Chapter 7: Help, My Pet Cat Can't Possibly Be This Hot!

"Yes—it's lovely! Almost as lovely as this book… that I will continue to read… as soon as you leave."

— 12 —

I once met an old Jew backstage an opera theater. At the time I'd been sweet on one of the opera singers, a girl in a wheelchair who shared the name of my little sister. She'd invited me to her performance, which doubled as her final for her opera classes at the university we both attended. I was waiting for her to come back from the stage so I could drive her to an afterparty she and I were going to attend.

I had no real evidence he was a Jew save for him sharing the exact same and oddly specific New York accent as my paternal step-grandfather, Joe. Or my maternal Jewish step-grandmother. Come to think, half of my grandparents had remarried into Jewish families, only one of which could make us all badass latkes and chicken wings for Hanukkah.
Your family rocks, Netta.

Anyhow, the man in the stage story's accent differed from the Donald Trump-like working class Queens accent of my maternal grandfather. He and I shared a few laughs together in conversation over the performance as he waited for his grandson to come back from the opera too.

As the old man and I chatted, speaking to each other like long-lost friends (I was the only one to happily converse with this stranger), he looked at me and laughed. "So, you're a Cracker, huh?"

"Sorry, sir?" I asked. The idea of not using honorifics like sir or ma'am still deeply bothers me to this day. I have to use them. Just do.

"Your accent. Where you're from. You're a regular Southern Cracker, aren't you?"

I don't know why that is the one memory that stuck with me most from that whole night. Probably because it was one of my last memories of that day while I was still sober.

Maybe it's because I was attending an opera where everyone sang in Italian, a supposedly high-culture event. Yet despite trying my best to be a boy of culture, it was impossible to escape my Deep Southern roots. It infected how I walked, how I carried myself, how I spoke.

No matter how hard you try, you can't never escape who you are. Not even when I was stuck in this lanky blond's body, I still wasn't Jaune Arc. I was me. Whatever my name was. Not that I even knew what it was anymore, not for sure.

My name is Jaune Arc, the scion of a long long of great Huntsmen now at Beacon and way out of his league due to a long web of lies. My name is Greg Veder, strong-willed pawn of powers stronger than myself. My name is Specialist Eric d'Orléans, American soldier and distant member of the royal houses of France, Spain, Two Sicilies, and Brazil. I'm a backwoods Deep Southern country boy born with a shotgun in one hand and a rebel flag in the other. I'm some shitty knockoff Kovacs.

I was me. An overly ambitious boy with a serious addiction to anything that'd get him pleasantly away from reality. Smokes, liquor, amphetamines. Pop 'em all and enjoy the world. The same drugs that'd gotten me kicked out of my childhood house. Not that I even fully remember what happened between Brockton Bay and Beacon Academy. My memories might as well just be cleverly built lies to make me the most useful in whatever situation I found myself in.

Honestly, they probably were.

And, a few fingers of whiskey down, I found myself faced off against Blake in our dorm room.

Blake sat cross-legged on her bed and just stared at me with the blank expression of a man who's just accidently made eye contact with another man at the urinal. Just pretend it never happened and pray to God both of you forget it ever happened.

I sat at the edge of my bed, elbows propped on my knees as I grinned at her.

Well, at her the copy of Help, My Pet Dog Can't Possibly Be This Hot! I'd swindled Shadow into buying last morning. When Blake came back to the room, she'd found it lying front and center on her pillow. I came out of the bathroom when she was on page forty-three.

It'd been like that ever since.

I broke the silence. "You like it?"

"No," she said blankly.

"I too enjoy reading books I don't like."

No response.

I sat up and shrugged. "I saw you were nearly done with your own certain book the other day. Figured by today you'd need a new one."

She blinked. "You go through my stuff?"

I snorted. "Please, don't be ridiculous, Mittens. I go through everyone's stuff."

"That doesn't make me feel any better."

"Bet the picture on page thirteen did," I said.

Silence. Her generally reserved nature cranked to eleven was really starting to grate on my generous nerves. But I've raised kitten litters; I know how to handle cats.

I made a turning gesture with a finger. "That start to chapter two was something else, though, y'know? It's where I really stopped thinking of the book as schlock and more as art. Ignoring the actual artwork on the page between chapters."

"You thought Felicia LeBleu wrote schlock?" she asked, cocking a skeptical brow. If I didn't know her better (and I didn't know her at all), I'd almost think she were offended.

"I thought the author was Ei Rothofen."

She glanced away. "She was writing under an Atlesian pseudonym in her early years. Same with the really strange titles. It was a sort of joke."

"Aaah, so when she wrote Et Les Chats Vont Pleurer Doucement, she was out in the open. I was reading the library's copy to try to finish it before you did. I think my favorite scene was towards the end where Beloved challenged the White Prince face-to-face in front of the entire city and the Prince just smacked him hard enough to pulverize his face. After Beloved returned from the dead and incited the revolution, it turned out that no, he really had died but had gotten his shapeshifter friend to fake the whole resurrection to inspire the people. Blew my freakin' mind."

"You're pandering to me," she said.

I let out a breath. "No. Well, yes, but it's all because I'm trying to connect with you, Blake."

She was about to say something and then stopped. "Wow. I think that was the first time you used my name."

"Con-nect," I said with emphasis. "We're a team, right?"

"Against my better judgement, yes, I allowed this to happen."

"And I'm an asshole."

"Amazingly not the worst one I've met, but yes."

I spread my hands. "None of these things is gonna change, Blake. Least I can do is make the experience a bearable one."

"You got that from a self-help book, didn't you?"

"I am functionally illiterate and have no idea what you're talking about," I said with a grin. I pushed my backpack (and all its self-help books) under the bed and out of sight with my foot.

She compressed a sigh. "Look, Jaune, can we not? I get what you're trying to do. I can appreciate it on an abstract level. But no."

My smile faltered. "No what?"

"No, I am not going out with you."

"What."

"And I'm not interested in reading steamy lit with you either."

I waved my hand. "No, no, no, backup. Date? ¿Como se pasa?"

"Everyone knows it, Jaune," she said in a tired voice. "You asked Pyrrha out. You asked Weiss. Asked some girl from the SSC. And now you're asking me. Girls talk, Jaune. The answer from me is I'm not interested. It's—I'd say it's nothing personal against you, but I'd be lying. And honestly you're kind of a creep."

I threw my hands up and jumped to my feet. "Oh for fuck's sake, Mittens, get over yourself! I—wait, girls talk? The only person who knows about Cards is Shadow. Does that mean Shadow's full time sex is female?"

"Who's Shadow?"

"Y'know, the guy—girl—has a hat—faunus but also." I gave up and just threw my hands towards Shadow's bed. They had a poster over their bed which read 'You don't have to be mad to go here, but it helps :).'

Blake rolled her eyes. "Just take a no like a man, Jaune, and move on."

This was exactly why I played off the refusal to join me for lunch as calmly as I did with Weiss. Blake thought she sensed weakness. Her instincts couldn't help but despise me for it. This was going downhill faster than a fat kid papoosed to a skateboard.

I had to win this conversation if Blake was ever going to respect me as, if not an equal, than as a "vaguely competent associate."

How?

Thoughts of John "Jack" Coffee Hays came to mind. One of the original Texas Rangers, he'd been one of the few, if not only, Anglo men of his 1840s era to figure out how to fight the Comanche horse tribes on the Great Plains. He turned his Rangers into White Comanches. He acted like that out on the Plains. He figured out that suicidal audacity was how to scare the Comanche and drove them away. And he'd consistently won in countless skirmish against the Comanche.

What'd be suicidal bravery versus Blake here?

Being as straightforward as I dared, that's what.

I exhaled hard through gritted teeth. I spoke with the practiced precision of a drunk trying to feign sobriety. "I'm not trying to ask you out, Blake. I am seeking help from a teammate. I can't go to the Headmaster or police with this info. But I know the White Fang is going to strike tonight and I need to stop them. I know you're skilled and have a strong sense of right and wrong, and I don't know who else I can ask for help."

It hurt to say that for some reason. I suddenly felt sweaty. My mouth was dry.

Blake took my words the same way as if I'd dipped cookies in ketchup—distressing on a spiritual level. If she could get her face stuck like that, someone could get rich by putting her face up on display and charging two bucks a gander.

Now sure, my idea of truth in this case had more in common with an abusive boyfriend with a psychology degree from an online university than might be recommended in a heart to heart like this. But you'll forgive me if I don't think that straight up using my knowledge of the future against Blake would do me any good. Hey, Mittens, I know you're a former terrorist, so who else to help me kill terrorists than a former terrorist herself, eh, beast bitch? or something like that. I remembered the last time I convinced everyone I was psychic and how impressively fast things went to shit from that. Idiot and narcissist though I may be, I was able to self reflect that much. Moreover, I was willing to live with this sort of half-truth if it meant I got what I wanted.

Hell, I was already planning what to say in case I accidentally let slip that I knew Blake was a faunus. I was going to pin it on her taking nude selfies at one time. Even though I had seen no such thing, I had a feeling that if I pressed the issue Blake would not counter it too hard. Although in reality, the only nudes I had seen were of Weiss, and that had merely been a passing, unconcerned glance of it on a 4chan board.

In a similar vein, I reckoned that my own inherent bias has kept me from feeling anything towards anybody around me here. Sure, lots of cute girls here, but something inherent to them crossed an Uncanny Valley Line in my head. I had legitimate trouble even thinking of the girls as attractive instead of just the girls of Beacon. Really put a damper on my college instincts to find cute girls with whom to spend the night.

"My help," Blake finally said.

"I have the time and place," I said in a determined yet matter-of-fact tone. "All I'm missing is people to help me. That's why I turned to you. I'm sorry if I've gone too far and you're not up for this."

"No," she said quickly, and I had to work hard to keep my smile down. "I know what you mean."

She was quiet for the longest time.

"But you're lying to me about something," she said, turning her eyes my way. "There's something wrong about this whole situation."

I met her eyes with a level gaze. "I committed a felony to get this information."

"Oh." She didn't really seem like she knew how to respond. if there was more she wanted to ask about, she bit her tongue.

I let out a sigh. "It's the White Fang, Blake," I said, trying to seem as honest as I could be. "Shadow Person, I don't know. Weiss hates me. You might dislike me, but you got a sense of honor, of justice. And I cannot do this alone, Blake. So, please, Blake. I can't tell the school staff how I got this. I'm trusting you here, please, as my teammate. Please, Blake."

From, the way her back straightened in surprise, I knew I'd sniped just the right words to use. Her mouth opened but nothing came out. She wanted to help now, but something was bothering her.

"Why do you care, Jaune?" Blake asked point-blank. "The White Fang is bad, Jaune, but you're—you."

That stung more than it should have. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Because you're a self-serving asshole."

It took effort not to wince like I'd been struck. I flexed my hands like I couldn't find somewhere comfortable to put my fingers. "Because when the chips are down, when I have a goal and direction, I care, Blake. I might be some Chinese knockoff Kovacs, but I know when it matters. And right now it does. So now I'm serious. You understand?"

Blake eyed me skeptically. She wasn't happy and wasn't trying to hide that fact. "You mean that, don't you? You actually believe that. Wow that's lame and cheesy."

I took a step towards her and nodded once. "With every fiber of my being, I stand by the truthful power of cheese."

She shook her head in disgust. "I… ugh, I can't believe I'm believing you right now!"

Thank. Jesus. Christ.