Now those memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse
Two — Doubts Drop Away
There is a hut in the forest outside Beacon, deep in the parts where the Headmaster will not send even fourth-year students. The man that lived there was ancient, an oddity for Remnant, and even more an oddity for he used to be a Huntsman. I was not interested in juvenile discussions about how partners and teams were chosen that first night in the auditorium, and so it was easy work to sneak my way out. I acted like I had the runs, spent five minutes in the bathroom on the first floor of the main building, and then went out the window.
The climb over Beacon's walls, and then the hike through the clear-cut kill zone by slipping from fold of land to slight rise to dips in the ground made the night refreshing, with that last bite of winter cold in the air and the promise of spring new beginnings carried in a light rain that started at mile three and continued until I was finishing mile six. I was happened upon by a successive string of the solitary ursine Grimm, and left in my wake a string of dead ursine Grimm.
And keeping pace with me the whole way, quiet, lovely, wholly and inexorably dead: Pyrrha Nikos.
"It should have been me," I told the shade that haunted me around the time mile five ended and mile six began, and waded across a tributary stream that fed into the river that fed Vale's industry.
Pyrrha was silent.
"Of course, from an empirical standpoint, I suppose your sacrifice was the lesser of two wrongs, for I have seven sisters and you're an only child."
Pyrrha was silent. I smiled at her in the moonlight coming through the weak rainclouds, broad and full of grief and love and longing.
Pyrrha did not return my smile.
I carefully held a branch out of the path for her.
Pyrrha was silent.
"Still," I said. "If we're discussing wrongs, I believe that setting the board so that a young man or woman of seventeen, eighteen years old must die— well, there's a wrong, and then there's a wrong."
Pyrrha was silent.
The moonlight reflected on the blood on her breastplate, dark and sticky, almost back. I resumed my easy pace, sword still held at my hip so that the tip was close to my heels. Courtesy cost nothing, and made life easier. Or so Mother had said.
"What do you think? Should we be out here? Am I on a fool's errand to see an old Huntsman before he passes into the void?"
Pyrrha was silent.
"No," I replied cheerfully. "You're right, he doesn't deserve to be alone. You didn't deserve to be alone like I left you, either. I should have died next to you." And there were several times I had. This far from the return, though, the memories had faded, dim and worn— I knew the contents of them like I could tell a friend the summary of a book, but I could no more describe taste or sensation or emotion than a dog could.
Pyrrha was silent. I remembered one instance, in particular: folly and ruin.
I had pleaded with Pyrrha to allow me to join her, tugged on heartstrings and emotions and ideals and love in ways that at this point only I could. And then I'd still gotten in her way, gotten her killed. I looked over, wished I could drape Pyrrha in the shroud of a heroine returned to her people on her shield, since she had never returned to her people with it. I pondered the shape of her jawline, her cheeks, the curves of her.
I drank the sight of her curves, the sight of her, drank it in like a drowning man drinks water, like a drunk that knows he will be cut off soon downs the rotgut, like a dying man in a desert burns for cool, clear, water.
I stopped smiling, stopped walking.
Pyrrha was silent. Pyrrha stopped walking.
[Lovegrieflonging]
I sent at her through my Aura. The shade was gone in an instant.
So. So.
Curious. And curious.
Old Ben Guinness found me in the forest in the false pre-dawn gray, dancing a duel of death with a Grimm outside his hut. He stroked his beard as he watched me deliver the death-stroke, and then he gave me a thin smile while the beast dissipated into wispy tendrils of black smoke.
"Hello there," he said. I cleaned my sword of the Grimm-gunk with a black handkerchief, sheathed it, and then turned to face the old Hunter fully.
I bowed, one fist held in the palm of the other hand.
"Manners, too! What brings you out this far, young man?"
"Good morning, Hunt Master Guinness," I said quietly. "I was hoping to infringe on your hospitality and share a cup of tea."
"Come in, come in. A young Hunter-to-be with manners and brains is a delight to see this early in the morning." He made an expansive gesture with one robe clad arm, welcoming me into his hut, set against the side of a hill and almost a cave. It was dim, but homely and warm inside from the hearth, and I left my shoes and sword at the door. The rules of hospitality are sacrosanct.
We knelt on the floor at his small table while his kettle heated over the coals in the hearth, and I contemplated what I was going to say. I had never told him the truth, unsure of his true allegiance or duty or loyalty, but I knew one thing for certain: Ben Guinness brewed a mean kettle of tea.
We knelt in silence.
Pyrrha was nowhere to be seen.
When at least the tea was carefully poured, allowed to cool to the precise second, and the first cups had been drank, I set mine down on the table and allowed Master Guinness to pour me another. I watched the steam rise from the top of the tea in the cup, and thought it a fitting metaphor for the fragility of human life on Remnant.
"I can tell that there is much troubling you, young man. Come now, it must be important if it brought you ten miles into the depths of the Forest and outside Beacon's walls." The Master's tone was slightly chiding, as though he'd expected something more intelligent of a Hunter in training from Beacon, but it was also warm and welcoming. I smiled, a true smile, weary and not at all polite.
"You have seen the worst of the skirmishes and battles that followed the Great War, Master Guinness. You have seen some of the worst of the Grimm-clearing campaigns, in your time. I wonder..."
He didn't say anything, merely cocked an eyebrow and made a noise in his throat. He set his own teacup gently on the low table. That time I poured for him, as a guest must on the second cup of tea for the host. Then he leaned forward.
"I have," Guinness said. "There is no point in lying to you. I knew your grandfather, young man."
"If you knew an attack were coming— say an incursion, or a Spartacist rising to try to overthrow the Parliament in Vale—"
"Or a White Fang assault on something important in the city, hmm?" Guinness interrupted.
I nodded, then took a sip of my tea.
"As Huntsmen— and make no mistake, young man: you are a Huntsman— we have a duty. Not to the Kingdom, or Parliament, or even the school. Our duty is not to institutions, or buildings, or even singular men or women. Our duty, Jaune Arc, is to people. The people that live, love, laugh, work, die, in Vale. The people in the factories, on the farms, in the cities and in the villages. What is the first rule of Hunting?"
"Better to die alone than die a coward," I repeated by rote memorization. And thought of blood-stained nights where some Huntsman had tried to hide in a shelter full of civilians, cowering and cringing against their inevitably sealed fate when he opened their shelter.
"No," Guinness said. I looked up from my tea and into his eyes.
"That is the first official rule. But the first, the most important, the rule you must carry carved into your heart next to the names of the ones you will fight, kill, and eventually die for: we must always be fighting for others. To protect them. To defend them. To drive back the howling darkness that threatens our very minds and souls as Hunters. It is not Dust or fury or rage the Grimm cannot stand. It is love. You must love your team, your partner, the people all around you. The best Hunters are the Hunters with hearts so full of love that the Grimm shy in their very presence."
I thought of silver eyes, and amber eyes, and gray eyes, and blue, and purple, and green.
"Loving so much... Hurts," I said plaintively.
"Garb yourself in its armor, young one. What is grief, but your love for another whose time was cut short? You did not stop loving them, whoever they were, because they died. Carry your love for them into your battles, and it will serve you as well as it has served me."
Guinness finished his tea, and allowed me to finish mine in silence. Then we finished the kettle and I was quiet, and thought. We exchanged formal bows at the entrance to his hut, and he smiled at my back as I picked my way back to Beacon in the dawn.
I would go back two weeks later, to a building at least two years overgrown, and a skeleton bleached white in the sun, sitting peacefully beneath an oak. But when I went inside, to look—
Two tea cups and a kettle, with only a couple weeks worth of dust on them.
I never went back.
And when I looked it up: Hunt Master Ben Guinness died two years before Headmaster Ozpin penned Jaune Arc's acceptance letter to Beacon, of old age, his retirement fully enjoyed.