It's two hours after the incident. Jaune is back in the infirmary room in stable condition. Most students are relatively unbothered, but the ones who aren't sure are passionate. Speaking of which, here's one right now!
"Miss, he is not allowed to have any visitors ye-"
"NO ONE GETS IN THE WAY OF ME SEEING FEARLESS LEADER!"
*VWOOOOM!*
A door gets hit. It does not give. But that's a minor inconvenience.
"YOU WILL BREAK!"
She charges up for a massive spin, and lets her hammer fly. The hinges strain and eventually crack, leaving the door to slowly fall down lockside.
A look of pure terror flashes through his eyes before he sees the trademark pink of one pissed off Nora Valkyrie.
"Hey No- OW!"
Even the painkillers don't stop the pain entirely. But at least he is not burning every second. But movements are hard…
"Jaune! Thank goodness you are ok!"
He wisely chooses to just smile at her for now. If she only knew…
Nora hugs him tightly, causing some more dull pain, and then slowly backs away.
"Get better soon Jaune-Jaune! I'm gonna go break some legs!"
"Nora please don-"
"You quit your worrying, Fearless Leader! I'll break that big-boobied blonde's legs so bad that she'll never even look at you again!"
"Pleas- OW!"
"Upp-upp-upp! I've got some legs to crack!"
She turns around and begins to run toward the door, only to run into a massive figure in the doorway.
"GAAAH! Get out of my way, mysterious man! I have some legs to break!"
Yatsu is unfazed by the novel disturbance. He looks down to see who it is and suddenly starts to smile.
"Ah, hello Miss.. Nora Valkyrie, isn't it?"
"Yes sir! And I'm about to go break some legs for Fearless Leader, so get out of my way, mystery man!"
Yatsu looks up at Jaune for confirmation, only to see his eyes pleading to him to not let her go, along with a small "cut" motion with his right hand.
"Jaune has ordered me to not let you pass."
The happiness on Nora's face vanishes. She really wanted to break some legs! But Yatsu is not too easy to push down. She looks over to Jaune, seeing him plead, and relents.
"Fine… but I will break YOUR legs if you do not tell me who you are, mystery man!"
The other two occupants laugh. Thank god that bomb is disarmed…
"My name is Yatsuhashi Daichi. Everyone calls me Yatsu."
"Hey Yatsu! What brings you over to Fearless Leader's side!"
"I want to ask the same to you."
Nora thinks for a while before providing her answer.
"Because he is Fearless Leader! I had to make sure he was okay! Did you see how bad he got injured!"
"I did. And that is why you want to break Yang's legs, I assume?"
"YES! She tried to kill him!"
That's a bold claim. Both Jaune and Yatsu try to think what to say to counter this… but can find nothing. She deliberately ignored Glynda's warnings to stop and deliberately aimed for the head and vital organs. No two ways about it, she was definitely looking to create a corpse on the field.
The air becomes gloomy. Everyone in that room knows that this is not going to be the end, that rock bottom is not even close to upon him…
No one talks. No one wants to talk. No one knows what to say next…
Nora and Yatsu meeting each other was done wrong. Especially because it's obvious as hell I was just trying to get to that last paragraph.
"Hey Nora, do something funny."
"Now?"
"Yep."
Nora launches into a random dream she had about pancakes, moving her arms around, swinging her hammer, and generally being very animated. Jaune and Yatsu both start laughing, which quickly morphs into a full on cackling fit.
"And then the monster tried to stick its tentacles into the syrup and I was like, no way Mr. Tentacle Monster! So I swung Magnhild and BAM! It ran away like a scared rat! And then I saw something that looked like a little puppy, and it was yipping around all excitedly, like I get when Renny brings me pancakes, and then it jumped up and-
"Nora? There you are. Let's go back to the dorm."
Jaune stares at him. Yatsu stares at him. Nora stares at him. Each with a look of annoyance, a "What's he doing here ruining this moment!" look on their faces. Ren wisely decides to kick the can down the road.
"Come back when you're done Nora. We need to talk again. *sigh*"
He walks away. The footsteps get quieter and quieter before ceasing to be heard by the people in the room. Only then does Nora return back to her story.
"So that puppy jumped up and licked my face! And then I reached down to try to pet it, and it was icky! Of course the pancakes are out of my mind now, as I wanted to find out what this adorable little puppy had on his fur, and I looked and it was made of sap! Like that stuff from Forever Fall?! Anyway I took a taste of the sap on my hands, and it growled at me! How dare it! I was just gonna get a taste, I wasn't gonna eat him! I saw the look on his face though and he was so sad! Like someone said they were gonna play fetch with him and never threw the ball! So I just started…"
The cackling returns. But no one pays any mind to that, nor of the fantastical nature of Nora's story. Not with the alternative being thoughts about Jaune's potentially horrible future. This day is going to end on a high note, even if that note is dragged kicking and screaming up there.
Yatsu eventually buts in with another fun story about an adventure featuring a certain clothing fiend…
"Ok, you know how there is a clothes shop close the edge of Vale, right?"
Nora nods but Jaune does not.
"I'll tell you more about it in the future Jaune. Anyway, one time I was forced to go with Coco to that store. I am not someone who is very interested in clothes, so I was just following her around and looking at the few other items the store had in stock. Thankfully for me, Coco always gets a one track mind in a clothes store, so after she started trying things on, I left to go find something more interesting to do. I saw an area, full of all different species of flowers. I almost lost myself in that area of the store. Anyway, while I was looking around in the carnations, I see someone get thrown into some bags of seeds that were lying around. Naturally, I had to look over and see where he came from, and there I saw Coco, with a rainbow shirt on, and a face redder than a tomato."
Nora laughs at the visual imagery.
"So I went over and asked her why she threw the clothesboy that far away, and she stretches the shirt out and points at something. I do not see what she is pointing at, so I look closer, and you know what it was?
"What?"
"There was a fingerprint on it, from the clothesboy."
"She threw him out over that?!" both Jaune and Nora say.
Interesting last five words.
"Yes. It took the entire rest of the team pleading with them to not get banned from all of their shops. We still can not go inside that particular one, unfortunately."
Yatsu adds on another story about flowers or something, but it keeps everyone's interest for a while.
"That's sad. But also kinda hilarious. One of my sisters had something like that. I was about 8 years old or so, and I was in a store like you were with my sister Lexi, and I was bored out of my mind, so I went to the toy aisle and got a squirt gun. So I take off the packaging, and put some water in it from a bottle. So now I'm walking around, pretending I'm looking for some evil Grimm to spray into oblivion, and I see Lexi, wearing what was apparently a brand new shirt that said "Don't mess with the hair" or something stupid like that, so guess what. I spray her with it, and ruin the shirt.
"What a surprise."
"Pfft! Hahahahahahahaha!"
And this kind of thing goes on for hours, trading story after story after story across the three of them. The pain that Jaune is feeling recedes into the background as laughing and general happy feelings fill the room. It is deep into the evening before their bodies finally give up and fall asleep, all blessed with some nice, happy dreams.
-️-️-️-️?️️?️️?️️?️️?️️?️️? POV️-️-️-️-
12:30 AM
Just rough him up a bit. Take his scroll away or something.
Yeah! Something small to make him sad come tomorrow.
I walk through the hallways and see Jaune's room. The door is lurched over on the floor. But why? Who could even do such a thing?
Lurched? I'm surprised I used that word (wrongly), I wouldn't use it now because I've become much less of a fan of words that aren't easily grabbable by an average person. It's one of my personal pet peeves when a fic writer decides to use millions of adjectives and action words just for the sake of having one in every sentence. My bar for 'purple prose' is much lower than the average reader.
I look inside and find my answer…
Jaune's over sleeping in the hospital bed. But what intrigues me is the two other faces in the room.
One is Yatsuhashi, which we knew about from earlier. But the other is new.
Nora.
I thought Ren could control her! Turns out he can't…
I still have a mission, so I look for something to take. I find his scroll and pocket it.
I return back to the dorms, but I let the group know of what I found before coming back…
Girls?
What is it?
Did you take anything?
Is he done crying out in pain yet?
...
There's another one.
I got a bit too invested in the little stories I made up for them. I think you all know what I am building towards by now. But don't worry, there is still far to go before then.
You can see the difference with the crack and the not crack in this chapter, comparing the ending and… the entire rest of the chapter.
Up until the end of this chapter, there was harmony between the crack and the seriousness. Maybe they could work together, you know? Create something really interesting. And they did. Other than non-flowing sentences and the occasional hiccup, there's not really many obvious problems with chapters 16-19. The plotline is a disaster, but the execution of said plot is not anymore. If the seriousness had not developed as far as it had, the sparring class chapter would have only been 1500 words or so, probably with only Jaune in it.
Really, for every character other than Jaune's betrayers, I could essentially course-correct and make them proper people. Jaune was easiest by far, as he was a decent person already, just had to remove some of the convenient stupidity. Nora and Yatsu could just have their traits toned down slightly. But there was a group I could not fix.
The Betrayal Club.
By this point I had given a group title to the people who were against Jaune. The next few chapters are the crack and the serious basically fighting over how this fic was to play out. The serious part eventually won the battle for the most part, but the fight was so torturous that my motivation to continue on afterwards went up in smoke.
