Chapter 2!

It was Six AM. The rosy fingers of the dawn were slowly creeping their way across the tiled floor of the dorm's common room. Sun had decided to go to bed about half an hour before, leaving Jaune alone in the common room with Blake and Yang. Blake was dozing in the room's sole armchair while Jaune and Yang faced each other on the couch. Three hours had passed since Jaune had shown up outside Sun's dorm. In that time Yang had managed to draw a halting account of last night's events. To say that she was incredulous would be an understatement.

"So, your telling me that a floating girl chased you? And took away the moon?" She had asked this question, or a variant of it, several times as the night had progressed. Jaune always answered in the same way.

"Yes. There was a girl in the forest. And whenever she was close, I guess, everything got darker." Jaune's answer was always hesitant, but consistent. Yang didn't believe what he was telling her, but he certainly believed what he was saying.

"And this girl could manipulate time? And freeze stuff?" Jaune sighed as she asked another one of her repeating questions.

"Yes, Yang." She could tell he was getting tired of it. Or rather, he had gotten tired of it half an hour ago. But she needed an inconsistency in his story. Something she could use to convince him that what he thought he had seen wasn't real. And something to banish the niggling doubt in the back of her mind that her friend was, in fact, telling the truth.

"Okay, okay," she raised her hands in a placating gesture, "this is all just really hard to believe."

"You think I don't know that?" He tried to snap, but it came out as a defeated sigh. "I know you don't believe me. If I hadn't lived through it, I wouldn't believe me either." He had taken his sunglasses off hours ago. Now he just turned them over in his hands as he stared at the floor.

"It's not that I don't believe you-" Yang began.

"-It's that you think I was high. Or hallucinating." Jaune finished for her. His bloodshot eyes met hers. "You think I don't know how this looks? A guy who says that some weird girl in the woods stole the moon and trapped him in some weird dark realm for hours and hours? No one should believe that." He flipped the sunglasses in his hands over and let his gaze slip back to the floor.

"You could easily just say that I got high in the forest, put my glasses on, and got lost. Boom. End of story." He continued to stare at the floor as he spoke. "But you also know that I barely touch alcohol. Let alone anything strong enough to screw with my mind."

She did know that. Jaune was about as strait-laced as it got. She could count on one hand the amount of times she'd seen him take a drink. And he had always been afraid to try weed, let alone the harder stuff. The whole 'drugs' angle didn't hold up the moment she considered what kind of guy he was.

"Maybe it was a dream?" She suggested. "You took a hit to the head and fell in a ditch where we couldn't find you. Then you woke up in the dark, and you were confused." When they had seen Jaune's car in the parking lot they had stayed behind to look for him but hadn't had any luck. One way you could explain that was Jaune getting teleported into another dimension or something. The other way to explain it was two exhausted people trying to comb a couple square miles of woodland. One of these was more likely than the other.

"If that was true," Jaune pulled his blankets tighter around him, "they how do you explain the cold? The gas in my car?" He desperately wanted her to trust him. She could hear it in his voice. But she could also hear defeat. He had already given up hope that she would believe anything he had said.

"I can't explain that right away," she agreed, "but does a magical time bending ice girl explain it any better?"

He sighed in response.

"Maybe you could show us?" She asked. She didn't like seeing her friend ruined like this. "If she froze the water and stuff beneath her feet then the ice should still be there right?" She knew she shouldn't be feeding into his fantasy, but if she could show him that it all wasn't real then he might calm down and laugh it off.

"No way in hell." He said flatly. "There's no way I'm going back to that forest." Fire seeped into his voice as he spoke, briefly rousing him from his defeated stupor. "That place is bad news, Yang. Even if you don't believe me, just do me a favor and stay away from it." His blue eyes focused on her; all traces of exhaustion pushed aside for the moment. "Promise me."

"I promise." She said. His stare didn't let up.

"I promise." She said emphatically. "I won't go anywhere near your stupid forest."

Jaune leaned back into the corner of the couch, satisfied. Exhaustion returned to his eyes. He looked at the pile of damp clothing on the floor beside him.

"I'm going to get dressed and go to bed." He said. "Would you mind turning around so I can put my underwear on?" She obliged. In a few moments he was fully dressed and out the door. Headed back to his own dorm. She waited to make sure he was gone before she crossed the room and nudged Blake.

"Wake up babe, we've got promises to break."

/-/

Blake was asleep in the backseat. Yang couldn't blame her. They had only gotten to bed around midnight last night. By all rights she should be tired too. But there was a mystery afoot. And she was too pumped to even contemplate sleep. She eased into a parking spot and stepped out to take a breath of the cool morning air. It was about six-thirty. It had gotten down into the high forties last night and the valley had no doubt been colder. Not cold enough to form ice, but cold enough to preserve it. She contemplated waking Blake up, but couldn't bring herself to do it. She was too peaceful back there. Yang cracked a window and locked the doors instead. You could never be too careful. Even if you were in an abandoned parking lot in the middle of nowhere. Especially if you were in an abandoned parking lot in the middle of nowhere.

Yang contemplated what she would do if she came across Jaune's ice girl. She wasn't armed. Except for the two guns she was always packing. She flexed a little bit out of pride. Nice.

Jokes aside, from what Jaune had described she probably wouldn't be able to get close enough to do anything anyway. Blake had a revolver that she kept in the nightstand. But it wasn't here now, and even if it was Yang had no idea how to use it. Guns had never really been her thing.

Gravel crunched beneath her feet as she made her way down into the valley. Jaune had said that he had crawled up this path on his hands and knees. She squatted and examined the stones for signs of blood or disturbance. Unsurprisingly, all she saw was a bunch of rocks. She wasn't a hunter or a tracker. And apparently gravel didn't do a great job of preserving handprints. Though she did see some spots of what might be blood. That all added up. After all, Jaune hadn't been faking the cuts on his hands. She continued on. Jaune had encountered the girl at the lake. She was most likely to find ice or something there.

She followed the deer paths and broke into the clearing. The sun had already flooded the forest with its light, and she could see mist rising above the morning dew. If she was going to find evidence, or a convincing lack thereof, she would have to find it soon. It may be cool out, but that was cool for the South. Which meant a low of sixty-five and a high of eighty. She never tried to predict the weather. She just kept a jacket with her and rolled with the punches.

Yang stepped out onto the mud flats and was frozen in her tracks. Her mind almost didn't register the pun as she stared at several puddles. Ice. She whipped out her phone and quickly took pictures of the frozen puddles from several angles. And a couple pictures of the frosted mud around them. She might have been able to explain it away if the whole lake area had been lightly frosted or something. But it was only a few select puddles, and they were frozen solid. She had tested them with a stick.

Suddenly she was exhausted.

The smallest part of her had expected to discover that Jaune was telling the truth. After all, who wouldn't want to discover that magic was real? That they had stepped through the veil and seen the truth behind fairy tales? The rest of her had expected to find some mud, take some pictures, and maybe get her friend to a therapist or something. All of that had changed now, and she didn't know what to do.

Jaune's story came to her as she made her way out of the forest. She found herself walking faster, shoulders hunched and eyes alert. She wasn't on a relaxed morning treasure hunt anymore. She was in a forest that housed something strange and hostile. Yang realized very quickly how lucky she was that the ice girl hadn't made an encore appearance.

/-/

The slam of the driver's side door didn't disturb Blake in the slightest. Yang was relieved to see that she was still there. A part of her had worried that Blake would be missing when she got back. Taken by some sort of monster. But there she was. Pretending to be asleep as Yang sped back to their apartment.

What did you do when you discovered monsters were real? Did you tell the news? The police? Did you start building a doomsday bunker in your backyard? Buy a gun? These were all things Yang contemplated on the drive home. But she wasn't going to do any of that at the moment.

She was tired. The excitement of last night and the revelations of this morning had overtaken her. And in the bright light of the morning sun it was easy for her to forget the horror that Jaune had felt. It was easy to forget her own fear in the forest. It was easy to forget that all the things that went bump in the night were suddenly very real. These were easy things to forget as she tried to squint past the rising sun and carefully carry her girlfriend up the stairs to their bedroom. These were easy things to forget as she collapsed fully clothed into bed. These were easy things to forget as Blake snuggled closer. She would handle all of this later. When Blake wasn't so warm, and her skin wasn't so cold.

/-/

Jaune stood in front of his bathroom mirror and picked at the pad stuck to his forehead. It had remained stuck to him after he had changed into dry clothes and now whenever he tried to pull it off, it sent a twinge of pain through his whole body. The pad was cemented to his forehead by a combination of blood and sweat and steadfastly refused to be removed. He splashed his face with cold water in an effort to loosen the pad's grip and convince it to fall off without a fight. No luck. He gingerly picked at it and sighed in defeat.

He couldn't sleep with the stupid thing on his head. He had tried for nearly two hours. But every time he had moved, he had felt it rubbing against his pillow or his sheets and that had rudely jerked him away from sleep. Not that he could really sleep anyway. His body was still pretty sure it was Friday afternoon. And even though he was exhausted he just couldn't trick himself into going to sleep. So here he was. Staring at himself in the mirror and admitting defeat to a menstrual pad. And somehow that wasn't the strangest thing to happen to him in the last twenty-four hours.

He took a long look at himself and sighed. He looked like a dead man walking. His hair was still wild, and his skin had lost any hint of the tan he had built up over the summer. He picked at the pad again. It would probably come off if he took a shower. But if he took a shower then he was locked into the day. He could never go to sleep after bathing. It came from long years of showering first thing in the morning. He hated how his body betrayed him in the weirdest ways.

There was no helping it. He would have to power through until he got his second wind.

Pipes gurgled as he stepped into the shower and let the hot water wash away his exhaustion. Ever since he had escaped her, he had felt a need for heat. A hunger for it. He closed his eyes and reveled in the steam drifting past his nose. He pressed his arms tightly to his chest and listened to pitter patter of falling drops. It was like he had to recapture the feeling of warmth. As if she had stolen it from his memories. He could remember walking in the sunshine. He could remember lazily lying in bed. But he couldn't remember warmth. He could remember burning himself, but he couldn't remember the pain. The lingering heat. She had stolen it from him. All sensations of heat. From his first kiss to his morning shower. All of his memories were monochrome. Stolen. Except for his memories of last night. His memories of the darkness. The black expanse that yawned endlessly beyond the feeble glow of his car. He remembered the cold. The sensation of falling. Of tumbling endlessly through a starless sky. He remembered the howl of the wind. The whispers it had carried.

They were like voices. Just at the edge of his hearing. They had whispered to him. She had whispered to him. Telling him things that no one was meant to know. Things that he couldn't bear to remember. He could remember seeing her frozen face in the mirrors. Watching him. Whispering to him. He could remember how her sculpted lips never moved. How her eyes never changed. He could remember her command. The one she repeated over and over again. The one she had screamed into his mind. He could remember the tears in his eyes. The pain in his chest as he had resisted her. The ringing in his ears as her whispered request had grown into a shrieking order.

"Look at me."

Jaune's eyes snapped open as he heard the voice in his ear. He scrambled against the wall of the shower, chest heaving. He had heard it. Heard her. She had been there. Next to him. He could still feel where her frigid lips had brushed against his ear. Where her body had been pressed against him. His instincts roared as his blood pounded. She was in here. She was in here with him. He could feel the winter wind. He could hear it howling. The world around him was dark. He was back there. In the cold place. In her frozen world. He was desperate to scream but his lips were frozen shut.

He opened his eyes.

He was in the shower. The bathroom light was off. The water falling on his shoulders was freezing. With shaking hands, he turned it off. His movement tripped the room's motion sensors and soft yellow light replaced the twilight that had overtaken it.

He stepped out of the tub on unsteady feet. His legs felt weak and every part of him was shaking. He leaned heavily against the counter and unlocked his phone. It was eleven o'clock. He had lost three hours.

She wasn't going away. This wasn't going to be some bad dream that melted away in the light of the morning. She wanted him. She was hunting him now. He had gotten away, and she couldn't stand the insult of his continued existence. Jaune could feel her hatred for him in his bones. It felt like a creeping a chill. A sweet numbness that begged him to close his eyes. To go to sleep.

He was marked for death. He knew it.

He thought about giving in then and there. Closing his eyes and just letting her come for him. He considered the merits of letting it all end quickly. But he couldn't do it. Something within him fought back. It felt like a combination of fear and pride. Fear of the unknown and shame for giving in without a fight. But how could he fight? She wasn't mortal. He was pretty sure of that. He had watched enough movies and read enough books to know that you couldn't just kill the monster in the forest. At best you could contain it. And he had no idea how to do that, but he did know someone who might. He typed a quick message into his phone.

"Hey Dr. Ozpin, will you be on campus today?" Ozpin responded almost instantly.

"I'm in my office right now, what's up?" What was up? Jaune contemplated telling his professor the truth. But given how his friends had reacted he decided against it.

"I wanted to talk to you about the project for Myth&Mythology" That was a good start. Then he could ask questions about fairies without looking like a lunatic.

"Sure, come on by." And like that, he had a course of action.

/-/

Ozpin's office was large by the standards of higher academia. Which made sense. He was the Dean of Arts after all. He had a large oak desk placed directly beneath a wide window which afforded him a beautiful view of campus. The walls of his office were lined with bookshelves which held titles from nearly every discipline of the humanities. But what predominated were books on folklore. Several of which had been written by him. Before he had settled down at Beacon, Ozpin had traveled the world collecting the oral traditions of common people and preserving them for future generations. Every few years he would take a sabbatical and work towards his goal of traveling all of rural Africa.

Ozpin was a fascinating man who had lived a long and interesting life. But he was getting older. And the comfort of a tenured position in a small town had been a temptation that he simply couldn't resist. And so now a man who had rightly earned a seat in any university he could name was sitting across from Jaune with a cup of coffee in his hand and a bemused expression on his face.

"You want to do a project on the weaknesses of the Fae?" Ozpin asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Sort of." Jaune said quickly. "I'm not quite sure what I want to look into really."

Ozpin leaned back and took a sip of his coffee. His gaze traveled over his collection of books.

"Maybe I could help you narrow down what you want to if you told me what has inspired you towards this particular topic?" Ozpin was clearly interested. It wasn't hard to get the gears of his mind turning, Jaune just had to make sure that they were working toward the answers he needed without raising suspicion.

"Well. I had been doing our reading on the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. And it seemed to me that with the Unseelie being such obvious bad guys there must be stories about defeating them." Ozpin nodded at this.

"The Winter Court is certainly more easily seen as the enemy. However, you must keep this in mind Jaune, the Gaelic peoples didn't necessarily the Fae as real in the sense that they could be fought. The Fae folk were more often than not used as an explanation for spoiled milk or unexpected sickness. They were a way to explain the unexplained and for elders to teach children the morals of their culture." He took another sip of his coffee before continuing.

"The traditional weaknesses, especially in the modern day, ascribed to them are iron, music, and fire. Do you know why that is?' Leave it to Ozpin to turn everything into a lesson of some sort.

"They represent civilization?" Jaune guessed.

"Partly. I would like you to find the answers to that question yourself." He smiled a Jaune. "I think the reasoning behind the physical weaknesses of the Fae would be an interesting project for you to pursue."

"I will," Jaune said, "but there was one other thing I wanted to ask you. I remember my mom telling me a story about a man finding a fairy in the woods. The fairy tries to catch him, but he gets away. After that the fairy haunts him. Would you know any stories like that?"

Ozpin leaned back and pondered his question.

"How does it end?" He asked after a moment.

"I can't remember." Jaune lied. He was pretty sure he knew how his story was going to end.

"Well it depends on if the man lives or dies." Ozpin said. "Stories like that are usually used to explain a strange death or to teach a lesson. Do you remember if the young man interrupted a ceremony? If he broke the laws of hospitality, he probably died or was otherwise punished."

Well that probably wasn't good.

/-/

Ozpin watched Jaune leave his office. The young man looked disturbed. And Ozpin was pretty sure he knew why. He had been polite enough not to mention the cut on Jaune's forehead and the haggard look in his eyes. He had been polite enough to overlook the slouch in his shoulders and the limp he had acquired. But what Ozpin couldn't overlook was the aura of cold that had followed Jaune into his office.

He was more than familiar with that chill. And the mark that came with it. For those who had eyes to see, the brand of the Queen of Ice was a glaring one. She was anything but subtle. It pulsed with the chill of winter and the scent of frozen flesh hung heady in the air.

It was a mark that he had seen all too often recently. Though never on someone who was still breathing. Curious.

He pulled out his phone and dialed a familiar number. It only rang once before the man on the other end picked up.

"Oz!" said a deep male voice. "Are we still on for dinner this evening?"

"Of course, James." Ozpin responded. "I just had a question."

"Go for it. I'm not doing much other than reading reports right now." Chief Ironwood said. He sounded relieved to have someone to talk to.

"I've been going over my map and time-tables over here. I think we're due for another body to turn up this morning. Have you seen anything?"

Ozpin had made friends with James Ironwood years ago. Back when he was still a promising Sergeant and a convenient contact with the local police. He had never dreamt that he would make such good friends with the eventual Chief of Vale's police force.

"I had been wondering the same thing." Ironwood responded, not bothered in the slightest that Ozpin had called to talk about a serial killer's habits.

"Nothing from the night shift." James said. "Let me skim these titles real quick."

Ozpin waited a moment.

"No bodies have turned up since sundown September Fifteen." Ozpin could hear his voice rise is surprise. He could almost imagine Ironwood's eyebrows shooting up.

"Doesn't he usually hit on Fridays?" Ozpin asked, filling his voice with innocence.

"He does. Every other Friday for the last three months. Like clockwork." Ozpin could hear the frown in James' voice. "Either he's stopped, or we just haven't found the body yet. I really doubt he's stopped."

"Or someone got away." Ozpin suggested.

"Not likely. This bastard is nothing if not methodical. It takes a lot of prep-work to freeze people to death in the middle of a Louisiana summer." Ozpin and James had been working together for several months to pin down the movements of the killer. Normally Ozpin would have taken care of this sort of thing on his own. But Vale was too small for him to hunt without looking suspicious. So, he had gently guided James in the right direction and given himself an excuse to keep and eye on the Ice Queen's movements. He couldn't do much else. Not against a Fae of that magnitude.

"Probably," Ozpin conceded, "we'll just have to wait and see."

/-/

"Oh, dude," Neptune said, "That's so fucked." Sun nodded in agreement. They were sitting in their common room. Sun's bedroom was on the right side and Neptune's was on the left. More often than not they left their doors open and treated the dorm as one big room. In the background their PS4 gently played the Firewatch theme.

"Yeah, man. I thought he was going to die on the couch!" Sun pointed at the wet spot that still hadn't quite cleared up.

"Jeez, man. Why didn't you wake me up?" Neptune asked.

"And deal with you when you're sleepy on top of all that? Like hell, man." Sun laughed. Neptune was famed for being a terrible grouch in the mornings. All of his friends knew that it was just good sense to avoid him until noon. All of them except for Sun anyway, whose eternally happy mood couldn't be assailed by Neptune's morning grumbling.

"Yeah. That's fair." Neptune knew exactly who he was. "But how are we going to fix all of this? It sounds like Jaune is going off the deep end."

"I have no idea." Sun replied. They had spent all afternoon batting around possible solutions, none of which were in a college student's budget.

"We could get him wasted." Neptune suggested. "Hard reset, you know?"

Sun nodded at this. Neptune's idea wasn't as stupid as it sounded.

"You think it's stress, then?"

"Yeah, man." Neptune said distractedly. He had his phone out, looking for something.
"You think it's his family?" Sun said. "I remember him talking about how he and his parents are on bad terms."

"Yeah. They're still pissed that he's going for a humanities degree instead of a STEM thing." Neptune nodded in victory as he found what he was looking for.

"Dude, Senior Shitface is tomorrow. And we're totally invited." Neptune gestured to his phone.

"What is tomorrow?" Sun leaned over to get a better look.

"It's a party for seniors at the Theta Chi house. They sent it in the group chat." Neptune said. Sun never checked group chats. If he saw that he was added to one he just muted it immediately. If anyone had anything important to say, then they would tell him eventually. Like right now.

"So, we take Jaune-" Sun began

"-and get him totally blasted." Neptune finished.

They nodded in agreement. It was a foolproof plan.

This fic started as practice in adding physical descriptions to my narrative flow. I may have gone a little overboard with Chapter 1. But I think I'm getting the feel for it