already leapt past any sort of moral standards most could attribute to anyone, and she had found comfort in it, giving up any sense of responsibility beyond ensuring her own survival.
As someone without any form of family, with a hard grained instinct to survive by any means, Emerald had never truly known what it was like to have someone she loved or cared about.
The closest she could get was by living vicariously through the characters of different books, but even with this, she often found it to be little more than an enjoyable distraction from her day-to-day life of pick-pocketing people.
This had changed when she had met Cinder, but, truth be told, her feelings towards her were strange and complicated, things Emerald disliked, and as such, she never tried assessing them for fear of it being something she didn't like (or worse, something she DID like).
She was, however, not without a sense of guilt when she felt she had gone too far with her actions.
The Fall of Beacon was one such thing.
Before then, most of her actions were something she could put some kind of justification behind, ones she could be satisfied with at the end of the day.
Seeing the helpless citizens of Vale fleeing in terror as waves of Grimm monsters assailed them was something she could never justify to herself.
Something deep inside her implicitly understood she had already crossed the line several times already, so she figured she shouldn't be able to feel anymore.
That day had proven her wrong, though she eventually tried to forget.
The last five minutes or so had brought such things back to the forefront of her mind, with the guilt she felt for indirectly causing Jaune's friend's death, in addition to God only knew how many others, coming up in conjunction with the fact that she'd slept with the guy on top of that while disguising herself as one of his friends.
"Sheesh." She muttered under her breath.
For someone who was aware of the fact that she was a bad person, she sucked at being one, she thought.
She began trekking towards the nearest door to hers, her opening it up and entering to find Cinder standing with her ear pressed against the wall.
"... Uh... Cinder?"
The woman had already started wheeling around when she opened the door, yet upon seeing her, she stepped away.
"What happened?" Cinder immediately asked.
"What do you mean?" Emerald said.
"I heard you screaming inside there, but I didn't know exactly if it was a ruse or not."
"Uh... No." Emerald's cheeks grew hot with embarrassment, though her dark face made it hard to discern her flushed expression.
She closed the door behind her, then walked over to Cinder.
"Are you still recovering?"
"It's coming along." Cinder raised her Grimm arm hand, then looked back to Emerald. "How is it going so far?"
"I made it work, somehow." Emerald sighed.
Cinder glanced between her and the wall with a strange expression.
"What's wrong?" Emerald asked.
"It's..."
She crossed her arms.
"I'm curious about what you two did in there before this situation arose, but... I would rather not think of it."
"Does it bother you that much?" Emerald asked.
"Well, no, loss of virginity is a rite of passage for many people," Cinder's tone became uncharacteristically awkward, "and while it's good you did it while married, I... Don't know what else to say on the matter."
"Please don't say anything." Emerald hung her head.
"Alright. Could I ask one question though?"
Cinder rarely spoke to anyone, sans Salem, in a genuinely questioning tone unless they were needed, and Emerald acknowledged this rarity as she nodded.
"Did he notice it? Or did your disguise slip in the middle of the act?" Cinder asked.
"No. He wouldn't be acting like he did if I messed it up somehow." Emerald said.
"Very well." Cinder said. "Hopefully you used protection."
Emerald sighed.
"I didn't."
"Oh. Well, hopefully nothing too bad will come of this."
"Don't worry. This is the last time I'm doing it with him." Emerald crossed her arms.
"Really? Why?"
"It was just a one-time thing." Emerald told her. "I just... I don't know how to explain it."
"I see. Well, regardless, did you find any information from him?"
"Nothing we didn't already know." Emerald said. "I took his scroll from him though, to keep him from contacting anyone."
"Ah, that's right, we never managed to destroy the CCTV tower at Haven." Cinder realized. "Though, I doubt you'd need to worry about him contacting anyone. All four towers need to work for it to function right after all."
"Just being careful." Emerald said.
"I see. Can you tell me what happened today?" Cinder asked her.
Emerald nodded.
A/N: Part of me likes to imagine Cinder as being like Azula from that beach episode from Avatar, so she's this prideful force of nature to fight against, but the second things turn to romance or anything involving normal human behavior, she just flops and fails miserably.
Also, there seems to be a misunderstanding with the last chapter, where it seems like there's a multi-month time skip.
This is not the case at all.
The context of the situation is that last chapter, Jaune pushed his banana into Emerald's sacred cave, and the two had their fun with the concept until they were tired out.
While I originally intended to write out a long lemon, I figured what I made was good enough, and settled for skipping ahead a few hours, to when they're finally worn out.
As far as I know, sex doesn't normally last too, too long (as in, anyone who manages to keep an election for a long enough time to warrant a doctor's visit), but given the fact that I've written lemons for several years now (to put it in perspective: started in 7th grade and I'm about to finish my second year in college now at present) I've fallen into a niche, and I figured, between the superpowers, the emotion sensing monsters, the Cowardly Lion inspired character of RWBY getting killed by a demonic jellyfish, among other things, making it last a while would be fine.
However, I still wanted to explain it instead of just saying "Jaune schmoogled Emerald's gafloovity for a few hours", so I said that they got that level of endurance from the months of training they both went through prior to coming to that situation, since Jaune at the very least had been training with Pyrrha for some time before traveling at least a month between Vale and Haven (I don't think the show ever made clear how big a time gap there is between Cinder sinking Arkos and RNJR fighting a Golem knockoff with a flaming tree arm). I assume Emerald went through some training as well, mainly because of what I've seen of her actually fighting (even if it's three on one, you have to be strong SOMEHOW to fight a maiden to a standstill).