Jaune resumes training that night. With Pyrrha's voice still echoing in his head, Jaune rolls out of bed hours after midnight and dresses without waking Amarilla. Soundlessly, he sneaks out of his room and then out of the house to the family's barn. Inside, amid the piles of hay, Jaune grabs one of their pitchforks. It's not Crocea Mors, not by a long shot, but it's heavy and offers him resistance when he swings it. His muscles have lost a lot of their definition from his weeks curled in bed. But he remembers Pyrrha's basics and thinks that he can live with himself for being a failed hunter, but he can't live with himself for lying to Pyrrha.

So he trains. Basic forms and hit combos he used to rehearse with Pyrrha. He's awful at all of them, but he drills them until his arms are burning and he gets a little less awful.

He does this for a week straight, pushing himself to the point of collapse, until he actually collapses during one of his self-imposed drills in a boneless pile of sweat and exhaustion.

"You okay?"

Jaune shrieks and swings his pitchfork around to see Amarilla dangling her legs over the edge of the hayloft above him. She's popping blueberries into her mouth.

"How long have you been there?!" he demands.

"Tonight? Or the last couple of nights?" she says with a neutral expression.

Jaune groans and drops the pitchfork, collapsing back on his stomach.

"Are you okay?" she asks, smirking a little now.

"Ask me again once the heart attack passes," Jaune mumbles into the hay below him. "I thought you were sleeping."

"Explosions and near-Grimm experiences make you half-deaf, right? Do you know how creaky our house is? You're in the room with me." She arcs a blueberry high and catches it easily. "Also, twin telepathy."

"At least tell me you didn't hear me talking to myself," Jaune moans.

"I did not hear you talking to yourself," she repeats with a mischievous lilt. In a beat, she swings over onto to the wooden ladder beside her and starts sliding down to Jaune's level. "But if I had heard such a thing, I might say your Pyrrha Nikos impersonation could use some work."

Jaune gets back on his feet with a sour look, but stops when he spots Amarilla grabbing a second pitchfork. "What are you doing?"

Amarilla fiddles with the tool, balancing it on the ground and bouncing it from hand to hand awkwardly. She doesn't look directly at Jaune. "Could you, um, teach me?"

"Ama, I'm terrible," he says. He can't believe she's actually asking him this. It should be obvious that he is the least qualified person to instruct anyone on being a hunter.

"My birds-eye-view says different," Ama answers a little defensively.

Jaune looks his sister over critically. "Um, why?"

She swings the pitchfork across her shoulders like a scarecrow and looks at her feet. "In nursing, you help people who have already gotten hurt. But hunting… You stop them from getting hurt. It's just as important." Amarilla looks up at Jaune hopefully. "Maybe you could teach me some things and I could teach you other things?"

It takes him a moment to realize she's being serious. He smiles a little. "Okay. I'm going to be an awful teacher though."

Amarilla's confidence returns. "I'm gonna be an awful student. So there's that."

Jaune taps his toe as he thinks, then puts his pitchfork aside. His arms are burning and done for the night anyway. "Let's start with unlocking your aura," Jaune says. "And I know it sounds like I sneezed, but—"

"Aura is a manifestation of the soul, used by hunters for bodily protection and to power their Semblances," Amarilla recites.

"How do you know that?"

"Jaune, Auralogy is a whole thing," she says with a laugh. "It's a whole field of medicine."

Jaune grumbles to himself and Amarilla laughs a little louder.

"No, wait. I gotta hear this. How did you think hunters kept from being Grimm-chow?" she asks earnestly.

Jaune stares at his feet for a long beat, turning redder and redder until he mutters, "I thought hunters were born with invulnerable skin."

Amarilla cackles.

"No one told me, okay?" Jaune says, pouting. "Do you want me to help or not?"

Her laughter turns to giggles. "Sorry, sorry." Amarilla clears her throat, and with a posh accent reminiscent of Weiss, says, "Please, continue."

Grumbling, Jaune steps up to his sister, putting one hand on her shoulder and one over her heart. "Just breathe. And, uh, be patient." Jaune makes a face of concentration. "I'm gonna try to remember a really complicated poem I only heard once."

Training becomes a nightly routine. Amarilla says she doesn't mind the weird sleep schedule. She'll have to get used to it for nursing rotations eventually. Jaune compensates with after-school naps that make his mother start worrying about his health. He excuses it as exhaustion from catching up on his studies. Mrs. Arc asks if he'd like to join a study group at school, that she and his father would allow that if he thinks it will help. Jaune tries not to decline too fervently. The last thing he wants is to spend more time with his hounding classmates and his overwhelming popularity at school.

Jaune's training make slow progress. He rehashes all of Pyrrha's basics as he teaches them to Amarilla. When her posture is wrong, he demonstrates and fixes her and lets her try again, like Pyrrha did for him. Jaune retraces his whole learning curve and actually starts to understand the moves better when he has to explain them to his sister. She teases him through a lot of it. Not because he's bad, but because he keeps trying to imitate Ozpin or Goodwitch or Pyrrha when he talks.

When either of them gets a particular swing or thrust just right, Amarilla calls time-out and takes a couple minutes to explain to Jaune, in all the gory glory of a medical textbook, what that particular move would have done to the human body without aura. She smiles as Jaune squirms and pales, and then tells Jaune how to hypothetically fix it. Tie off circulation if it's an appendage, remove any dust fragments that might have gotten into the wound to prevent infection, boost their aura with yours if it looks like you won't make it to a hospital within a half hour. It's all helpful — if a little detailed coming from Amarilla.

As they train, Amarilla props her scroll up on two rusty nails so that they can keep track of the time. Every night, she tires out earlier than her brother and leaves Jaune to do a little training on his own, conveniently leaving her scroll behind. Jaune drills his own slightly more advanced training until he can barely lift his pitchfork, then he rewards himself by messaging Pyrrha. She's almost always asleep at the hour he finishes, so he sends her a single long message with updates on his life. Most nights, he sends it and deletes it from the scroll so Amarilla can't tease him about it and heads to bed.

Some nights though, he'll run later than usual or Pyrrha will get up a little earlier for her morning jog, and with their time difference, they just catch each other. Those are the nights Jaune doesn't sleep, grinning as he slouches against a hay bale and messages back and forth with Pyrrha until it's time for class. He tells her about his Ursa fight and she's so proud. She won't even let him claim one element as being 'just lucky'. He asks her questions about fighting; Pyrrha sends him links to videos she used when she was starting out and offers suggestions to tighten his training regiment. She tells him all about challenging class assignments and partner auditions, and she keeps him up-to-date on the exciting tales of their team and RWBY. Sometimes Jaune even regales her with what's going on in his sisters' lives, seeing as the highlight of his day is always talking with her.

Pyrrha asks if he's happy being back home. Jaune always tactfully skirts around the truth. All the while, he restrains himself from saying I miss you as much as he really wants to. Which is really every single text message.

The scroll keeps buzzing one night, earlier than usual. It vibrates so often it threatens to fall off the nails where it's hooked. Every time it does, Jaune sighs with half a smile and ignores it, focusing instead on Amarilla's shield bash. They were using the metal lid of the compost bin.

"She sure is frisky tonight," Amarilla teases, repeating the move as Jaune tells her to.

Jaune blushes. "What? No! It's not Pyrrha." He rolls his eyes, but his fake annoyance is only to mask his amusement. "Nora is on a bit of a sugar high. She's been harassing me all night on Pyrrha's phone because she can't sleep. Apparently, Pyrrha wiped the floor this morning in a sparring session with my old bullies. Nora insists Pyrrha is going to be humble about it so I need to hear the full story from her." He shakes his head, smiling. "Anyway, thrust again, a little higher."

Amarilla drops her shield arm, watching Jaune carefully.

He comes back to the moment, his smile fading. "You tired already?"

"Jaune, you need to talk to dad," she says seriously. "You should be back at Beacon."

Jaune's heart stutters at the words. Reality comes back soon enough though.

"I can't," he mumbles, dropping his pitchfork and gaze to the floor. "You know how dad is when he's made up his mind."

"He hasn't seen you fight," Amarilla insists. "He hasn't seen the way you light up when you talk about your team."

"...my former team," Jaune corrects. Amarilla pretends she doesn't hear.

"Dad's going to be back in a few days from his mission. Get him when he's happy after dinner and talk to him. " She looks exasperated as she motions to him. "You're miserable here. Even Gia's noticed and she doesn't notice the weather! Most of the day you're a zombie until you're swinging a rusty pitchfork with me at four in the morning on a school night."

The scroll buzzes again with another message from Nora. Jaune looks at it longingly before shaking his head firmly.

"I already know what he's going to say," he mutters.

Amarilla huffs, annoyed. "Fine. It's your life." She sets her shield and pitchfork on the ground. "I'll see you in the morning."

She leaves him alone in the barn, and he's angry because Amarilla makes it sound so easy. Like it's something anyone could do. But dad never looks at her like he wishes she were someone else. Dad never makes her feel like she's responsible for the family legacy.

Jaune puts down his weapon stand-ins and goes to retrieve the scroll. He scans the obscenely long string of text messages offering a play-by-play of Pyrrha's fight with CRDL, till he reaches the last one. It's from Ren, apologizing for Nora's behavior and promising that he has taken the phone away from her and that they are both going to bed. He hopes Jaune's doing well.

Jaune sighs and taps through Amarilla's scroll to open a writing app. He starts drafting a speech.

After dinner on the night of Mr. Arc's return, Jaune knocks on the door to his father's study. Mr. Arc calls him in and Jaune braces himself as he crosses the threshold.

His father's study is warm, located in the center of the house where there are no windows. His father's equipment hangs off the back of the door and papers litter his desk with town council duties. High above the empty fireplace, Crocea Mors rests on ornate brass hooks for all to see. In the corner of the room, his great grandfather's full set of armor shines within an upright glass presentation case. The fancy lights around it make it look shinier than it really is.

"Jaune? What is it?" his father asks.

Jaune snaps out of his daze and tears his eyes away from the family heirlooms. With a raised brow, Mr. Arc looks his son up and down.

"You're still grounded," he says gruffly. "If that's what you're here asking about."

"It's not. N-Not exactly," Jaune stammers.

Mr. Arc waits, crossing his arms over his desk. "Well?"

"I-I want…" Jaune digs his nails into his palms. "I want to go back to Beacon, dad."

"To visit your friends," Mr. Arc suggests carefully, knowing full well that's not what Jaune meant but giving him an out.

Jaune shakes his head. But his next words, I want to be a hunter, stay lodged in his throat under the critical gaze of his father.

After a long moment, Mr. Arc leans back in his chair and sighs. "Why did you do it? Why the lying and the stealing and the cheating."

"You weren't going to let me go," Jaune says.

"They weren't going to let you in, Jaune," Mr. Arc corrects. "And I think, in your intelligent mind, you knew that, didn't you. Not unless you had fake scores and a famous family name and our forged approval."

Jaune folds in on himself, his shoulders to his ears. "Dad—"

"I know you want to help people," his father continues. "You and Ama, ever since you were little. All you wanted to do was help others. But there are ways to help others that are less dangerous. Less risky. Can you imagine what it would do to your mother if anything happened to you?"

Shuffling from foot to foot, Jaune tries to keep his eyes on his father, when really all he wants is to sink into the floor. "But you… You go out and do it all the time."

"And who's here to take care of your mother and the girls while I'm away?" his father challenges. "Who is going to look after them if anything were to ever happen to me?"

Jaune knows the answer but can't say it aloud. His tongue won't work.

"I wouldn't trust anyone else to do it," Mr. Arc says with a note of finality. When Jaune doesn't say anything for a long minute, Mr. Arc gives his son a thorough once-over. "Your mother tells me you're not sleeping well."

With his eyes on the floor, Jaune nods.

His father sighs. "If you would like to do something with your sisters or your friends tomorrow night while your mother and I are at the mayor's dinner, you are allowed. Your grounding still holds, but I will make an exception for your health. Get some fresh air."

Jaune nods again and turns to go. He throws Crocea Mors one last glance before he leaves.

In bed that night, Jaune wants nothing more than to curl up and sleep, to curse himself and his father and his whole unfortunate luck. It would be easy. He hasn't had a full night's sleep in weeks. And it isn't like anyone is expecting him to do anything but rest. He reaches into his bedside table and pulls out the paper Ozpin had pressed into his hands when he'd left. It's a link to the online portion of the Beacon entrance exam. The one Ruby took, and passed, after Ozpin was impressed by her skill. The one he originally forged.

When the digital clock between his bed and Amarilla's hits scheduled training time, he shuts the alarm off before it can fully wake his sister and sits up with a purpose.

"I'm going to do some solo stuff tonight," he tells her in the dark, pulling up his pants. Amarilla gives him a weak mumble of confirmation.

Jaune marches out to the barn and snatches the metal cover off the compost bin. He grabs the pitchfork from wherever it was left. With a heaving breath on the very verge of tears, Jaune takes a stance in the middle of the barn.

He repeats to himself Pyrrha's pre-training instructions. Shield up. Grip tight. Front foot forward. Stance wide. Shield up. Grip tight. Front foot forward. Stance wide. He remembers her voice and it soothes him, pushes him back from the edge. You're mad; he's not. He has all the control over your momentum. All the control.

His breath steadies. His vision clears. He tightens his grip and stares down an imaginary Beowulf.

With a muted yell, Jaune swings.

Jaune's parents leave in the early evening to their gala and leave Gia in charge of the house. They're not gone ten minutes before Gia comes down the stairs, dressed for a date.

"Is it still the son of the metalsmith?" Rawaya asks.

"Yes," Gia says simply, proudly. She looks at her four siblings. Rawaya is washing the dishes in the sink. Amarilla is making plans with her friends on her scroll. Flava is watching a romantic comedy on the TV. Jaune stands awkwardly in the corner of the room, waiting for the right moment to escape out to the barn and get some extra training done.

"Heading out. Don't burn the house down," Gia announces. She walks towards Jaune and the door and stops right in front of him. "Dad said grounding was lifted." She raises a brow. "You have plans tonight?"

Jaune shakes his head. "Not unless one of you want to do something."

Gia smiles mysteriously and pulls out Jaune's scroll from her pocket. She places it in his stunned hands. "In case you go out. Don't say I never help." She musses up his hair. Then she's gone into the night like a shadow.

Clutching his scroll like it might vanish if he lets it go, Jaune announces that he'll be in his room. He locks his door, plugs in the scroll, and waits for the battery to charge enough to turn on.

He has over five hundred messages. Texts asking how he is and telling him about adventures, pictures of the new students and of weapon upgrades and class excursions, training videos from Pyrrha and goofing off videos from Ruby, sound clips of Oobleck and Port's classes recorded by Blake and Ren. He never imagined he'd miss those.

Jaune gives the alerts a sweeping glance, feeling his heart swell. But he'll have time later to read through them. He props the scroll on top of his headboard and video calls Pyrrha.

The call connects to an image of Pyrrha in bed wearing reading glasses. She has a book laying flat against her chest. She's thrilled. "Jaune! What an unexpected surprise."

"I got my grounding lifted for tonight," Jaune tells her proudly. "Are you in bed already?"

"Just reading, I'm afraid," she says, holding up the book for him to see. "It's one of Blake's."

Jaune does a double take. "Are you wearing glasses?"

The glasses disappear off her face with a flick of her Semblance. "No," she says quickly, blushing.

"I...I didn't know you wore glasses," he says, sincerely intrigued by the concept. He'd lived with her for a whole semester and had never noticed.

Pyrrha sighs and the spectacles gradually float back onto her face. "I try not to advertise it. Tournament fighter and all," she says sheepishly. "Anything less than 20/20 is a disadvantage. I keep my contacts a secret too."

Jaune smiles understandingly. At least it wasn't something glaringly obvious that he missed. "They look nice on you," he says, because it's true. Combined with the messy bun she's currently sporting, they make Pyrrha look softer around the edges. Less intense.

She laughs nervously, glowing a little pinker. "Oh, I'm sure they'd look nice on anyone," she says. "What are you doing tonight now that your grounding is lifted?"

"Talking to you," he says with a grin. He takes the scroll and holds it over his head as he lies down. "I don't know if I mentioned it before, but I miss you."

Pyrrha laughs outright. "It's a Friday night and you're a free man. You should be out on the town!"

"So should you," he counters, realizing something. "Hey, if secret-glasses Pyrrha is out, where are Nora and Ren?"

"They're, um, out," Pyrrha says, shifting the scroll a little. She looks over at the door. "Yes, they're...out."

"Doing what?" Jaune asks.

"Whatever it is they do," Pyrrha dodges. "I didn't want to intrude. I told them to go on without me, I was fine with this excellent book."

Jaune's brow scrunches. "What about RWBY?"

"They're doing something tonight also."

"Couldn't you have mooched off their plans?"

"I don't like to mooch," Pyrrha answers shyly, tucking hair behind her ear and not making eye contact with him. "Really, I wanted to stay in tonight and read a book and perhaps talk with you when you went to train."

Jaune bites his lip, debating whether or not to push the issue. Pyrrha hated being alone, and he knows from their text conversations that despite a handful of auditions, JNPR has been a three-man team for almost the entire semester now, making Pyrrha the odd man out. Spending her Friday alone willingly felt like self-sacrifice at the level of martyrdom.

He doesn't need to say anything, it turns out. After a long minute of awkwardness, Pyrrha sighs and rubs her eyes, jostling her glasses. "It's...It's the night of the dance tonight, Jaune," she confesses.

Jaune balks. "Then why aren't you at the dance?"

"Because…" She stares at the floor. "Because nobody asked me."

"Someone's pranking you," Jaune says immediately. "They have to be, you… You're Pyrrha Nikos."

"I've told you how hard it's been," she says softly, "for Ozpin to find me another partner. This is… It's the very same thing." She closes her book and sets it aside. "I've been incredibly fortunate, Jaune. I've been given incredible talents and opportunities; I'm constantly surrounded by praise and adoration. But when you're placed on a pedestal like that for so long..." Pyrrha pauses to sigh. She stares at something across the room. "Everyone assumes I'm out of their league. That this pedestal they've placed me on is simply unreachable. It's become impossible to form any sort of meaningful relationship with anyone, so—"

"I would have gone with you."

Pyrrha makes eye contact with Jaune through her screen. She offers a tiny smile. Hopeful. "You… You would have?"

"Of course I would have," Jaune says earnestly. He knew about the partner issue with Ozpin, but hadn't thought much of it. Pyrrha was plenty intimidating until you got to know her, and Jaune was convinced someone would get to know her. He never considered that people would be too scared to even try. "We could've gone as friends. Or partners, like Nora and Ren!"

She laughs a little, breathlessly. "Ren and Nora offered to keep me company if I wanted to go stag. But I felt like such a burden. I didn't want a stranger to start asking questions about why I was alone tonight."

"Well, you're not alone tonight," Jaune says, flipping onto his stomach and smiling warmly at her. "You've got me."

Her smile turns shy. "You know, Ruby asked Ozpin if you could be invited back as her friend-date."

Jaune props his chin in his hand, heart racing. "For real? That's...really cool of her. What did he say?"

"He told her if you wanted to come, you would find a way," she says without a hint of bitterness. It's all encouragement. "But it's alright. You probably wouldn't have enjoyed yourself anyway."

"Really?" he teases. "Because I'm a great dancer."

Pyrrha laughs with a little more gusto, and a little more sadness leaves her eyes. "I had no idea."

Jaune grins, pausing his video. "Hold on one second."

He jumps up from the bed and quickly shuffles through Amarilla's half of the closet. From the paused video, he can hear Pyrrha asking, "Jaune? What are you doing?"

When he turns the video back on a couple minutes later, he's in one of Amarilla's dresses, grinning like a fool. Pyrrha laughs so hard, Jaune fears she might swallow her glasses.

They talk through the entire night until Jaune's parents, and Ren and Nora, come home.

Author's Note: Just a quick dip back into canon so you can see roughly where we are parallel to the main timeline.