Volume One
"Here I am again. In over my head. An idiot, getting the shit kicked out of him. An idiot who's trying, trying, trying so damn hard.
Chapter 1: Blinded By the Light
"I look forward to the day I wake up, and I am forgiven for my sins. In the meantime, have you heard the words compound interest before?"
Gray was in a rush.
He could tell he was in a rush because the sides of the halls were starting to fade from his world as his blood struggled to supply oxygen. 'Always remember to breathe while running' was a common adage that Gray often forgot.
That, and paying attention to which dorm is yours.
Slipping on the ground and nearly getting third-degree carpet burns in the process, Gray found the correct door and began to pound on it, hoping that the time he saved having someone else open it could be better spent.
Once, twice, he knocked before deciding to abandon it altogether, attempting to ram the door with his shoulder. Pain lanced up his arm after he learned the door was much tougher than him.
He rubbed the offended limb for a moment; he placed his hand on the door, beginning to reach out to see if-
The door opened, and his other teammate peered through the opening.
"Hey, what the hell is-"
Gray grabbed the boy by the shoulder, shaking him back and forth as he cut them off. What Gray had to say was more important.
"No time! Pop Quiz! Oobleck! Valean civil war!"
One with green hair polishing a saber in the corner refused to turn away from his task; his voice carried across the room and verbally assaulted Gray's ears with his following phrase. "Professor Oobleck warned us at the end of last class; genius."
The brown-haired boy he was shaking, Jasper, turned confusedly, even as the shaking continued, albeit at a significantly reduced pace, as the message had, in fact, been delivered. "He did? I wasn't really paying attention-"
Gray wanted to tune out Jasper after learning that he was not helping at the moment. Help was safe. Help was security. But Gray also knew he needed Jasper. If for nothing else, then to help him read the last six chapters while Gray read the first 6, then paraphrase them together.
Gray snapped his fingers in front of Jasper. Eider was a lost cause, traitor though he may be, content to pay attention in class. "Jasper. My guy. My source is legit. Russell heard it from Jaune, who heard it from Ren. We don't care how Ren learned it. The guy doesn't lie. Ignore Eider, how much do you know about the Valean civil war?"
Eider chose to speak up again as Gray checked a watch that wasn't there. He made a note to buy a watch. It was an aesthetic. "Guys. Learn to take notes in class. How do you think I stay awake during morning classes?"
Jasper took the moment of distraction to break out of Gray's grasp. Damn. Power in any negotiation was based on physical contact and control. The shoulder grasp was the evolution of the handshake.
"Seriously, stop grabbing me to make your points; it's weird. And to answer your question, Eider-" he said, nodding to the sword shining nimrod, "-I never stay awake? I thought you didn't either."
Gray shrugged, partly trying to bleed nervous energy, partly trying to keep the conversation focused on him. "I was on my phone- dammit, scroll."
Eider finally sighed as he stood up and began to pull out a notebook, cracking it open to a marked page. "Next time; I'm giving you the wrong chapters to study."
Greedily, Gray grabbed the glossary, gazing gratuitously at the page.
It was too many.
Fuck.
Jasper looked down at the page, too, idly ignoring Gray's tears. "That's a bold assumption to make, assuming I study. I managed to get through a year and a half of college without properly studying once."
Gray wiped his eyes as he stood up. "It's high school. It's just high school. We are in hell, and its name is high school. And when you are in hell, the only way out is to ask the devil for some aid. If we cram for the next thirty-seven minutes and ignore Port during his class, we can know at least a bit of the history of the Civil War for the second period. Guaranteed."
Alexander, who decided to wait for the most opportune moment to strike out at Gray, chewed on a granola bar as he was doomscrolling on huntnet, and undermining Gray. "Isn't this supposed to be their version of uni? My guy, you are flunking out of Gen Ed. Maybe spend less time on your hair and get your life together."
Eider chimed in. "Gray, our classmates are 17. This is college."
Jasper made a raspberry noise with his dumb face hole as he added to the humiliation. "Beacon's more of a shitty boot camp and college put together."
Gray had to stop this insubordination before they decided to do crazy things like figuring out if his G was really at the start of the team name.
"No. You guys are idiots. 17 is high school."
Gray should have probably wondered when he stopped focusing on the test to argue this, but the little things mattered.
Eider sat up straighter, looking at Gray with his head tilted. "No, that's the end of high school, the start of college."
Jasper grabbed the journal again, holding it up to the light. "I knew a guy who didn't finish high school till he was 20."
Gray tried to grab it, as Jasper held a hand out to stop him. "Why do they shuffle them off a year earlier- fucking; let me look again!"
Jasper passed it back to Gray once he was done looking at it, holding it out to Gray, who looked at it closer again. "It's another world, dude, don't question the little shit. You'll go crazy."
Gray wanted to say that it wasn't little shit. That it was, in fact, a quite large pile of shit. But Gray wasn't willing to fight that battle at the moment. "Fine. Fine, fine! No, it's cool. It's fine. I'll study my ass off, pass this, and otherwise be gravy. Then, I'll do it a hundred more times, get my license, then get a sweet gig somewhere."
Jasper, in a rare moment of clarity, finally saw Gray's brilliance shine through. Or he was just trying to placate him. "Chill, man. It's a quiz, not even a major exam. Forgetting once ain't gonna tank our grades."
"Yes, because that is our biggest concern as we train to risk our lives for the greater good, passing History 101," said Eider, quite Eiderly.
To Eider; Gray thought. Definition? Unhelpful.
Gray rallied. "Our biggest concern, gentlemen, should be appearing normal. Sane! Or at least… as normal as huntsmen tend to be."
Jasper started to pack his bag, but without any of the ass in it of someone who actually wanted to succeed. Gray decided he was gonna make them run backpack drills. That should make them better. Fastest backpacks in the entire grade. Team Glade. Gale. Whatever. "Those words don't go together. You know that, right?"
Jasper used a free hand to gesture to Alexander, who was staring wide-eyed at the wall, eyes focused on nothing as his hand wrote into a notebook. "I'm starting to think it don't go with us anymore either."
It was moments like this that he wished Jasper understood more about fitting in. Gray was a chameleon. Well, not an actual one. But a social one. Fit in. Be what you gotta be. Smile your smiles, live your life. Nobody ever appreciates how much effort it takes to appear normal—duck rules. Appear cool on the surface and paddle furiously below.
"Baseline. Average. Medium. Mean. Mode, for Christ's sake, Jasper!" A finger extended for everything Gray listed. "My point is that nobody has to look too deeply into us if we don't give them reasons to look."
Jasper stopped putting his bag together, scratching the back of his head as he pulled out his scroll. "I feel, if anything, a couple below average students draws less attention, given we are surrounded by literal prodigies and shit."
Ignorant Jasper. That's why they had to try so hard. Everyone around them was going to break the curve. The curve was the lifeline of every lazy college student. And Weiss Schnee was going to kill them all. Every single test. Every single quiz. A perfect grade. Gray hated her like a man hated a tsunami—a natural disaster. You can rage, you can scream, but the destruction still occurs.
Eider, meanwhile, already had his bag full, so he was just standing there tying his shoes. Sit down and tie your shoes, Eider. Like a normal person. "I don't know about you, but I'd call average the median value of two prodigies and half a dozen logs of shit."
Gray was not going to look at him. He didn't understand Eider, and that bothered him. "Ok, but the point is, we can't fall out of the shit pile, agreed? As long as we remain in comfortable mediocrity, we are making it."
Jasper frowned. "I think we have to get to a comfortable mediocrity first. My main weapon is a fucking pistol, and I can't hit the broad side of a barn."
This fucking guy. "What's there to know? You point and shoot. Easiest shit ever. It is the literal weapon of choice for housewives to shoot strange people."
Jasper probably wasn't the worst guy ever. Gray just… didn't know too much about him. But the other two ignored him too often. So, it led to Jasper just accruing anger points just being in front of him. It was cool, though. It was like community service.
"Aiming," Jasper said slowly, as if he was explaining it to a child. Which he is. Because Jasper was really saying this to himself, Gray could tell by the way he was. "Aiming is what I need to know."
Gray had put on his thinking boots, so he was ready to boogie. "Buddy, pal, compadre. We are fighting monsters the size of barns. You are not trying to get a headshot or heartshot. Hell, I don't even think they have hearts. You are just feeding rounds into them until they fall over due to being sad."
Gray made a bang noise as he pantomimed, shooting a pistol. "So easy."
"Easy for you to say. You just fucking whack shit with a stick till it falls over," said Jasper.
"Stick works. Stick is good! Stick worked for thousands of years!" said Gray. It was true. Stick was good. Lots of funny YouTube men talked about the stick. There were orders of the stick. The right stick in the wrong man's hand could make all the difference in the world.
"Fuck you and the wooden cow you rode in on." Jasper shot him with a middle finger, which was a statement in itself, because Gray was pretty sure he threatened to bite it off last time one was shot his way. Eh, he would let him have this one.
Somehow slipping by Gray, Eider had walked out of the room at some point. Probably to go track mud on the carpets. It sounded like something that guy would do.
Wait, Jasper had insulted him.
"Fuck you, I left Bessie in the lock room. Wait- no, forget about it. The point is, you can't pass this without studying. Chapters six through twelve. Valean civil war. We just need to figure out why it happened, then spitball from there." Gray had heard enough about one civil war in his life; he figured most of them would be equally stupid.
Jasper leaned back against the door. "I don't expect to pass."
"Come on! If we put our heads together, speed read, and focus on the bullet points, I really think we can-"
Alexander, finally done with writing, snapped the journal shut and began to walk out the door as his scroll blared an alarm. "Five minutes till class."
Alexander held the door open as he looked down the hall. "You have two minutes to spare if you go now. Or you can stay. It's a quiz day. Who cares if you're late." He let the door swing shut behind him as he skedaddled.
Jasper nodded at the exit. "I've accepted my fate. I think… instead? I'll spend the day in the city."
Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit.
Gray looked around the room. Eider was nowhere to be found. Jasper was going awol, and Alexander was being himself. Fuck it. He's done worse with less.
"Fuck it, I'm leaving you behind. I don't know where Eider is. Jasper, if you don't come with us, know this. God's love has limits. You can win, or you can lose. Your choice." Gray grabbed his book bag, shoved four textbooks into it, and began to power walk out the door. He would pass this quiz. May not make an A. But he would pass.
It would have to be enough.
-2-
Cheating off of his classmates would have been terribly easy. They were spaced far too near to each other; he could practically read his seatmate's writing with just his peripheral vision. Meanwhile, the people in front of him didn't even make an effort to hide their papers. Not that Alexander needed any of their help to answer the short quiz the Professor gave them.
He had a few go-arounds with university already, and the panicked Gray from earlier was completely exaggerating. This was the first quiz of the semester. Sure, the unit covered multiple chapters on Vale's wars and other related histories, but this one only needed light reading of the introductory summary chapter and the few proceeding ones.
Multiple choice, true or false, identification, chronological order of events. All of these were the same, just rote memorization.
"Eyes to your paper, mister Galazio," Professor Oobleck's voice echoed in the lecture hall. "That will be your first and final warning."
Alexander mumbled a quick apology and looked back down to his paper. There were multiple ways to entertain himself as the minutes ticked on before he ultimately got bored enough to submit the paper. Hiding his left hand on the shelf beneath the desk, he flashed a bit of his aura and tested how far away he could feel.
A few seats away, it felt like someone was as bored as he was; he could feel the gears inside their mechanical pencil spin each time the pencil hit the desk and retracted the lead. Another flash of aura and the gears locked in place, breaking the lead and earning him an annoyed tut from its owner. Unfortunately for Alexander, that was enough to break the person out of their reverie, and they began writing the essay portion of the quiz, and the movement was far too fast for him to keep up with. More than that, their handwriting was too light and thin for him to actually parse the paper from the lead.
No matter ink was heavier, he came prepared for this quiz and stuffed his pockets and soles of his shoes with the reading material. An ordinary man would say that sitting down and actually studying the material would be easier, and he would be correct. But to optimize life, one needs to find small multitasking opportunities here and there.
With a bit of creativity on Alexander's part, he moved the mental image that his semblance formed in his mind. He then made quick work of the essay, effortlessly copying his own pre-written notes along with bits and pieces of the original material. The essay was finished swiftly, and he finished, and he submitted the quiz to the professor.
"Since you were the first to finish, would you like to wait for me to grade it?" The man raised his brows at Alexander, "It won't take long, mister Galazio."
Alexander pulled out his class schedules from his coat pocket. "Why not?" He shrugged, "I have a three-hour break after this class anyway."
"Very well then, now would you kindly?" He pointed towards the desk up at the front of the class, assumedly wanting Alexander to stand near it.
Shrugging, he followed the professor to his desk, and before he could even get near his desk, his paper was already graded.
75. He was given the mark of 75. Everything was graded perfectly, except for the essay that had half marks.
"Professor, I don't want to be rude, but you graded that a bit too fast."
"You plagiarised your essay." Professor Oobleck's tone was low and brokered no argument.
Stunned, Alexander did not know how to respond to this.
"Do not take this the wrong way, mister Galazio, but-" He pursed his lips, looking for the correct verbiage to be used. "-where was your schooling?"
"I was a product of the public school system, sir." Technically true, for he did attend multiple prestigious yet state-funded universities.
"Ah, that explains it," Oobleck said, not explaining anything at all. "Your essay was plagiarised."
"Sir, with all due respect," which at the moment was not much at all. "You said that twice, yet you never explained how or why it was plagiarised."
"The Faunus Rights War was started over the disunion of the Kingdom resulting from a difference between interpretations of the Magna Carta and its legacy following the Great War." He did not even glance at my paper as he recited it back to me. "There was nothing moral about the start of the war, though moral elements were injected as the war raged on. Just like Graad, Vale was largely populated by racists, and Faunus were persecuted pretty much everywhere aside from a few isolated pockets, namely Patch, where they were treated as almost equals."
"That was my introductory summary, yes, sir."
"You sound like you have a doctorate in history. You want to know why you sounded like one?" He then opened a book partway through. "Because you were, you lifted this from my book."
"That was the required reading for this unit, sir; taking ideas from the reading is expected."
"You are not wrong." He shrugged, "But there's a world of difference between taking inspiration from someone else's idea to outright copying. Your writing was adequate; it expounded on the ideas presented, but there were still parts of it that were lifted from elsewhere."
Alexander mulled over what the professor told him, debating within himself if he could change the essay even if his grade weren't changed. There was something at the back of his head that screamed at him that his conduct and writing could be improved.
"Tell you what, professor-" He started.
"No. Your marks cannot be changed." Oobleck replied before he could finish his sentence.
"Not what I was going to propose, sir."
"Go on then."
"Could I rewrite the essay portion? The marks can stay the same, but I know I can write better."
Oobleck furrowed his brows and pursed his lips. "You can, but your paper will be at the bottom of the pile."
"Well, I have three hours free, sir," Alexander's grin threatened to split his face. "I could help in marking the papers."
Oobleck leaned backward, and one of his brows slowly crept up his forehead. "Sure..." He said warily. "You had perfect marks in everything but the essay, so you can just use your own paper as the test guide. Now, what are you waiting for? Grab a chair and rewrite that essay."
-3-
Vale was one of the cities of all time, Jasper quickly decided. It was undoubtedly the largest city that he had ever been in, and even putting aside his general dislike of crowded areas, it was surprisingly well planned out. Parks were common, and the entire place was walkable, which was exactly what he was doing, aimlessly wandering around the city's commercial district.
Oh, sure, he could give whatever excuse he wanted to, but that was, in essence, what he was doing, mindlessly wandering around like a tourist. The heat had forced him to leave most of his gear back at the school, which he didn't mind. He didn't understand the fashion statement or whatever of just walking around in your full huntsmen regalia as your day-to-day in the first place.
Jasper was simply clad in a simple white tee, jeans, and a belt where his dagger sat sheathed in its scabbard. What? He wasn't going to be walking around Vale entirely unarmed; there were White Fang and thieves around every fucking corner.
As if the world was reading his mind, a shout tore him from his thoughts as he looked down the street to see a man running full tilt, bag in hand, with another man running after him. Tuskon, Jasper's mind eventually realized. 'Course, the one day he decided to head out, shit happened.
A small part of him wanted just to ignore it and keep walking; it wasn't his problem after all. He's got enough on his plate. He was busy ignoring school, after all.
The men continued to sprint, and eventually, Tuskon, who was following behind, began to slow down after losing his breath. Jasper stifled a sigh. It wasn't his problem…
The thief neared.
It could be his problem, though.
Yeah, he was gonna make it his problem. He stuck his leg out in the path of the sprinting thief, who caught on the outstretched limb, tumbling forward through the air and onto the concrete facefirst.
He looked for a moment, seeing the man out cold, then reached down and grabbed the wallet out of the unconscious man's back pocket, rifling through it, taking all the lien from it, and dropping the empty wallet back onto the fallen man.
Tuskon approached and grabbed his bag back from the man, then turned to Jasper with an irritated look. "You stole from him."
"Yeah, and he stole from you. Comes full circle or some shit." Jasper said while counting the lien; some two hundred, not bad.
"I suppose." The pale man hummed. "Still doesn't make it right."
"The police would have confiscated and 'lost' it anyway." Jasper shrugged and pocketed the cash.
"You're parents never teach you two wrongs don't make a right?" Tuskon asked.
"Can't say they did, but I did just learn that two wrongs can make me richer," Jasper replied with a smile and began to walk away, ignoring the sigh from the man, something about 'damn kids.'
He should get ice cream with this money or something; he hadn't had ice cream in ages. The only problem was he didn't know any ice cream parlors in this entire damn city. He fished out his scroll and pulled up a map. It wasn't any Google Maps, but it worked.
He walked through the streets, deftly avoiding the dozens of people going about their day-to-day. Before long, he found himself at some food court area within the commercial district. Bright lights, foreign smells, and delicious-looking food. His stomach rumbled.
As he walked toward the food, he noticed something out of the corner of his vision. A disheveled man sitting near a trashcan, a sign in front of him that read, 'Don't waste, give leftovers to the hungry.'
That's an excellent idea, he thought for two seconds and then continued to walk toward a food stand selling what looked like kebabs. However, the homeless man's eyes seemed to follow him as he walked toward the stand. Not his problem, he tried to think to himself.
…but it could be.
He found his legs carrying him away from the delicious food and toward the disheveled man on the ground. His hand fished the lien from his pocket, and he bent down to gently place it in front of the man. His stomach growled in protest, but it could shut up. He could get food whenever he wanted at Beacon.
Jasper then went back in line and fished out his wallet to check how much he had, only to be hit with a crushing reminder. He's flat fucking broke. No cash sat in his wallet at all. There were two ways for him to fix that. Go back and beat up the homeless man to take his cash back and decry him as a thief. Or, you know, get a job. He decided on the latter.
He took back to the streets, a clear objective in mind. Get a job, or at least try. Conveniently, he was in the commercial district, which meant there had to be plenty of shops around hiring, right? He could just walk into a place and ask if they were hiring. So, he set out to try exactly that.
The first store was bust, so was the second, so was the burger place and the ice cream parlor. Come on, it couldn't be this hard to get a job, right?
Hours later, he found himself on the very edge of the commercial district, several stores having kicked him out and managing to get permanently banned from Johnny's Pizza Shack after Jasper educated the owner on how shit pineapple was on pizza.
He found himself in front of his final stop, some bookstore his tired mind swore was important but couldn't exactly remember why. It even had a help-wanted sign, unlike Johnny's Pizza Shack.
Jasper walked forward, slowly pushing open the door. A bell sounded out, and a gruff but familiar voice spoke. "I'm in the back, and I'll be out in a minute!"
"Take your time!" Jasper called back and leaned against the front desk.
After a minute or two of waiting, the person staffing the shop stepped out. Realizations hit his brain like a twelve-pound sack of bricks; oh, right. This is Tuskon's bookshop, the guy he helped earlier, the guy who is supposed to die in just a few weeks.
Tuskon's face twisted into a frown. "What are you doing here?"
Jasper wasted no time recovering, jerking a finger over his shoulder. "Ya had a help wanted sign up out there. Still need it, or was the sign up for shits and giggles?"
"Why do you need a job, and why here?"
"Well, I'm broke, so I need money, and this is the only place that hasn't kicked me out after a five-second conversation." Jasper shrugged
"You're broke?" Tuskon said, sounding somewhat doubtful. "What about the cash you stole from that thief earlier?"
"Ah well," Jasper rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment. "I ended up giving it away, so my wallet is still frighteningly empty."
Tuskon grunted, seemingly in thought over something. Then he lifted his head up and spoke. "Can you organize books?"
"Yes, sir," Jasper responded.
"Do you have basic literacy?" Tuskon asked
"I like to think so," Jasper said.
"Do you have any relationship with the White Fang?" Tuskon asked.
"Well, there is this one girl-" Jasper began.
"Never mind, of course you don't. You're hired, and you start next week. If you're late, you're fired." Tuskon grunted out. "Now get out. I'm about to close soon."
"You got it, boss man." Jasper snapped off a two-fingered salute and walked out. As the door closed behind him, he realized he probably should have asked for more details, but ah, well, it'd probably sort itself out.
He began his trek back to Beacon long after his class would have ended originally. He still wasn't sold on the city, but he could get used to this place. Hopefully, at least. So long they're able to keep it from blowing up in the near future.
Ah, that wasn't a fun thought. As good as things were right now, the future looked rather… bleak, to put it lightly. A multitude of psychos, terrorists, and thieves posed to tear the whole place down.
Eh, it wasn't his problem.
-4-
Suppose, if you would, that monsters were real. And not in the abstract 'people who would commit atrocities even when not necessary' sense. Literal monsters. Creatures from nightmares that go bump in the night and wipe out villages—things which live for no reason beyond destruction.
Now, suppose that those creatures were attracted to any kind of negative thought, like moths to a flame. Or politicians to the nearest lobbyist.
Vert Eider, of the up-and-coming huntsmen team GALE, did not have to suppose. He had the unparalleled honor of living this nightmare.
And instead of indulging in the wrongthink that would eventually invite creatures that knew only how to destroy, he decided to do something about it. Like that morning, when he had snuck out of his dorm ahead of his teammates. Seeing two of them rush into the classroom with seconds to spare before Professor Oobleck closed the door and began the quiz had been good for a few quiet chuckles in the classroom.
Others had had their spirits raised. Now, it was Eider's turn to get in a better mood.
That thought process had brought him to a suspiciously underutilized part of Beacon's campus: the gym. It really was the oddest thing; For an institution dedicated to training the next generations of guardians of humanity and civilization, surprisingly few of his classmates took advantage of a free gym.
Judging by the rail-thin physiques of some of the top performers of his class, however, that did not seem to impede them at all.
Eh, not his problem. An empty gym was an empty gym, and all the more to his benefit.
Well. Almost empty. A pale figure was using one of the practice dummies on the ground floor. Eider had taken one look at all the pirouettes and spins and decided, for his own mental well-being, to practice somewhere he didn't have to see that travesty.
In-between sets, however, some other movement caught his eye. A guy with shaggy blonde hair wearing a school uniform trudged past the rowing machine, eyes laser-focused on a vending machine on the far side of the hall. Past the machines, he marched, paying no mind to his surroundings beyond that which was immediately in front of him.
From the way he was walking, with slumped shoulders and a hurried gait, he looked like he was trying to avoid being seen. Granted, he was easily six feet tall and dressed in a school uniform in a gym, so he was wasting his time.
Given that there was a noted dearth of blondes in his year, Eider could quite confidently identify this depressed child as one Jaune Arc. More importantly, something was bothering the teen. And who was he to let that continue?
Eider caught up to the boy at the vending machine, staring blankly at the mechanical arm as it retrieved a pale yellow bottle. Some sort of protein drink, no doubt.
"You look about ready to attract a pack of Beowolves," he said, catching the teen by surprise.
"Oh! That – you…" No, more than surprised; Jaune looked damn near ready to have a heart attack. After a moment, though, he managed to compose himself enough to speak almost coherently. "I didn't even hear you walk over here…"
"That tends to happen," Eider allowed. "But seriously, you look like a forty-year-old dad wondering when his life became a cruel parody of his dreams."
Jaune sighed, gesticulating a bit like he couldn't quite find the right words. "Something like that, I guess. It's been a rough week."
"It's the first week," he pointed out. Truth be told, he knew perfectly well what had gotten the other guy down. Pulling him out of that trouble was tempting but would only be more harmful in the long run, which left trying to cheer up the worst student in the grade who had lied and cheated to get into Beacon. "Is this about the quiz from Oobleck's class?"
"Oh yeah, that." Jaune let out a suffering sigh. Oh, good, so it wasn't just him being the errand boy of team CRDL; he was struggling academically, too. Why he was so down about a simple quiz, Eider couldn't guess unless Jaune had completely failed to study for it, like half of team GALE. Then again, given whom Eider was talking to, odds were pretty good that he had. "Pretty sure I flunked the whole essay section."
"Eh, could be worse." Eider already had two examples in the time it took him to finish that sentence. "You aren't retaking the class. And unlike a quarter of my team, you actually took the quiz."
"Wait, one of your teammates never showed up?" There we go, a distraction from his plight. That was a start. Now, all Eider had to do was try and keep that momentum going.
"I know, it's hilarious," he said, a smile on his face. "So you already aren't the worst. Chin up."
"Great. Not in last place." The teen's voice was bitter as he spoke. Just like that, all the progress had disappeared. Fantastic. At that point, Eider was rather sorely tempted to just throw up his hands and be done with it. "Just for showing up."
But that would mean giving up.
"Well, if you want to be miserable, just keep doing what you're doing," Eider said. An appeal to pride, that. It held promise if the person valued their pride. Or, given that he was talking to Jaune, the subject was trying to hide their insecurities.
"If I want to?" Jaune asked. The vending machine rattled loudly as it dispensed another bottle, and the teen paused with his hand holding up the flap to the receptacle. It almost sounded like the very notion had offended him.
And that was what Eider had been looking for.
"Isn't that why you're playing errand boy for Winchester instead of studying with your team?" he asked, and Jaune flinched. Another reaction, a flash of forced introspection. Something to force him to act on his own.
"Stu- yes, studying, that's what we were talking about."
"People won't just invite you to study apropos of nothing; you need to ask for their help," Eider counseled. "Now hurry up, you're hogging the vending machine."
With luck, the message had gotten through to Jaune. If not… well, everything was going to resolve itself in the next few weeks, anyhow, even if Eider couldn't hasten its course much.
AN: Hey gadies and lentlemen. It's your favorite trashcan, with another story. yes yes I know I said I wouldn't start something till I finished my current one, but this is a collab so it gets a pass. As said, this is a collab featuring myself and three of my friends. So lets credit em shall we, writing Alexander here is Wildboar who goes by Prince of Austria on and Strongboar on QQ, writing Gray is Aiden who is also Aidenmc3 on SV and SB, writing Eider is Fenestrus who goes by the same screen name on QQ and SB. I myself am writing Jasper. Give them all some love. As with always, hope y'all enjoy, call out any mistakes and have a wonderful day!