Weiss Schnee was paralyzed with indecision as hundreds of thoughts and feelings assaulted her mind, her brain was conflicted with her heart, reason and emotion were at odds, her training and her instinct clashed against each other. In the end she disregarded everything her brain could think of, and instead chose to follow a memory of sister's advice.
Every time Winter had trained with her, she would give her lectures in an attempt to hone her ability to think while under pressure, and at the end of each spar she would be quizzed. Although Weiss wasn't born with excellent academic prowess, she would memorize every word her sister had spoken. In one such lecture was the topic of medical aid on the battlefield.
After a few minutes Weiss had finished her assessment of his injuries and was done treating the Arc boy as best as she could. If he died now, it wouldn't be her fault, she had done everything she could, no one could blame her.
She was kneeling down near the whimpering boy, his face was smeared with tears, blood and mud. Even now she didn't trust her brain to be functioning at her preferred capacity, so she had allotted every ounce of her focus on ensuring the young man didn't pass away.
Weiss blinked as the boy coughed up blood, specs of red ruining her previous pristine outfit, she would have to send him the bill for her dry cleaning when this was all over. Again the boy coughed, this time with less blood, but it had also sounded like a choke.
As she moved her hands to feel around his throat to check for any broken bones or swelling, her ice blue eyes met a sky blue eye stained with red. Weiss was momentarily frozen as her heart threatened to fill her thoughts with emotions, and then she spoke. "Glad to see you're awake, can you tell me if you can feel your fingers and toes?" Although her sister had told her to speak in an upbeat tone, so the patients didn't panic, Weiss' voice was colder than ice.
The boy didn't show any signs of intending to answer her question, instead his only open eye stared blankly into her face.
"Arc, blink twice if you can understand me."
The only response she got was more wet coughing.
"Arc! Blink if you hear me!" She screamed into the face of the dying boy. "Just do anything except die right now!"
A whine escaped his throat, and after a few seconds he blinked twice.
Again, her heart almost overwhelmed her brain, but she was able to shut it down in time. "Great, now tell me what the hell is wrong with you! Are you an idiot!? Why aren't you healing with your Aura!? I doubt a Huntsman in training wouldn't have enough Aura to survive a fall of that caliber, so I'm guessing you lost your cool and panicked before you hit the ground, so you should have more than enough Aura to at least set your bones back in place. Now hurry up, I'm sure I don't have to tell you that even Aura can't realign bones that are healed incorrectly, at least without invasive surgery first." Her ramblings had mostly been filled with irritation.
The boy whined and coughed some more, and his single eye showed no relief, recognition or realization, instead he just looked confused.
"…Arc, I'm going to do something I would rather never have to do, I'm going to ask a dumb question, do you think you could answer it when I ask? I'll only do so once." Her tone somehow got even colder.
He blinked twice and then his eyelid twitched once more.
"..Arc, do you know what Aura is?" She stared with eyes of unblinking frost directly into the boy's single eye. "Blink once for no, and twice for obviously I do because I'm not a complete and utter moron."
A single blink and a glance away from her face.
"If you weren't on the brink of death, I would kill you right now." She hissed into his face, cold venom dripping with every word.
Great, I'm dealing with a fucking idiot! How'd he even made it last time is a mystery to m-
Her thoughts abruptly stopped, Miló, Pyrrha's spear had caught Jaune last time. And although Weiss didn't know why the champion had caught him, she knew that the reason those two were aware of each other was because of her actions. "It's not my fault." She whispered. She didn't know why Jaune Arc lay dying, but she knew that he wouldn't be if she didn't change things. "It's not my fault." Again she whispered.
I can't control everything that happens in the world. It's not my f-
Her thoughts abruptly stopped; Jaune's chest suddenly lurched forward and he began making wet choking sounds. Immediately her mind changed gears and she began to reassess him, his body was violently spasming, his pupil was heavily dilated and a red tinged foam began leaking from his mouth.
"No, wait, stop." A weak voice escaped her, her hands uselessly checking his vitals.
A fresh stream of blood ran out his nose and Jaune began digging the back of his head into the ground frantically.
"No, stop, stop, wait." Her brain stalled as it recognized the futility of treatment. "No, no, there has to be a way." She heard a bitter laugh in her voice echo inside her head.
'It's pointless, he was sentenced to death before we arrived, all we did was prolong his pain.' Her brain informed her.
"No, there has to be a way! There has to be!" She screamed at herself, she couldn't fail, she couldn't fail.
Another bitter laugh. 'Listen up, nitwit, there is no way. I'm disappointed. Is this all it takes for you to forget your training? Have you seriously lost your composure over the single death of an insignificant oaf?'
"Shut up!" Her heart screamed at her brain. "It's not supposed to be this way… I can't fail… again…" Teardrops fell over the soon to be corpse. "Stop. Please don't die. Stop. It's not my fault. Stop. It's not my fault. Stop. It's not my… huh?" Her teary eyes widened as she saw her tears hang above the corpse. "What?" She sniffled and wiped away her tears, and as her hand moved away from her eyes, they had returned to being cold.
Weiss stood up from her kneeling position, and she saw what had appeared beneath the boy. A Glyph had manifested on the forest ground, it was glowing a faint golden color, and although the boy's body covered nearly a third of it, on the visible parts she could see runic numerals and packed gears. It was unmistakably a Time Dilation Glyph, yet this one was different, for one the runes were frosted over, and secondly the gears were unmoving and cracked all over.
Most importantly this Time Dilation Glyph didn't slow down or speed up time, instead it stopped time completely.
"It appears that there is a way." Weiss whispered to herself, then she sighed and lightly placed the tips of her fingers against her head. "Why couldn't the development of Semblances be strictly reliant on physical and mental effort, emotional outbursts are just so unreliable. If there had been a single Grimm around, then my life would be lost while I uselessly mourned." Her reason had taken back over, and her heart, although suppressed, pointlessly fluttered with happiness.
The main components for this development were the factors of a) needing more time, b) wanting something to not progress any further, and c) a desire to not repeat past mistakes. The main emotional ingredients were a) guilt, b) denial, and c) past regret. Memorize this, Weiss.
Weiss closed her eyes and focused on the words she had thought, and while her brain held on to those, her heart began searching through the memory catalog of her Winter's words, and after finding each one, Weiss stitched them together in the order she had thought. And she formed a new base memory of her sister speaking to her, for now it was pretty bare, but later when she has learned more of her ability she'll expand on it.
Ozpin, or whoever was observing, was taking their time to get here. I already administered first aid and now I've prevented Arc's condition from worsening. It's no longer my job to nurse him.
She straightened her outfit and wiped away the loose dirt in a futile effort to tidy herself up.
It's been about 252 seconds since I had found and began treating Arc, and about 379 since I landed. I was the 8th to be launched, approximately 14 seconds after the 1st was launched, and Arc was in 16th place, so he should've been launched approximately 30 seconds after the 1st was launched and 16 seconds after me. His air time couldn't have been longer than mine, considering I weigh less and I used my Glyph to slow me down.
Although she had begun to occupy her mind with pointless numbers, her body was on high alert. The fear of death from Jaune should've been high and her emotional outburst only added to those negative emotions, Grimm were probably circling them waiting to pounce.
And then a complete sixty seconds had passed since she had manifested the Glyph underneath Jaune, and right on the dot, it vanished and he resumed dying. Her brain immediately gave up, it told her to flee, and her heart panicked as she fell into the clutches of despair once more.
And then they finally attacked, Beowolves leapt out from the tree line and rushed towards them. Weiss had no issue dispatching the few that ran at her, but even more ran at Jaune's fallen body, her attention couldn't waver, she didn't have time to be concerned about someone else.
Yet her heart didn't listen to reason as it used up her Dust to fire off elemental projectiles at the Grimm rushing the dying boy, and each time she saved him, another Grimm would get a small hit on her, slowly chipping away at her Aura. She couldn't fail, not again. One of her main motivations to become a Huntress, aside from making a name for herself away from her father, was her desire to leave behind a legacy, to have accomplished something great enough that it would be spoken for generations, just like her grandfather had done.
And unlike her father, she wasn't going to build upon a foundation of suffering to get there.
If Weiss Schnee couldn't save a single boy from a pack of Beowolves in a controlled environment, what hope did she have at doing anything great?
Weiss Schnee didn't have any issue dealing with the Grimm. Sure, she had been forced to inefficiently use her Dust, wasting about forty percent from the total of the seventy percent she had used, and sure her Aura sat at about sixty-four percent of her full capacity, but in the end, not a single claw had touched Jaune Arc.
And yet…
And yet she had failed.
Her tired body knelt down next to the corpse of the boy she couldn't save.
She didn't need her brain to tell her that he had died while she was still fighting.
She didn't need her heart to tell her that he had died scared and her words were the last thing he had heard, that she had been his final sight and his last experience in this world.
And for a rare moment her thoughts and feelings aligned. 'You're a failure.'
'If you were smarter, he would've still been alive.'
'If you were kinder, he could've died at peace.'
If I wasn't such a failure, Jaune Arc wouldn't be dead.
'If you weren't such a failure, Winter Schnee wouldn't have died.'
'You failed, yet again.'
'Someone died from your failure, yet again.'
Tears poured at her eyes, and sobs tore at her throat.
'It is all your fault.'
'It is all your fault, yet again.'
Her mind, brain, thoughts, reason and training.
Her body, heart, feelings, emotions and instincts.
Both held Weiss Schnee accountable for her faults and failures.
And her in the depths of her soul, something whispered to her. 'Once more, you have failed again. Yet again, you shall try.'
Weiss blinked away the nonexistent tears in her eyes. Pyrrha Nikos closed the locker she had just finished using and turned to face Weiss who had just approached her. The tip of her partnership speech on her tongue, but her throat ached from nonexistent sobs. And just over Pyrrha's shoulder, she saw him walk past a glum little sister and her anxious older sister.
"Ridiculous!" Jaune Arc shouted with a map with unharmed hands. "There's no way I put my gear in locker 636 yesterday! I would've remembered having to count that high!" He whined, able to speak in more than whimpers and chokes. And then he walked last Pyrrha, without even a glance in her direction. "Oh, why does-" He stopped speaking as someone stepped out in front of him, blocking his path.
Her heart flipped and flopped from emotions, and her brain was still trying to process the details of her abilities. So Weiss Schnee stopped him from walking and grabbed him by the collar. "Come with me, you idiot!" Her tone frosty, she yanked him along as she walked.
You're going to survive Beacon's Initiation no matter how many tries it takes us, and then you're out of my hair.