I realize that this fic borrows some ideas from the upcoming one. This one does maintain better focus on those ideas but, regardless, I hope it isn't jarring to see them reflected.
PART 2 – Adhesion
It's the second year at Beacon and the rest of the juniors are out by the cliffs watching freshmen start their initiation by being hurled into the woods at a speed that would break normal people's necks.
Weiss wants to scope out the competition to see if they'll have any favorable opponents for the Vytal festival. They're competing this year again too and she aims to win.
Yang arrives a little later than the rest since she spent much of the night before unpacking.
On instinct she moves to sit next to Jaune but then he laughs at something Pyrrha says and she almost doesn't. Almost. She plops down anyway and asks what's up. Turns out, another student was launched screaming through the sky just like Jaune was.
He decides then to make an announcement. Then promptly shuts his mouth. He wants to keep it a surprise. Ruby bugs him to say it anyway but he holds his tongue.
Yang can tell Pyrrha already knows and its clear Ren has an inkling. (Nora's poker face is so legendary that nothing can be read). It's another thing Yang doesn't know about Jaune.
-0-
Ruby has taken to decorating their room. She strings lights across the ceiling, sets table cloths on their nightstands, lays a carpet in the middle of the room, and smatters the walls with pictures of them and their adventures. It feels a little more like home and Weiss doesn't fuss about how scattered it all looks.
Yang can't help but fixate on one photo tucked into the corner of the room.
The two teams are huddled together, but on the far side is Jaune and Pyrrha. Cheeks pressed together and their hands – unseen in the photo – are clutched together behind them. They were in love then, she tells herself, even if the word love is so ambiguous at this point that it makes her irritable.
Maybe one day she'll convince herself he's okay and that he has nothing to hide. At least from her.
"Going for a walk," she announces to the busyness of the room.
The clatter of Blake's book follows after her as she plunges into the noise of the hallway.
Blake walks with her without a word because the halls are filled with so many voices behind the hundred closed doors and any one of them could be listening in. It still, somehow, feels uncomfortably quiet.
They sit at the garden just out by the dorm and Blake asks her what's on her mind.
Yang says that it's not worth mentioning. A petty, tiny thing that she'll get over in a day and that it's silly she's even worrying about it.
Blake tells her that it can be silly if she's worrying about it. Just because the world has bigger problems doesn't mean she should feel ashamed for feeling what she feels. Some things – she says slowly, empathically – are beyond our control. Even in ourselves.
Blake's smile isn't real. Yang catches the self-defeat hiding in the too wide look in her eyes.
Not wanting to let Blake wallow in her own torments amidst the silence, Yang confesses that she's gotten to really know Jaune for the better part of a month. She says she's his friend but believes that she barely qualifies. She doesn't really know the real Jaune Arc.
"What's the first thing he does in the morning?" Blake asks.
"Uh… cook breakfast, water the cactus, play death metal at my door so I wake up to set the table."
"He has a cactus?"
"Don't ask me to explain. It's a long story."
Blake explains that despite her little courtship triangle with Sun and Ilia over the summer, she couldn't answer the question herself. If anything, they know more about each other than she does them. When it was happening, she tried to memorize everything on the surface. Music tastes, favorite food, books they've read (they didn't have many. They're movie buffs), but one time the two of them were arguing and Ilia let slip that Sun was a virgin, and Sun returned fire by reminding her that so was she.
Blake didn't know any of that, but they told each other in confidence somehow.
It was no surprise that they called things off a month before school started. She even overheard Sun setting Ilia up with a close friend of his, and Ilia's been behind him and Pyrrha ever since.
Yang tells her that it doesn't mean she didn't get to know them or get closer.
Blake smiles, brightly with a ghost of a chuckle rumbling from her lips. "Yeah, that's what I mean." Blake may not have gotten to know them as well as they did with each other, but who can say who is closer to who. Does that kind of comparison even matter?
The bottom line is that they care about each other. It'll take some time to get to know them but love isn't a quantity set with knowing what someone says or does. Those are things that make it easier, but love of any kind has only one requirement: a willingness to give something selflessly.
Yang is surprised by that and admits, rather somberly, that she hasn't done that yet.
"What are you talking about? You did."
Blake explains that – for the most part – people give things to those they care about without really knowing it. You listen to them talk so you lend them your ear, you eat where they want to eat so you give them your time, you say something nice, you crack a joke, and sometimes, just sometimes, you sit there and be whatever they need. The sacrifice is often tiny, but you're still giving for their benefit.
And sometimes these connections go at a different pace, she says. Like her with Sun and Ilia, them to each other, Yang with herself, and Yang with Jaune. That doesn't mean they're any more or less valuable.
So maybe it isn't so bad that she's still getting to know him, but that doesn't mean they aren't friends.
-0-
At lunch, everyone seats themselves around a blonde in a hoodie, snoozing with the hood pulled up. Minutes later, Jaune shows up and they all stare wide-eyed at the mysterious blonde they converged around. Jaune's surprise, apparently, is that his twin sister, Joan, is attending Beacon with her team.
Yang realizes that Jaune hasn't been wearing his hoodie.
Joan calls it the "elder hoodie," because no one knows who was born first so they trade the hoodie depending on who the eldest is supposed to be at the time. Since he stole it for a year, she's keeping it till they finish being sophomores. Everyone's just going to have to get used to him without it for a while.
Nora says he should stop putting it on altogether cause his muscles are showing. Joan takes a quick look at her chest – undefined in the oversized cloth – and quickly takes it off and tries to give it back to him. They fight over it until Yang snatches it for herself.
The twins are momentarily embarrassed until she says, "Okay! I'm the eldest now."
Joan decides that Yang makes a great big sister. No one tells her that Yang's three months younger.
-0-
It's Friday after class and Yang shouldn't be surprised that Joan muscles into the apartment. She doesn't take the couch either. Joan and Jaune shared a bed so often that she decided that bunking with him was evidently the logical conclusion.
Joan cooks soup for dinner. It has banana slices in it. It reminds them of home.
Yang wakes up on Saturday morning to find Jaune sat on the couch in a towel; shampoo still in his hair. Joan woke up grumpy (he doesn't mention the teary-eyed look) and kicked him out of the bedroom so she could shower and change without him seeing. Yang doesn't like this, but Jaune tells her not to get mad at her.
He explains that, even though he reconciled with his parents, it didn't go so smoothly with his sisters. Joan especially. Had she known he was running away to Beacon, she'd have followed after him. He didn't want to risk her future for the same shot in the dark as his.
Still, she's upset cause she spent a year worrying about him and being petty for one morning is hardly the worst she could do.
"And what if she does this again?" she asks, arms crossed.
"She won't," he says swiftly, an affection to his eyes that tells her that he knows his twin sister as well as he does himself.
Joan is probably hating herself for kicking him out in the first place, and will come out apologizing for it. Cause she's eighteen and things should have been okay now. No sense in dragging things along.
Yang offers her bathroom for him to finish. She resists innuendo. He catches it anyway. They laugh.
"I'll get some soap from my closet real quick."
"Dude, use mine. I don't care."
As predicted, Joan comes out into the living room looking sheepish. She asks where Jaune is. Yang instead offers to talk.
With a hesitant step, she sits down with her.
Joan tells her about how things went down at home. She spent a lot of time defending Jaune, saying he'd come back soon. It was only a week before even she seriously doubted he'd come back safe. They feared the worst until Jaune called Saphron at the height of his guilt to explain that he's fine and that he got accepted into Beacon. A week later, he calls again and tells them about his team.
When they heard they were both nice and competent, they left him alone until he was ready to come back.
They knew they had to trust him and their dad, Apolian, admitted that he should have tried to prepare him instead of pushing him to pursue medicine like a civilian.
Good things did come out of it though. Joan got training like she wanted and she got registered with a local team. It was too late to enroll for freshman year but their accolades qualified them as sophomores. She didn't want to stay in the field though. She wanted the academy experience.
It's thirty minutes later after an anecdote about one of her teammates, that they realize that Jaune's already starting breakfast. (He still had some of his spare clothes in Yang's closet. It did use to be his).
He's happy they're getting along.
Joan is sorry she was being petty.
He's sorry he ran away without telling her.
Apologies go back and forth until it ends abruptly. Yang almost envies the speed in which they hash things out.
They spend the day together.
Joan took the same guitar lessons as Jaune. They're both terrible at singing. So is Yang. The neighbors hate it. Then they make plans to buy amps.
The afternoon is a blur of stalls and dust shops. Sugar and music. Noises and laughter. Joan is still fresh into the city life and Yang feels like she could take her under her wing. She even has an interest in getting a bike.
Yang shows Joan the Club. Junior is amicable with there now being two Arcs who will keep her on the dance floor instead of the bar.
There's a moment where Yang and Joan are talking between themselves. In that time, Jaune thinks to himself for a minute too long and he reaches for his flask to ease the torments swirling in his mind. Yang takes his hand. She noticed. With a smile small enough to be honest and pleading, she leads him out of the booth and into the dance floor.
Joan watches the way they look at each other.
"Huh."
She snaps a picture.
-0-
So much happened the day before that Yang almost gets whiplash when it's just her and Jaune again. It's blistering hot outside so they decide to make milkshakes.
Yang goes on a tirade about why Jaune should just buy a bike instead of saving up for a car. Jaune insists on getting a Highway Aries his sister Sable vowed was safe and sturdy. They're so distracted by the conversation that someone forgets to lid the blender.
The mishap is explosive, and they're both covered in stray milk and sugar. They take a picture and laugh it off. It's another memory – they decide – that would be timeless.
After getting changed, they get the idea to get a "before and after" shot. Since they couldn't take a before shot, they take one now and pretend that it is since the kitchen's all cleaned.
They try with the milkshakes again, remembering to have the lid closed, and after smothering each in whipped cream, they're sat at the TV, streaming an old film they saw as kids.
Their scrolls buzz.
Everyone saw the photos.
Ren asks why their clothes are different in both shots.
Nora sends a winky face.
Joan rants about how she leaves them for one day and they're already messing around.
Weiss rants about their lack of propriety.
Jaune is static as he stares at the continued outburst from the rest of their friends just because Ren had to question the logic and Nora had to take it that way. Before he types down an explanation, Yang stops him. She takes another photo, milkshakes in hand, and captions it.
"Come join us next time. Let's make it a party." Everyone who isn't Weiss knows the party is genuine. Weiss struggles to even say "orgy" and, somehow, "preposterous."
Jaune takes pity on her and asks Neptune to explain that it's a joke. Somehow realizing she misread the whole thing makes Weiss feel even more embarrassed.
Yang is very satisfied with the outcome.
Sat quietly together, their movie drones on and they forget that milkshakes aren't exactly coffee. Their drowsiness straps weights to their eyelids. Haphazard jokes that mean nothing and make no sense are the only attempt at staying awake.
Joan slips into the living room cause she forgot something. She finds Jaune cleaning glasses while Yang slumbers on the couch.
"No luck?" she asks.
"Didn't even try," he answers.
"Maybe you should."
"Maybe I'll screw up again."
"Maybe you won't."
"Maybe it's safer –" he pushes a tiny strongbox into her hands, "–that I don't."
Despite herself, Joan doesn't pry. She hugs him instead and makes for the door. Before she leaves, she peeks through the crack in the door and sees Jaune staring at Yang. Temptation twitches at his fingers. He goes for his flask.
Joan gets an idea.
-0-
Joan skips class Monday morning. She sneaks into the apartment and waters down Jaune's whiskey.
She doesn't know if it's wise. It might even end poorly, but it might turn out precisely how it should. Jaune already hardly notices the taste, and this won't feel much different.
A week passes and nothing happens. That is until Joan is sitting with Ruby on Sunday. The weekend before, they went to the dock to indulge in the carnival.
Joan is, at first, not surprised to hear that Jaune and Yang disappeared somewhere towards the end.
Then, it turns out, Yang came back to the dorm really late with a bruised lip. She was also missing her jacket.
Jaune walks into the cafeteria with band aid on his neck. They already know he's hiding a hickey.
Ruby makes a demand: as his best friend, she wants to know what he did with her sister. Her and Joan look up at him expectantly.
"Fine," he groans, "but this stays between us."