Blonde Roast, Part 8
Jaune's mind raced a mile a minute as the bus seemed to amble back to Beacon; Torchwick and Junior's heated conversation echoing in his mind. The money that the client had paid with was stolen. Stolen from a man who had threatened, in a packed café in broad daylight, to burn down the very shop in which he stood. And Jaune didn't need to dig to know he was serious; he had finally remembered where he had seen Torchwick before.
The man was on every newscast in Vale every other night of the week. Larceny, robbery, assault; the man had a sheet a mile long, and growing by the day. The next morning, at breakfast, he dropped the guy's name as casually as he could, leading to a snort of derision from Yang.
"That asshole? Haven't heard from him or his bunch since he broke out of General Ironwood's custody." Blake also scowled at the mention of the name.
"I still can't believe he got away; how could the general let his guard down?" she asked angrily. Ruby did her best to calm her teammates.
"He had a lot to worry about with the festival; it's not his fault," Ruby said. She sounded as though she was trying to convince herself, but that wasn't the important part. They knew this guy, they had fought him. They had beaten him before… could he trust them to have his back if this Torchwick guy figured out it was Jaune who had been paid with his money? If Jaune was safe anywhere, it was at Beacon but…
For the second time in a few months, Jaune was stuck between a rock and hard place because of a lie he was on the verge of being caught in. Not for the first time since the events at "The Three Bears" earlier today, he wished he had never taken a job at the coffee shop.
Pyrrha noticed that Jaune was only halfheartedly poking at his breakfast and leaned over, asking what was wrong. For a moment, Jaune contemplated telling her everything. The information he had sold, the money used to pay for his service and how it belonged to Torchwick, how he had lied out of fear, even after promising never to do so again. He could say it all, and he'd be safe, or at least safer.
But he didn't. He kept his mouth shut, and years later he still wouldn't be able to explain why. Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was guilt. It didn't matter. The outcome was the same.
"Nothing, Pyrrha. Just thinking of how relieving it is to finally be able to stop worrying about my dues, is all." Pyrrha smiled at his arm.
"It is good that you're finally free of the debt. But you seem on edge. Are you sure you're alright?" Before she could answer, Jaune's watch alarm went off. He had work today – early shift, his job to go in and open up the shop since Junior was going to be late. He stood and took his tray, dropping it off and shooting a look back at Pyrrha still at the table. He gave a reassuring smile, as best he could muster, and kept walking.
When he got to the shop, the street bustled with its usual energy. A 'Closed' sign hung in the shop's window and as Jaune retrieved the keys from the light fixture and opened the door, he held back for a moment and took stock of his situation and how generally shitty it was at present.
Torchwick was angry. He thought Junior was the one behind his money disappearing, and he wasn't going to stop until he was reimbursed. Unfortunately, Junior was just as tight about holding onto his money as Torchwick was. Neither man was going to back down without a fight, and a fight between Torchwick and the Xiongs was not something Vale could afford right now. Jaune's lie was eating him up inside the same way his first one about working at "The Three Bears" had, except now it was worse because there was a very real chance that Jaune was in danger. Coco and her team were off the grid. Jaune hadn't heard anything in days, and while he knew that team CFVY could handle themselves, he still didn't like being out of the loop. Despite the seemingly short time they had been together, Jaune had come to love the older student. She was all the strength and sass that people knew her for, plus all the charm and sweetness they didn't.
It was then that he also came to recognize everything that he had. An awesome girlfriend who he never would have even imagined would care about someone like him. A team who stuck up for and looked out for them, even when he did a shitty job of returning the favor. Teachers who wanted to see him succeed, friends who helped him succeed, a steady job that he actually enjoyed, a family who loved and missed him and so much more. They say you never knew what you had until you lost it, and Jaune was the lucky one-in-a-million who beat that statistic.
Smiling for what it was worth, he strode into the shop with newfound determination. He could manage this. He had lasted this long, after all. He could wait a few more days, then quit the job – he could tell Junior that his studies were picking up and he couldn't juggle school and work anymore. The gangster wouldn't be happy, but Jaune would be free and more importantly, he'd be out of the line of fire when things came to a head between Junior and Torchwick.
His mind set on that course of action, he took a chair off a table and set it on the floor, proceeding to do so with several more chairs before he noticed the flashing light at the back of the café. A slow, steady red blip coming from inside Junior's office at the back of the shop. Strange.
His curiosity got the better of him, and he set the last chair down before walking to the back of the room. He pushed the slightly ajar door open slowly, and as he did he saw that the light came from the "missed call" button on Junior's old-fashioned phone receiver. Jaune chuckled slightly, wondering just how old Junior really was.
Then his aura flared, his foot clicked, and the world exploded.
When Jaune came to, he was surrounded by people he didn't recognize. Many of them spoke in distant voices, and he couldn't decipher the words. A few were looking down at him, examining him. He became aware that he was staring up into a blue expanse. Strange, he thought. I don't remember them painting the ceiling…
Gradually, he came to get a better feeling for his surroundings. He was in pain. A lot of it. Every part of his body felt as though it had been thrown into a blender. The sky – for he knew it was the sky now and not the ceiling – was too bright and hurt his eyes. His ears were ringing and his lips and tongue were dry and swollen. He tried to sit up and a wave of nausea and pain hit him like a truck full of cement, before several pairs of hands simultaneously pushed him back down, muttering words that sounded soothing but still meant nothing. He felt a prick of pain in his arm and turned his head ever so slightly just in time to see a person sticking a needle into his arm. He barely had time to register that he hated needles before sleep took him once more.
The next time he woke up, everything was clearer. He was in his own bed, back at Beacon. The room was dark and no light came from the window, save the glimmer of the moon high in the sky. Across the room, Ren and Nora had pushed their bunks closer together, the pair sitting up with their backs against the wall as the petite ginger slept soundly on the shoulder of the quiet boy. Closer at hand, Pyrrha was lying on her back, facing the ceiling.
He thought she was asleep, but the moment he stirred she jolted, crying out in surprise. She immediately quieted herself as Nora snorted in her sleep before inching out of bed and across the floor to where Jaune lay, slowly rising. She grabbed a cup of water from the nightstand and forced him to take small sips as his head rang like a steeple full of church bells. "What—" he began to ask before Pyrrha shushed him. She helped him sit up and lean against the frame of the bed, groaning quietly. Pyrrha checked over her shoulder once more to make sure that Ren and Nora were still sleeping before sitting at the foot of Jaune's bed while he took a few more sips of water.
When the feeling of sandpaper in his throat had subsided, he looked at her quizzically and set the cup down. "What happened?" he asked quietly. Pyrrha's eyes flooded with sadness.
"You went to the coffee shop and someone had trapped it. There was an explosion… Jaune, you stood on top of a tripmine. What were you thinking?" Jaune was astonished, and all at once images of a click, a flash and a roar of thunder came back to him.
"I… I didn't do it on purpose. I saw… I saw a light in the back room and when I opened the door to see what it was… Pyrrha, are you saying somebody bombed 'The Three Bears?'" She nodded morosely.
"You were the only one in the building and… Jaune, you don't know just how lucky you are. Your aura protected you from the blast. If it had been anyone else in that shop when the bomb went off… but how do you feel?" Jaune pondered the question, as though he hadn't thought of it before now. He reached out his hands and examined the lengths of his arms, looking for burns, scars, anything. He saw none and Pyrrha obviously took note of his searching. Reaching over and beneath her bunk she withdrew a silvered mirror she had once confided in Jaune was given to her by her grandmother. Jaune held it up before his face and noticed the only sign of the trauma he had endured. Running down from his right temple to the bridge of his nose was a long, sharp-edged scar, already white from time spent healing.
"Pyrrha…" he asked, touching the scar and feeling no pain from it. "How long ago was the shop bombed?" Pyrrha cringed for a moment and Jaune could see tears brimming in her eyes; pearls glimmering in the moonlight before pools of endless green.
"Jaune… it's been six weeks."
No, he thought. There's no way… Instinctively, he began to stand before Pyrrha gently but forcefully pushed him back down. "Pyrrha," he said desperately. "I need—" She pushed him down again.
"You need to rest. Lie back down for a moment…" She reached behind her and grabbed something as Jaune reluctantly did as she asked. She faced away from him for several moments before turning back, the cup of water in her hand. "Drink this," she said as she pushed the cup into his hands. He almost pushed her away before meekly accepting that even if he did, she'd knock him out and force it down his throat if she had to. As he drank down the thick liquid inside the cup, he nearly gagged at the nauseating sweetness of the stuff.
"God, Pyrrha, what the hell is this? It tastes like… why are the walls melting?"
Jaune's unconscious form hit his mattress with a dull thud and a quiet creaking of springs, and Pyrrha sighed as he began to snore softly within moments. What Jaune didn't realize was just how much had happened since he had been out. The bombing at "The Three Bears" was just the start of a rash of violent criminal attacks all over the city. More bombings, drive-bys, organized attacks… the city of Vale did little at first because all the crimes committed were aimed at other criminals; either those with connections to the Xiong family or those owned and run by a mysterious and as-of-yet unknown second faction – supposedly led by notorious criminal Roman Torchwick. What had sparked the war between the two was unknown, but Torchwick was being blamed for the bombing at "The Three Bears," and ever since then Torchwick and the Xiongs had been playing a dangerous game of tit-for-tat with high explosives all across Vale.
The attacks hadn't just been hurting criminals though. Besides Jaune, twenty-three civilians had been hospitalized by the violence, though mercifully none had died. The city projected the monetary loss in property value at over six million lien, and the city had put together a specialized task force of mixed city law enforcement and Huntsmen from Beacon. Everyone now agreed that the sooner the two criminal groups finished their little pissing contest, the better.
Jaune coughed quietly in his sleep and Pyrrha's hand moved slowly out, tracing the space just a few inches from his face and following the line of the scar that wound its way across his eye. Weeks unconscious showed on his face; a scraggly blonde beard followed the edge of his jaw and jumped upward through the gap between his nose and mouth before rejoining the line of facial hair. As her hand hung back, her eyes drifted to the numerous gift baskets piled on the floor next to his bed. A huge bundle of sweets, flowers and books from team RWBY sat next to a cluster of junk food and decidedly inappropriate magazines – the latter shipped all the way from Mistral by Sun and Neptune.
Even the teachers (meaning Ozpin) had chipped in. A defensive-combat manual sat in a more modest basket alongside a Beacon Academy coffee mug and a bag of Vacuan special dark roast. The centerpiece of the gifts though was a bag of additional coffee grounds, chocolates, pastries and hand-written letters from team CFVY and Coco in particular, the letters written by the team's leader while the group was on assignment. CFVY had returned to Beacon three days after the bombing, and only Professor Ozpin's insistence that members of a team could not spend the night in another team's dorm had sent her home each night after a day of quiet vigil at Jaune's side.
Pyrrha sighed. Things would start to move back to normal in the morning, once Jaune woke up, but she figured it would be a long time yet before things were back to the way they had been before. It wasn't just the physical damage; there was no telling what Jaune's outlook on things emotionally and psychologically would be from now on. He might never trust another living soul again; he might grow angry, or moody, or just introverted. His friendships would deteriorate - to say nothing of his relationship - and he'd be forced to endure the long, slow dive into social and emotional vacuum. Pyrrha prayed that such things would not come to pass; nobody deserved that. But it was a reality that was all-too close to real to ignore.
As Pyrrha returned to her own bunk though and settled down for the night, she found one persistent thought plaguing the back of her mind. Jaune had gone in to the shop early to open up the place and the bomb had gone off. But whoever had set the bomb, be it Torchwick or anyone else, would have known that it would have been Jaune in the shop early that morning. You didn't pull a stunt like a bombing without doing your homework; especially when you were a career criminal like Torchwick was. Collateral damage was bad for business, and the bomber wouldn't have hit the shop when they did unless they meant to. Which meant that not only was Jaune the casualty, he was the intended target.
Which begged the question: just what had Jaune Arc gotten himself into?
The next day, Jaune Arc relived his early childhood by learning how to walk again.
Turns out, being blown up and comatose for a month and a half may cause some loss of motor function. Who knew?
The response was overwhelming though. As he made his shaky way across campus, Coco never leaving his side, Jaune received no shortage of "get well soon" and "nice scar" call-outs from passers-by. Jaune even got an appreciative nod from Cardin, who admitted that getting blown up was something not a lot of people could claim. At least not with their own mouths. Jaune smiled weakly. Despite his faults, Cardin wasn't a bad guy. Just stupid - but hey, what was the guy who stepped on a landmine doing calling others stupid?
Jaune was excused from classes, but he stopped by Professor Ozpin's office during lunch to check in. The gray-haired headmaster seemed relieved to see Jaune up and about, and as Jaune sat in one of the surprisingly comfortable chairs in Ozpin's immense office, the two talked at great length about the events leading up to the explosion.
"I hope you know that I don't mean to put any undue pressure on you with these questions," Ozpin said as he stirred his coffee. "But I need to know the answers sooner or later." Jaune nodded.
"I understand, sir," he replied as he gazed down into his own beverage. He told Ozpin everything; from working at "The Three Bears," to not telling his team about it, to telling his team about it, to selling information on the side (making Ozpin the first person to know the secret to Jaune's success), to Torchwick and Junior's fight and finally to the day he went into the shop and set off the bomb. Through it all, the professor listened with muted interest, quietly hinging on every word as he occasionally sipped from his mug. Outside the wide windows of the tower, the grounds bustled and in the distance a few airships made their lazy way across the early-afternoon sky. Jaune had slept clear through semester break, and Spring was rapidly approaching. When he was finished with his tale, Ozpin sighed and set down his mug, the sound reverberating through the space.
"You do understand that, while your intentions were pure, you have now broken school policy on several different occasions, yes? Students taking jobs outside of official work is the big one, but I also feel the need to note that you broke Vale law by selling information - a crime that, on the level you committed, can be considered a felony. Policy dictates that I give you two hours to pack your bags before I throw you out on the street, where you'd have the choice to turn yourself in or go on the run from the authorities. Everything is right here," he said, as he tapped his scroll. His gaze remained placid, but Jaune's electric-blue eyes clouded. He knew all this, of course. Fear had been coursing through his body all day as he anticipated this meeting. He had even prepared all his things, ready to go on a moment's notice. He had planned to turn himself in and receive an alleviated sentence however he could, but he'd still held out hope that Ozpin might show mercy. Now, it seemed that he was wrong.
Then, Ozpin smiled. "It is a terrible shame when technology fails us," he said casually, opening his scroll and flipping through a few pages. "Sometimes you just lose a few photographs or telephone numbers. Other times you lose evidence in substantial trials." He tapped a few more times and smiled with small satisfaction as a message flashed on his screen. "Message Deleted." He set the scroll down and stood, and Jaune did the same. The boy's mouth was agape as Ozpin moved around the table and put a hand on his shoulder. Jaune struggled to find words.
"Sir... Why...?" Ozpin cocked an eyebrow.
"Would you like me to recant my decision? The record stays archived for several hours after it's been deleted." Jaune's eyes widened.
"Nonononono! I mean, no sir, but... Why are you doing this? Why are you giving me a second chance?"
Ozpin smiled. "Jaune, if we persecuted every young man and young woman who made a mistake, the whole world would be imprisoned. It is those who fail to learn from their mistakes who we must be wary of. Learn from your mistakes and never repeat them, and this conversation will remain between us. Be wary though, young man. I will not be this generous if there is a next time, nor will anyone else. Now," he took his hand from Jaune's shoulder and returned to his place behind his desk. "Enjoy the rest of your time off. I expect you to return to your less-physically-strenuous first thing tomorrow."
Later that day, Jaune sat with Coco and watched the sunset from the same bench where they had sat two months before. The same bench where they had said their very-physical goodbye before the latter's mission. Coco told Jaune about the mission while he told her what he dreamed about. Stories of hordes of Grimm and Nora the Cloud Goddess were swapped as the two sat close together and watched the color of the sky shift from blue to orange to pink to red to a hundred thousand colors that Jaune couldn't even name before the sun finally disappeared beyond the horizon.
"So, what are you going to do now to pay for next year? Last I checked, your workplace is a pile of scorched brick and concrete in the middle of a city block." Jaune shrugged nonchalantly.
"I guess I've got enough free time now that I can spend the rest of the year training. By the time next year rolls around, I'll hopefully be ready to go out and do some freelance work." Coco shot him a bemused glance but nodded appreciatively.
"I like when you're confident. It suits that feisty new scar of yours." Jaune blushed and chuckled nervously as his fingers traced the pale thunderbolt that slashed his face. He figured he could come to appreciate the mark. It was a sign of what he had done and how he had survived it. It was a symbol of distinction. Plus, Pyrrha said it added character. He supposed that there weren't many better endorsements than that.
As Coco moved a little closer, Jaune wrapped his arm around her. He found himself remembering all that he had reflected on before he went into "The Three Bears" all those weeks ago. How lucky he was. He believed it, and he wasn't going to let anything compromise it. No more illegal schemes or hiding behind a veil of silence. Jaune had promised his team, his friends and Ozpin that he wasn't going to make any more mistakes. While they had all noted with some bemusement that everyone made mistakes, Jaune was adamant about his pledge. "An Arc never goes back on his word," he had quoted stoically. Jaune Arc was free. He may have been good at making coffee, but Jaune the Barista was only a precursory stage. Jaune the Huntsman was back now, and he had no intention of ever giving up that mantle again.
"So," Coco said, ending the age-long silence. "Suppose we'll have to find somewhere new to get coffee, huh?" Jaune smiled.
"Personally, I think I'm going to stay away from it for a while."
AN – And that was the last chapter. I know I said that I meant to have one more, but I think this is just how I wanted it to wrap up and I didn't want to ramble and draw out the ending. I hope it was satisfactory for you guys, and I'd like to thank you all one last time. This was my first real big Fanfiction project that started as a crazy idea off a Reddit thread and turned into an 8-chapter 24,000-word novella based on one of my favorite shows and dedicated to one of my favorite fanbases. This series has seen a lot happen in between, from the exciting milestone of /r/RWBY's 15,000th subscriber to the tragic passing of Monty Oum. We've been through a lot, and especially in relation to this last one my writing has really been my escape. I wouldn't have continued it if I hadn't seen that it was having an impact.
You guys are fantastic, and as a final parting gift, check out the Reddit link to this story for a little extra treat. Thank you all so much, one last time, and I hope that we may meet again in the future over many more stories.
~LegionOfMisfits