Jaune's face twitched as Blake wiped at the cut on his cheek. The cut had gone deeper than expected, and he had spent the last fifteen minutes sitting in the library staring at Blake's exposed middrift as she cleaned and dressed it.
"Thanks," he muttered, mentally reciting as much of Professor Port's classes as he remembered while she rubbed a cream over the wound to stave off infection.
Blake was silent for several moments as she continued to wipe at his cheek. Jaune was fairly confident that the wound was clean now that the bleeding had stopped, but decided to stay quiet as her mind was clearly elsewhere.
Eventually, they were interrupted by a knock at the door before Blake's parents stepped inside, startling her out of whatever thoughts she had been caught up in.
"How is he?" Kali asked, her hands clasped together in front of her in worry.
"I'm fine Mrs. Belladonna," Jaune replied, leaning around her daughter to smile at the woman. "It was just a scratch."
"A scratch that nearly went down to your bone," Blake countered. "Why didn't you try to even block her attack in the first place?" Jaune could almost taste the bitterness in her tone.
"The weapon was glowing," Jaune replied. "I didn't have time to figure out what kind of Dust was powering it, so I had to choose between flaring my aura and risking the blade bouncing off me and hitting one of your parents, or taking it and reducing whatever speed it had left so it wouldn't go any farther."
"That's very noble of you, Jaune," Ghira said. "Not to mention some very quick thinking on your part. You have my thanks, I don't know what I would have done if Kali had been injured."
"Honestly," Kali griped. "I'm not an invalid." Her expression softened however as she turned back to Jaune. "But that doesn't diminish how grateful I am."
"Like I said," Jaune repeated. "It's just a scratch."
"In that case, I find myself wondering why you don't use your aura to heal it," Ghira commented, causing Jaune to avert his eyes in discomfort.
"Yeah, I only really like to use my aura when I really need it. Helps me save it in case of emergencies, as well as teaching me to be more careful."
"I see. Well, I suppose we'll all have to be more careful in the future after tonight's events. People are already starting to ask questions."
"Let them," Blake replied. "This could be an opportunity to show people what the White Fang is really like."
"I'm inclined to agree," Ghira said slowly. "I'll have a press conference set up as soon as possible."
Jaune grimaced but kept his mouth shut as he suddenly stood up and skirted around Blake. "In that case, I think I'll head off to bed. It's been a long night, and I have an early day tomorrow." He then beat a hasty retreat towards his room where he threw himself on his bed and pulled out his scroll to continue reading until he couldn't keep his eyes open anymore.
The next day, Jaune woke up early and went around the Belladonna residence to the scene of the fight. Once there, he began focusing on the ground around where he saw the woman from the night before escape until he found light footprints in the dirt.
"Can't believe I'm doing this," he muttered to himself with a yawn as he made his way deeper into the jungle, paying attention to any broken sticks or trampled plants he came across. "Then again, I figured I'd probably run into them eventually if I stayed around here. At least she didn't make this too difficult." He paused as he felt a chill down his neck and figured it would probably be a good idea to keep pulsing his aura periodically in case that crazy chameleon-lady came back and started following him.
When he did so, however, it wasn't the woman from the night before that he found tailing him from a safe distance. "I know you're there, Blake!" He shouted as he crouched down to inspect the ground once more. He felt Blake appear next to him as she leapt down from the tree where she was hiding. "I thought we agreed that you don't need to follow me around like that?"
"Sorry," Blake replied unapologetically. "Old habits. What did you mean when you were mumbling to yourself?"
"That girl from last night may be good at hiding where she is," Jaune answered. "But she's not so great at hiding where she went." He stood up and continued following the trail the girl had left behind all the way to the large wooden walls that separated Kuo Kuana from the wilderness and deserts between Menagerie's handful of settlements. "Trail ends here," he mumbled. "Question is, where did it go?" He ran his hands over the rough bark on each wooden log as he looked for any sign as to where the girl had gone until he noticed something strange with the bark and removed his guantlet to get a better idea of what he was feeling.
"What is it?" Blake asked.
"There's something off about the bark here," Jaune replied, more to himself than to her. He pressed his hand against the wood, following it between two of the massive logs before him. Pressing again, he found the wood yielded to his pressure more easily between those two, and he frowned as he began at the edge of one of them and started rapping his knuckles against it, listening closely. It wasn't until he got about halfway through that he heard the slight change, and it continued all the way to halfway around the adjacent log as well. "It's hollow," he declared, removing his other guantlet as he began running his fingers around to see if he could find some sort of mechanism to open the tree up.
Frowning at being unable to find anything, Jaune lowered himself to the ground to look for any marks that might indicate how the door would open, and swept his fingers through the oddly flat dirt. He couldn't find any markings to indicate the hollow section of the tree would swing open one way or another, and stood up, dusting himself off.
"Welp, I guess subtlety is out," he said, smirking at the confused look Blake shot him before activating the mechanism for his shield, causing it to slide to his shoulder, connect with its other pieces, and descend to his forearm before extending into the shape of a large, rounded rectangle with a pair of trapezoids sprouting from the sides about halfway up. Jaune then closed his eyes and once more dove into the comfortable ocean of warmth that was his aura before diverting it as he reared his arm back and slammed the edge of his shield into the hollow section of the wall, smashing clean through one end and out the other before pulling his arm back and collapsing his shield. "We're probably gonna want to tell your dad about the hole in the wall we found. Wouldn't want any Grimm sneaking through undetected."
"How long has this existed," Blake asked as she examined the hinges inside the hollowed out wall. "Better yet, why does it exist? The Fang is welcome on Menagerie."
"You can't think of any reason why someone would build a way to sneak into a city?" Jaune asked rhetorically. "It doesn't even have to necessarily be the Fang. I've seen enough of Kuo Kuana to know that even a place as nice as this has its own underbelly."
"Either way, this is how Ilia got out of the city?" Blake asked.
"Looks like it," Jaune replied pointing to a section of flattened foliage. "Look there. The trail picks back up again pretty much right away."
"Then what are we waiting for?" Blake took off towards where Jaune had pointed and Jaune smirked.
"Uh, Blake, the trail heads that way," he called after her, pointing towards the Southwestern part of the island. He laughed when Blake froze in place, her ears drooping as she spun in place before marching back to him dejectedly.
"Sorry," she mumbled.
"No worries," he replied. "I'm actually surprised they didn't teach you guys any of this stuff in the White Fang."
"They're not so organized as to have a set curriculum for all of their fighters," Blake explained. "The most important things were being able to fight and hating humans."
"Well, at least you got one of those down," Jaune joked, grinning when Blake allowed herself a small smile while following him deeper into the jungle. The two of them walked in companionable silence as Jaune kept his eyes open for any indicators Ilia may have left behind in her flight from last night.
"When I asked what you meant earlier," Blake said, eventually, her tone more cautious than Jaune was used to. "I actually wanted to know what you were talking about before commenting on Ilia's inability to hide her tracks."
"Were you?" Jaune asked distractedly as he crouched to investigate a few broken twigs that seemed to have caught the dark fur from somethinng else that had been running through this section of the jungle.
"You sounded like you weren't altogether thrilled to help track Ilia down," Blake continued. "You know you don't have to help if you don't want to, right?"
"Yeah, I know," Jaune admitted. "I knew I would have a run in with the White Fang sooner or later - being the only human on Menagerie pretty much guaranteed that. I guess I just..."
"Just what?" Blake asked, her tone more gentle.
Jaune shrugged, struggling to find the right words to explain himself. "It's hard to explain." He sighed and continued walking into the jungle only to be stopped by Blake's hand on his arm.
"If you want to head back, I'll understand," she said softly. "This isn't your fight, you don't have to be here."
Jaune smiled, grateful he didn't have to try and explain the conflicting feelings making his chest tighten uncomfortably. "Thanks, Blake, but you're my friend. That's reason enough to do this."
"That means a lot, Jaune," Blake replied. "Before Beacon, I didn't really have many people I could really call my friend. It's nice to know I still do after Beacon as well."
"Whenever we wind up running into the others again," Jaune replied, reaching up and squeezing Blake's hand. "You'll see that you've still got plenty more than just me."
Blake smiled, but Jaune could see the sadness in her eyes as she averted her gaze. "You know, you actually make me want to believe you."
Jaune returned the expression before turning back to the trail he was following. They were moving farther and farther East, and he was starting to wonder at the surprising lack of Grimm considering what Blake had told him about the wildlife here and what he already knew about the beasts themselves.
"Can I ask you something?" Jaune queried after a few hours of mostly silent tracking and thinking.
"You just did," Blake replied, and Jaune rolled his eyes. He could hear the smile in her voice as she continued. "But you can ask me another, sure. I can't guarantee an answer, though."
"That's fair," he said, crouching down to examine a footprint that had definitely not been left by Ilia, considering the size and claw marks. Standing up he looked around noticed several trees with puncture marks on them as well. "If you don't mind, I was just curious as to what you were doing before I ran into you on that boat."
"I'll tell you," Blake agreed after a few moments of thought. "But only if you answer my own question as well."
"Deal."
Blake took a deep breath. "It was always my end goal to get back home," she explained. "After everything that happened, I wanted to come back and see my family while I still had a chance. More than that, though, I just wanted to get away from it all. But without the safety of Beacon, I had to make sure I stayed off the White Fang's radar. That meant slowly going from town to town, stowing away wherever I could as I tried to make it to the coast. I had a number of old contacts who had gotten out before me, and a few of them gave me shelter and supplies. Even then, though, I... had to do some things that I'm not proud of." She looked away as she took another deep breath to calm herself, only to turn back when she felt the weight of Jaune's hand on her shoulder. She tilted her head up and he looked deep into her warm, golden eyes. In them, he found shame and sadness. The same thing he found whenever he looked his own reflection in the eye. Looking into Blake's eyes, Jaune saw someone who understood the weight of what he had been carrying for the last year, because she was carrying that same weight herself, and as he came to realize this and saw her own eyes widen in realization, the weight became marginally lighter.
"We've all had to do things we'd rather not have," he said softly. "I won't say it's okay or ask you to tell me what you did, but you should know that I don't think any less of you."
"Thanks," Blake croaked, choking back her traitorous emotions. Jaune smiled and turned back to his tracking while she worked to get herself under control before speaking once more. "What about you? What did you do before winding up on that boat?"
Jaune sighed and closed his eyes. "After... everything, I had a hard time readjusting to life with my family. We'd never had it easy, but none of them had ever gone through what I did, and it was hard for them to relate. I spent a good three weeks just... wallowing before I finally got my act together and remembered why I had run off to Beacon in the first place. I wanted to help people, and make money to support my family while I was at it. Mom and Dad weren't thrilled about the idea of me heading out on my own into the wilds to hunt down Grimm, but they finally agreed when one of my sisters, Lavender, offered to help me build a set of weapons and armor that were better than Crocea Mors had ever been."
"Didn't you say your father was a Huntsman, though?" Blake asked.
Jaune smiled and shook his head. "Hunter, not Hunstman. The worst he had ever come across was a really grumpy moose one time. Sure he had run across the odd Grimm once or twice, but nothing on the scale of what we deal with. Anyway, after Lav and I finished making my new gear, I headed out, sorta just wandering from town to town taking whatever jobs they had for me. Eventually, though, I had to stop going towards towns myself."
"Why?"
"With all the things I was feeling after losing Pyrrha, I became a magnet for Grimm. Not a day went by when I didn't run across one or two of them." Jaune chuckled darkly. "Nothing like having to deal with dangerous monsters everyday to kickstart the grieving process. I decided that I was done being a part of the games people like Ozpin and whoever was behind the Fall of Beacon were playing, and started dedicating myself to doing what I knew for a fact was right: protecting people from the Grimm. With my mind made up, I went back to accepting contracts while working my way towards Menagerie, where I figured I would be have to deal with the Fang, but at least I would be away from all the politics the rest of the world was playing."
Blake was silent for several minutes, and Jaune left her to her thoughts as he continued to examine the tracks in the ground before him. Wherever it was that Ilia was headed, there were markings from several different Grimm going in the same direction.
"This just gets weirder and weirder," he muttered to himself.
"What do you mean?" Blake asked.
"Look at the trees." Jaune pointed to one of the nearby logs that had fallen to the ground with a large hole sunk right into the trunk. "Those marks are from something with a stinger. At first I thought it might be a really big Lancer, but the shape of the hole doesn't line up with the shape of their stingers, and a Lancer big enough to do that kind of damage wouldn't fly through the jungle, its wings are too delicate."
"A Deathstalker, then?" Blake suggested. "They are native to the deserts around here."
"I thought so too," Jaune agreed. "But Deathstalkers are patient, they don't normally go out hunting, but find the nearest source of negativity and create a burrow in a cave or something similar. Plus, there are no tracks belonging to one anywhere around here, and the size of the hole would indicate a fairly small Deathstalker relatively speaking."
"So what are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking it's starting to get dark and there's a village nearby. If she hasn't gotten on a vehicle yet, then odds are she went there. We'll pick up the trail tomorrow."
*(OoO)*
Blake reluctantly followed Jaune for another two hours until they arrived at the border to the village of Ma'ula just as the sun was dropping beneath the trees. While none of the settlements on Menagerie were as developed as those inside the kingdoms, Ma'ula consisted of little more than a few dirt roads with small, wooden buildings in between. All of the roads converged at a main square, where Blake could see the closed stalls of what must be the village's market. Behind the square was a somewhat larger building where the governor presumably resided, and that was where Jaune was headed first.
"Where are you going?" Blake asked.
"I get the feeling I won't be welcome there," Jaune replied, pointing towards the nearby inn where they could hear the muffled sounds of shouting, singing, and laughter as the villagers relaxed at the end of the day. The small amount of light shining through the establishment's grimy windows was enough for Blake to read the sign hanging over the door that read The Drunken Rabit as well as the plank of wood just underneath the carved rabbit laying on its back with the words No humans allowed! painted messily across it. "So, I'm going to pay whoever is in that big, official-looking building a visit and tell them that I'm a Huntsman working for your dad. Hopefully, that'll at least keep the villagers from hating me too much."
"You know, you're surprisingly unfazed when it comes to being discriminated against by almost the entirety of Menagerie," Blake commented, earning a chuckle from Jaune.
"After seeing what my sisters have been through, I've grown used to it. At least here, most of them have a good reason for hating humans."
"That doesn't make it right," Blake muttered angrily, glairng once more at the inn before turning her attention to the people who were starting to appear at their windows to stare at them suspiciously.
"No," Jaune agreed. "It doesn't. But getting angry won't change anything, and that's not why we're here."
Blake watched him continue walking towards the town hall and couldn't help but be impressed. She could see that he was aware of the way people were staring at him - no doubt word having reached everywhere on Menagerie of the human Huntsman by now - but he paid them no mind as he seemed to be quickly taking in every aspect of the village, looking for points of strategic value.
Her observations were cut short as they approached the town hall and heard shouting. Grabbing Jaune, she threw them both to the ground behind a nearby closed down merchant stall as the large wooden doors were thrown open and she looked up to see two hooded figures walking down the steps.
"Brother Adam will not be pleased," a familiar voice noted, and Blake's eyes widened.
"It is no trouble," a slightly deeper one replied, and Blake looked at Jaune to see that he too seemed to recognize the voices of the Albain brothers. "If Oryx cannot see the benefits of supporting his fellow brothers and sisters, then we shall simply have to show him."
"Are you sure?" The first voice asked. "This close to Kuo Kuana?"
"After the mess that Sister Ilia made, Ghira will be too concerned with investigating her to worry about matters outside of his precious city. It is fortunate we were able to extract her so quickly."
"And the human staying with him and his daughter?"
"What better scapegoat for Brother Adam's plans then one of them?"
"Speaking of which, we still need to find a way to secure the youngest Belladonna somehow."
One of the brothers sighed. "I suppose. This... obsession of his is becoming something of a... distraction."
Blake was unable to make out the rest of what they said as she crouched behind the stand, frozen.
Adam was on Menagerie. He was looking for her. Fear gripped her chest, and she suddenly found it extremely difficult to breathe as images of what Adam would do to her once he found her surged through her mind. Images of violent, bloody retribution for her perceived betrayal of both him and their cause. Images that stopped when she remembered fiery golden hair and lilac eyes turned red with rage before blood and tears swam in her mind's eye. At that moment, her fear transformed. The ice in her veins became fire, burning through her muscles and urging her forwards with thoughts of exacting her own retribution. No more cowardice. She would show the same bravery Yang had and take down the one who had caused her so much pain.
Blake was nearly to her feet, prepared to go after the two brothers when she was yanked back to the ground. Whipping around she nearly snarled at Jaune as he kept her from pursuing their targets.
"What are you doing?!" She hissed. "They're getting away."
"I know," Jaune replied. "But they aren't our main concern."
"Did you not hear them? They know where Ilia is! Adam too!"
Blake struggled to escape his hold only to yelp when Jaune grabbed her with both hands and pinned her underneath him so that she was forced to stare up into his eyes as he glared down at her. "Calm down," he commanded slowly, his tone sending shivers down Blake's spine as she became suddenly aware of how close the two of them were.
"No!" Blake snarled. "I have to go after them!"
"No, you don't." Jaune's tone remained cool and soft even as Blake found herself getting more and more incensed.
"Yes, I do! You heard them! He's after me! The only way I beat him is if I get to him first!" Her eyes began to sting as tears pricked the corners of them. "I can't keep living like a coward! I have to end this. For Yang!"
"Then you'll die like an idiot!" Jaune growled, lowering himself until their faces were mere inches from one another. "Do you think Yang would want that? This isn't you, Blake!"
"You don't know anything about me!"
"I know that you're one of the smartest, strongest, most talented women I have ever met," Jaune retorted. His features softened as he reached up and cupped her cheek. "I know that you have suffered and are terrified of what that Adam guy will do to you if he finds you. I know that, at the moment, you're angry and want revenge for what he did to you and Yang, and that, at the moment, that's outweighing your fear. I know that, once the anger fades, the only thing that will keep you going is your guilt."
The entire time Jaune spoke, Blake was unable to look away from his cobalt blue eyes. More than his words, it was the understanding and care she saw there that made the constricting feeling in her chest loosen. When he pinned her to the ground, she felt trapped, restricted. Flashes of nights where she was caught in the same position underneath Adam had flooded her mind, but as she looked into his eyes, and felt his hand on her cheek, those feelings changed. She felt sheltered. Jaune knew what she was feeling, because he had gone through the same thing. She could see it in his eyes. The sadness, the rage, the fear, and, most prominent of all, the care.
"I'm so scared," she whispered, her tears boiling over and streaming down her face.
"I know," Jaune replied, just as softly. "But you're not alone. We'll watch each other's backs, and when the time comes, should Adam make any sort of move against you, I'll be right there by your side."
Blake's voice died as she cried quietly into the soft material of Jaune's hoodie, taking comfort in the smell of sea water, earth, and citrus while he gently cradled her to him. Eventually, she felt herself calming down and sat up, smiling when Jaune handed her a rag that he had pulled out of his pocket.
"Thanks," she whispered, wiping her face. Jaune merely smiled and nodded as the two of them reclined against the closed stall and stared up at the sky. "So, what do we do next?"
Jaune's face hardened back into that of the warrior she had seen so much since reuniting with him and he pulled her to her feet. "First, we find somewhere to rest for the night. Then, we go pay a visit to that Governor those two creeps were talking about. He needs to be warned."
"About what?" Blake asked, her curiosity helping her reclaim her composure.
"His village is about to be attacked by Grimm."
A/N: Not an easy chapter to write, that's for sure. I've re-written that last section at least four times, trying to find the best way to move the plot along. I'm not completely satisfied with how it turned out, but I finally got to the point where I just had to let it be so that I could move forward. Anyway, hopefully I won't have the same problem with the next chapter, and you guys still liked this one a bit. Once again, thanks for all the reads and reviews, it really helps keep me inspired. See ya next time!
