"Where are we going?" Weiss whispered, glancing from side to side furtively. Technically speaking, there was nothing wrong or forbidden about walking around the weapon lockers on a weekend. Technically speaking, the Schnee Dust Company heiress could choose to depart a social gathering late at night with a faunus boy who had an intense aversion to buttoning up his shirts with no consequence. Technically speaking, Jacques Schnee could be visited by the three Geists of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, grow his heart three sizes in one night, and decide to liquidate part of his personal wealth to ensure that no one went hungry that cold winter night.
All three incidents were technically possible, but anyone witnessing them would have many, many questions.
"You know the sneakier you try to be, the less sneaky you are," Sun said, leaning over and gently nudging the back of her hand. "Also, careful there. You'll make a guy feel like he's not wanted."
"You know that's not true," Weiss snapped, fingers lacing through his and fighting down a flush. After a second she looked over her shoulder again. "I just want to make sure that Yang doesn't see us. She still thinks I'm pining after Neptune, and so long as she has something to 'console me' over" — Weiss rolled her eyes and added air quotes with one hand — "she's not going to go searching for something else to needle me with."
Sun laughed, loud and deep. "Blondes, am I right?"
"Keep your voice down!" Weiss hissed, steps clicking angrily as she pulled Sun further into the building. "Just because there shouldn't be anyone here doesn't mean that-"
A low, breathy moan cut through the air, shortly followed by soft panting.
Weiss and Sun froze.
"Please, keep going, just a little higher and-" the voice cut off into a whine, masculine and vulnerable and needy and not for voyeuristic ears. Weiss's flush went full-face, and when she turned to look at Sun his complexion had gotten rosier as well. He met her gaze for a moment, glanced towards another row of lockers, then gently tilted his head away from them.
Weiss nodded, turning around to walk away, then bit her lip. There was something familiar about the panting she heard, a thought that inspired no small interest in her. Who did she know with an active sex life and without a date to the dance? No one sprang to mind, but the sound of lusty groans couldn't be ignored.
Her feet slowly trod back, even as Sun shook his head vigorously and crossed his lone free arm across his chest while mouthing no repeatedly. Weiss glared back and dragged more firmly on his arm. Either someone she knew was getting nookie when she didn't know or she knew someone who was getting nookie and didn't know them, and both options were unacceptable. Sun was coming along for the ride, if for no other reason than because she wasn't witnessing whatever this was alone.
Slowly, they moved closer to the row of lockers, granting the passion new dimension. The rustle of cloth on cloth, the slightly-moist impact of lips on flesh, of echoing metal where bodies adjusted position against the lockers. Heat suffused Weiss as images appeared in her head, fantasies of what could be happening just out of sight hiding just behind her eyes. Each step pit curiosity against embarrassment, both growing stronger and more powerful the closer she got to the source.
"Weiss," Sun hissed, so quietly she almost didn't hear it over a particularly loud gasp.
"Quiet," she hissed back, pressing her back against the locker. Around the corner was the answer to a dozen half-formed questions, awkward as they could be. So long as she took a quick glance and left quickly, no harm would be done. She could keep a secret.
Weiss took a deep breath, then peeked around the corner.
Intellectually, Weiss knew that it was hard to be a hunter-in-training and be unattractive. A strict workout routine plus aura meant lots of muscle and clear skin, both genetically pleasing traits. Add in years of training in the psychology of positive emotions and the sort of dedication to a mission normally seen in religious zealots and the result tended to be figures that typically only appeared in romance novels. Even on an all-female team, even though Weiss was comfortably into men, it was hard not to notice just how fit some people were.
It was one thing to know that hunters-in-training were a snack, and quite another to see it in action.
The first thing that struck Weiss was just how much bare skin was showing. The figure pinned against the locker had his jacket and shirt unbuttoned and pulled down, restraining his arms behind his back, and a belt lay on the ground while suit pants sagged enough to reveal the very top of skin-tight shorts decorated with dark pink hearts. Pale skin showed off delicate pink tooth marks lining one side of his neck, while a slim strip of white cloth covered the boy's eyes.
His companion was also shirtless. And pantsless. Weiss flushed as she forced her eyes away from perfectly-sculpted legs, over two barely-concealed arousals, and up to a mane of black hair that lead to a head buried in the other side of the blond boy's shoulder. One hand hung down, caressing and tracing lines, while the other was just out of sight, hidden by the profile of the two bodies.
Weiss got lost for a minute. Coincidentally, that was the exact length of time Sun needed to recover.
"Jaune!?" he shouted. A voice crack, sharp and unusual broke Weiss out of her daze, and prompted the two boys to pull apart and spin to look at their voyeurs. Which brought with it more questions.
"Ren!?" Weiss hissed, every muscle seizing as one of the two bastions of sanity in her life blinked dumbly at her. There was no mistaking those pink eyes, nor the blue ones revealed when the slip of cloth fell away from Jaune's face.
"Weiss!?" Jaune and Ren both asked as one. Then their gaze went over her head. "Sun!?"
"We are so sorry," Sun whispered, both hands falling to Weiss's shoulders and gently tugging back. Firmly.
Weiss didn't move. Jaune was furiously trying to shrug his coat back up, but an elaborate knot around his wrists was keeping him from making headway. Ren, meanwhile, had placed both hands ineffectually over his groin and was making an admirable effort to keep a straight face. "How? When? Why?"
"In reverse order: because I enjoy it, for the past month or two, and by asking nicely if he wanted to have sex. Please leave," Ren said carefully.
"Please!" Jaune added, stumbling around to cower behind Ren. The half head of height difference plus mass made the action almost comical, if not for the absolute death of dignity the pairing entailed.
"Weiss!" Sun hissed.
"But why ask in the first place?" she pressed, shaking off the other boys arm and stalking forward, heat rising to her face. "He's pushy, immature, arrogant, doesn't know how to take a hint, dangerously irritating, completely lacking in any type of fashion sense, and possesses all the charisma of a wet sponge! He's also been chasing me for the past few months, so how on Remnant—"
"Perhaps he's pushy because he wants to deflect questions," Ren interrupted, one hand moving behind his back as his brows furrowed. "Perhaps he knew that loud, obvious motions would make most people consider him a buffon and little more. Perhaps he thought it might be easier to be seen as a normal failure than an irregular success. The people around him have certainly haven't given him any reason to doubt the efficacy of such a strategy."
Weiss stopped. Then she leaned over to look at the blond boy, who was blushing furiously.
"It was a plan to get Pyrrha to stop ogling me," he muttered. When Weiss's jaw dropped he whined again. "I didn't want to hurt her feelings but I also didn't want to come out to the crazy violence lady who nearly killed me in initiation and keeps trying to convince me to join her grappling practice!"
"Wait, is that why you lose all the time in combat class, or do you just suck?" Sun asked, stepping up beside Weiss and scratching his head.
Jaune shrugged. "Little of column A, little of B. We've got, like, one test that matters. I do suck, but I figure that goosing the pedal might get me a few more points on the final when Cardin tries something stupid that he can't actually get away with."
"You've been lying to us this entire time," Weiss said slowly, reviewing the scenes in her memory. On the one hand, the idea was preposterous. No one could act that well, and to deliberately be as pathetic as possible went in the face of everything Weiss knew about good marketing. Perhaps no publicity was bad publicity, but there needed to be something behind the rumors, behind the failure, otherwise scratching away even part of the illusion would reveal the whole.
Unless it was only part an act.
Jaune's test scores had been going up. Not fast, but steadily, and some quick math told her he'd pass with comfortably more than the minimum if he kept it up. He was receiving training from the Pyrrha Nikos, and if any student at school could whip a near-civilian into shape it would be the most dangerous one on campus. If he didn't change his character, only his actions, and those actions were in line with what people wanted to see, and in such a way that they pandered to the observer's ego, and if the illusion seemed too stupid for any self-respecting human to adopt intentionally...
Well, then you'd be able to fool a Schnee.
"I wouldn't call it a lie," Jaune clarified, peeking out from behind Ren's shoulder. "I like you guys. Even you, Weiss. I don't lie about important stuff anymore. I just don't want to deal with a whole lot of attention right now."
A pause stretched out.
"Also, why are you here? With Sun?"
The glyph was instinctive, borne of shame and fear. Jaune went flying to the side, yelping as more than six feet of huntsman in training compacted into five feet and seven inches of locker. The five projectiles afterwards must have been a conscious decision, must have been calculated to put Jaune right back in his room, but for the life of her Weiss could never remember precisely why she decided to hurl them.
What she did remember is the look of dismay on Ren's face, the shocked expression of Sun, and the feel of night air on her face as she grabbed her partner and started running away as fast as possible. She remembered the flush of heat that suffused her as she realized that she'd been had by Jaune Arc, that he'd been having the entire school, that he'd been had by Ren for months...
And that she'd just yeeted him to his dorm.
Which was right by hers.
"Where're we going?" Weiss recognized the shouting. It was from Sun, who'd slowed to a stop beside her.
"Your room," she replied distantly. "Mine has too many blond idiots."