"Yang?"
"Yeah?" She looked over to Jaune as they stood in the midst of carrying a few plates over to the sink, him minding her.
"Did you... Rest well yesterday?" Jaune asked her, tone concerned as he spoke to her.
She thought it over.
"Eh. Not my best night's rest." She shrugged indifferently. "But it's not the end of the world."
Admittedly, after years of growing up as one of the homeless, Emerald was of the belief that she could make any place her bed without complaint, especially since she had adapted to even be something of a light sleeper who was a night owl (people were less likely to pull any crap during the day after all).
It was therefore a point of great confusion when she realized how stiff and uncomfortable her joints felt that morning.
Only after pondering this for the last several minutes of her life, wherein she had offered the innkeeper their help again with dishes, did she realize what had happened: She had grown accustomed to being taken care of by Cinder.
A lot of the simple luxuries people often took for granted, such as a warm, safe place to sleep, had been provided for her by the woman, and she had adjusted to one of her basic needs as a human being fulfilled, to such an extent that she briefly forgot how such cramps and the like were the norm for her some time ago.
How such details related to Jaune's question to her, however, seemed to be based around her seeming more tired than would be normal for Yang.
"Sorry that this happened." Jaune said. "I... Didn't mean for you to end up like this, because of me."
"Just... Forget it." She shook her head, placing the stack of plates atop the kitchen counter. "It was a just a... Weird mistake on both our ends."
Jaune frowned slightly.
"I wish I could REMEMBER it though." He said, irritation with himself clear.
She glanced over to him, mentally sighing.
Him and her both, she thought to herself.
"We drank a lot that night. I wish we could turn back time, stop it from happening."
"Yeah... Yeah." Jaune sighed as he began the process of clesning the dishes with her, him only pausing when he saw her helping.
"Do you think you should expose your arm to water?" Jaune asked her, and Emerald blinked.
"You think it's a bad idea?" She asked, making a show of grasping her hand.
From Jaune's perspective, the girl grasped her robotic arm's hand with a sense of worry.
"I don't know exactly how that thing works, or if it's water resistant," Jaune said, "but if you're not sure, I can handle the dishes."
She looked at him curiously.
"Are you sure?"
"Well... Yeah," Jaune said, running a soapy, water-laden hand along his blonde locks without thinking, "that was tailor made for you. I don't want to do anything to mess it up, when you just got it."
She seemed to consider it as she looked to him, before nodding slowly.
"Okay, if that's how you feel, go ahead."
She stepped away, going to the opposite counter and leaning against it casually, and Jaune went about washing the dishes.
Despite his putting up a façade of poise, Jaune was trying to process all of things that had happened since he'd come to that bar before.
Jaune was having a moment of reflection, and as would often accompany such moments, the familiar feeling of soul crushing regret festered inside of him.
The young man had seen many, MANY strange things in his life, especially since coming to Beacon, and though that only served to be one-upped every couple of days since nearing the end of Ruby's journey to Haven (capped by his apparently age-old Headmaster's ghost latching onto a kid while being a wizard from times of old), the current thing he was going through was something he struggled to truly make any sense out of whatsoever.
An old conspiracy thing, that worked in the shadows against even worse monsters than the Grimm? That was something he could understand.
The idea that his weird, sort-of creepy Headmaster was the head of said conspiracy, with their current leader against their enemies now living in the body of a kid half their age? He could comprehend it
The notion of his, and all mankind's, existence being the result of a couple brothers getting tired of having cosmic family feuds with each other? He could comprehend that.
The idea that he was such an idiot that he misread all the cues Pyrrha sent him about her feelings? That was so him it hurt to even think about.
There was a clear distinction between ALL of those things and what he was going through then however.
The distinction being that they were simple enough to understand, once he gave some actual thought to it, with it even being very simple when he put enough thought into it.
This, in contrast, made NO FLIPPING SENSE to him.
Once more, despite having established this to himself, Jaune cycled through the last day... Days... WHATEVER amount of time had apparently passed since the fight at Haven.
Yang had returned with the Relic, nearly got attacked by an injured Emerald and Cinder as they fled, everyone regrouped to make plans for going to Atlas later on, Jaune had left to try drinking his thoughts away, and then...
He simply woke up the next morning, naked and married to Weiss.
But then... It turned out not to be real, apparently? And he was actually married to Yang?
Had it been a dream? Jaune wondered.
It seemed too vivid and lifelike to be that - especially since he had apparently gone to sleep inside his own dream and slept.
Was that an actual thing in dreams, he wondered, having a dream inside of your own dream, as mind-screwy as it sounded?
But then... How could he have a dream that somehow predicted how his morning would go, even assuming that time he spent with Weiss was a dream to begin with?
Was his subconscious really so simultaneously advanced and base in nature, that he somehow predicted his own future before turning it into his own wet dream about Weiss, which then warped into some other weird thing of her screaming in a bathroom about survivor's guilt?
Was that all REALLY a dream?
It would be so simple to say that, yes, he DID just have a weird, future prophesying dream-thing about Weiss in some drunken stupor.
But then another conundrum made itself clear to him, one that Dream(?) Weiss had even specified to him: the fact that the bed he slept in was covered with the stench and stains of sex when he woke up, last he checked, which implied he had done the deed with someone there recently.
But something made no sense as he recalled one of Weiss' points to refute any belief that they DIDN'T do it in there, the fact that he was fully clothed after the fact without even a sign of his clothes being messy or anything.
Assuming it WASN'T all a dream, that he had spent actual time with Weiss and redressed himself after their "do-over", he understood it was feasible.
But then, HOW could it be possible, with the things he was experiencing now, with Yang being his wife?
This couldn't have been a practical joke, especially not at a time like this.
(Even considering that one time Ruby managed to get everyone to pretend she stopped existing for a week, when Weiss said something to that effect in one of her tirades against her leader, for the sake of messing with the heiress' head, this seemed too far-fetched even for Ruby's standards.)
That wasn't even mentioning his notable lack of a hangover, something that was present when he had his "dream", but not when he woke up that day.
Assuming that they had been drinking so much that they wouldn't even recall the wedding the next day (as he STILL couldn't remember that at all even then), Jaune seemed especially fine compared to what he probably should be suffering through, even in silence.
Thus, the resulting conundrums of his various observations made him mentally teeter on the edge of screaming his frustration to the sky, uncaring of what anyone would say, because he might as well be going mad with the mind-fuck that was his memory at that point.
On the outside however, despite the inner turmoil his mind suffered, Jaune was stoic and silent.
"Yang?" He looked over his shoulder at her.
"Yeah?" Yang asked behind him.
"Can you come with me later to try and find the bar we met inside of?" He asked her.
"Huh?"
"I'm just... Well... I wanted to figure out what exactly was going on." Jaune said, turning to face the woman and crossing his arms. "You said the innkeeper gave us the room last night because we were too drunk, right?"
"Uh... yeah." Yang nodded.
Just like in the "dream", Jaune thought.
"I wanted to try going out to see if we can get the story from him. He'd probably have a better idea of it than we do."
"I see..."
Hearing the slight edge to her tone, Jaune spoke uncertainly.
"Do you think it's a bad idea?" Jaune asked her.
"No, not really."
"What's wrong?" He asked, genuinely curious.
She ran a hand along her golden locks.
"I'm a bit scared we left a giant tab when we left." Yang told him, and Jaune wanted to give a rebuttal, but paused.
Given that he was currently washing dishes for a guy who had lent them a room out of common empathy for two drunken newlywed teenagers, he understood where she was coming from.
Unbeknownst to Jaune however, this reasoning was only a half-truth on his spouse's part.
For Emerald, the simple truth of the matter was that she didn't want Jaune to go there and realize her deception in such a way, as this would be liable to cause her to have the authorities on her back.
If he understood who he was, under the wrong conditions, it would only be a matter of time before she found herself in hot water.
(Again, she cursed herself for warping her appearance and façade without properly thinking it over that morning - at the very least, in the bedroom, she could go about knocking him out and getting Cinder if he found out there.)
As she thought about her present condition though, she wondered something, and for a moment more, she hesitated.
"Could I ask you something though?"
"Uh... sure. What?" Jaune asked curiously.
Emerald attempted to alter his hearing as she spoke.
"Can you pronounce the word "chrysanthemum"?"
He paused briefly, as though trying to process what purpose this could serve.
"Verification?" Jaune asked her, repeating the word he'd heard her say due to his warped sense of her.
"Good." Emerald nodded. "Thanks."
That was one base covered, she thought, glad her experiment with her powers was a success.
A/N: If anyone was wondering about Ruby screwing with Weiss, the background behind that was during the Volume 1 era, not long after Ruby became her team leader.
Weiss got mad at Ruby screwing something up, and eventually it boiled over into a tirade against her, something along the lines of how "air" would be a less annoying leader than Ruby as far as Weiss was concerned.
Ruby, hurt by this, ended up just entering a sulk corner, wherein Yang decided to cheer her sister up by concocting a prank to get back at Weiss.
This prank started out innocent enough, with everyone in RWBY (sans Weiss) and JNPR getting in on it by pretending Ruby had never existed, but that their actual team leader had been a person named "Air" whose semblance was to turn invisible.
In order to set up the prank, they went to Ozpin and had their team name rearranged to fit "Air" in as the team leader, and he agreed before decreeing it to all of the staff that they were not to pretend the joke lasted, then they went about taking out EVERY trace of her existence within reach of Weiss, including their custom-made bunk beds..
Of course, when Weiss experiences it, she just assumes Ruby's run off, so she goes and seizes her chance to be leader by going to Ozpin, explaining that since Ruby was gone, she should be her replacement.
Cue Ozpin asking if her team leader's semblance is going off again, and it just escalated from thereon.
People started realizing just what was happening, and it got to the point the entire school was talking about this "Air" person as though they were the single greatest huntsman prodigy in history, eventually treating this made up phenomena as their equivalent of Chuck Norris, and while some joked, others started asking Weiss, Yang and Blake if they could meet "Air" or not, and people just treated it as a ghost that roamed the halls in search of cookies and hot milk.
The prank was only supposed to last a couple days, but it got to that point in the space of a week until Ozpin, Yang and Ruby (who hid from Weiss daily) that it would be enough.
Then Ruby decided to try and get a wig and a whole new outfit for the sake of topping the joke off, and so she and Yang splurged on making Ruby look like a blue ghost wearing a Grimm skin over her back (they may or may not have "borrowed" it from Professor Port) while parading around the school proclaiming that she was Air's ghost daughter from the future come to tell of a great crisis that would befall them, something that could be alleviated if they donated to the cookie dough foundation.
After that, Ruby ditched the costume, came back to her dorm room, and pretended that absolutely nothing was wrong when Weiss came back and found her.
Then Weiss goes tsundere again and acts pissed off because she was worried about what had happened to Ruby, and Ruby, happy at this turn of events, lets it slip that Weiss really did miss her, which resulted in her putting two and two together and realizing it had been a ruse all along.
That was how Weiss began planning her revenge.
But that's a story for another time.
Simply know that Air was there at the Battle for Beacon, and was also there at the Breach.