Chapter 3 - Waking Nightmares
The sunlight trickling in through her window tickled at her senses, and slowly the pajama-clad figure began to stir, before hissing and wincing as spikes of pain shot up behind her eyes.
In the chair next to her bed, a dozing Taiyang was woken up by the slight noise and movement (a decade as a trained Huntsman, followed by another two as a father, had made him rather sensitive to that sort of thing), and as he turned to check up on Ruby Rose, he found his second daughter attempting to sit up slowly. Not missing a beat, he quickly moved to her bedside, and gave her a tight and warm embrace while exclaiming: "Ruby! You're awake!"
Ruby, meanwhile, was still struggling to get her faculties back in order (and wondering why her father wasn't doing anything about the Grimm hammering nails into the back of her skull), and only managed to lean into the hug as she groaned: "Ugh... what happened?"
"Your friends, Pyrrha and Weiss." Taiyang explained, as though that answered everything. "They got you out of there, and brought you and Yang home safe."
That raised more questions than it answered to Ruby's disoriented mind (such as what "there" was), and as she tried focusing through the pain, to seize on the fragments of memories her waking mind hadn't grasped yet, a name resonated with her, and a vision of an empty bloodstained sleeve made her gasp: "Wait! Yang! Is she alright!?"
Taiyang couldn't help it; he had to look away from her concerned gaze, or else the memory of what they'd done to his baby girl would overwhelm him again. Taking a moment to compose himself, he tried to put it delicately: "Uh... She's uh... she's gonna be alright."
Eventually. Hopefully.
"I think she's just... I think it's just gonna take some time for her to get used to things."
Understatement of the year.
"She's too strong to let this stop her."
He'd always hoped she'd be nothing like Raven (and been disappointed in that regard the first time she'd thrown a tantrum), but if there was ever one thing he hoped she'd inherited from her egg donor, at that moment, it would have been her strength, her drive, her sheer stubborn resilience.
"I'm just glad to have my girls back at home."
And that the only statement so far that was nothing but the whole truth.
He'd fallen into a rut when Raven had walked out on him. He'd fallen into a deep depression when he'd lost Summer. He'd have been destroyed if he'd lost either one of his girls as well, let alone both of them, as he'd learned that day.
There was a moment of silence as Ruby's mind chewed on those words, before the image of a burning tower, and a falling figure, hit her. Quietly, she followed up: "And... what about Jaune? Is he okay?"
Taiyang could only look away from her, unable to meet her eyes. He'd been worried when his introverted daughter had suddenly been admitted to Beacon, 2 years before she'd even graduated from Signal, and had left behind the few friends she'd painstakingly made. And he'd been delighted when she'd written back saying that she'd made a new friend (though he'd been less happy to find out that the first friend she'd made a friend on her own had been a guy, but he trusted Yang to keep pests away from her). Eventually, Taiyang did the only thing he could do; he took the coward's way out: "I'll... I'll let Pyrrha explain it to you, alright? I'll let them know that you're awake."
Ruby could only blink in bewilderment at her father's rapidly-retreating back, before Pyrrha entered the room a few moments later, the Champion rushing to embrace the Red Reaper. As a lost Ruby weakly returned the hug, Pyrrha began: "Ruby, you're finally awake-"
"Pyrrha, what are you doing here?" Ruby interjected, confused. "Why aren't you back at Beacon?"
"Beacon's... Beacon's fallen, Ruby, and so has most of Vale. You did something to the Grimm Dragon, something that stopped it, but it's still alive, and the Grimm are still swarming around the area."
"I did... what?"
"Your Uncle Qrow knows more than I do, and he said that he'll explain the rest to you."
"O...kay? So why aren't you back home instead?"
"It's not easy to get a Bullhead with all the Nevermore and Griffons around Vale. Also... also Ren, Nora, and I... we want to go after whoever was behind the Fall. According to Qrow, the enemy's trail leads to Haven. So that's where we're heading to next. We owe Jaune that much, at least..."
The final piece of the puzzle clicked in Ruby's head, a falling figure riddled with sizzling glass projectiles, and she forced the words out through a suddenly-constricted throat: "Jaune... is he... really?"
Pyrrha took a deep breath and looked away, still racked with guilt by the memory of her failure. If she hadn't gotten distracted, if she'd gotten there earlier, if she'd been quicker, stronger, more skilled... even now, weeks after the Fall, it still hurt. They all hurt.
Then again, Team NPR hadn't just lost a member.
They'd lost a leader, a friend, a brother, or something that could have been more. All because, when it'd mattered, they hadn't been there with him, their leader, the weakest member of Team JNPR, when he'd needed them the most.
She couldn't lie to Ruby. She was a friend, and she'd been his first friend. He wouldn't have wanted that. And so, Pyrrha took a deep breath, looked into Ruby's eyes, and began: "Jaune... he's gone. His aura must have been in the red by the time we got there... and taking those glass shards finally did him in."
The reason he took those shards was left unsaid; neither needed to be reminded of it. Looking up at the side of Pyrrha's face, Ruby's voice trembled as she asked: "Can I... can I see his body?"
"We... we think she imbued her glass weapons with her fire magic; when we finally recovered from what your eyes did, he was just... gone. All that was left was a puddle of blood, his scroll, and his broken sword."
Another empty grave, just like Mom, Ruby bitterly thought to herself, even as tears welled up in her eyes. The thought of family, though, made her speak up: "And... what about his family? Have they been told?"
"... did he ever tell you that he faked his transcripts and ran away from home to Beacon?" Pyrrha quietly asked.
"... he did what?"
"Anyway, the point is, he never told us anything about his family, and there wasn't anything in his Beacon-issued scroll, either. We tried looking up the name "Arc", but with the CCT down... Ren's taken to checking the library for historical records, looking for any old genealogies to trace, and Qrow and Nora have promised to keep a ear out for rumors, but so far we've had no such luck..."
The thought of another hero sacrificed, another family losing someone precious, and never knowing what happened to them, was the final straw for Ruby. As she began sobbing, Pyrrha quietly rubbed her back, murmuring: "It wasn't your fault, Ruby..."
"It was! If I'd been paying attention... if I'd been more careful... if he hadn't had to push me out of the way..."
"And I was the one who'd been pinning down Cinder! I was Jaune's partner! He wouldn't even have been there if not for me..."
"..."
"..."
"How about the two of you just agree that it's Cinder's fault, and take it out on her when we track her down?" Qrow piped up from the doorway, breaking the somber silence. Pyrrha shot the alcoholic a glare, but Ruby gave her favorite uncle a smile, relieved to see he was alright. Weathering Pyrrha's glare, he nonchalantly finished off the contents of his hip flask, and asked her: "Mind if we have a minute?"
Pyrrha sighed, by now familiar with his bluntness, and took a second to look over her friend before releasing her. As she got up and turned, she excused herself easily: "Well, I'm off to check on Ren and Nora."
As the door closed, Qrow approached his second niece, and said: "Good to see you're finally awake, kid. So, what do you want to know?"
-HELGEN DUNGEONS, 17TH OF LAST SEED 4E201-
Gross, gross, gross, gross, gross, gross, gross, gross! Yang internally wailed as she glared at the sick now covering her boots, though outwardly the only change to her facial expression was a slight tightening of her jaw. True, after all the dirt, ash, blood, and viscera that caked her boots from running through the town (and kicking her way through no small number of Stormcloaks), a little more vomit wouldn't even be noticeable, let alone pose a health hazard to her body. And yet, there was just something about human waste and excrement that just naturally disgusted her.
"Ugh, I'm sorry..." Jaune groaned unsteadily below her, still disoriented from having fought against the fire witch and the Grimm dragon, losing said battle, and then waking up to the strong smell of guts and gore violently shaking him awake. As his eyes slowly adapted to the sudden illumination, his instincts kicked in, and he tried to push himself up. He was still weakened from his battle, though, and was only kept from falling into his own vomit by the blonde figure above him, who'd moved automatically to catch him.
Exchanging a look, Hadvar and Yang quietly debated leaving the boy behind, or at the very least leaving him in the questionable care of the torturer and his far-more-sane assistant. On the one hand, he'd clearly been through Oblivion, even with the skilled healer who had tended to him, and it might have been more merciful to quickly slit his throat, rather than letting him be crushed to death or suffocate when the fort collapsed. On the other hand, at the very least, Hadvar needed to escape, if only so he could warn the surrounding settlements (such as Riverwood, where his uncle lived) about the dragon threat, and Yang was determined to survive, if only so she could find out what had happened to her mother. They didn't know if they could risk being slowed down by taking on an extra person, let alone one who seemed to be little more than dead weight.
Fortunately, before they made a decision, the boy's eyes burst wide open, and he began looking around wildly and flailing as he gasped: "The dragon! Fire!"
"Woah, easy there, kid. Settle down." Yang reassured him, pinning his struggling limbs down gently but firmly (and making sure neither of them were touching vomit). Jaune looked up at the human contact, and relaxed upon seeing a mostly-familiar face, once again succumbing to unconsciousness. Yang quickly made up her mind: "Hadvar, you carry the boy. I'll clear us a path out of here."
"Are you sure?" Hadvar double-checked.
"It wouldn't sit right with either of us, to just leave him behind." Yang defended, unwilling to admit that she had been considering it just a few moments before. "Also, you heard what he was ranting; he might know something about the dragon that's trying to kill us all right now."
"You have a point..." Hadvar conceded, slinging the boy's prone form over his shoulder, and together the two continued the arduous task of fighting their way to freedom.
-ONE TUTORIAL DUNGEON LATER-
The smell of fresh air hit Jaune first. He'd grown up in a small town near the frontier, but his family had always been overprotective of him; he'd never even gotten close to the walls, let alone been able to sneak out into the surrounding forests, and the only times he'd been in unspoiled nature were on the rare camping trips to Shion. So he'd treasured his time in Beacon dearly; even the trip to Forever Fall, marred as it was by him being blackmailed by Cardin and almost hurting Pyrrha (and dying), had been a novel experience. And so, when the scent hit his brain, he subconsciously realized that he was outside.
The shaking and jolting registered in his mind next. He was moving, though not under his own power, clearly. And the fact that his motion sickness wasn't acting up meant he probably wasn't on an airship or a boat. A train, maybe? Or was he being carried?
Funnily enough, it was the sudden absence of light that did it for him. Light had been tickling at his senses for a while now, gradually growing stronger and stronger in intensity, but it was the sudden darkness that finally kicked his instincts into overdrive. Rather than struggle, though, he merely snapped his eyes open, wondering if a Nevermore was flying above him.
Yang and Hadvar, meanwhile, peeked out from the rock they'd hidden behind, and apprehensively watched the black dragon fly overhead past them. Only once it was out of sight did they allow themselves to relax, release the breath they hadn't even noticed they'd been holding. None of them would admit to jumping, though, when a soft voice piped up over Hadvar's shoulders: "Ummm... don't suppose you could let me down now?"
"Oh, look, Vomit Boy's finally awake." Yang sneered, with only a slight promise of impending pain, as Hadvar gently rested him against the rock. "You owe me for my shoes, Vomit Boy."
For a moment, Jaune quailed, tempted to apologize to Yang. Then he looked closer, and wondered how he could have ever mistaken the blonde bombshell for Yang Xiao-Long. Sure, she looked like she could've been her twin sister, but this girl's equipment was nothing like the fashionably low-cut and revealing clothes the Yang he knew flaunted. Her gauntlets were also rough grey metal, rather than the well-polished yellow bracelets he knew and feared, but what convinced him that the blonde bombshell in front of him couldn't possibly be Yang Xiao-Long was the hair.
After all, Yang Xiao-Long protected her hair like a wolf protected its cubs. There was no way Yang Xiao-Long would have ever allowed her hair to get so messy and unkempt... at least, not without levelling the entire building and breaking a few bones.
Sighing, he propped himself up, and mentally cursed his luck and motion sickness, that he'd thrown up on a second blonde bombshell's boots, and earned the nickname of Vomit Boy a second time! Inwardly, he swore that he'd buy her new boots once he got the chance to leave Beacon and go into Vale, and then paused, as the weight of the words hit him. Quickly looking around, he urgently asked: "What happened? Where's my team? And where's the dragon?"
"Big black flying lizard?" Yang confirmed rhetorically, and as Jaune nodded quickly she jerked her thumb towards the mountains, and replied: "Flown back off to whichever plane of Oblivion it came from, hopefully. But I doubt we'd be so lucky."
"And as for what happened..." Hadvar followed up, offering him a waterskin. "We were hoping you could tell us. We found you alone, at the bottom of the keep, gravely wounded, and pulled you out before the dragon brought the whole place down on us."
Jaune quickly processed the information, along with his surroundings. They were just outside a cave, which he guessed had been the secret exit tunnels to the keep they'd saved him from. His best guess was that they were in the Emerald Forest, following a secret escape route from the clock tower, and that it'd been a few days since the battle. Presumably, his team had successfully pulled him out and patched him up, before continuing the fight, but it didn't add up. For one thing, after the stunt he'd pulled, he doubted anyone could have pried Pyrrha off of him with a crowbar. For another, he'd seen the massive Grimm swarms; between the chaos of the Atlesian army turning on them, and the Grimm invading Vale, he doubted that even the numerous Huntsmen and Huntresses of Vale could have begun clean-up operations quite so quickly.
Morever, the equipment of the people who'd rescued him... they reminded him more of his initial equipment, when he'd entered Beacon, than the usual mecha-shift weaponry that most Huntsmen and Huntresses employed. The more he thought about the situation, the weirder it all seemed.
Cautiously, playing up his injuries, weakness, and disorientation (not that he needed to do much acting), he began prying: "Thanks for the help... by the way, I didn't catch your names. Who are you two? And where are we?"
"Ah, my apologies, it's been a long day." The leather-armored brunette placed his right fist upon his left breast, and with a short bow began: "I am Acting-Quaestor Hadvar, of the Fifth Imperial Legion, Skyrim."
Jaune blinked in bemusement, trying to process what he'd been told. Sure, he'd have been the first to admit that he wasn't the brightest or most studious teenager in Beacon, but he hadn't heard of any empires in Remnant, let alone a place called Skyrim. It definitely wasn't anywhere near Vale, at least; the snowfall made him wonder if he was somewhere near Atlas. It was the blonde's next words, however, that froze his blood.
"And I'm Yang Xiao-Long of Bravil." Yang introduced herself to Jaune with a cocky grin he recognized (and dreaded), before she glared at the two in mock reproach, and added: "The girl whose head almost got chopped off thanks to Hadvar, and whose boots you ruined."
"It wasn't my intention! And I helped you escape in the end, didn't I?" Hadvar protested desperately. Jaune ignored them, trying to process their words. His initial thought was that this was all a joke Yang was playing on him; Yang certainly did love her jokes. But she knew when to be serious, too; he doubted she'd have dragged him all the way to the Emerald Forest or Atlas, pretend not to know him after he'd vomited on her shoes again, and mess up her hair. Not when Vale and Beacon were under attack, and not when he'd been so severely wounded trying to save Ruby.
And speaking of severe wounds... how had they managed to patch him up? He'd seen a lot of blood, and felt easily half a dozen holes burning in his chest. Team RWBY was good, and his partner was better, but he doubted they could've fended off Cinder and the Grimm Dragon at the same time, and pulled him out. In fact, when the white warm light had engulfed him, he'd been very sure that he'd actually bought the farm...
The memory of some Vacuoan comics he and Ruby had been discussing weeks ago came to him, and for a moment he wanted to laugh at his imagination. Dying and being transported to a new world? Really, Jaune? You're 17, not 7! Forget your sisters, Ruby would die of laughter if she heard the thought even crossed your mind!
... but at the same time, Toto, we're clearly not in Kansas anymore, Jaune mused, looking around at his surroundings. Then he looked up, and his jaw dropped.
Above him, the moons were barely visible in the darkening evening sky. Two moons. Two unbroken moons. The sight was breathtakingly beautiful, but even as he took in the view, ice began forming in his gut.
"This may sound like a weird question, but what continent are we on?" Jaune finally spoke up carefully, interrupting the good-natured argument that had begun between the two, before inwardly cringing as the two looked at him like he'd been touched in the head.
"We're on Tamriel, of course?"
"... do the names "Remnant", "Vale", or "Grimm" mean anything to you?"
Two heads shook, bemused.
"... and what about "RWBY"?"
"What, like the precious red gems?" Yang asked, cocking her head in confusion at his questions, before changing the subject: "Anyway, Vomit Boy, before we get to town, we were hoping that you could tell us more about the dragon attack you mentioned earlier."
"Any information you have would be of great importance to us, boy." Hadvar followed up, unknowingly putting even more stress on a shell-shocked Jaune. "Today was the first time we, or anyone really, has seen a dragon in perhaps three Ages!"
Jaune wordlessly slumped against the rock he'd been resting on, before beginning to laugh hollowly, ignoring the the looks of concern the two Nords gave him.
After all, he'd been prepared for the worst, when he'd taken Pyrrha's place, but he doubted anyone could've warned him that he'd die to a dragon attack, the first anyone could remember... and wake up to another dragon attack, the first anyone there could remember.
Author's Note: Here we finally are, and all I can say is apologies for the delay; I wanted to get it out a week ago, but my schedule finally caught up to my body and I've been sick on-and-off for the past week or two.
I'll be honest; I had absolutely no idea how to start this chapter. I really couldn't figure out how a naive idealistic kid would react to dying, and then waking up in an unfamiliar place surrounded by familiar faces. I abused the hell out of time-skips in the shorter version of the story specifically so I wouldn't have to answer such awkward questions...
And that is why I decided to basically rip off what I did in TWOA, which is to say I put a Remnant section dealing with the fallout of Jaune's death to pad out the chapter, before dealing with what Jaune's going through. It's not stealing if you're doing it to yourself, after all.
I have no idea if Jaune ever opened up to anyone besides Pyrrha about his transcripts being faked. I always figured he at least told the rest of his team (eventually), and I believed that Ozpin knew all along that faked transcripts were a thing, but was willing to reward people resourceful enough to get their hands on said transcripts (with the assumption that, if they were smart enough to find fake transcripts, they'd be smart enough to do the research on the basics of being a Hunstman, like Aura and Semblances and fighting) and used Initiation as a way to test people's strength and skill. But I doubt he ever actually told Team RWBY, and so I'm just going to roll with it.
As for the dig at Dovah-Yang's hair... well, please remember Skyrim seems to be in the Medieval Ages. Not that they didn't have the occasional culture of bathing, but please imagine the discomfort of bathing in a freezing stream. None of the dwellings in Skyrim seem to have stuff like water tubs or rooms for heating water (let alone central heating and running water), and they seem to use Troll Fat as a substitute for soap. Sure, Dovah-Yang takes exceptional care of her hair (for a person in Tamriel), but you really can't compare war-torn disaster-stricken Skyrim to the quality of life of a Dust-powered modern society that can be found in Remnant.
Hopefully, the next few chapters should come more easily (and be a lot less boring and awkward), now that they've left the first dungeon, gotten to know each other, and have entered the vast open world of Skyrim.
And no, my other story is not dead. If a story of mine is dead, it would be deleted.
