Under the harsh fluorescence, the soft lava lamps and the intrusive glow of the evening news, Weiss looked better than ever. Her long, platinum blonde hair was tied up in an artfully messy ponytail that hung off to the side, held together by what looked like an actual tiara. Weiss was every inch a princess, even when she was drunk off her ass.
I was old enough to know that I couldn't have ever conceivably loved her in my life to this point. I barely knew her. But at the moment, I was crazy enough to believe that I did anyway.
The words tumbled out of my mouth. "You can see it?"
I felt this strange sense of vulnerability like I was about to be the butt of some joke. It could have been something that Yang cooked up. She had made a passing comment about how I seemed to be possessed when I woke up earlier and had a long memory for stuff that was "just a prank, bro." This would fall under the sort of thing that Yang did often and they had ample time to plan something that would unintentionally hurt a lot. Why did girls have to go to the bathroom together?
Weiss looked around, suddenly self-conscious. Junior was leaning over the bar, listening to some dude tell him a story with a host of questionable hand gestures. Most people were more somber and, now that the bar had quieted just a little, I noticed how many people were glaring at their bottles.
She nodded, a palpable sort of relief flooding into her features. I felt better - not just because I knew she wasn't fucking with me, but because she felt better too.
Weiss Schnee brought out an ugly, selfish side of me. It was the side that wanted to marry the rich girl and do nothing with my life. The side that wanted validation from my peers for accomplishments that weren't worth much in the long run. But tonight, it was also the side that wanted some kind of proof that I wasn't crazy.
But this disease infected more than just me. It had spread to her - all those looks in class that I gave her to feed her ego. The little, boneheaded questions that gave her space to monologue about her past and her struggles with family. And tonight, she wanted the same proof of sanity.
I slid into a pleasant fantasy about how we were perfect for each other. It was a terrible idea that made me smile so hard it hurt.
"What does it look like?" I asked, begging her to tell me the truth.
Weiss frowned, perplexed. Her words became a stream of thoughts. "Like nothing and everything. Like the ashes in the air around us but given form. Between that and who we are. Between everything and us." Her slim, white fingers found her crucifix. "God help me."
I didn't understand. I couldn't. I saw no ashes, I saw no angel. I hadn't heard the voice again. Weiss was making less sense than people I'd spoken to at shows who were on acid trips.
The crucifix dug into her fingertips, leaving little red lines. "It's a she." She paused. "I think. She's hazy. I can't really see her, I just know she's there. And when I look for her, I can feel a little of what she feels."
Weiss took a deep breath and clutched at the cross even harder. "Every time I see her, I hope she's smiling at me." She smiled in the way she wanted to see from the angel to demonstrate. It was open and honest and pretty but there was a hint of self-doubt in her mismatched eyes.
The gold glinted as she let go of it and it bounced against the nape of her neck. "We're poor, miserable apes, Jaune. But God loves us," Weiss said.
We sat in silence until Yang swooped in, saving my immortal soul from my thoughts with easy confidence.
"We're going home," she sang out. Uh-oh. Yang had her responsible face on. "We've all had ones too many. Plural."
The bar had begun to empty out. It was a little different than normal but we were living in strange times after all. I was hit with a shred of responsibility that made my stomach turn. What if the Grimm came back tomorrow or even tonight? I was suddenly glad that I hadn't drunk as much as I'd wanted to.
I nodded at Yang, who'd snaked an arm around Weiss's shoulder and was now whispering a joke to her. The hand attached to the arm which pinned the other girl against her gestured wildly and Weiss laughed.
There was something sad and angry in the air that I didn't want to put a name to. I was glad that at least Yang was having a good time.
~Fictional~
I arched my back in a long stretch as I emerged from the bathroom. My arms came back down really quickly. Belatedly, I had hoped I remembered to zip up. I looked downwards surreptitiously until I found myself back to where Yang and Weiss were now rocking back and forth on the bar, singing something I didn't recognize.
I slammed my hands onto Yang's shoulders, showering her with droplets of water. "I feel like a new man!"
"Gross," Yang trailed off, flipping her hair back. "What took you so long?"
I pointed at the line in front of the men's room.
"Fair enough," she muttered. Her head found the surface of the bar for half a second before she abruptly stood up. Weiss shrieked in surprise.
Weiss stood too and immediately found Yang to lean on. Her face was flushed red now. Her eyes dropped shut. I pointed at her and tried to find words of alarm but ended up exchanging glances with Yang. Thankfully she seemed to know what I meant.
"Maybe I should give sleeping beauty 'ere a kiss to wake her up," Yang slurred.
Not quite what I meant.
Weiss jerked upwards. "I'm fine!" she squeaked, carefully maintaining a bit of distance from Yang.
Yang wasn't deterred. She closed the gap between them in a second. "Of course you're fine in the arms of Sir Yang Xiao-Long," she said, deepening her voice comically.
"You're making me very uncomfortable," I said, mostly for Weiss's sake. I turned to the other girl, who struggled against Yang's grip to no avail. "Yang gets a little crazy when she doesn't have someone to go back with."
"Hey!" Yang shouted at me, offended. I purposefully strode towards the door, both to corral Yang and Weiss out of the bar and to see if I could walk in a straight line. I was a little more successful than Weiss but somehow less so than Yang, who was very good at pretending she was sober.
I pulled the door of the bar open and was hit by a blast of cold air. The streets were still a little iced over. There was no sign of mist anywhere.
It was thankfully easy to guide Weiss along the brightly lit streets of Vale. The concrete was newly paved. Though Beacon itself was on a hill, Vale was a relatively flat city.
"Are you feeling better, Yang?" I asked, somewhat quietly, as we stumbled towards Beacon's campus.
She nodded, counting the stars in the sky. "You were right," she decided.
"About?"
Yang shrugged helplessly. "Bringing Ruby out. She deserved to have a night like this."
"There will be more nights like this," I promised. It sounded hollow, despite my state of mind.
Yang shook her head. "Junior says he'll be closing up the bar soon and driving south. He's got family in Virginia," she said. "I don't think I'll ever see him again. I don't know who he is, what his life was like, anything other than the fact that he's good at listening to ranting when you're drunk," she said, her words coming out in a flurry. "But it still makes me sad to say that."
We reached a side gate after a few moments and I raised my wallet to the scanner. It beeped once. The little red led turned green and the lock buzzed.
Yang pulled it open.
"Weiss?"
There was no response but she walked through the gate with us dutifully.
"Weiss?" Yang repeated. Weiss shook her head into Yang's arm. Her face made a ruffling noise against Yang's parka. "Where do you live, Weiss?" Yang asked, shaking the girl.
Beacon's freshman dorms were spread out over the northern side of the campus and named after the seasons.
"Autumn," Weiss finally replied. "Autumn 204." She gave up any pretense of alertness and slumped against Yang again.
"I'll come with," I started, thinking of cold mist, but Yang shook her head.
"I know it can be dangerous out here," Yang conceded. "But you're wasted, Jaune," she said. "You look like you're about to hurl. Just go back and text me in the morning. We'll make breakfast or something."
I nodded gratefully. Autumn was next to Yang's dorm and on the other side of the green from where I lived.
"Good night," I said to them as I drew myself up and walked towards my building.
~Fictional~
Spring Hall was deserted when I returned. There were no students standing outside smoking and I could only count two lighted rooms from the courtyard. Unlike the brave souls who were so certain of their invincibility or too naive to stop themselves, most people had not gone out to drink.
Mostly everyone was gone from the campus, on their way home by plane, train or car. Those who weren't probably pretended there was nothing wrong with the world and hid away in their dormitories, playing games like Ruby. An eastern european kid who lived on Yang's floor who'd spotted me a calculator during one of Professor Port's exams last semester had been studying in her floor lounge when we'd left for the bar. He was probably still there now.
It was a strange sight. I was used to the liveliness of Friday nights at Beacon, when the future of the world would leave their ambitions behind and, to quote Yang, get down. Beacon's campus was legendary for how much of a good time it was. Despite complaints from the board of trustees and even from some parents, Dean Ozpin refused to enact any disciplinary measures for students caught with alcohol. There was even one weekend in October in which Cardin had gone streaking across campus - after the Dean himself had chased the boy down in a golf cart, Cardin was driven back to the dorm wearing a tarp, without a punishment.
I imagined that it got silent like this over the summer but it felt wholly unnatural and contributed to the sense of fear building at the tip of my consciousness. I let the thick glass doors slam behind me for emphasis just to disturb the silence. It echoed.
The fluorescent tubes which lit the hallways were a bright yellow and white, but seemed a little colder than usual. There was no body heat - no crazy bitches breaking bottles and obnoxious frat bros whipping each other with towels. I could hear the slight thumps of my feet indenting the blue-gray carpeted floor as I walked along and read the names of the residents along my hall. They'd been written on postcards from all over the world and taped to the doors by our RA.
I stood in front of my own door for a moment.
London, Jaune Arc. Shanghai, Cardin Winchester.
I stared at the postcards and let the emptiness overtake me. I pulled out my phone with the sudden urge to check the snapchat he'd sent me in the morning.
It was the profile of a hooker dressed as a playboy bunny. The caption read "she calls herself Velvet". A hand belonging to my late roommate tugged at one of the ears on the costume. After a few seconds, the snapchat disappeared. I dropped the phone back into my jeans pocket and put my hand on the doorknob. The world seemed a little less real.
The key slipped into the lock with a click. As the door opened inwards, I felt myself lean back slightly as though I'd been hit by something I couldn't see. It smelled of cinnamon and sex.
Cardin used to live in this room.
I walked forward and the door closed behind me. I groped at the wall.
"You wouldn't turn on the light if you knew what was good for you."
I jumped. My back hit the door with a metallic thwack. "Who's there?" I asked, my hands flying to my pocket, ready to call the police, to text Yang, to do something. But in an instant, I stopped. A cold sobriety worked its way through my drunken haze.
It was the voice.
I let my hand fall to my side easily and leaned against the wall next to the door. The question came to me easily. "Who are you?"
A soft laugh, sensual.
The moon shone through the window, blindingly bright. It left blind-shaped shadows on the ground between the two beds on the opposite side of the room. There were a handful of batteries and an xbox controller on the ground, as well as one of my hoodies. A half-used roll of paper towels stuck out from underneath my bed, on top of a box of cookies i'd meant to give to Ruby sometime this weekend.
"I don't have a name here. I'm not allowed. Names have power, after all."
The voice came from Cardin's bed, an improper angle to be lit by the direct glow of the moon.
"Not allowed?" I closed my eyes, willing them to adjust to the darkness.
"You may demand it," said the voice. It was silky, with a deep, cultured timbre. This was the voice of someone who spent their time in museums and listened to live chamber music.
"Why wouldn't you be allowed to have a name?" I asked, a little dogmatically. The woman had invaded my room, had taken Cardin's bed and was now spouting some kind of gibberish that made sense to me in ways that weren't logical.
The laugh again. It sent a chill through my spine but it was a pleasant feeling and not a fearful one.
"In many ways, I'm closer to the Grimm than I am to you, Jaune." My name slid over her tongue with a tender affection. I decided this was what it felt like to have an older lover or an extramarital affair.
My eyes finally found purchase in the shapes of the dark room and traced her silhouette perched on Cardin's bed. She was sprawled forward, her wrist tucked under her shoulders, which hugged the dead man's sheets. She'd been reading in a way that reminded me of how a lioness might hold court. I roamed over the exaggerated curve of her back and her long, slightly bent legs. A thigh rested against the far wall and her feet traced lazy patterns against the headboard. She'd been reading Cardin's chemistry textbook.
"After all, I'm just fictional."
My throat was dry. I swallowed, hard, but I couldn't clear the lump that pinched at my trachea.
"But every moment, I'm becoming more real," she said. She sounded like victory and last hurrahs.
"What are you?" I whispered. The shape of her body was too perfect, her voice too enchanting. She'd been in my locked room and she'd spoken to me during my chemistry exam. She'd known what the Grimm were before the news reports, before anyone had chosen to call them Grimm. She'd said those strange, strange words that I recalled every inflected syllable of that seemed to make everything around me more than it was.
As my eyes got more and more used to the darkness, I could see a pair of beautiful, wide amber eyes crinkle into a smile.
"I'm a visitor."
A little bit of resentment bled into my voice, amplified by the alcohol coursing through my veins merrily. "Can you stop being so cryptic?" I half-shouted in irritation. I pushed my palm against the wall. "Where are you from? If you don't have a name, what do people call you? And," I stopped. My voice became something smaller. "Why is this happening to me?"
The smile fled her face. She slowly slid her legs over the side of the bed and dragged one over the other. Her back straightened slowly. She was wearing a loosely buttoned vest with tails over an undershirt that exposed her midriff. A pair of white shorts that Yang would have found risque hugged her hips over a pair of glossy black stockings. A pair of high heeled boots had been discarded neatly at the foot of Cardin's bed. Around her neck was a thick, black silk scarf.
Her hands fiddled with a large, black bow that sat on her head. It looked like a nervous habit. In the dim light, I saw a deep little cut on her cheek which welled up with blood. I recoiled in fear or arousal.
"I'm not from here," she finally said. She drew an errant hand to gesture at Beacon, at everything. She sounded disappointed to admit it. I could only come to a single conclusion.
Impossible things had happened today but that was on another level. "Another world?" I asked, unable to keep the skepticism out of my voice. "Are you a Faerie from the Nevernever? Are you here to make me a Death God?" I sighed, running out of steam as quickly as I'd built it out. A profound tiredness settled over me. "What did they call you back home?" I wondered, humoring her.
The disappointment disappeared from her face, replaced by a savage triumph.
"A good question," she purred. "I don't know what my parents named me, but everyone who mattered to me called me Blake. Blake Belladonna."
The question left my lips before I could stop myself. "Were you a porn star?"
Instead of taking offense, she laughed. It was unlike her other laughs - this was something more deep and throaty. "You're the same, no matter where I go," she decided.
My face burned in humiliation. I was wholly incapable of controlling my motor mouth after even a sip of liquor, it seemed. Then her words registered with me.
"What do you mean by that? Have we met?" I couldn't control the confusion that had overtaken me and thus fell victim to a potent headache. I turned to sarcasm like an old friend. "Were there lots of other Jaunes in the multiverse?"
She looked a little angry now - maybe because I wasn't taking her seriously or maybe because I was glaring at her, blaming her for my headache. "When the last of mankind sputters out like a candle, the Grimm move on," Blake said imperiously, by way of explanation.
I didn't understand it and she knew that, so she continued after a deep breath.
"When they move on, so do I."
The implications of what she said were so serious and upsetting that I believed her for a moment. Weiss's words came back to me. "Are you an angel?"
The movement of her shoulders did wonderful, voluptuous things to her body. "I don't know. I haven't met anyone else like me," Blake confessed.
"But you've met me, or people like me," I finished for her. Amongst my admittedly small group of friends, Ruby was the only one who could lay claim to any deep knowledge of particle physics but I was truly beginning to consider that Blake could be a dimensional traveler of some sort.
"Many times." She didn't seem happy about it or particularly mournful.
My mind ran in wild circles. "If you've met so many of me and so little of you, do you think you somehow killed all your parallel counterparts?" I wondered, excited about the possibilities.
The troubled look on her face reminded me once again that I had nothing in the way of tact.
Blake picked at her nails with a thumb and shook her head slowly. "I don't think so," she said, looking a little lost and very lonely. "I'm forced to conclude that either the Grimm only go places where I don't exist." Her words hung in the air with a dubious question. "Or that maybe I simply never existed in the first place."
I couldn't convince her that she existed because I wasn't entirely sure that I wasn't just crazy, so I said the only thing I could think of.
"Cogito, ergo sum," I whispered to her, like a prayer. I'd taken Philosophy 101 last semester. Somehow, Descartes sounded like a platitude with my atrocious American accent and my heavy doubts.
She shrugged again and smiled at me, looking thankful that I tried, at least.
"But why me?" I asked, desperate both to know and to move away from the strain of existentialism that had cropped up in our conversation.
"It felt right this time," Blake said. "Someone has to save Weiss, after all."
I smiled in a faraway manner that Weiss would never know about. "She's too pretty to die."
The smirk that bloomed on her face infuriated me.
"I'm sure you're about to tell me that there's no world where I'm actually in a relationship with Weiss Schnee."
The smirk widened.
"But you'd be factually wrong," I shouted. "There has to be an infinite amount of worlds where that fact is actually true-"
I deflated, sighing. I picked myself up off the wall and stomped over to my bed, which I laid back into, propping up a bunch of pillows so I could stare at her while I rested.
There was nothing I could think of to stall the inevitable elephant in the room. "So why are you here?"
Blake smiled. Her lips were glossy and her teeth were sharp. "Why, I'm your new roommate, Jaune."