"I wish we could rest for a few minutes."
Pyrrha finished off her flask, looking over at Oscar, eyes half closed against the rising sun. Kuo Kuana was nothing but a memory, the desert was as inhospitable as advertised, the destination hazy in both dreams and reality.
"Our enemies will not rest, Oscar. I'm sorry."
They both were early risers, the rest pulling themselves together while the sun rose. They had found a small, less impressive oasis to stop at, Oscar raising rose thorns to keep the beasts out and sleepwalkers in. Breakfast was nothing but coffee, the heat already nauseating. 'We need to move at far as possible before it gets too hot. Then Ironwood raises a wall, and we rest until dusk. Then move at night in the chil-"
"Big Sis?" She looked up. "Are you in pain when you see things?"
"...I am." She finished her cup, Jaune dropping his cloak over her head while he got himself together. "But, I have the support of my friends, likely and unlikely, on my side."
"Is it enough?" He rose to his feet, shoulders broadening by the day. "Is this enough to save the world? Is it support and hope enough?"
"Oscar..." She pressed into the dust to stand besides him, catching what he was looking at: Ruby asleep a bit away, sunstreaks scarlet against the darker locks. He turned to look back at her. "...We have to be there for each other. Are you okay? Is there a problem"
"I...miss my aunt and uncle. I go to sleep and they're screaming for me. They...miss me too. And here I am." Tears built in his eyes. "I wake up...and wish that I was dead. It's a si-"
Pyrrha hugged him until he squeaked. "Don't indulge that line of thinking. Don't ever listen to that." She threw her pistol at Ironwood, who fumbled on the catch.
"Okay. I'll...gather some gumption. I promise." Oscar caught her dull stare. "Your eyes are glazing over. Lay down. I'll get everyone ready."
She blinked, the edges of reality beginning to warp, once again reclining by the fire, balling Jaune's cloak for her head.
Jaune returned to find her laying there, braid snaking through the sands, bronze chain catching sunlight. "She was awake...?"
"Not for much longer." Oscar looked over his shoulder at the minor commotion, Winter unable to wake Qrow. "HEY!" She looked up. "Bring him this way." Ironwood schlepped him over, placing the old crow's hand over the invincible girl's.
"We've got time..." Jaune helped Winter up. "Go get yourself settled. Don't worry, in case there's anything, there's thirteen other people to handle it." She nodded before wandering off.
"Jaune..." He turned, Yang was standing behind him. "Can I talk to you?"
"Of course..." She shuffled off to a corner, arms wrapped around her middle, watching the wildlife through the grate of vines and thorns. "What did you need?"
"...how do you...deal with Pyrrha? Even knowing what she's done and what she's been through..."
He cracked his knuckles, and while he was at it, took the plates off, laying them in the sand, leaving strained black underarmor. "I don't deal with that Pyrrha; I deal with the Pyrrha in front of me."
"I don't get it." He turned to look down at her, gold hair catching on the thorns behind her.
"That Pyrrha is known to Pyrrha and Pyrrha alone. There is no way that I could ever help her in that capacity, and it would be a mistake to open a wound I can't close. That Adam is a memory as far as we can tell, and you shouldn't go-" He grabbed her hands to stop her picking scales. "fucking with him to change that."
"...I got him talking once and never again after." She pulled her hair out of the barrier, weaving it into a plait that kissed her knees. "He just...shut down when she showed up, especially after she admitted to trying to kill him." She scowled.
"Have you noticed that he doesn't talk much at all? Even to you, when you're with us? Silence as to 'I'm sorry.'"
"What?"
"He's not going to talk. She's not going to stop apologizing. You can't save him." She looked at the sand dancing up her boots. "I can't save her. Like they can't save us. Stop picking at your scales." She let go of her arm. He reached to heal her. "I have to stop healing every little thing..."
"So now what?"
"Now, you figure out whether or not you give a shit about Adam by and for yourself. You be there, in thick and thin, while you figure that out before you do something that you regret. And-" He turned to the side, Blake standing there, ears droopy, sand caught in the fur on her ears. "what do you want, eavesdropper?"
"You still don't trust me, Jaune?"
"With nothing. What do you want? And no, you don't get to talk in private with anyone." Blake walked away.
"...thank you, Jaune." She caught her rattling arm.
"Not a problem. Did you-" Yang hugged him, he squeezed her back. "Those are always free." She went back to her pack. He watched the shadows under the shrubs. Nora waved him over, Ren at her side, holding vigil over Pyrrha. He grabbed his plates, shrugging them back on. "What's up?"
Nora looked over her shoulder, to Blake sitting alone, reading a book. Ren prayed in whispers, laying hands on a fussing Pyrrha, Jaune rested a hand on her belly, the ivory mist spreading over her and Qrow in a instant.
Thatdamnedcat...thatdamnedgirl...fuck...I'm...not Qrow. Qrow is not me. I am not a bird.Sienna'sgonnakillher...she...
"Hey." Ruby whirled over, crashing the train of thought. "We've got food?"
"Ask the Master." Ren threw a handful of lavender on the coals. Taiyang coming to sit opposite the fire, eyes locked over their heads. "Quite frankly, I'd rather-" Qrow sat up, then Pyrrha, the haze still dense. Everyone scrambled to get ready to move, their feet dragging, hands raised against body checks and foreheads, Ironwood handing Oz his bag, ready to carry Qrow.
The two seers leant against each other for another degree of sunlight, the younger taking her time to speak. "There's a labyrinth. We have to find it."
"...this is endless sand and dunes, how are we going to do that?" James spoke softly, giving Qrow the flask he was grasping for. Qrow drew a map in the dust. A spiral of stones in decreasing size, curling towards a center stone. "But where is that?" They pointed, over the oasis' pool.
"I can go look." Ruby pulled Jaune up. "If it's over of half my range, I'll come back." They whirled off together, petals catching in shrubs and trees. Qrow took Ironwood's hands as leverage, though James ended up just swinging him on his back, eyes still hazy. Taiyang took Pyrrha into his arms, Ren whispering a thank you.
Blake approached the group, they turned to look, Weiss huffed and dragged her over.
"Stop sitting alone." Taiyang watched the whirl of petals and gems return, Jaune left spinning. "What is it?"
"There's a army out there with the Fauni from before!" She patted the dust out of her hair.
Pyrrha's Aura ripped like foil, Glynda craning to look, a grimace setting crow's feet into her eyes. "What was that?"
"Are they moving towards us?" Oz loaded dust into his cane. "Can we avoid it?"
"They're not moving."
"...we can't move until they're up." Ironwood set Qrow back down, and Taiyang put Pyrrha back down besides him. Glynda huffed.
"I'm out of Aura for now." Jaune sat in the dust, hands shaking. "Stay quiet and hope that they don't get us."
"How many?" Weiss cleaned Myrtenaster. "Can't be more than a few in this heat."
"...A hundred or so?." Ruby finished her flask and cookies. "And it's not plain Peter Masons out there either." Qrow's aura crackled. "...I don't like this."
"We can't leave them defenseless either." Oscar paced around camp. "We're sitting ducks!"
Yang gritted her teeth, hands sparking. "Just...can't I do that again? With the fire?"
Taiyang frowned. "So that'll be four sitting ducks. We can't keep moving at the speed of light and expecting for things to turn out well. And Cosmic Sugar Daddy is not helpful." A golden petal skidded in front of his face. "You are not helpful!"
"GUYS!" Oscar knelt besides Pyrrha and Qrow. "...they're not breathing."
Glynda burst through the worrywarts, checking for pulses and pupil dilation.
There was nothing.
Oz threw his cane so hard into the thorns it ricocheted right back into his eye. Winter stood there besides Jaune, saying nothing, the both of them unhearing and unfeeling towards the grief of Ruby or Raven.
"No..." Nora ran over, holding their lukewarm hands. "They can't be dead! Grandpa! We need them!" Her skin danced with electricity. "They can't be..." A arc of pink lightning ran from her shoulders, suffusing into them.
The march came up the dune.
"Nora...?" Pyrrha pressed her hand against her cheek, shaking and cold. "...I'm tired. Let me sleep. It can wait." Ruby grabbed her, arms too tiny to grab Qrow as well, who lurched awake. Nora smiled, her eyes dark and fading as she fell into a heap at their side, Ren sliding into to grab her, tears falling onto her face.
"We...have to abandon this." Ironwood picked up Qrow and Pyrrha's bags. "We stay, we're dead. Oscar. Tell Cosmic Sugar Daddy that we can't sta-" A golden petal blew in front of Ironwood's face. "Wait, was it over or underground?"
"It has to be underground!" Ruby let go of her uncle. "It's a-" James and Tai caught each other's eyes.
A single punch crumbled the ground underneath them, a chasm opening up and swallowing them whole.
She woke up to another hall, a black cloak with white trim shuffling with a man's gait, stone walls into the distance and golden thread reaching behind them.
"Hello?"
Hands shuffled her over to sit on familiar shoulders. "You're awake." Jaune spared a hand to pull curls out of his eyes. "Nora saved you, don't know how, don't care how, how are you feeling?"
"Exhausted." The rest of the party trampled ahead of front of them, Qrow on Ironwood's shoulders, in the middle of the crowd. "How is he?"
"Uncle's not too great either."
"I'm not your uncle, Jaune." He raised a finger against him.
"But you're my uncle!" Ruby piped up. "And so you're Jaune's uncle!"
"If we're done negotiating the family tumbleweed, it's that way." Weiss pulled on the spool of thread, turning to see where tension revealed the next curve forward forward, her skin red and cracking underneath the ambient light from gaps in the stone cavern. "Yep, we're going that way."
He handed Pyrrha to Taiyang, a ivory light running clear through the ankle deep water.
'Oh no...oh no oh no, not him, he can't do this right now. To whatever relic or dastardly object, RECONSIDER!' Tai's arms were, as expected, a savior against the chill. 'Okay. Reconsider a tad bit later. Good job, Glynda, you have a personal space heater.'
"Don't go that way." Ren pointed in the clear other direction, a through-way between the walls of the labyrinth. "Go this way." He rested his weight against the wall to find a dagger ready to stab him.
"That's likely a trap." Weiss squinted down the hall, a axe hanging and waiting for the next fool to take the shortcut. "Guys look up." They did, weapons lined the ceiling, some still had skulls hanging from edges.
"Weiss, keep walking after Jaune. Something's... wrong with him." Nora piped up over Raven's shoulder. "We have to hurry or we'll die down here."
He pressed through, following the light through the rising tide, a pale hand tapping his, grabbing a pinky then the rest with every step.
'Who are you?'
'What?' He turned around, looking for the voice. Winter stopping short in front of him. 'When did I get in front? Where did Pyrrha go?' .
'What are you?' They both turned to press through the maze. A hour of looping around the walls brought stale water up to Ruby's calves, Adam plucking her out of the brine.
'You don't know who you are, where you've been, or where you're going.' Fog rolled over the surface, the chill setting in. Raven nearly flew for fright's sake. He looked at Winter and she looked at him, her eyes strange in the light, illuminated yet misted over. 'What's wrong with us?'
'Are you sure that the path you walk is your path? The Brothers are cruel, oh how they are cruel.' A wet and scaly underbelly slid over the walls, scraping and shifting rock, the water up to Winter's hips before long, the glow hypnotic, the depths beginning to sing. The cacophony rose with the waters: garbled and bungled memories, the taste of blood in his mouth, and the wrath of the dying crooning in his ears.
"Jaune, what are you trying to heal?!" Winter held on his shoulder.
"You lied." He whispered solely to her. "The airship didn't kill you." Her hand retracted, sitting in the ivory colored waters, the rest of the crew's wounds fading by the second, the old injuries giving way. "Your father did. When you were sixteen."
'Aren't you tired of flowing wherever the cracks lead you? Aren't you tired of being powerless?' It skidded Jaune's claws after another few minutes, the waves came harder with a wicked undertow.
After a long curveless stretch, the center appeared. A single beam of light illuminated a sullied pedestal, a sword stabbed into the stone.
He pressed through the waist high water, his legs turning to jelly.
"...Okay, where's the big fuck off talking thing?" Ruby held Crescent Rose folding up, ready to hop off Adam's shoulders and go flying, if she didn't tumble into the water first.
Winter swam towards the sword, the surf glowing as she went, oblivious to the cries of the others, to Qrow and Weiss reaching for her.
She took the sword by the handle as a handhold to pull herself out of the lake, and with a single fluid motion released it from the pedestal.
Her foot rested on the surface, the veil about her hips at one with the water, eyes hazy, suffused with blue light, stopping a meter away from the rest of them. Jaune vaulted out of the water to stand besides her, meeting her gaze with bottomless eyes.
"Winter? Jaune?" Ironwood's voice faltered. Qrow had to fetch his jaw from the deep. "Are you okay?"
"...yeah. She's fine too." She blinked and the light faded, though she remained on the water's surface, a clawed hand resting on her shoulder. "Are we-"
The walls slid through the floor and the water levels evened out, The underbelly from before enclosing them all, the waves churning over silver scales, curling about the pedestal, a snake's head broader than a train and twice its size ground the pedestal into dust. It opened its eyes, the socket lined with a thousand pupils, convex and weeping black tears. "How do you think that this is going to end? At the center of everything, without nowhere to run?"
"I don't think that we're getting out of here." Tai swallowed for the fourth time, the rest of the Calvary watching the Snake curl and curl, a old scaleless spot coming into view again and again. "...the floor might fall or the ceiling."
"TAI! YOU'VE WON THE LOTTERY!" Raven stared aloft, the hundreds of thousands of discarded weapons lowering towards them, spikes and burrs falling as it creaked and caught in its mechanism, hurtling towards them. "Oh we're fucked."
"This cannot be for nothing." Winter skated towards the open wound, slashing at it with her new weapon, arcs of ice raising from the water as she closed the distance, turning the pink flesh black with frostbite, Jaune on her heels. The fog rolled in, now seamless and unending, the waters rose over all of their heads in a flood, the ceiling with its merciless descent pierced flesh and bone.
"Hello, Pyrrha."
She sat down with her aunt, on a train to somewhere, the sun shining through the window, the water on the table cool and clear, her hair was white and tied in the style of the old ways, the shawl falling gracefully from her head, green eyes still filled with life.
"Hello, Aunt Io."
"You seem to keep getting on and off, what's wrong, my dear?
"...I'm poor at decision-making..." She kept the glass from her as she reached for it. "What's wrong? I'm thirsty."
"This water ain't for you."
She woke up to salt water soaking into her clothes. A stone cathedral stretched for a league, the pews made of white and gold, light silhouetting fish and octopi through the windows, even a errant shark passed by.
Sitting up was a ordeal. Standing was out of the question. In front of her was the rest of the Cavalry, all washed up, golden petals floating in the water that flooded the chapel, a massive grate holding Ironwood hostage, his metal half glowing with red lights. She pulled apart the grate and yanked him over, the impact causing him to cough up water and petals, dark patterns visible underneath the white shirt.
Winter's eyes opened, standing up like nothing happened, holding the sword she pulled from the stone, silver metal accented by blue gems.
"Pyrrha? You're awake?" She walked over, careful to not kick more water into her eyes.
"Welcome to Undeath 2." Pyrrha took the offer to help to stand. "Wait, it's four or five, by now, what am I saying?"
"Who is counting? Why?" Nora kicked a wave into the sodden carpet. "DON'T COUNT!"
Qrow sat up, reaching for Harbinger, only to not find it, stomping over everyone to find it, before throwing it so hard it got stuck in the wall. "DADDY, LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!"
"...I take it the dead will take every opportunity to haunt the undead." Winter wrung her hair out. "Saw your grandma?"
"...I saw my aunt. Died of a long standing illness." Raven got up and threw Omen into the pews. "What's with fathers and being difficult?"
"Because fathers, more often than not, get to walk away. And leave their kids to sort themselves out."
"Pyr?" Jaune waded over from the deep end, pulling her into a hug. She pulled back, losing track of time in his eyes.
"...alright. That's a adjustment. I'm okay. Are you?" He nodded. "No, really, are you okay?" He looked away. "You went silent as a brick and then next thing I knew, you had the water glowing like a floodlight, even James managed to soften up! Are you-" He kissed her, he tasted of salt and smelt like home, letting her go just as quickly, receding towards deeper waters. "Jaune..."
Over the next degree of sunlight, everyone rose and wrung themselves out, Oz being the last.
"Okay...so now what?" Weiss finally got done splashing in the shallow end, letting Ren pick her up and out of the salt water, resting her weight on a pew. "Thank you Ren." Ironwood kept out of her sights.
"We get out of here." Winter waded into the front of the chapel, sliding the sword in her into the slot. "...that should work." Except nothing happened. She, however, decided to float, her hair curling with the waves that flowed in from the endless hall behind the altar. "Let me know when it happens."
"...We forgot to kill the big snake." Nora threw her hands in the air. "How-" The pedestal pulsed, and the rest of the sword fell in. Winter washed away and returned, not a bit disturbed and if anything, falling asleep. "...was the snake Grimm?"
"If it was, it's dead. If it wasn't, then it's dead." Oz sat on a pew. "How are we getting out of here?"
A hand tapped Winter on the shoulder, she started drifting the other way. A woman sat on the pedestal, shapely and full bosomed, sword in her lap, chuckling as the elder sister passed by. "Hello."
He swallowed though his throat was dry, the salt too much. She was there, fresh and effervescent. '...DAMN.'
"Jaune." She stared him down. "Not now."
"Which relic are you and can we get out of here any faster?" Ruby poured the sullied whiskey out of her flask. The girl's hair tinged green and returned to teal.
"I am Ariadne, Mistress of the Relic of Destruction. The creature you slew was in the process of becoming Grimm."
"Destruction?" Jaune ran fingers through his salt curled hair, the shirt already dry on his skin. "...but...water?"
"...you will return to me, eventually. Many before you have come seeking the labyrinth that you all have delved into, only to find the flood waters will claim them without fail. Through Ozma, you have lived."
"Will you be okay?" He beheld her one last time, she turned away, blush soft on her face, offering him the tips of her fingers, he met her halfway, watching the edges of his claws. Raven stared into the depths behind Ariadne, lost for words.
"See yourself as you truly are, and you will be able to answer that question."