I, Jaune: Or, The Context-Insensitive Semblance

by Eric d'Orleans

Jaune's new team Gaslights, Gatekeeps, and Girlbosses its way from one mental health crisis to another. A story about self-improvement, failing to live up to your own expectations, cute girls suffering emotionally, and learning how Blake somehow goes from Bland to Best Girl. The ride only stops in case of emergency, and crippling trauma is NOT an emergency!

52. Volume 5, Chapter 11

Chapter 11: This Volume is too Long

"I don't think cocoa was the only powder in that chocolate!"

— 25 —

Weiss had to admit, being held like this was a weird feeling. Doubly so that she was holding onto Jaune in kind, leaning into him each time they landed on one of her glyphs, going further and further down into the abyss. It was hard to keep the color from her cheeks. It wasn't because Oh no, a boy is holding me or something so base. For heaven's sake, she was Weiss, not Blake. But it was more of the fact that this kind of close proximity to another living person was outside her scope of expertise. If his argument for sticking close like this didn't make sense, she wouldn't have done it. People weren't very touchy-feely in Atlas or Mantle. Even handshakes felt too personal for her. You weren't supposed to touch other people and that was that.

But here she was, holding onto Jaune as he held on to her. Acutely aware of just how much bigger he was than her. How his arms were double the size of hers. And that worrying look of determination on his face. She had this sick sense he was going to get himself hurt like when he starved himself or broke his body trying to run. That was the kind of boy Jaune was. And she worried she would get swept up in it this time.

By her estimation, after all of the jumps, they were… a very long way down. With each cliff she made, each platform that landed on, she doubted more and more that Coco was alive. This was a worse fall than Initiation, and at least there, you had trees to catch on to and swing herself around to kill momentum. Here, there was just the ever approaching bioluminescence of the ground. And this weird, distant humming noise she could make out at the fringes of her perception.

She was almost relieved when they finally hit the stone, leaning against the boy to put most of her weight onto him.

Jaune landed with a slight crouch, hissing in pain. "Goddamnit, all this time spent strengthening my muscles, and I never once thought to strengthen my bones." But he was already aiming his revolver this way in that way, shield in the other hand, expecting something.

"How do you think I feel?" she asked, feeling out with her aura, and coming up empty when it came to Grimm. They were all alone. "These straps are killing me."

They didn't really need their flashlights to see down here. It helped illuminate some of the darker patches, but those were just little islands of bleakness between what Weiss had to admit was a gorgeous bioluminescent forest of fungus of all shapes and sizes. There were even living things among them: small, pink jellyfish-looking creatures floating around in an invisible breeze. She could imagine if these caves were cleared out, this itself could be a major tourist attraction. She would have loved to explore this place in peace, without the threat of a dead friend.

Or well, a dead whatever Coco was to her. She understood the stakes, but a part of her couldn't really get emotionally attached. She cared, yes, but this was… complicated. More an intellectual quandary than an emotional specter.

The boy crouched down, picking up a broken can of food. It had been among the supplies they had bought the day prior. In an off-handed tone, he said, "So borrow one of Shamrock's bras."

Weiss stiffened. "No! I mean this backpack."

"Which can't be more than twenty pounds; you packed insanely light."

"Coupled with my sword, and I'm carrying a fifth of my body weight!"

He turned around, holding the can. "Just how light are you?"

"Are you really asking a girl how much she weighs right now?"

She hadn't really meant it as a serious barb. But all the same, it looked like it bothered Jaune. He closed his eyes and let out a breath, before holding the can up to her.

"Look, this was from Coco's pack. There's bits of detritus all around here, but no corpse." He dropped the can and stood up. "Don't suppose you can sense her Aura or whatever?"

Weiss shook her head. "No."

He dragged his hand down his face, fingers lingering to squeeze his nose. He let out another long breath. "Which means we can't sense Grimm, and we can't sense her, but we know she's alive. Okay, okay—okay okay okay!"

"Jaune?" she asked, ignoring the flapping wings of a bat just above her.

Jaune looked at her as if remembering she was there for the first time. His look was lingering, with a fringes of desperation creasing the corners of his eyes. Weiss couldn't help but swallow, wishing he would look her way. She didn't want that gaze anywhere near her.

She wanted to ask him what they should do now, how they could possibly proceed from here without Coco anywhere nearby, but she suspected he didn't know any better either. It was a creeping sensation, that he was just pretending like he had any idea what was going on. He couldn't know any more than her. She remembered once trying to convince the Headmaster to replace Jaune as team leader and put her in charge. He had denied her with few words, leaving her fuming without a proper explanation, without giving her the chance to explain why that drunken idiot couldn't possibly be in charge of a team.

Now? She wondered what she would do differently if she was team leader. How she could work out solutions in a plan of action with what she had seen so far. And she honestly couldn't think of anything different than what they were doing now, which was just pretending like they had a semblance of an idea. It made her feel slightly pathetic.

"Right now?" he asked, holstering his revolver. He replaced it with his sword. "We face the facts, then act on them. That's the only advice I can give you. The only advice I can give myself. We face the facts, and act on them."

"And the fact is there's no Coco."

He readjusted the strap on Coco's purse, tying it to his hip. "Which means she's alive. And the longer we stand around talking like asshats, the more danger she's in. C'mon."

He picked a direction seemingly at random and gestured for Weiss to follow. She did. The way forwards appear to be wading through the mushrooms. It was a lot like that dank passageway that had come through to get to this cavern, only far more open, and far more bright. She held her sword close, idly rotating the Dust cylinder within it.

"Keep your Aura up," he said, his long legs letting him easily navigate over the taller of the mushrooms. The same one she had to skirt around. "The moment we sense something, we go for it."

"I don't know about that," She said, her own voice sounding weak to herself. "I know you would like to keep yours up all the time, but I use a lot of my Aura making all of those glyphs. It was a lot further down than I thought. And we hit them a lot harder than I realized. If it comes to a fight, I don't want to be too drained."

He made an uncomfortable noise, but didn't argue. His own Aura was in full effect, glowing with a soft no-color that she didn't really like to look at. But he was always doing that. She wondered if he just had a huge stockpile to draw from, or constantly using it like he did had simply made him more efficient over time. That's how she suspected people like Fox survived, who seemed to perceive the world entirely through his Aura. It was beyond the average abilities of a normal Huntsman, at least not without a lot of work.

A stone ruin interrupted the path they were carving through the fungus. It looked like it had once been some kind of temple or shrine. Scores of those little jellyfish floated around, seeming to feast on the guano left by an army of roosting bats in the stone rafters. A couple of pillars holding it up had fallen. It was loud with the squeaks of bats, and the smell of old dung made her hold her nose.

But the weirdest thing was the old bullet holes in the stonework. They were oddly scattered, with large gaps between them. Like someone had missed or was just painting shapes. They were too new to have been part of the old ruins themselves. A more recent addition. But why?

It took her a moment of thought to realize why this was.

Once as a girl, one of her tutors had taken her to the old royal palace in Mantle. It had been laid to waste during the end of the Great War. Turned into a sort of living museum of the dead, left dirty and unclean, just cared for enough for occasional tours for people like her. After the king had died in the deserts of Vacuo, soldiers carried the king's corpse back home and crowned his child the new sovereign of the Fosterland. The child had been encouraged to continue the failing war. When General Friedrich Dawnclaw turned the Home Army against the king and stormed the palace, they had fought against the Faceless secret police and king's own Livgardet, the Royal Guard. Their losses had been ten to one, but they took the palace and the general personally murdered the boy king.

When they lined up the loyalist survivors and mass executed them against the walls of the palace, the bullet holes looked like this.

Weiss was looking at the aftermath of an execution from who knew how long ago, buried in guano. There had to be people under the bat droppings. Under the mushrooms and detritus. Who had done this? The only people who came to mind were the White Fang, the only group she could think of who'd carry firearms down here. Just like LaChance had suggested.

She looked at Jaune, to see if he realized what this was.

Jaune shone his flashlight up into the warren of bats, frowning. "They built this place to last, whoever it was."

He doesn't know! she thought, almost flabbergasted. The boy seemed to notice everything but the most obvious things

"The Final Empire," she said, sounding oddly clownish with her nose closed like this.

He pointed his flashlight to the side and kept on, towards a distant sound of water. "With it all underground like bunkers, might as well be Albania for all I fucking know. Why would they even dig these?"

"It looks more like they just built them into natural caves, and then dug through them. Maybe they were mining like the people today are," she said, able to breathe again as they continued walking. No comment on the bullet holes. No thoughts that they may well have just passed by unburied corpses.

Weiss shivered. She didn't want to think about it. She didn't want to think of what those animals had… no, no, not that word. They weren't animals. Blake had been one of them once, and she was a person as far as Weiss was concerned. But… she felt so confused.

"Why would you build little shrines and frescoes in a mine?" Jaune asked.

"They liked to build art and monuments wherever they went," she said, shaking her head and the thoughts away with it. "Maybe it's like a break room on a grander scale?"

He gave her a funny look.

Suddenly self-conscious, she said, "You know, before they invented water coolers and coffee machines, they just had little places of worship and art exhibits for cultural enrichment?"

He hopped over a small finger deep creek running through the rocks. "What did they worship?"

"Their emperor."

"So he's not only in the art, but he's in the religion?" he asked. "Dude must have had one big ego. Lord knows when I want to relax, I don't sit in a room with a picture of the prime minister or whatever."

Weiss' heels made navigating the terrain awkward. She still felt it was a worthwhile trade to gain a couple of inches. "They were pretty advanced. It was kind of their thing. When everyone else was using bronze, they were using iron. When people were still figuring out chariots, they had the stirrup. A lot of ideas they had you still see popping up in the modern day."

"Like?" he asked, pausing to briefly flare his Aura. Jaune sucked on his lips, unhappy, and pressed on.

"The Huntsmen schools," she said. "They were founded by the Great King after the war, but he was hardly the first person with the idea. Before the Eldbrokna, the Empire established Academies all across its territory, from Mistral to Vacuo. Of course, back then, they weren't academies, but were called Mayikprollolon; and instead of the modern term Huntsmen, you had Witches and Witchers. Back when Aura wasn't quite as well understood and it was all so much superstition and hocus pocus."

Jaune paused atop a rock, looking out across the forest of glowing fungus. "That's both a lot to take in and pretty wordy of you."

She huffed. "You asked."

Asked for history, and not after the bullet holes. Gods!

"Not for so many details. Right now's really not the time." He gave her a look. "Do you gotta jaw off like that?"

And just like that, part of her deflated, feeling ashamed. "I… I don't know. It keeps my mind from wandering. Talking, I mean. Right now."

"Where's there to wander?" he asked, and then instantly seemed to realize. To keep from obsessing over the worst possibilities. "Look, we's gonna find Coco. She's going to be alive. And then we're going to figure out how we can link up back with our team. Just picture that moment in your head like I am. The moment we're all together again, probably hurt, but laughing that the scary times are over. There's no more uncertainty. We're put together and ready to find CCHS."

And suddenly it made sense how he might have missed the implication of what they'd seen in the little shrine. He was completely lost in his own world. His own head blinded him.

"Is that how you go through life?" she asked.

Jaune nodded. "It's a trick I picked up from therapy," he said slowly, as if ashamed of the fact. "Something I've always done, I think, but reinforced. When I go for a run, the entire time I'm just thinking of the feeling of getting back and taking a shower. That moment when I can pause, and look back and remember thinking the thoughts. I mean, I don't know how to say it. Just the ability to wish for a moment, and then when that moment arrives, the ability to look back on when you were making that wish and knowing it's all over, it's all better now, the hard part is done. Now you can relax."

Weiss hugged herself. It suddenly felt so cold, with this distant smell of something rotting in the musty air of the cavern. "And that's your headspace right now, huh?"

"Yeah. That's what I'm doing now. Coco is alive and that's that. And I'm just imagining the feeling of this all being over, of being back in Beacon with the mission accomplished, laughing at how panicked and nervous we all were. And knowing that everything turned out alright in the end. And when that happens, I'm going to think back to this moment right now, and laugh at myself for ever having doubts, ever being worried or nervous."

Weiss did it too. She pictured finally being able to take off this backpack and collapsing out to her bed. She fantasized about a nice, warm shower, and finally tucking in under her covers. And she imagined the inevitable feeling of being annoyed when Jaune woke up early to do push-ups for calisthenics and go for a run. Of watching everything go back to normal with his contented smile on her sleepy lips.

She let her mind drift for just a moment. Without running her jaw about this and everything, it was easy to do. Weiss tried to isolate this moment in terrified, uncertain time. Just so that tomorrow or the day after that, when this was all over and everyone was okay, she could think back to the way she was feeling right now, and be happy it was over.

Jaune flared his Aura again. The illusions that everything was going to be okay shattered when he immediately lowered his center of mass, holding his sword tight. She stepped towards him, putting her shoulder nearly against his, holding her sword out and she felt with her aura.

That empty hole in reality. Cold, hateful, and darkly intelligent with pure malice. Several of them in the direction she couldn't quite place, but felt forward somehow. Grimm.

They weren't alone anymore. It wasn't in the direction of the humming noise. Closer towards the direction of the water. They had been walking between those directions, but now it was a sharp turn that way.

She exchanged a glance with Jaune and nodded. "Let's go."

— 26 —

Fighting Grimm wasn't the problem, not exactly. Weiss had been out on class field exercises plenty of times. Everyone had. It was part and parcel of being a Hunter. The exact problems boiled down to team composition. She had seen Jaune and Blake dispatch Grimm together in the Forever Fall Forest; they clearly had no trouble working together. But she had never been in that same position with Jaune. When push came to shove, all they had was some training in the gym, one of Jaune's obsessions.

"Stick behind me," he said, readying his shield. "Hit 'em with Dust, Semblance, whatever. Area of effect as they focus on me."

"Okay," she said, trying to make it sound calm and collected, and not blankly terrified. "What if you get hit? What if they're too fast?"

"Then hit me," he said, advancing forwards like an ancient Mistrali hoplite. "I can take it so long as it kills more of them than it kills me."

Weiss could feel her heart threatening to tear out of her chest. She held her rapier so tightly that her hand shook. She couldn't exactly estimate how many they were up against. It was hard to see here: limited lines of sight through the mushroom forest and oh so dark even with the bioluminescence. But the pit in her soul she felt didn't paint a pretty picture. It felt like… it felt like saying mommy. That's the only way she could describe it. It was like sitting beside her parents as a little girl, there for some formal gathering, and looking at her mother and accidentally saying mommy in public.

It wasn't the breaking of décor that made it bad. Wasn't the way it looked way too informal in front of guests, not proper for someone of her standing. But it was the way that every time she accidentally said something like that to her mother, it was like something inside her mother broke. Like her mother just wanted to hide her face and cry in quiet desperation. And it was all Weiss' fault.

That was what the presence of so many Grimm they couldn't see felt like when she burned her Aura. She just wanted to curl into a ball and ask why Mommy was crying.

They weren't far from the sound of rushing water now, a waterfall perhaps. Maybe some sort of aquifer. She really didn't know how cave environments worked.

Weiss gasped as Jaune's armored hand came down on her shoulder. Wordlessly, he just pointed into the 'tree' line. At first she thought they were just shadows in the darkness cast by bioluminescent fungus. Or maybe just illusions at the corner of her vision. Someone had once told Weiss that you could see better in the dark with your peripherals. That if you couldn't properly make something out in the darkness, just look around it and your mind could fill in the gaps better than your eyes. It was like that.

Grimm didn't lurk in the shadows like that. They didn't see you and then wait patiently in silence. They were brutes, pure and simple. Mindless monsters of murder and malice. If ever you were in the crosshairs of a horde, they would swarm and surround you, ripping you limb from limb like starving animals.

But hiding was exactly what they were doing.

It took her a moment to really see them, squinting into the darkness and letting her eyes readjust. Hiding beneath fungal moss-analogues and the great caps of giant mushrooms, occasionally lit up by little floating pink jellyfish-looking creatures. They were dark, standing on two legs, each with a warped silhouette like a child's crayon drawing of their own shadow—the shape was there, but the dimensions were all just inaccurate enough. When she had been doom scrolling social media back in the hospital, she had come across a post like that. A piece of an art book with a detailed sketch of the rear half of a horse, for the child drawing to finish on their own. The child with the book had just drawn an ugly stick figure for the front half of the horse, and then the point of the meme was someone had then tried to realistically recreate this accurate end of a horse with this childish front portion.

That's exactly what they looked like. They weren't beowolves or ursae or any number of the more common species that walked the daylight. They were all like crude children's approximations of what a human being should resemble.

"Wendigos," she whispered. More of the creatures that had stolen Coco's face. Just one of them had nearly been enough to kill three Huntsmen. There were far more than one lurking in the darkness.

One of the shadows turned and looked her directly in the eyes. It was hard to tell, but some sixth sense told her she was making eye contact with something inhuman on a primal level. Activating every single fight or flight response drilled into her through millions of years of evolution. Telling her what she was looking at was wrong and shouldn't exist.

"Wendigo," she heard it whisper as it pointed at her.

"Wendigo?" "Wendigo." "Wendigo!" "Wen-di-go," came a hushed chorus as more turned to face the two of them and spoke, repeating her words in their own corruption of her own voice.

One of them stepped forwards, still walking in the cover, but more easily seen. Its head twitched, body shaking like Parkinson's. She watched it grab black scalp and pull, digging and dragging fingernails through it and pulling out clumps of rough, white hair like hers but somehow filthy.

In one of her psychology classes at Beacon, there had been a minor lesson about something called the uncanny valley. It was a weird quirk of human and faunus psychology that anything that looked almost human but fell just short of hitting the mark instantly put people on alert, made them uncomfortable, and prone to lashing out. It was why clowns and wax doll museums freaked some people out. Why people inherently distrusted masks that obscured the eyes and mouth. Weiss and Jaune had been taking notes, more or less just copying the lecture slides, as the teacher went into an aside. She had been thinking aloud, wondering why it was that humans and faunus had developed this psychological quirk in tandem. Millions of years of evolution had shaped their biology and psychology, honing them to survive and thrive in this world. What evolutionary advantage could there possibly be in being terrified of ambiguity, of something that looked human but just couldn't quite stick the landing?

Weiss saw her own face in imitation and understood this was why. Her skin was loose as if it didn't quite fit on a too small skull. The way the scar over her eye was widened and drooling. How, when it tried to smile with her own lips, the muscles pulled in the wrong direction, giving the friendly expression a look of drooping insanity.

"Could you come here for a second?" the thing wearing a party mask of her own face asked. "I want to show you something."

"Show you?" "Show!" "Sh-sh-sh!" "Want. Want!"

They just kept talking, trying to sound human, and failing.

Jaune's hand on her shoulder tightened so hard it hurt, and she felt so thankful for it. For the briefest of moments, she realized she hadn't been looking at him in minutes. He hadn't even said anything. It was an illogical thought, one of the things had stolen Coco's face and no one could tell. Jaune was still Jaune, right? The reason he didn't know the color of communism or who the Final Emperor was was just because he only knew weird things, and not because he had been replaced somewhere along the lines, right? Right?

His skin fit his face. That hard, determined looking in his eyes had to be human. He hadn't been replaced while he had been out of her sight. It was a ridiculous thought. But he was holding her so tightly that she didn't think she could escape if she wanted.

"No!" one of the monsters screamed, but it sounded too human, and female. And it had a tone, a personality. Like someone was crying out in desperation through sobs. "I don't fucking want you! Get the fuck away from me!"

"That's her," Jaune said.

"How do you know it's really C—"

He put his hand over her mouth. On instinct, she wanted to bite him. How dare he touch her like that! With that kind of commanding force. How dare anyone do that to her!

But at the desperate, almost feral look in his blue eyes, she couldn't find herself the energy to be angry. All she could do was go silent, and try not to shake.

"Don't say any names," he said. "Don't give them anything to use."

"Name?" "Name." "Nom." "Nom de plume." "I want a name." "What is your name." "Nay-nay-name!" The shadows shifted. The one wearing her face stepped backwards, watching her through the darkness. She couldn't take her eyes off it. Her peripherals were nothing but darkness moving and whispering.

None of them were coming out to attack them. They just kept hiding, imitating voices, pretending to speak. It was like a room full of chatbots given a voice.

Weiss felt more than she saw Jaune take his hand from her mouth and slide it down her arm. His gloved hand interwove fingers with hers, and she held back. She didn't need him to explain. She just inherently understood that so long as they were touching, neither of them could be replaced without the other noticing. They could keep their eyes forward, around them, without needing to watch behind their backs at each other. And right now, she was thankful for the human contact. It grounded her back in reality.

"What is your name?" a wendigo asked as Jaune led Weiss forwards. Not in the direction of the monsters, but around them, towards the sound of water and Coco's yell.

Neither of them spoke. But she could feel dozens upon dozens of inhuman eyes burrowing into her. It would almost be preferable if they attacked. If they could focus on killing these things because there weren't any other options. But there were so many of them and they had to be so dangerous and this was their territory. She knew it would be stupid to chase after them. After all, that's what they wanted—they had something they wanted to show you if only you followed them in.

"Name!" one of them yelled, like a cat whose paw had been stepped on. "What is your name?"

They just kept walking. There were so many of them it was hard to keep track. Even harder to remember exactly where Coco's voice had come from. If it even was her. It was probably a trap.

"What is your name?" the yowler called out again. It had an all-too-human tone this time: annoyed, angry. "Your name, your name, what is your name, tell me your name, what is your name!"

She held onto Jaune tighter. Every step for maybe a mile. She couldn't even watch the way forwards and tripped. If not for the way he was holding her, she would have fallen. He hauled her back up without comment. And her heart felt too cold to feel the shame and embarrassment she should have felt. Those kinds of emotions felt ridiculous. They felt stupid and childish. She remembered being back in class and panicking over tests, and how that just seemed so… so nothing. Who cared about a psychology exam, or the finer points of weapon maintenance, not at a time like this. All her fears and worries beforehand, it just felt shameful. How could she've ever felt like that was important when she had this for context?

The wendigo screamed. "Tell me your fucking name!"

Her breaths came in short and ragged. Weiss couldn't look at them anymore. Their broken faces, the way they looked human in the wrong way. The ones that tried to imitate her. She shut her eyes tight, letting the boy guide her. Weiss inhaled sharply and told herself that she wasn't crying. That she wasn't scared. She wasn't afraid. She was a Schnee. She was the cold and the ice. She was the storm that is approaching. Heiress to a legacy of nobility and warriors judging back generations upon generations. She wasn't going to die down here. Something pretending to be her wasn't going to swarm over the two of them, overrunning them, and not her face off to wear it as a party mask. That wasn't going to happen.

She just thought of Coco. She thought of being back in her own bed in the dorm rooms at school. She thought of waking up and brushing her hair and thinking back on this moment, and laughing at how scared she was over nothing. How she was going to be fine and everything was going to work out and they were going to save Coco and no one was going to die or get hurt or tear her heart out or eat her eyes or filet her breasts into neat little steaks and eat them while she was still screaming.

Weiss and Jaune were going to be fine.

She was going to laugh at this one day. It would make a great war story. Something to tell people like Yang and Jack as she used them as guinea pigs to test out her newest baking creations. They were going to be so impressed and how she survived this without a scratch, and then they were going to be stuffed to the breaking point with the awesome things she was going to cook and bake.

She had to believe it. Had to tell herself that this was the only way it could end.

It was the only way to wrestle control of her quick, sobbing breaths and the wetness in her eyes.

Why aren't they attacking us? Please just get it over with. Please just do something; I can't handle the waiting!

"Shut up!" Coco screamed, and Weiss bumped into Jaune's back.

She let her eyes open and saw before them stretched a vast lake. They were on the edge of a low cliff base overlooking a rocky beach. No more than a couple meters down the hillside. The fungus didn't grow that far down into the water. Distantly, she could make out a waterfall. The entire lake had a current going further into the darkness which the bioluminescence couldn't follow.

There Coco was, curled into a ball on herself in a pile of rocks like some kind of fortification. Her legs were in the water like she had washed up there. Or, like that was as far away she could get from the wendigos before something in the water got her first. Her back to a corner, an open, endless corner.

Weiss already called out her name, before she remembered the things watching them. It took several attempts at moving her neck before she was able to turn her head and look behind her. They were standing and crouching and crawling there. One of them was so close it could touch her, looking back at her with the face of a mummy. It was hunkered down in a squat, reaching out. Its clawed fingers brushed the hem of her combat skirt, and it let out a soft breath as if amazed by the texture of the fabric.

She screamed, flailing backwards away from it. It snapped its hand back and crawled away as if startled, but she was already moving. She tripped and fell, tumbling towards the slope. Jaune held onto her hand, the weight of a backpack and a body feeling like it was trying to tear her arm off. The boy's eyes were wide and wild, his mouth open, but stopping himself before he said her name. He held her there for a moment, most of her body over the edge, prevented from falling only by his grip. And for a brief, irrational moment, she almost imagined he was going to drop her. That he was going to remember all the times they had fought, the way she had tried to be nasty to him to make him go away, and he would remember and hold it against her, by holding her no longer.

"I gotcha," he said breathlessly, pulling her towards him.

As soon as she had two feet under her, it was a wonder she didn't collapse. Her knees were anything but steady. She almost wanted to grab onto Jaune just because he was an armored rock that wasn't falling down. Use him to anchor herself until she could finally stand safely again. It was a shameful, embarrassing thought and it sickened to her core. Weiss was strong, she was independent, and she wasn't a terrified little girl grasping at straws for anything that would make her feel better.

Just as soon as the feeling passed, a worse one came over her. Jaune sometimes seemed to know everything about her. The way he just looked at people and intrinsically understood way more than he ever should. She wondered if right now, looking at her, he knew. Knew that for just a moment, she wasn't the strong Huntress she wanted to be, but was just a terrified little girl, and would never forget it.

Jaune nodded towards Coco, cowering and shivering there in the water and the rocks. "C'mon."

No snide remarks. No knowing statements. No attempt to make fun of her or crack a joke.

She turned one last time to see the things just meters away behind mushrooms and rocks. And she tried not to listen as they asked her questions and talked amongst themselves as she and Jaune slid down the embankment towards Coco.

— 27 —

Coco saw the two skinwalkers descend down the embankment. They had stopped crowding there atop the hill, whispering, asking her to join them. And they were wearing the faces of her friends. Jaune Arc and Weiss Schnee. The two of them hadn't followed her down. The one that had replaced her… it… she…

She felt so cold, so numb. And it wasn't just the icy chill of the water she had crawled into just to get further and further away from those goddamn things. The only way those skinwalkers could have seen those two faces was if they stole them themselves.

In a desperate twinge of something, she tried to reach out to Fox. But no one replied. No one had replied to her since she got down. The only person to speak to her had been the dying man in the tree. She had failed him. She felt everyone. And now she was collapsed here behind the rocks, barely able to crawl on her knees, feeling every bit of warmth in her lower body seep out into the water and render her without feeling.

Now they were coming to finish the job. Tired of egging her on and asking for her to join them, they were doing it themselves.

Coco hadn't intended to fall down here. She had just been running and running and then she tripped. And impossibly, her Aura hadn't finally shattered when she landed. But what remained hadn't been enough to keep her pain-free, keep her standing. It had just been enough to remind her that she wasn't alone. That they were out there, watching her, too terrified of that chain monster to get near her. So all she could do was crawl, trying to get away from it, her back and legs nearly useless.

She could feel her fractured bones pinching and stabbing nerves and blood vessels every time she forced herself to move. She knew for a fact that the only reason why she had any sense of heat left in her back was from internal bleeding, warm blood leaking just beneath her skin. Fighting the cold lap of the waves she had crawled towards for defense here behind the rocks. It was as far as she could go. Not unless she could swim on worthless legs. She'd always been more of a track and field girl rather than a swimmer in any case.

The last bit of warmth she had beside the blood was hiding under her beret. That tiny little bat shivering and squeaking and hiding under the hat that the Grimm had given her. It was all she had left.

Coco was going to die down here alone. She wasn't going to die fighting. Wasn't going to go out in the last stand to save a life. Open ground all around, as the old party song went. She was going to freeze to death on a beach who knows how far underground. Bleeding and broken and alone.

The only things you could think of, the only hope she could manage through the pain, was that her friends would find her and return something of her body to her family. Maybe that way her soul could find rest in the stars and finally meet her grandmother. She didn't want her spirit trapped in those sticky webs making up the star-like ceiling to be devoured by worms.

But as soon as she saw the two skinwalkers reach the rocky beach and step towards her, she knew everyone was dead. Coco was the best fighter they had, for sure. And she had run ahead of the team, lost her weapon, and broken herself. The monster had stolen her face and killed her teammates one by one as they crawled out of that tight little tunnel, catching them all by surprise. All because she couldn't be the fucking leader they deserved. Because she was scared and terrified of the tunnels and a failure and this exact fucking thing.

It hurts so badly, but she held herself up on her elbows, greeting her teeth, and staring the monsters down. They were good impressions. These weren't like the ones watching her from a top being embankment. These ones could flawlessly resemble humans. Right down to the cute little nose on Weiss' face, and the oddly alluring feather on Jaune's chest.

If Coco was going to die and couldn't do anything about stopping it, the least she could do was die on her feet. Or at least, die like a bulldog with broken hind legs, biting and snapping.

"Get the fuck away from me," Coco crawled.

Jaune, or at least the thing wearing his face, just seemed impossible to read. It was the surest sign he was one of them. Like this expression of dullness had stained his face. The girl beside him looked like she was trying not to cry, and trying instead to put on a brave, almost combative look that just looked adorable. They were holding hands in a way that was almost cute, except for the complete death knuckling.

The girl looked like she didn't know what to say. "Hey, it's us," she finally let slip.

"I said, get away from me!" Coco hissed back. She pushed herself up, until she was able to get herself into a sitting position against one of the larger rocks. The water still soaked through her pants. She found that bit of stalagmite or whatever she had tried to use as a weapon and held it out like a knife. "You know what, make my day. You want me to come to you? Fuck you. You come any closer and I'll kill you all! Do you hear me, you whispering bastards? I'll kill every single one of you!"

She heard them up above in the forest. Whispering amongst themselves, like a chittering of worried hands. "Kill?" "Make my day." "Whispering." "Hear me. Hear me!"

Coco couldn't help but scream. "Stop doing that! It's not been scary hours ago and now it's just pissing me off, you sons of bitches!"

Jaune took a step towards her, holding his hands up. She tried stabbing at him with a piece of rock, and missed entirely.

"No, for real, it's me!" he said with a desperate edge. Credit where it was due, it not only took his face, but his goddamn weird little accent that she could never place. "Girl, just come down, we're here to rescue you!"

"I said get away!"

He stepped towards her again. "Girl!"

She swung and missed. And when he tried to reach his hand out for her, Coco grabbed it and pulled him towards her. He let out a yelp in surprise, one of his armored knees hitting the water.

"J—" Weiss tried, and stopped herself. The exact same way that so many of those monsters had been aping human speech but couldn't quite get the words right.

Coco grabbed Jaune's face, trying to dig her thumbs into those fake eyes. How fucking dare it steal her friend's eyes! She had adopted the kid and promised to make him a better Huntsman. All he had to do was follow her advice and he would be the best out there, and now he was dead, and now it was wearing him, and now it was trying to kill her!

"Those eyes don't belong to you!" she screamed.

"Girl, it's me!" he said, frantically grabbing her wrists. His grip was so strong, so tight. The fingers dug into her skin and bones, leaving bruises almost instantly.

"You can't fool me; you don't even know my name."

"I'm not saying anyone's name with those things around!" he yelled back, forcing her arms back. He pinned her against the rock, in a position like being crucified.

She tried to make her lower back work, tried to get her useless legs out beneath her. To get them from under the water and try to kick him away. But all she could do was grunt in pain, feeling the blood beneath her skin, and the broken fragments of bones poking through nerve tissue.

"You stole his fucking face!" she said, letting her head sag. "Everyone's fucking dead because of me, and you're just rubbing it in. Just do it. Just kill me. Stop pretending, you sick bastard. Just let me finally die." She choked up, and then broke out laughing, and then choked that back down too. An incoherent mess of sounds, a rapid shifting of polar opposite emotions. The edges of her vision were going black. Her legs were so numb, she couldn't even properly knee him in the groin. It didn't hit with any force, and in any case, she knew he wore a cup.

Jaune made it a point that his balls were always protected.

It had copied everything about him. Everything.

Jaune held her hands against the rock, spread out. "Maybe there's nothing I can prove to you to make you really believe me. You know, except the fucking fact that I could remember shit."

"Like what?!" she snapped.

He made a low, growling noise in the back of his throat. "Like exactly what cup size you rockin', girl. Fuck! Just calm down."

Coco instantly stopped struggling. She just stared up into the boy's baby blue eyes, her expression slack jawed. "I… holy shit, that was how you're going to prove you're actually him?"

He rolled his eyes. "I panicked. It was the last important conversation we had. You know, besides panties, but that was in the tunnels, so I didn't think you would count that. You never did tell me the size, exactly."

"You can feel me up later," she said with a laugh.

Almost reluctantly, he let her hands go. And instantly she had wrapped them around him, pulling him close. He held up his arms, off balance from the way he had fallen one knee in the water, just kind of collapsed onto her.

Suddenly, she felt warm again. The press of another human body against her. Living, breathing, feeling, and looking a little embarrassed. Fuck you, Jaune. Feel embarrassed. Suffer in silence! Gods, she needed this. She knew she was going to regret it. She knew how pathetic she looked. How she was going to try to have to think of an excuse to explain why she was doing this and couldn't stop herself. But that was a problem for future Coco. Right now, she was just beyond words that he was alive and that she could touch somebody alive and real.

"Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit—you're real, you're real, so real, you're the real deal. I can touch you and you're not cold and dead. This is real and you're real and I'm alive and you're alive."

Almost reluctantly, he touched her back and didn't really seem to know what to do with his hands.

"I thought you were all dead and I was dead and, god, this is fucking embarrassing."

"Girl," he said, trying to push off her. He coughed awkwardly. "You said I could feel you up later. I can feel them pressing against me now!"

She only grabbed him tighter. "They're all okay!"

"I mean, I don't know why your chest would be smaller or anything."

She bopped him over the head. "No, you dumbass. I mean your team. My team. Every one of us!"

"Oh. Your partner got hurt pretty badly," he said, sounding almost embarrassed. "My partner is patching him up. This one and I came down here to rescue you. But everyone should make a full recovery."

"I'm losing track of these people," she said, finally letting him go.

"Yeah, it's hella awkward trying to speak without naming names." He turned to Weiss and smiled. It was an oddly painful expression.

She wasn't really looking, however. She was just staring up at the top of the ridge, at the wall of shadows up there staring down at them and whispering. Little dots of red eyes in some of them. But most of them were trying to look human or faunus. A lot of them were faunus, actually. With lopsided ears or tails that just look somehow cartoonishly inaccurate.

Weiss pulsed on her Aura. If she or the boy had done that earlier, Coco would have known they were the real deal. At least she thought she would have known. She prayed for all that love was worth that those skinwalkers were incapable of pretending to have Aura. She suspected that if she had seen it in the moment, she wouldn't have believed it, and assumed it was just another trick. There were so many of the bastards up there that it was hard to pick any of them out with her own semblance of an Aura.

"Why are they just standing there?" Weiss asked, holding her sword tightly. "The one that was pretending to be Coco nearly killed three of us."

They whispered a chorus in response, mangled words and half-formed sentences.

Coco felt her guts writhing. The one that stole her face—Jaune mentioned some of them were really hurt, her teammates and friends. She wondered if they would have been fine, if they would have been okay, if only she had been less gung-ho. If she hadn't let that thing shove her off the cliff.

"Maybe they can't," Jaune said slowly.

Weiss flicked a glance towards him, as if taking her eyes off the figures on the ridge caused her physical pain. She cringed slightly, and her eyes were locked back up on the Grimm.

"The one that tried to kill us could talk. It could imitate faces pretty well. These ones can't, like they don't know how."

"Like they're babies," Weiss whispered. "That's why they're just repeating us. They're trying to learn how to speak." She blinked, her eyes fluttering. "How to look and pretend to be human."

"The longer we stay here, the more we talk, the more they learn to blend in," he said. "The better they're going to be at killing people one day."

But it had to be worse than that, wasn't it? Coco kept thinking about Haakon in the tree. He had been stuck, but able to speak. What if the reason he was there wasn't just for boundless cruelty, but what if this cave was where skinwalkers spawned? Did Grimm spawn or did they just appear out of thin air? She supposed it didn't matter. What mattered was that maybe staying here was just giving them more opportunity to learn and observe from an actual human being, however corrupted and maimed their imitations were.

Part of her wanted to tell Jaune and Weiss. To relate this information. Prove that she had actually completed the mission on her own and knew what happened to team CCHS. But that would mean admitting she had abandoned a man begging for her help. That she had failed as a Huntress. That she was better off dead.

She couldn't do that. The man was obviously going to die, and she couldn't have helped him. And she doubted trying to get to him now would do anything but get the two freshmen killed. It was better that they didn't know about Haakon. Better that nobody knew anything. And allowed her to stew in the implications all alone.

Weiss just looked at Jaune, her mouth opened by an inch.

Rather than answer any implied question, he turned around and offered his hand to Coco. "Here. Can you walk?"

The question sent a frisson of angry unease coursing through her shattered nervous system. "Yeah," she lied, still taking his hand without explanation. She gripped him tightly, her left arm about the only thing that still worked right, allowing him to haul her to her feet and out of the water.

Blackness clouded the edges of her vision as a wave of nausea struck her across the throat. It felt like someone had removed the bottom of her rib cage and replaced it with broken glass all the way down to her tailbone. Piercing and stabbing, feeling warm as new blood leaked beneath her skin. She flared what was left of her Aura, suddenly out of breath; it was the only thing that stopped her from sucking in a choking gasp of air.

The boy regarded her for a moment that seemed to last forever. Her heart beat three times as she watched those judgmental blue eyes piercing into her. Evaluating her like a piece of meat. Coming so close to worry, so close to pity. She grit her teeth.

"Give me my weapon."

He almost seemed startled to realize he was holding her purse. With a casual throw, no small feat given its weight, he tossed it towards her, and then seemed to instantly realize his mistake.

Coco caught her purse in the wrong hand. Her left hand, the one that worked. But doing so required her to twist her body, to twist her spine, to get the angle right. The weight was like a ton of bricks suddenly compressing her spine into a singular piece of bone once again. It felt so familiar, poundage she was used to carrying, and she felt it slipped through her slick, shaking fingers. "No!" she grunted, a half formed word in her throat.

But the feeling of trying to carry it all broke everything. She recalled one time in Beacon gym, that place with the uncomfortably low ceilings, where she was trying to show off how strong and tough she was to her then-new partner, Fox. She'd looked at the weights on one of the bars at the squat rack, and altogether they didn't look like too much. She carried more weight in her purse, when using her minigun. Of course, Fox couldn't read the weights, but he still seemed to sense something was off as she racked more and more iron onto the bar. And finally, thinking it was enough to really show off, she'd put it onto her shoulders and stepped forwards, and collapsed.

She probably didn't break anything internally because Fox had been there to catch her.

Coco didn't have anything left that wasn't broken when Jaune caught her. She screamed, a noise made ragged by the way she'd ruined herself yelling before. Her vision swam black, cold blood coursing through her heart from her frozen legs. Her entire body had a sensation of needing to sneeze, there was no other way to describe it: this violent tingling sensation all across her that felt like it would explode out at any moment. Every bone in her body sang in pain. Every muscle twisted and sprained. Jaune caught her, holding her against himself, saying that it was all okay and that he had her, and the last thing that hadn't broken collapsed: her sense of self.

It was embarrassing. Pathetic. Humiliating. She would have reflexively tried to shove him away, but she couldn't get her arms to work like that. She had dropped her purse. She didn't even have the residual strength to pretend like everything was fine.

"No," she said, trying to grit her teeth and bear through the pain. It came out as a low moan, almost sexually weak.

Coco tried to get her legs beneath her, and the pain was so bad that she choked. And then she gagged. And in the worst moment of her life, she spat out a mix of stomach acid and bile onto his chest plate. She coughed and sputtered, getting the taste of spit and stomach goo out of her mouth. It fell down to the ground in a long string of saliva. Coco coughed once more like getting a positive strep throat test.

Some part of her hoped that he would get disgusted and throw her away, forcing her to stand on her own. She was pathetic. She wasn't even a huntress. Just a sad little girl with a broken body. It was what she deserved. Dead weight just to be abandoned. It would have probably helped their chances to escape this place alive. And the sense of hopeless dread would almost be cathartic in a completely irrational way. The sense that disaster had happened, the worst was over, and she could just focus on making the world's most beautiful corpse.

Instead, the boy just held her up, his arms beneath hers. "I gotcha, I gotcha," he said, his words a warm breath of human air in her ears. The baby bat hiding under her beret shuddered.

"No!" she cried out, trying to do something, anything. And failing.

Jaune shifted his arms. "Here, if you can't walk, we'll try to carry you."

"Don't," she said, uselessly. He didn't let her go. All she could do was struggle in vain.

"Coco," he said, more at a loss than anything.

"I can walk."

"And I'm the King of France," he said. "You're not fooling anybody."

"There's too many Grimm up there; you can't fight if you're carrying me. I'd just be dead weight, and then we'd all be dead."

Weiss glanced over her shoulder, looking concerned, but once again was unable to keep her attention off the Grimm for too long. It was like she was afraid that they would seize the moment she was distracted and kill her.

"Don't be stupid; we didn't come all this way just to leave you here," he snapped.

"And I didn't come all this way just to get everyone around me killed!"

"Coco!"

She tried pushing away. "Jaune!"

He growled in his throat. "We're not leaving you behind, you stupid bitch. Now push your panties and your pride to the side and let us help!"

Unable to really stop him, he crouched down slightly and adjusted his grip on her. His hand practically on her ass, he grunted as he picked her up in a humiliating bridal carry. Everything sang out in pain, her spine popping and cracking like a broken window under combat boots. Coco screamed.

"No, no, it hurts too much, just leave me!"

"Look me in the fucking eyes and tell me if you were me, that you'd leave me here to die."

Their faces so close together as he carried her, she could feel his breath on her. See him greeting his teeth hard enough that she imagined he was almost going to bite her. She reached up with her one good arm and grabbed his collar.

"Yes!" she shouted. "I would fucking leave to you to die. I'd leave you so I could save the people around me. Because you're just some worthless pathetic failure who can't even do anything right, who gets herself hurt, and is broken dead weight, and she can't even fight alongside you, and she's an awful boss, and can't even save—save—save—" She choked up.

Jaune regarded her calmly, so calm that it was almost offensive. It was almost a look of disgusted pity. "Cool story, bro. Ya done?"

She tried to take a swing at him but it did nothing against his bulk and Aura.

"Because all I hear from you is that I'm better than you," he hissed. "And I would have never thought the great Coco Adel would ever in a million years let me think I was better than her at anything."

"Fuck you," she said, covering her face with her hand. She wasn't crying. She wasn't sobbing in pain and embarrassment and humiliation. She had to keep telling herself that. "You're not better than me, you piece of shit. Never in a million years. Not at anything because I'm the best there is."

He held her tighter, finding a better way to grip her in his arms. "That's what I thought. Because after everything you've tried to teach me, I'd never turn around and abandon all of that, abandon you." And then, in a suddenly lighter tone, he winked and said: "How am I supposed to finally tell you the student has become the master and rub it in your face if you die right now, huh?"

Carrying her, he stepped out of the ankle deep water, onto the rocks of the shore. She didn't have the willpower anymore to fight him. She wanted to so badly. Hell, she would have preferred slinging her one good arm around her shoulder and fighting through the pain to walk. But he wasn't about to let her do that. If she had pissed herself back when she landed instead of just hitting water, that would have been less emasculating than this.

"So do we just go the way you came?" she asked, keeping her eyes shut.

Jaune sighed. Once again he adjusted her. She was convinced that between her own weight and his rucksack, he had to be carrying one hell of a heavy load and barely able to walk himself.

"No. We needed Weiss' Semblance just to get down, and I'm not confident we can all go up that way again," he said.

The skinwalkers continue to whisper words, picking up pieces of everyone's conversation and repeating it amongst themselves. There seem to be more and more of them up there every moment that passed, standing in fungus, crouched down behind rocks, crawling on the ground just to poke their eyes over the ridge. It was like a mold infection.

"Shamrock and Velvet were supposed to shoot a flare if they found a safe way down, and thus a safe way up," Weiss said.

"Wait, a flare?!" Coco gasped.

Weiss gave her a funny look. "Yeah. Loud and bright. I imagine we're waiting for that before we move out. Otherwise we're just wondering. We'll still have to find a way past those wendigos."

"A flare is going to attract Grimm!"

Weiss suppressed a scoff. "With all due respect, I think they already found us. And they're just watching." She shifted in place uncomfortably. "I'm not sure it would really change anything at this point."

Coco shook her head. "No, I mean, there's more than just the skinwalkers. The things that steal faces are just one of the things I've seen down here. There's a lot more out there, I just know it!"

Jaune's expression was unreadable. "And they don't know that." He blinked slowly. "What kinds of Grimm did you see? Do you know how many?"

Before Coco could answer, the light lit up the entire cave.

One heartbeat was all it took. Da-dum thump! By the time her blood pumped into the left ventricle, the monsters replied.

Da-dum thump!

Coco turned her eyes towards the top of the ridge. The skinwalkers all began to hiss and recoil, hiding and ducking for the shadows.

Da-dum thump!

She felt the sweat drip off her forehead and land on the rock below. A red flare like rocket's glare shooting high up towards the ceiling of the cave from down the lakeside and across some distance.

Across the distant parts of the lake's coast, Coco saw them. Hidden originally in the abyssal darkness. They broke out across the shadows like chickenpox. Infecting the skin of blackness and turning it into a sea of eyes fixated onto the sky.

And somehow she could sense in the core of her soul, the pit of her dying Aura, when one of those eyes turned from the flare to look directly at her.

Da-dum—

It stopped. Blood frozen in her veins, congealing in her heart. Right as the eyes turned towards them like a figure emerging from a deep sleep. First pairs, and then dozens, and then hundreds of them.

The howling began.

This is how everyone dies.