Well this story did a bit better than I was expecting it to.
I mean, I thought it'd do well, just not a hundred followers in a day and a half well. Hey, not complaining, I'm glad so many people liked the story!
Here's chapter 2 a bit earlier than I'd initially planned for as... I don't know, repayment? I've actually got all the way up to chapter 5 written out, and about half of chapter 6. I might end up adding some more stuff after chapter 3? We'll see.
Anyways, without further ado...
Chapter 2
Cinder's not sure how long she runs.
She just does because she can't do anything else. She has to run, or else they'll catch her. She's killed the Madame, and her daughters, and Rhodes–
And he touches her head, and he smiles down at her, and where had that been all those years Cinder had suffered? If he'd cared, if he'd wanted her to live, and be free, then why hadn't he helped her, why hadn't he saved her, why hadn't he rescued her? And she's mad, furious, and she wrenches the swords out of him, and Cinder has just enough time to realize that she doesn't want him dead oh gods what has she done what has–
His body strikes the ground with a dull thud.
His eyes are lifeless.
–Cinder barely manages to keep the bile down as she rounds into one of the alleyways in Mantle, and shivers as she clutches her arms to her sides. She's… she's managed to escape Atlas. She's managed to make it down to Mantle. She's…
She's free, isn't she?
The cold whipping against her skin, the dull thudding of her heart growing weaker, the way the scar against her neck seems to only ache worse whenever she stops moving, like a reminder, like a scream in her ear that she could still be warm in captivity, walking around on a leash like a dog, seems to disagree.
She falls to the ground, her body not able to supply her with the energy to keep going. Her eyelashes are frozen over, and she can barely see anything. She doesn't know how much longer she can keep doing this, keep up this running.
"That's all you'll ever do." Rhodes voice plays like a broken record with a faulty needle just skipping, skipping, skipping, reminding her over and over that her only option is–
Initially, Cinder had tried to use her semblance to heat the things around her, to let them burn and sit in the warmth. Well, then, people had realized that wherever fire sprung up, there she'd be, and so she'd ran. Then, she'd tried to heat up her palms and use them on her body directly… and found that nothing had happened.
Cinder supposes that makes sense. She isn't affected by her semblance's ability; if she uses Scorching Caress to superheat a piece of metal, for instance, then she's not burned if she picks it up and molds it. In that same vein, she's unaffected when she places her burning hand against her own body as well.
Because she can't feel her own semblances heat, for better or, in this rare case, for worse.
She can set things on fire, though, and marvel in the heat of it. By this point, people are looking for the fires to track her, knowing that she's the one responsible for them. She has to be.
But…
There are probably other fires. Other people in similar situations, who need the warmth, right? She's… she can afford to light another, and have that heat, right? Because…
It's so cold. It's just so cold.
Cinder growls, and she stands somehow, and even through the shivering, she realizes she needs to keep going, that she needs to not be stood stock still in an alley. She's murdered four people – one of whom had been a huntsman–
His eyes stare back at her, and there's no life there, no warmth, he looks at her with nothing, and oh gods what has Cinder–
The things that wrests her from her own head is warmth. The tiniest, most absent warmth.
She feels for it in her breast, and nearly weeps when she recognizes the feeling.
She thought she'd buried it that day when Madame had reminded her that no one would ever love her. She thought she'd weakened it beyond recovery, the light inside of her.
She doesn't want to cry. She does regardless, hot, messy tears that run in splotchy trails down her face, and she tries to keep her voice inside but that spills out too, until it's all she can do not to scream and yell, and she just barely manages that.
She just weeps as quietly as she can in the snow-filled alleyway, leaned against a dumpster, feeling like she's nothing at all.
But she's not alone. She has the light, still.
Someone still cares about her. Someone still…
She tries something she's never tried before. She tries to send a message. She doesn't know how, but she uses the gratitude she's feeling, and she takes the line she feels the light from and gives it a metaphorical tug.
She has no idea if she's successful, no idea if whoever's on the other side even feels a thing.
But it makes her smile. The first smile on Cinder's face in what feels like…
Gods, but it feels like it's been years.
It's the middle of winter, so perhaps that should explain why Jaune's always cold, but even bundled up in his jacket, in his room, under the covers, his teeth still chatter.
His mom looks at him in that way that all adults seem to, this sort of sad expression he can never quite parse out the meaning of, and tells him that if it's his soulmate, there's nothing he can do. But that's not true, and Jaune knows it.
Because whoever they are, they're cold, and Jaune can feel it. So Jaune knows, rather obviously, that he has to be warm, so that they can feel it.
It's pretty simple, Jaune can't help but feel. He thinks they learned about it in school. The transitive property, maybe?
That sounds vaguely right.
It's not, but Jaune can't really be blamed. He's, like, eleven.
He's not even twelve.
So, he has warm chicken noodle soup whenever he can, and he stays inside while all the other kids are out playing around outside, having snowball fights and sledding down hills. His sisters call out to him, but when he explains, they just nod their heads in understanding.
Suddenly, one of them pulls up a boardgame, and he sees Saphron smiling down at him, and then they're playing together on the kitchen table, and then his mom joins, too, and then the twins are in, and now it's the whole family playing, and he's laughing as one of his older sisters swears when she loses, and mom yells at her, but instead of stopping she just swears a little quieter.
He's lucky to have them all. So very lucky.
He wishes he could share that luck. That he could spread the warmth more than he's already trying to.
He doesn't even know if what he's doing is working. Pain spreads through the link between soulmates, he knows that, but do good feelings? Warm feelings? When he asks, his mother just smiles down at him, but it's a small, somber thing, and even at only eleven-ish years old, he understands that it probably doesn't work that way.
He feels so helpless then. What can he do?
If he'd been older, he'd have gone and got them, and pulled them under his blanket to warm them up. He'd wrap his arms around them, and tell them everything is going to be okay, and then he'd probably try not to cry, because having them there would be so…
Jaune gets a bit sad sometimes, even trying not to be. It's so hard.
There's a feeling in his breast that's not his own, one he doesn't really recognize. When he describes it to his mom, she tells him what it probably is.
Regret, she says.
She says he's too young to really understand it, too, which is bullcrap! His parents always say that about stuff, like why they won't tell him what the swear words he hears his older sisters saying sometimes are, or when they won't tell him what Saphron and her soulmate Terra are doing up in her room at night, when they lock the door.
Still, it's not like Jaune can do anything about it.
Regret is… it's like he's made a mistake. Like when he'd gotten in that fight and forced his dad to come out to his school, he'd felt a bit of it then. It'd worked out, but…
Something Saphron says one day catches him a bit off guard. He's taking care of little Amber, his youngest sister, helping her eat her breakfast, and then his oldest sister laughs, and he initially thinks he's done something dumb, but–
"When did you go and grow up so much, Jaune?"
He's not really sure what that means. He's just helping Amber not get all her applesauce on her bib.
But when he asks her about it, Saphron just shakes her head, and then she says something else.
"Well, I hope whoever's on the other end of this," She says, and she pokes him in the chest. "Is ready to get spoiled to heck and back some day."
Jaune blushes something fierce, and he just looks away, trying to ignore the way his eldest sibling giggles at his expense.
Even if he's secretly a little proud of himself.
A few more weeks pass by, during which Jaune's still cold, and getting colder, and just when he's about to really start to worry about them, thinking they might freeze something really bad, something new transfers through his link again.
Fear.
He's afraid, terrified, or, well, they are. He's not sure what of, and perhaps that's really what scares him, because they've never been afraid before, not even with what they've gone through. They've never once shown fear.
He wishes he'd been braver then. Because instead of trying to encourage them, it's all he can do to stay under the covers, to hold himself close. Jaune's happy when the fear goes away, and so does the cold, and soon it's… not warm, but not cold, either, through the link, and Jaune's glad, really.
Maybe things can finally be normal for them, wherever they are.
"Welcome to Evernight Castle, young Cinder, or…"
The eldritch woman, skin as pale as fresh fallen snow, veins as black as dry blood, looks down at her with a smile so filled with mirth that it, oxymoronically, feels entirely empty.
"Should I call you Cinder Fall, now?"
Jaune never feels the shocks again.
He's glad for that; glad for them, even if he does begin to feel something different. Like he's being hit in different parts of his body with different sorts of things. Like he's being cut with sharp razors, or punched, or struck along his entire form. Along his abdomen, along his arms, along his legs and his back and his face.
He supposes it's no surprise that the other students at his school know him through reputation alone now. He's the kid with the 'trouble' soulmate. The kid whose soulmate can't stop hurting themselves. Everyone else thinks they're a klutz, or an idiot. Jaune knows better.
They're a tortured, fragmented soul. Someone who's suffered more than nearly anyone else on the planet.
He thinks some people understand, first, but clearly they don't, cause they all look at him with this odd type of sadness, like they're sorry for him, the same way the adults do, and Jaune's still not sure what it really is, or why, but he knows he hates it.
He's not sorry it's him.
Because if it had been those kids, they wouldn't have been there for them.
Jaune would be.
So, it's okay that it hurts sometimes.
One of the teachers, however, pulls him aside one day, when he's practically knocked out of his chair and laughed at when he bumps his head on another students desk. When Jaune tells his teacher that he'd felt like he'd gotten punched in the ribs, the man says that he knows a little about the new sensations.
Apparently, he's married to a huntress, and he says that when he'd been younger, he'd felt like that. How whenever she'd trained, whenever she'd been beaten and bruised so that she could grow stronger, he would feel like he'd been run through a woodchipper.
That makes Jaune feel a little bit better, at least, even if he's not sure that's it. He's not really worried about the physical pain anymore. It's hard to feel it for so many years and not get a little used to it. It's just…
The feeling coursing through the link and into his heart is one of longing. Like… like he's been starving all his life, and right in front of him, dangling just out of reach, is the ripest apple known to remnant.
And yet he just can't grab it.
And again, Jaune finds himself wishing he could be there for them, wherever they are.
Cinder often finds that Evernight Castle becomes a bit dimmer in the dark of night. She's not sure it's a purposeful thing that Salem does, or if the woman, perhaps subconsciously, blocks the light of the shattered moon out as the very castle itself ebbs and flows like a massive, breathing beast. Either way, she supposes that it helps her keep track of the days, helps her know how far she's come in training, how much she still has left to do.
It's still bright enough to move around within its hallowed corridors, but dark enough that Cinder can't quite manage to read any of the books she's acquired from Salem's library as she lays down to rest in her room.
She's been in Salem's service for a year or so, now. It's… she's becoming stronger. More than strong, she's free now. She has to be.
She tells herself that. Power is freedom. That's what Rhodes had told her once, and–
The man she'd realized far too late she thinks of as a father draws his maces. "That's all you'll ever do." He says, and swings for her.
She bites down on her bottom lip as she slumps down atop her bed. She looks to the window, barred with thick iron as moonlight filters in. She looks to the door, a heavy, reinforced wooden thing that seems to have been fashioned in a far-gone age.
A gilded cage for an extravagant bird.
Cinder shakes her head, snarling.
She's free. She has to be.
What had it all been for if she's not?
Idly, her mind reminds her of the date, of the fact that today is her birthday.
She's seventeen now. The age when Rhodes has promised to take her to a huntsman academy, to let her start a new life…
Cinder sometimes wonder's what the man would think of her, now. Working for the academies mortal enemy, working for Salem, the queen of the Grimm…
She wonders what the little light in her soul would think of her, too.
Would they be disappointed? Would they hurt if they figured out who she'd become? After everything, would they think her some malevolent witch?
She's not sure she wants to know.
More than that… she knows that they can't love her. Salem had said it, too.
"All that which you desire can only come through me. No one else can give you what you wish."
Cinder believes her. She'd believed Madame, too, she supposes.
She… She has to forget the light. She must. It cannot help her like Salem can.
And so, she tries to stop thinking about it.
It's a conscious effort at first, gradually intensifying her training until the only thing she can do after a day spent near the spawning pits is lie down in her bed and sleep. Sometimes she tells Hazel not to hold back on her and uses the pain to pass out quicker. She's used to pain, after all, has had to be.
She's adjusted to it rather well, Cinder thinks.
But even as the days turn to weeks, and the weeks to months, and the months to years, try as she might… She can't manage to get the feeling out of her head. She can't fully eliminate the way she smiles when she pays attention to that tiny warmth within her heart, or how she sometimes reaches for it, placing her hand above her breast, just to remind herself it's there.
Just to remind herself that someone out there… they…
It's a weakness, Cinder knows that. If anyone figures out…
Even so, she decides to take a risk one day. She asks Hazel if he has a soulmate after the two of them have finished training. She picks then so that the man is weak enough that, if he tries to punish her, or hit her, or break her, she can at least run. Instead of attacking her for her idiocy, however, she watches with some small surprise as the man meets her gaze with an ethereal smile.
"I did. A long time ago. In better days."
He says nothing else, though he doesn't really have to.
She could ask Tyrian about his soulmate if she wanted to be eviscerated, or Watts if she felt like dealing with the man reading into her every action, or Salem if she wanted to, once more, be eviscerated, but she doesn't particularly want any of those things, even if the curiosity wanes on her soul, so she leaves it at that.
And eventually she gives up on trying to forget that tiny light.
Because it still glows. A little less warmly than it used to, but…
But the light never forgets her.
And sometimes it's all she has.
Jaune doesn't feel them quite as much as he begins to grow up. The pains, the scratches, the aching and whatever else it is that had tortured them so is fading, too. The longing is still there, however, and what's more, it only seems to grow more potent. More powerful.
He's got his own longing, though.
And so, when he's around thirteen, Jaune decides to check in on his home village's options for continued education. There's a pretty standard continuation of his regular education, a high school, that Jaune's pretty sure his parents expect him to attend. But there's another school, as well. A huntsman prep academy. It's just been built a few months back, set to open this coming fall, and it's a tiny thing, taking only a few students a year, but if he can make it in…
He goes the day of admission, and he walks up to the desk, and he gives them his story, how he has to be strong for his soulmate, and…
"You're too old, lad. We start training kids at 12, here."
Well, the wind kind of gets ripped from Jaune's sails, if he's being honest.
Cause he's past twelve. He's going on fourteen.
That's fine, though. Jaune will just… he'll just…
Well, he goes to high school, cause what else is there to do?
He asks his dad to train him on the side, and the man is hesitant to say the least, but he knows the reason why Jaune has to be a huntsman, despite everything, so he does his best. But he's only around a few days a month, if that, off of his missions – supporting eight children isn't cheap – so it's all that Jaune can do to try and train on his own, but…
Well, then tomorrow comes and goes, and then so does the next tomorrow, and the next. And suddenly, one day, the day he'd thought would never come… comes. He's graduated high school. He's, apparently, officially an adult, and that means it's up to him once again to choose what to do with his life.
As much as he doesn't want to admit it, despite having nearly seventeen years to have made something of himself, he's still somehow caught off guard by the passage of time.
He decides, despite having no real training, despite being spurned at every corner, that he wants to be a huntsman after all. Part of it is that his dad had been a huntsman, as had his father, and his father before him, but really…
Well, his soulmate is going to be a hunter, aren't they?
He really should've trained more on his own, and he knows that, it's just… he'd been so discouraged from being turned down, and then when he finally got over that, and went to train… well, when he'd thought of the pain filtering through the link to them, he hadn't been able to bring himself to go and get the snot kicked out of him, and have his muscles ache, and his bones be broken. Not when they'd already been going through so much themselves.
Or, well, that's what he tells himself, anyways. It's also possible that, being a teenaged boy, he'd simply been too busy playing video games and slacking off. And, well, when he hadn't been doing one of those two things, he'd been helping his mother around the house, taking care of his younger siblings, going to school, doing homework, trying to live his life…
Still, he's at least… well, competent, he thinks? He knows how to use his sword, you swing it at a problem, and he understands, he feels, what you're supposed to do with a shield; point it at the sharp object, the sharp object becomes not a problem.
So, he goes and tries to get accepted at a huntsman preparatory academy a few hours from his village, a thing that will train him for a few months before the start of Beacon Academy, but they turn him away when it's clear he's not skilled enough. No, the year or so's worth of training he's intermittently snuck in here and there isn't good enough.
But he won't give up. Not on anything, and especially not on them.
And so, even when he's rejected by Signal for being too old, even when he's rejected for personal training by a local hunter for being too weak, even when he's rejected from the adult courses at that prep academy in his village for being too dumb, he fakes his transcripts all the same, and heads off to Beacon.
Because he can't really afford to take no for an answer.
He's going to protect them, after all. Even if they're strong enough not to need it. He won't be a burden on them, won't drag them down. He refuses.
They've dealt with more than enough of that already.
And so, he tells his family that he got accepted into Beacon, and his mother and sisters congratulate him, even as his father looks at him with a complicated expression that's simultaneously pride and disbelief, and then Jaune's off, the family blade strapped to his hip, and a spring in his step that's just a little bit forced.
He's off to Vale. Off to Beacon. He's off to be a huntsman.
And maybe… just maybe if luck's on his side…
Perhaps he'll find them, too.
The last preparations are in place, Cinder realizes.
So much planning, so much forethought and preparation, and it's all lead to this.
Emerald's beside her, now, a girl she's picked up off the street. Her semblance is powerful, and even though Cinder won't admit it, she sees some of herself in the girl, in the desperate look in her eye, in that longing for warmth, for affection, for love, for anything she can get her hands upon.
Cinder wishes, sometimes, that she were a better person. But she isn't. So, she takes that want that Emerald has and uses it like a carrot on a stick, and lures Emerald to her side, and keeps her there by dangling all of it right in front of her face.
And Emerald won't leave because she can't.
Because it's right there, and she can almost reach it, almost touch it, almost–
Cinder knows that feeling far too well.
Mercury's there too. He's an oddity. She'd been sent by Salem to gather his father as a recruit for her mistress' operations; to act on the same level as she, Tyrian, Hazel, and Watts. But when it turns out the man is dead, Cinder's allowed to take his son for herself.
Mercury isn't exactly loyal to her, given he's sticking around so as not to die, but fear is equally as powerful as want, Cinder supposes. It had, after all, kept her under control for a very, very long time.
It's a useful thing.
Still, once more, Cinder's mind is called back to one thing in particular.
This is it. This is the moment.
She gazes out the window of the airship they've taken, one commandeered by Watts, and sees the walls of a city coming into view.
Vale is a good mixture between Mistral, practically overrun with nature, and Atlas, a technological nightmare. It's almost quaint, Cinder feels, which is part of why she can't help feeling the tiniest regret that she'll have to burn it down.
Needs must, however.
And so, as they disembark, Cinder sets to work. There's so much to be done, after all. A master thief to be recruited, one pliable enough to bend to her whims, and not important enough to put up a fight when she's done. The White Fang to be put to heel, and Adam Taurus to be manipulated.
The Maiden and the Relic to be acquired.
And…
There's a tiny, foolish part of Cinder, one that never really left her even after oh so long, and oh so brutal a life.
It longs only for that tiny light.
Maybe, it reckons, maybe in this vast, never-ending city, maybe, in this ocean of people and places and things of all sizes…
Perhaps she'll find them, too.
End Chapter 2
Our star-crossed lovers pine for one another, and they're headed for the same place, but will destiny be so kind as to allow them to meet?
I don't know (this is a lie, I do know). Maybe you'll find out next chapter?
Speaking of, the next chapter will come out... probably a week from now? Not sure. Maybe sooner, just depends how motivated I am to churn another chapter out. I like to stay ahead by a few chapters so that just in case something comes up, I can still upload.
If you like my writing, by the way, consider giving my other story 'Paved with Bad Intentions' a read. I like it as much as this one, and it's got dramatically less followers (this is me very subtly complaining, like the little baby I am) than this story.
Anyways that's all from me, see you all whenever!
