Howling. It was all Jaune could hear as the freezing wind battered him, ice showered him clinging to his damp clothes and stinging his face. The cold flurry that surrounded him turned his world a cruel white as if the world itself had been destroyed leaving him alone. He forced himself to move, his fingers and toes were numb but his muscles burned as he forced himself to put one foot in front of the other. He fought the wind feeling it push him, keeping him back or threatening to push him down into the snow. He squinted his eyes and shielded them with his hand just to keep his eyes open and watch where he stepped. The dying light was slowly removing what little visibility he had left and the thought of being left in the pitch black surrounded by these stinging and howling winds as the dropping temperatures suffocated him until he didn't feel anything anymore.
"Jaune!" He heard feeling a grip on his hand pulling him up. He hadn't realized that he'd stopped kneeling in the snow. He looked up seeing Penny, even in the dim light of the setting sun she was a bright splash of color in this white void. Her copper red hair blew off to the side whipped about by the frigid gusts.
"Penny?" His weak voice didn't pierce the deafening roar of the wind, he felt like he was being swallowed by the storm and only Penny was keeping from being consumed.
"We're almost there!" Penny told him projecting her voice over the screaming gale, "hold on!"
He felt like he was floating, he couldn't even feel himself walking. He numbly trudged through the the deep snow wading through it, mindlessly focusing on moving forward and clutching Penny's hand.
He forced himself to look up seeing the silhouettes of buildings through the white haze. Refuge. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to move faster spurred on by the promise of shelter.
The sound of creaking boards and clattering shutters joined the symphony of the storm and together they approached the closest building. Jaune could see boarded up windows and an old door with peeled paint. Jaune could barely get a grip on the rusty doorknob, Penny managed to force the door open and pushed him inside.
The front room was dark and musty, it smelled like an old dusty attic. Penny forced the door closed behind him and locked it. Jaune scanned the dim room before it, it looked like it'd been a house at one point, long abandoned and left to decay. It was mostly empty save for a layer of dust and some cobwebs, an empty fireplace, some furniture was left here and there, an old moldy couch sat in one corner and an old table with chairs in another, a dirty rug lay decaying on the floor.
Jaune dropped to his knees and rubbed his hands shivering violently. Penny didn't waste time looking around the dilapidated building. She moved across the room to where the table was splintering it with a punch.
"Let's get a fire going?" Penny said shattering the wooden furniture with ease and moving to the fireplace. She shoved the scraps of wood into the fireplace forcing the flue open, a single blade from Floating Array deployed and morphed into its laser gun form shooting a single green beam of light at the collection of wood burning it. Penny added a few bits of trash letting scraps of old paper or cloth catch fire helping it catch to the table pieces.
A dim orange glow filled the dark room and Jaune held his hands out feeling the heat. He moaned at the heat feeling it wash over him. He sat there for a long moment and Penny moved about adding wood to the little pile they had.
"Uh… Jaune?" Penny asked.
"Yeah?" He asked, looking away from the fire.
"I do not mean to embarrass you," she began tentatively looking away as he caught her eyes reflecting the fire, "but you need to get out of those wet clothes."
Jaune frowned looking down, his shirt and pants and everything beneath was completely soaked. Frost and unmelted snow covered him and clung to his armor. "You're right," he sighed, moving to unbuckle the plates of armor stepping them along. Whatever thought or insecurities he might usually have about being nude in front of another girl felt very weak. He needed to keep warm and damp clothing wouldn't help him, and he'd need dry clothes for the trek tomorrow, right now it was that simple.
"I will try to see if I can find a blanket," Penny assured him, moving to leave, "be right back."
Jaune nodded laying his armor down neatly next to Crocea Mors and the pistol he'd taken from the their driver. What had been his name?
He pulled his boots off and looked at the soaked socks, he left them by the fire to dry too wringing what little moisture he could from his socks before handing them like stockings. He took a long moment to hold his feet out to feel the flames, sensation was returning to his body and with every passing minute he wanted the damp clothes sticking to him gone. He stripped his shirt off and like his socks did what he could to squeeze out excess water before leaving it by the fire to dry followed by his jeans.
Jaune kept his boxers on in the hope that Penny would in fact find a blanket before he removed them and help him preserve what modesty he could in the situation. He sat on the dirty floor and basked in front of the fire feeling it's heat wash over him before standing to take a small look around the abandoned house for anything he could burn or use. He wasn't going to just bask in front of the warm fire while Penny did all the work, even if he was still cold.
He could hear the it groan against the wind and hear it whistling outside and through cracks in the walls, he looked into some of the smaller room returning to the fireplace to wrap a scrap of dirty cloth around one of the broken chair legs to make a little torch just so he could see in the dark rooms.
The signs of the former occupants where littered in the mostly empty room, a old spring mattress, a few moldy old books, a broken tobacco pipe, a stuffed teddy bear. He took whatever he could back to the fireplace, without any fuel for his torch he couldn't keep it lit for very long so he'd relight it every trip.
He stepped up the stairs careful on the rickety steps before spotting a closed door at the end of the hall. He forced the door open cracking the rotting frame and stepping in with his torch. It looked like the master bedroom with a broken bed frame with another moldy mattress. A few crooked paintings hung from the wall, whatever had once been upon them couldn't be determined anymore.
"Jaune?" He heard Penny cry out for him from the living room having returned from checking the other buildings.
"I'm up here." He called looking in the corner. He could hear her every footstep from down stairs as she moved to join him. "Woah," he said stepping close, an old double barrel shotgun was leaning against the wall. The blue steel was spotted with rust but he picked it up all the same.
"What are you doing up here?" Penny asked, stepping inside her eyes glowing a soft green.
"Helping you look for anything of use," he explained feeling a little silly standing here in his underwear, "look what I found."
"Any shells?" Penny asked him.
"I'm still looking," he explained handing her the dying torch he made before glancing on the floor for anything, "what is this place?"
Penny moved around the room breaking some scraps of wood from the broken bed frame making a small pile to carry downstairs, they'd definitely have enough to keep the fire lit for the rest of the night. "It used to be an old Schnee Dust Company mining town," she explained to him, "I think this used to be the head prospectors home."
"So why's it a ghost town now?" He asked her, moving to one of the nightstands and pulling the drawer out.
"The grimm attacks were too frequent," Penny explained simply. "And the dust deposits were too small to keep the mine operational, eventually the SDC declared the mine and the town to be failed investments, they evacuated the area and left it abandoned. Occasionally people come out here, huntsman and huntresses mostly looking for a place to escape the elements during a job. I found some gear that'd been left behind."
Jaune reached into the drawer and pulled out an old cardboard box, "I found some shells," he said looking at the plastic cartridges.
"Do you really plan on trying to use that gun?" Penny asked standing up and gathering her stack of wood in her arms.
"Maybe," Jaune said following her back downstairs, "we need to make use of whatever we can, that assassin and those drones are still out there, we should probably try to hold out here, out there we're exposed. Plus this place is a landmark that should be easy for our friends to find, we might even be able to signal them somehow, though we'd risk exposing our location to that assassin."
"You are probably right," Penny admitted.
"Plus if worse comes to worse I can try holding out while you try getting back to Mantle yourself," he explained stepping into the living room.
"I am not going to leave you Jaune," she said.
"Just hear me out. That Vasily guy was right, I'm a liability to you and I'm slowing you down, at best you're left wasting power carrying me you'd be faster without me and I'm getting weaker, I'm no help to you in a fight," he explained kneeling down in front of the fireplace inspecting the old hunting shotgun under the light of the fire. He broke the action of the gun open and held it up peering down the double barrels seeing to obstructions.
"I am not leaving you to die," Penny said with a frown, "I do not care what that criminal said!"
"I'm not asking to be left to die," Jaune assured her setting the weapon down, "I'm saying that if push comes to shove you should take the chance to go ahead and find help, that guy doesn't care about me, you're the one he's hunting and I'm just making things easier on him."
Penny still frowned, "I see your logic," she admitted, "but I don't like it, it still means leaving you alone to deal with grimm, Vasily or who knows what else."
Jaune shrugged, "it's a risk we might have to take."
Penny reached down grabbing an old dirty blanket she'd apparently found and handed it to him. "It sounds like a gamble to me."
Jaune smirked pulling the blanket around his shoulders, "I'd be betting on you," he said flashing her a cocky grin, "that doesn't sound so dumb to me."
Penny looked away awkwardly but with a little smile on her lips. "You would be putting your life in my hands."
Jaune sat back down in front of the fire finally stripping away his wet boxers to dry with the rest of his clothes. "I'm used to relying on my friends," he said staring into the flames.
Penny looked at him sitting on the floor next to him. "I am your friend?" She asked him curiously.
"Yeah," Jaune said offering her a warm smile, "at least after this I think so," he explained to her with a chuckle, "I'm sitting here naked and I just spent a long day with you fighting grimm and robots, you literally carried me through the day, I've made friends from a lot less."
Penny smiled at that and two of them fell into a comfortable silence together watching the fire burn together and listening to it crackle and spark, they occasionally put on a new scrap of wood to burn and Jaune would watch the flames consume it.
"Do you enjoy staring into the fire?" She asked him.
Jaune nodded taking his eyes off the flickering flames to look at her, "Yeah, I don't know why really but it's always been fascinating to look at, my family and I would spend hours around the campfire."
"You'd spend hours together looking at the fire?"
"Not just looking at it," he explained, "we'd do all kinds of things, we'd talk, we'd roast marshmallows, my mom would tell the scariest ghost stories."
"Ghost stories?"
"Yeah, my younger sisters would get so scared they'd ask to stay with me in my tent, I'd stay up late with them making shadow puppets with my flashlight or maybe read them a story that wasn't scary so they'd fall asleep," he smiled fondly recalling the memories, he stretched his hands out and shifted it so the shadow cast by the fire resembled a long eared rabbit.
Penny giggled watching the shadowy bunny hop across the wall. "Why would your mother tell stories to scare your little sisters?"
"Well… Uh, sometimes it's kind of fun to get scared," he explained to her.
"How?"
"Well uh… you get excited and feel a rush," he explained, "like have you ever felt jittery after watching a horror movie?"
"No," Penny answered with a shake of her head.
Jaune chuckled, "I suppose I should have figured, it's hard to explain but when my mom would tell us stories about ghosts and monsters things just got intense, we felt like things were watching us from every dark corner, every rustle of leaves was something sneaking around, we'd jump at our own shadows, but we'd always laugh at ourselves afterward for being silly."
Penny nodded, "I think I understand," she explained, "when you are scared you are excited."
Jaune nodded, "yeah pretty much."
They turned back to the fire listening to it crackle as they blizzard raged outside happy to just sit next to one another. Jaune felt his shoulder touching hers and he felt like they were back in the truck again talking comfortably together, before that hired assassin had forced them to flee across the tundra and fight for their lives.
"Are you scared Jaune?" She asked him softly breaking the short stint of silence.
"Not in the fun way," he said honestly but with a nervous laugh. "I keep feeling like every sound I hear outside might be that gunman or his drones, and I wonder if I'll be able to get my drying clothes back on before I have to fight."
Penny giggled at that. "You should try to sleep," she told him seriously, "rest will help replenish your aura and you will need all the energy you can."
"I don't know if I can sleep," he answered her somewhat honestly, "I barely slept against that cave wall, though this dirty floor is definitely an upgrade."
"You could use my lap as a pillow," she offered.
"Thank you," Jaune said appreciative of the offer, "but what about you?"
"I told you Jaune, I do not sleep like you."
"But you do sleep, right?" He asked her looking into her green mechanical eyes.
"In a way," she explained, "I… go into a standby, or sleep mode if you prefer."
Jaune's brow furrowed, "you turn off?"
"No," she said shaking her head, "I am still operating but most of my systems shut down to consume less power, I can use it in emergencies or if I am too low on power I will automatically enter this state so I might be recovered."
Jaune nodded, "I think this counts as an emergency," he said, "you can go into sleep mode and conserve your power, I'll keep watch."
"Are you sure?" She asked him.
"It's only fair, you took watch last time, and you preserving power for a couple of hours is just as important as me getting sleep. It's probably more important honestly, I'll sleep after you." Penny held his gaze for a moment, she looked like she wanted to protest his idea and insist that he sleep but she voiced no argument to him.
"Alright," she relented, "I'll sleep for three hours, then it's your turn."
Jaune nodded, "agreed."
Penny moved away and laid down on the floor flat on her back folding her hands on her belly looking up at the ceiling.
"Will I be able to wake you up?" He asked.
"You can," Penny explained, "anything that is too loud or tries to move me will power up my other systems, I could also have a set word or phrase that'll make me."
Jaune nodded, "how about if I just say your name, will that work?"
"Yes," Penny answered, "that will work."
Jaune nodded in understanding, "alright then, sweet dreams Penny, uh… do you dream?"
Penny shook her head, "no, part of my mind is still active running my systems at a minimal power consumption but no I do not dream."
Jaune nodded, "I see."
"Can you tell me what it is like?" She asked, "to dream?"
"Dreams are… weird," he explained to her, "most of the time they don't make any sense and I can barely remember them at all,"
"How do they not make sense?" She asked.
"They uh… like one time I had a dream back in Beacon where I was running away from Yang because somehow I stole her hair," he explained, "I actually had her long hair for some reason and she wanted to take it back and I had to like do team RWBYs homework or something, there's a hundred other weird details I couldn't remember but during the dream it all seemed to make perfect sense."
"That is not how hair works," Penny said giggling, "you could not just take it and attach it or reattach it."
"Exactly," Jaune said, "it was complete nonsense, and that's how dreams usually are for me, nonsense that's only coherent in the dream, sometimes I would be naked in class or running from something weird or silly. But I'd wake up and I could hardly remember any of it, I just knew I dreamed and there was no logic in what I dreamt."
Penny nodded to him, "it sounds… fascinating, but some of these dreams sound more like nightmares."
Jaune frowned, "nightmares are… worse, much worse, I remember them a lot easier, they're clearer, more vivid."
Penny looked at him worriedly and sat up from the floor, "so you have nightmares?" She asked him tentatively.
"All the time," Jaune admitted to her.
"I am sorry."
Jaune gave her a little smile, "it's not your fault," he said, "I'd be worried if I didn't have nightmares after everything."
They again fell into a short stint of silence, she wanted to ask him about his nightmares, to know about what haunted him. But she didn't know how to ask, or if she should ask. Jaune was her friend, he'd called them as such but she didn't know if she was enough of a friend to ask him about his nightmares.
"You should be getting to sleep now," Jaune said.
Penny nodded, "alright."
"Goodnight Penny," he said watching as her eyes closed.
"Goodnight Jaune."
Vasily smiled watching the screen, the faint red glow of heat penetrated the grey backdrop. His drone circled the old ghost town scouting it with it's thermal lenses.
As predicted the android had sought shelter for the boy endeavoring to keep him alive through the storm. It would have been wiser to try to keep moving through the harsh weather on her own. His eyes flickered through the various screens observing the digital map. His vehicle's connection to the CCT was spotty from the weather but it didn't seem that this storm would be letting up for another several hours, it would likely break after dawn but that gave him time.
Time to prepare his battlefield and ensure his victory, with his target trapped by the weather they had no options for escape. As long as the android protected that boy she'd be hindered.
He could lay his own traps, keep the little android on her toes. Prey such as her needed a special touch to bring down. A knife wouldn't do much against a Goliath after all and he'd prepared for the occasion.
He typed in a command to his drones ordering them to monitor the abandoned town and begin deploying the traps. Unless the android herself was watching the perimeter he was sure he'd remain unnoticed, the storm would mask the noise of his drones and spotting them through the haze of the storm and dark of night.
Yes. Things would get quite interesting. The android's compassion for her frail human companion had already doomed her, she let her concern for him lead her into a perfect position to hide. Like cornering an ursai in its own lair, he could dispose of the beast whilst its back was to the wall or it could charge blindly into his trap.
The android had let him control the situation and it was a mistake she wouldn't live to regret.
He put his snow truck into gear, sending it forward on the treads towards the ghost town. He'd launch his attack before dawn, in the darkest hours before the sun rose above the horizon.
He smirked looking over to his favorite express rifle on the rack. He could hardly contain his grin, he'd claim another prized trophy with the weapon. His first android. He pushed down on the gas driving through the blizzard, he could practically taste the kill.
Again thank you everyone for reading and reviewing. As one guest reviewer tried asking yes I named Vasily after the famous Soviet sniper Vasily Zaytsev who used to hunt deer and wolves before hunting Nazis. His last name Patterson I took from John Henry Patterson a British hunter and soldier famous for killing the Tsavo man eater lions that allegedly killed over a hundred railway workers. Once more thank you all and please review, your constructive criticism makes me a better writer.