Chapter 4: If Your Eyes Cause You to Sin

"Defeat, my Defeat, my solitude and my aloofness;

You are dearer to me than a thousand triumphs,

And sweeter to my heart than all world-glory."

— 9 —

"Are you trying to look up my skirt?" she demanded with disgust.

"I lost my dick," I said tiredly. "I was hoping I could find it inside you. Wanna check?"

Honestly, I was still shaking a bit from the encounter with Cinder. But just because I had collapsed onto the ground in the dorm common room didn't mean I had to take shit from a Schnee.

"You're disgusting," Netflix No-Chill said.

I groaned and somehow got to my feet. Why did my head hurt so much? Honestly, it was probably the hangover. Definitely the hangover. I needed to wash down some opiates with a bit of fire water. The worst part was this oncoming feeling of pneumonia, where every now and again I would get this sensation like I was going to bleed from the nose whenever I started thinking too hard.

"What are you even doing out here on the couch?" I asked, rubbing my nose. I went over to the box of tissues on the kitchen island to stuff my nose. It kept the blood at bay.

Netflix glowered. Then slowly looked around, squinting. "I… I'm not sure. You were talking, you and I, we were—I mean." She rubbed her face. "I'm not sure how I got here?"

I washed my hands of nose blood in the sink. "You probably walked. Maybe you had your nubile faunus slave boys bring you here. I don't know the kind of shit Schnees are into."

"I don't—shut up, just shut up. My head hurts."

I pulled out an amphetamine cola from the fridge. It wasn't mine, but if I wrote my name down in permanent marker on all of the bottles people just kind of left them in there for me. As I sipped the fizzy liquid, something occurred to me.

"Are… we having a conversation right now?"

"We were talking earlier?" she said, looking increasingly distressed. "About Montluçon and…" She hissed, rubbing her a scar. "Ow."

I shook my head. "No. Last time we talked was, like, a couple days ago? I was asking for your measurements because I was looking for a porn star who matched you and—" I blinked. "Oh shit, you met my doppelganger! What did he look like? Did he look like a complete bitch, did he have an eye patch, a scar on his cheek in the shape of a banana?"

"Doppel…" She swallowed hard. "You look different, Jaune. What happened to your tattoos?"

I looked at my left arm. I don't know why my left arm was the first one I glanced at. The little tissue in my nose soaked through with blood. It got in the way of trying to drink the cola. "I've never had tattoos."

She sat up suddenly, eyes wide. "You're—you're not him!"

I gestured vaguely. "No, I'm the original. Also, yes, I do have a clone running around at this point and I'm not sure who it is. It wasn't toothpaste girl. But it is someone with a transformation Semblance like Shadow Person trying to fuck with me. I wouldn't worry about it. It's not like I have a reputation worth preserving."

Gritting her teeth, Netflix No-Chill pressed herself against the couch. "You're not Jaune! I—this is wrong. Everything feels wrong. Where am I?"

"You're talking mad shit for someone in blastin' range."

"I hate you. I don't hate you. What's going on?"

"I think it's called puberty. Those conflicting emotions mean you're finally becoming a woman. My advice is to buy extra panties because you're going to have discharge and ruin several pairs along the way."

But she just looked scared. Her hands gripped the sides of the couch, blue eyes bugging out of her skull. It was enough to make me anxious by proximity.

"No, I—" Netflix swallowed. And then her gaze settled back on me. "Why can't I remember? I know this is wrong; I feel wrong but I can't remember why."

I strategically placed myself on the other side of the kitchen island, putting something heavy between me and her. "Uh, Netflix No-Chill, you're starting to scare me."

"You? I'm scaring you?" She barked a single laugh. "What were you doing last week?"

"What?"

"One week ago. Do you remember what you were doing?"

I looked at my bottle of cola, imagining it was alcohol. "I don't even remember what I was doing yesterday."

"Then how did you know the last time we talked was just a couple of days ago?"

"Because." And I froze. "It… just felt like the thing to say?"

She was fidgeting in place, so bad it was like she was vibrating. "It's on the tip of my tongue. I know for a fact I was doing something important last week, something…" Her gaze snapped towards the oven. "Something about this."

I watched her stand up and walk like a zombie towards the oven. "Uh, Netflix, did you get into my hooch?"

Her knees buckled beneath her. She fell down to the ground in a surprisingly lady-like fashion in front of the oven. With a defocused look at her eyes, she reached out and opened the oven and seemed completely baffled to find it empty.

"It's in here," she breathed, closing it and opening it again. "It's got to be in here. I know it's in here. I remember something. You were singing. But you can't sing. I've heard you in the shower—but have I? I feel like I know I've heard you sing horribly in the shower, but I can't remember it happening. I can't remember you singing but I know you did. You said we should go running to get better at cardio."

She opened the oven and slammed it shut. And then did it again and again, continuing to mutter to herself and ask questions in an increasingly frantic voice.

I raised my hands slowly to protect myself and backed away, trying not to make any sudden movements or noises.

It didn't stop her from snapping her head around towards me fast enough I thought she might break her neck. "Who's Simone?"

"Yeah, no, all of my fucking nope!"

I turned and ran into the bedroom and jammed the door shut with a chair.

— 10 —

"It just ends here," Shamrock said, his voice barely above a whisper. He reached his hand up towards the open air and just stopped. He tried to take a step forward and it was like something was holding him back.

We were at the outskirts of Beacon. Below the cliffs the school was located on was a series of elevators and some garages. While the primary way to get onto campus was through airships, there were a couple of old, barely maintained roads that serviced between here and the city proper. I saw Yang's motorcycle parked here. It was why there was that shitty little gas station with that wolf boy who always seemed to be working in there no matter what hour it was. It had been my usual haunt to get booze and cigarettes and amphetamine cola.

I put Aura into my thumb and popped the cap off the bottle of cola. The wolf boy gas station clerk had been more than a little terrified to see me, still covered in blood and looking like I would murder him if he said anything. He nearly forgot to ring me up. I paid in cash. The first bottle was for me. The second I offered to Shamrock as he gestured at nothing.

Beyond us was the city of Vale, down the road towards the smoke and lights of la Ville Lumière.

Shamrock tried to move forwards again, but always stepped backwards as if deciding against it. His expressions grew increasingly panicked. "I can't move forwards. It's like there's something inside me holding me back. You can't get through either, can you?"

"No," I said simply, still holding the bottle out for him.

He grabbed it and twisted the cap off. I had to hand it to Shamrock, he chugged like a professional drinker. Especially considering he claimed to be from a dry country.

"It… the world just ends, doesn't it?" he asked, and laughed. It was a frantic, half made sound. "The world just fucking ends and it looks like it's real but it's all an illusion. Everything here is fake. This isn't a dream. It isn't a hallucination. But it's fake! My reality is a lie!"

"Yeah," I said evenly, sipping my perfectly legal diet flavored amphetamines. "Cowabummer, dude."

Shamrock world on me with a disbelieving face. "That's it? That's really it? You're telling me you're not even from this world, and this world that we're already in is fake, and the only response I get is cowabummer?!"

I shrugged, looking back up at the academy. "You get used to it. I've been here before, this situation. Idn't the first time I've realized my entire reality and life is a lie for someone else's benefit."

Shamrock collapsed onto his ass, weirdly trying to lean back against the invisible wall that was and wasn't there. It resulted in him leaning back and then awkwardly pitching forwards, again and again.

"Who benefits?" he asked, slowly taking off his top hat. He really did look like a redheaded Brendon Urie. "Actually, no. I want to run by this whole thing again."

I looked around and shrugged. Then, on a whim, I threw my empty soda bottle towards the invisible barrier. Unlike myself and Shamrock, the hunk of glass flew through without problem.

Debating opening another bottle and overdosing on amphetamines, I said, "What's to tell? My name is Jaune Arc. Earlier today Team BASS was deep under the caverns beneath Montluçon. We got melted. Drowned in liquid Grimm. You asked me if I legitimately had sex with an elder goddess. Next thing I know, I'm waking up here, and everyone fucking hates me."

Shamrock kept shaking back and forth, his expression distant. "Why would I ask you if you slept with a goddess?"

I shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. There was some kind of radiation effect in the caves. We were all hallucinating and seeing things. Maybe we still are. About as likely a theory as any."

His green eyes locked onto my tattoos. He searched across from the symbol of the phoenix to the family tree to the six-winged angel and the symbols around her. "G.O.M.D," he read aloud off the ink. His mouth kept moving as he whispered possible interpretations. Until eventually he looked up, squinting at me, and asked, "Goddess on my dick?"

I looked away towards the gas station. Or maybe the combustion Dust station. I legitimately didn't know what it should be called. "I thought she was. But what girl idn't a goddess when you're both fifteen and in love?"

"You have a tattoo of your ex?" he snorted. "Holy crap, that's pretty cringy. Never mind, even if you are some weird alternate universe version of my teammate, you're still definitely him. I feel mental pain just knowing this!"

I shook my head. "No, it actually stands for get off my dick. Just a turn a phrase. And it's a song by J Cole." I pointed at the angel. "This also technically is and isn't her."

"Papa Gede would have a field day with you," he said, making a gesture.

"What does that mean? The hand signs. You and Weiss are always doing it."

"She doesn't know how to do this," he said with a squint.

"She does, or she should," I said. "You two were kind of close in a weird way. She joined your friend group and learned how to cheat at cards."

For a moment, Shamrock looked like he was about to deny that. Before he thought better of it, considering who I was and what I was implying. Instead, he lifted his left hand and started to slowly make gestures. "It's communication. It's prayer. This is usually the one I do. It means, roughly, pardonne-moi, Celiphie. She's the violent, drunken goddess with a rap sheet longer than most career musicians. Her divine domain is senseless violence, alcohol, and strong-wills. Not particularly smart or bright, but pretty fucking scary."

I frowned and thought. "Why would you apologize to her?"

He shrugged. "Celiphie isn't bothered by much. She's too busy picking fights and being annoyed by everyone else. So you apologize to her in advance just in case what you do is so blasphemously horrifying that even she winds up taking offense. It's mostly sarcastic. She thinks it's funny."

I tried to mime the gesture. He snorted, and tried to show it again. Slowly, I mimicked Shamrock, bending the fingers of my left hand correctly and making the same jerky, but rote motions. He smiled and nodded.

"Yeah, there you go," he said, his expression all teeth.

I made the gesture, and then kept making it.

Shamrock frowned. "Stop that. Celiphie is gonna start to notice if you keep trying to ask for her forgiveness."

I shook my head. "I'm making up for lost time. Done a lot of bad shit in my time. And I'm fixing to do a lot more bad shit before it's over. Need to stockpile for that."

"I'm not sure it works like that."

"Course it do," I said. "Once when I was, like, seven, I sat around for an hour muttering 'God bless me' so that I could safely sneeze for the rest of my life without needing to say the line."

"Did it work?"

I pointedly gestured Celiphie for pardon. "Does this?"

He looked at his glass bottle of cola. Before finally nodding. "Yeah."

"Then it works."

Shamrock brought his knees to his chest. He kept leaning back and getting forced forwards, rocking himself with the very limits of reality itself. "So. My world is fake. You've done this before?"

I shrugged. "Once or twice."

He snerked. "That often? Someone must fucking hate you in Heaven."

I shrugged. "Life continues to get increasingly sexually attracted to me in the least consensual way possible. You learn to deal."

Slowly, Shamrock got to his feet. Even as a boy, he wasn't much bigger than Blake. "So. If this world is fake. If in the real world, me and Weiss made nice, if we're actually a team, then…"

"You're taking this surprisingly well, y'know," I said. "Usually I try to kill myself when I think my life is a lie."

"How does that tend to work for you?"

I made a so-so gesture, my case of amphetamine cola tingling in my off-hand. "I'm one-for-two on that front. Hoping to make it two out of three after today. That's a solid D+ success rate right thar. So we can return us all back to our own world of love, friendship, and face-melting."

He sighed heavily, leaning on his halberd for support. "Alright, Jaune. Fine. I'll bite. How do we destroy this world and go home?"

Against my better judgements, I felt a vicious grin spreading across my face. "I thought you'd never ask, Shamrock."

"Good," a third voice said, and we both looked up with a start to see Fox Alistair, Coco's partner, standing there. His expression dark, his milky blind eyes oddly focused, and fully armed with the blades on his arms. "Because I want in."

— 11 —

Fox knew he had died the moment he woke up and saw everything for the first time in his life.

Fox was blind. It was simply a matter of fact, just part of the natural equation of life for him. It had been that way ever since he was born. There had been a time when he wanted to be just another kid growing up in the Kenyte tribe. But even as a boy, everyone treated him with the kid gloves on. And that was before he lost his parents to a sinkhole of all goddamn things. Of all the ways to go in Vacuo, it was simple misfortune. Then he'd been the blind orphan of the tribe. And as much as his adoptive Uncle had tried to support him, no one ever forgot that he was the blind kid without parents in a country where even the strong were just as likely to die as anyone else.

It was something he quickly grew used to. He had to. He didn't know anything else. Until the day he figured out how to use his soul itself as a weapon and a tool, and it became his eyes. There was some weird pop culture belief that if a human loses one of their five key senses, the others get stronger to compensate. In his experience, that was all bullshit. He didn't hear any better than anyone else; Fox simply learned to pay better attention to it when most people drowned out everything into a background noise and paid it no mind.

It was why Fox was the first person to typically awake when the Velvet's alarm went off.

Six feet under, she gon' kill me for that paper

Not that kind of mess around, gon' turn that ass around.

Opening his eyes was a basic organic reflex. It really didn't matter to him one way or the other, but open eyes was a natural state for humans. So when he got out of bed and opened his eyes, Fox knew that he was dead.

Colors.

It was the first thing he marveled at, staring at the wall. This was a color. In the abstract way, he knew most of the words for color. He knew he wore red because someone told him. And that red was a color you associated with violence and heat. Somewhere along the line, someone had told them that every person had a color for their Aura. Fox could always see and sense the Auras of all living things near him, much to the constant theological consternation of many of his peers. When most people considered an Aura and the soul one and the same thing, it raised troubling questions when he could identify a tree from its Aura. He had been using his Aura for years, to the point where it was more than just second nature, it was first nature; it was his surrogate for vision. The feelings he got from Aura were what he always imagined colors would look like if you could see them.

The wall didn't feel hot or cold. It just felt empty and plain. Like someone had designed this color without any care for the visually enabled. It was masonry, plain and simple. Function over form. And he suddenly felt uncomfortable that he'd always been sleeping next to a wall like this.

He looked down at his covers. He knew them by weight, smell, and texture. The color made him feel like they were something edible. Bringing his hands from beneath the blanket, the color of his skin—Fox froze. He had always wanted to see himself. He knew every nook and cranny of his own body, every fiber of muscle, every individual scar and hair. He knew the way it moved, the way it felt, and the way to use it.

But Fox didn't have skin. He flexed his fingers, watching his Aura itself. The exact same perception of his own physicality he had always known. He could tell it was moving, understand what it was doing, and broadly perceive it as a kind of incorporeal feeling. Fox could see the world, but to his own eyes, his own body was unchanged.

He stumbled out of bed and into the bathroom. He could find his way there with his eyes closed, but that metaphor kind of fell apart when he was blind in any case. Fox had always wanted to see a mirror.

But as he stared into the glass surface with a color that made him think of the feeling of ice, he couldn't see himself. He thought that was the purpose of mirrors, to reflect visual images. His body remained the feeling of an Aura. He imagined himself suddenly as some kind of monster, like the mirrorwalkers, Grimm who traveled the world through reflections. Creatures that would crawl from the mirror to devour people who talk about them openly, leaving no reflection when they came into our world.

But that couldn't be right. He was human. And just yesterday…

What happened yesterday? He had vague premonitions and thoughts on stuff he should be able to talk about, but whenever he zeroed into an exact memory, tried to explain those feelings of what happened, things came up fuzzy.

And everything he remembered was Aura and touch.

Fox was a savant; years of relying on his Aura as a primary means of perceiving the world had stained his abilities to understand reality. People claimed he had an incredibly advanced understanding of Aura techniques, but the way he figured it, that was just because most Huntsmen weren't constantly using their Auras. If a Huntsman survived long enough, they'd learn the same techniques he did from their little bursts and spats of flaring their souls.

He felt a sudden wave of nausea. Biting it down, he leaned against the door frame, staring into Team CFVY's room. The walls, the blankets, the carpet texture, the snow outside. He knew what all of these were, but this was the first time he'd ever been able to put eyes to them.

Coco rolled out of bed and hit the ground with a, "Blegh." For a moment, the familiar sight grounded him back in reality. Until it occurred to him that her blankets were visual, but the girl herself was all Aura. She didn't have a body.

She looked up at him, and from the creases in her soul he could read her expression. The same as he always did. "Dangit, did you already claim the bathroom? Uuugh!"

The question bubbled from his mouth before he could control himself. "Do I look different today?"

Velvet sat up, flailing towards her nightstand and the alarm on her scroll. She too looked exactly like he remembered, all soul, no color. "Fox, you look like you. Was it a haircut?"

"We would have noticed that last night," Yatsuhashi said. Just Aura. Nobody. Everyone was the same.

"What happened last night?" Fox asked suddenly.

Coco groaned. "Pfft. I don't know. Nothing important. What's gotten into you?"

Fox's eyes darted around, something he used to only do for effect. But this time, he was drinking in the colors, the scenery, the details. And the way he and his teammates did not fit in. In a split second choice, he decided he couldn't tell them. He didn't know why. But it felt wrong. Impossible to explain. And cold to the core of his being.

That's how the morning went on. Coco eventually suggested they go get coffee from the cafeteria. Velvet and Yatsuhashi declined, citing some reason or other he couldn't bother to remember. Fox was too busy staring at things. Despite the winter chill this time of year, Fox found himself sweating as he and his partner went for breakfast.

He couldn't believe that this was what winter looked like. That was snow. A cold so thorough it burned. And in that direction, he knew there was a tree, but it had never clicked with him that that was how the canopy was supposed to look. It made him think of a grasping corpse's bony hands. It struck him as… ugly. Not a word typical in his vocabulary. Words like beautiful and ugly just didn't fit with his understanding of the world. He had once joked that one of the perks of being blind was that every girl was a ten out of ten. That, and that one time he had actually managed to get away with walking through the girls' locker room with his hands outstretched, using the excuse that he was blind and had gotten lost. That had definitely felt beautiful to his hands.

But what struck him now was the lack of people on campus. Usually, even on a weekend—wait, how did he even know what day it was?—people were milling around outside doing whatever. He could always sense them. Always feel their Auras. But now it seemed like a ghost town. Like the place was abandoned and only he was aware of it.

"But for real, you're acting weird," Coco said, snapping Fox from his thoughts.

"What?"

Coco shrugged. "I don't know. You're constantly twitching and looking around. Have you been drinking &'d Up?"

He looked at his feet, at the Aura being that he was, stepping across the concrete. Concrete made him feel like a cog in the machine. "I… I don't know."

"Did you get any sleep at all last night? Your eyes are red. That's a bad color."

"We sleep in the same room; you should remember if I wasn't sleeping," Fox said slowly.

Coco just shrugged. "I clocked out. Class was way too long yesterday."

Fox made a face. "What subject did we have yesterday?"

She scowled. "Normal Friday stuff. Kind of thing I tend to repress for my own sanity."

The answer was flippant. The exact kind of answer he would expect from Coco. But at the same time, completely meaningless. She was deflecting instead of giving any kind of real answer. "But what subjects did we have last night?" he said with particular emphasis. "Class, training; hell, even what we had for dinner?"

For the briefest of seconds, he saw her Aura flicker in intensity. Meant she was using it. "I, I don't know." She paused, looking around as they walked together. "I don't have enough caffeine in my blood to think that far back. Stop trying to make me think. You're giving me a headache."

He felt anger bubbling up. But before he could release it, his attention snapped to somebody walking by. The first student he had seen all morning beside his own team. It was a boy, and his Aura hurt to look at; it kept twitching and flickering and moving around in a way that made it nearly impossible to get a solid read and understanding of, like it was outright hostile to the idea of being perceived in the first place. He was walking in the opposite direction, shambling like a zombie.

Oh, there goes Jaune, Fox thought gloomily

And then he blinked.

Who the hell was Jaune? Why did he know that name? Why was his Aura so freaky and how come he felt like he knew it from personal experience? He had never seen this Aura before in his life; Fox would remember something so completely uncomfortable to perceive. But there he was, remembering it; but he couldn't remember, he—

Fox sniffed, his nose feeling runny. He tasted blood in the back of his throat when he leaned his head back.

"Uh, Fox?" Coco asked. She waved her hand in front of his face, snapping her fingers. "Remnant to Fox. Are you having a stroke? Do you smell toast?"

"The toast is because the cafeteria is right there," he mumbled. And then: "Do you know that kid?"

"Kid?" Coco looked over her shoulder at the boy with the impossible Aura. And then she shook her head. "No. I don't remember him at all. Look, Fox, you're really freaking me out today."

He pressed his thumbs into his eyes, rubbing them. "You don't feel strange? You don't think this is all weird?"

Coco put her hand on his shoulder. "Hey, man, are you okay? Do you need to sit down?"

Remember. Remember. Remember!

Fox remembered… that freaky Aura. He remembered seeing a girl. Actually seeing a girl in a tight dress that made him feel like he was witnessing blinding purity. He remembered the feeling of grabbing Coco to keep her from falling. When did that happen? Why did it feel like… like he wasn't really at Beacon.

There is a lot of magic in these caves.

When he opened his eyes, he was sitting in the cafeteria. Coco was sitting across from him at the table, pushing towards him a very visible cup of coffee. He could feel her worried concern, and it made his skin itch. It was like the feeling of being the blind little orphan boy in the desert village all over again.

He tried to rub his nose, and then realized someone had stuffed a wad of tissue paper inside. "What?" he groaned, his voice tinged from the clogged nose.

"Don't 'what' me, boy," Coco said scathingly, bringing the coffee to her mouth. It was surreal seeing the visual cup drain into her Aura self. "The things I do for friends. Do you know how gross it was stuffing that into your bleeding nose? Drink the coffee; you'll feel better."

He stared at the cup for a long time. Until Coco leaned forwards and tapped her finger on it. Just a subtle wordless way to demonstrate its location by sound. She didn't need to condescend him and tell him where it was. She knew him too well for that.

"I know where it is!" Fox snapped.

Coco regarded him evenly, and then sat back down to sip her drink. "Okay."

Even though he couldn't see her directly, he could still feel the pitying judgment. He knew her enough to know the expression she was making. Or at the very least, the emotion she was trying to physically convey. It was hard to hide those from Fox.

He grabbed the cup of coffee and looked away, feeling his skin itching. His eyes went wide as he regarded the cafeteria. Finally he realized where he was and the people around him. Fox was so used to just passively sensing people through their Auras that just seeing them there blindsided him.

He could visually see everybody here but himself and his partner. Fox flashed his own Aura, trying to bring up his senses better. But it didn't help. It made things worse. Nobody but him and Coco had an Aura. None of them had souls. It wasn't the same absence in reality a Grimm gave off, the opposite of an Aura really. These people just did not exist on any level except visual. These weren't people at all. They were like objects, like dolls, marionettes clad in human flesh.

Only I can hear your prayers here, sweet children.

There was magic in the caves. Someone had said so. And then Fox had seen a girl. What was he remembering and where was it from?

He dropped the coffee and stood up sharply. "What the hell, what the hell, what in the goddamn hell?!"

Coco jumped up with him. "Fox!"

"Try to feel them. Try to sense them," he stumbled out. "They're not there; we're alone!"

She held up her hands. Slowly, she said, "Alright, Fox, dial it back a notch. Who isn't here? Velvet and Yatsuhashi had plans."

He gestured frantically, not willing to let his Aura down. He was a savant by nature; he always had at least something of his soul burning in the background. A savant gets very good at a low burn all the livelong day. But now he was pumping it as hard as he could, using it as a protective shield. His eyes started back and forth, seeing everybody, witnessing the color of hair and skin and teeth. And then back to his partner, who was the same as ever.

"You have an Aura," he said. "They don't; they're like puppets!"

"They're just people, Fox! Stop it!"

He was breathing heavily now. He could hear them talking, he could see them existing, but he had the cold sensation of being in an empty room. It was like trying to watch a movie, the thought suddenly struck him. All he could do was feel like a voyeur to people who didn't exist when he watched those.

"Coco," Fox said through grit teeth. "I need you to listen to me and I need you to trust me. Can you do that?"

She looked around, not replying.

"Coco."

He and Coco locked eyes. But it was hard to do. His attention kept snapping to the things around him wearing human faces. Or faunus ears and tails. Listening to them talk but saying nothing.

Her attention hardened. "What are you doing with your eyes?" she said slowly.

"I'm seeing."

"You're blind," she said in a voice like she wasn't sure she was correct about anything anymore.

"Then why am I the only one who can see what they really are?" he whispered.

With the slowness of someone standing on fracturing eyes, Coco turned her head and looked at the crowd in the cafeteria.

A hundred pairs of eyes were staring back at them in silence. Frozen in place, stalled in mid conversation with each other, and all focusing on the two of them.

"I…" Coco brought her hand to her forehead. "Fox. Something isn't right. What happened yesterday?"

"Class," he said, mouth dry. He stepped around the table to stand beside her, facing down the silent horde. "I thought you remembered."

"I don't know anymore," she whispered. "Why—" Her breath hitched in her throat. "No."

He followed her gaze out to the window, the one nearest their table. The tree with its dead limbs like so many broken finger bones pressed up against the glass. The face of a man grew from the bark, his body intertwined with the wood. Fox could hear the tree creaking as it smiled wide. He smelled cherries and mustard.

The man in the tree reached out a hand and tapped twice on the glass. "Heeey, Coco," he said, voice like nails scraping against dried bone. "Trying to forget me already?"

"Who—I!" Coco stammered. She pulled off her sunglasses and just stared, shaking. "No, I, I didn't forget you. I remember. Fox, I remember!"

He grabbed her shoulder, sticking close, waiting for the soulless husks to stand up or attack. But all they did was stare in utter silence, their eyes and expressions locked the way they were in avid conversation minutes ago. Some were smiling, some were laughing, some were eating—but all their faces were completely motionless.

"What?" Fox demanded breathlessly. "Coco, what do you remember? What the hell is going on?"

Coco slowly removed her beret. A small dead animal fell from it onto the ground and she just stared at it. "I remembered this is all my fault."

She reached a hand to her nose and pulled it back. In an almost dreamy voice, she said, "Oh no. I'm bleeding." And then collapsed limply onto the ground.

One of the soulless people stood up. He expected the motion to somehow be jerky, stilted, like a skinwalker with its mask off. But instead, the girl with a face frozen in mid-life with a cheek stuffed with eggs got to her feet primly, and turned to face Coco. Others got to their feed, just as professionally, just as cleanly, just as empty and vapid.

"No!" he shouted, grabbing Coco. He felt the blood pouring from her face onto his arms. Nasal blood, just as much viscera as it was chunks of mucus. He was glad he couldn't see it; he thought he might throw up from just the texture of it alone seeping down his arm.

"Get away from me, get away from her!" Fox shouted, keenly aware of just how unarmed he was. Just how aware of how precarious the situation was. There were maybe a hundred of those soulless students here standing between him and the only door out.

Fox understood what was going on on a level deeper than conscious. Because rational thought and understanding had no place in whatever the hell was going on here. He was being dragged into a dark place where two plus two equaled five, and the road out was only wide enough for one person.

He wasn't going to let that happen. There was still a way out. There was the window with that weird tree man. But one weird thing in a tree was nothing he couldn't handle. He held Coco, trying not to think of how screwed he was, trying not to think of the soulless things smiling at him. Telling himself how he was totally going to make fun of her for passing out on him like this when everything was over and they were safe. He would never let her hear the end of it, because thinking like that, refusing to consider the idea that he was going to die here and so was she—it was stupid but it helped.

He felt the third soul in the room as soon as his Aura burned at maximum intensity. Someone behind him in the direction of the window. He could feel the presence and knew he had sensed it before. He was familiar with Auras like that. He knew to the core of his being he didn't want to see it. He didn't want to sense it. He didn't want anything to do with it.

No, not it. She.

Fox turned around anyways. There was no way out without turning to face her.

A woman wearing a dress that devoured the light and buried it in a mass grave. Flesh like the chill gust of wind on a moonlit night. And eyes that wouldn't let him go. Her Aura pulsed irregularly throughout her body like veins, coating what he could see under a weave of something else. It was like her soul didn't belong to her and had been nailed to her flesh by some savage god. He knew by sight alone that she was the reason he could see anything. And the very sight of her made his own veins twitch and writhe, like they were filled with leeches. His sweat felt like a coagulated jelly on his skin.

Immortal things of endless powers dine on fire and blood.

"She knows nothing of use to me," the woman said with a voice that made his knees buckle. He put all of his effort into his Aura, locking his legs into place to keep on his feet. "Yet you, sweet child, can see me."

Fox coughed, feeling his throat filling with a sensation like razor blades. Like the thousand sucking darts of desert ticks. "How?"

The woman seemed to regard the question like she wasn't expecting him to be able to talk. And seemed to find some matter of delight in him regardless. "Those who follow me are granted eyes. You stole those from me. Would you like to keep them?" The tone was sweet, almost motherly. Her smile was warm, inviting. It made him feel drunk just looking at it.

"I want to go home!" he said, forcing himself to take a step towards the window.

The woman laughed. A divine sound practiced and refined through the ages. "No."

The trays clattered to the ground as the crowd of people snapped their heads towards him and Coco. And without any restraint, any warm up, they as one broke out sprinting towards them. Utterly silent except for the noises of their feet on the ground and clattering across tables. Fox stole one last look at the woman and her maternal smile, and forced every ounce of effort into his legs to run.

Fox threw himself through the window, the broken panes of glass shredding his arms. The face in the tree that had been there once was gone. Bleeding and mostly unconscious, Coco was still able to hold on to him. He spun around quickly, looking at the things chasing after him. There were so many of them. Fox doubted he could fight them. And he didn't think he could outrun them forever.

Then he remembered his locker. He flailed around, trying to hold on to Coco, while reaching for his scroll. For the longest time, Fox had thought it was more a neat gimmick than an actually useful ability—everyone's locker at Beacon came equipped with thrusters and the ability to lock onto your scroll. It sounded ludicrously expensive and deeply impractical. He had never used it himself. But he knew how to.

Or so he thought. He pulled out his scroll and realized for the first time ever he didn't understand how to use it on sight. He just stared at it, forgetting all of his muscle memory with the advent of vision.

"Coco!" he screamed.

She moaned weakly, bleeding on to him.

"Scroll—call my locker. Right there. Artillery!"

Coco looked at him almost passively, and he had to shove the scroll into her hand. Her grip was weak, shaky, barely able to hold on to him. He heard the buttons clicking. The little hard light chimes indicating something was happening.

Then the sound of jet thrusters ripped through the air, before a moment later crashing against the window and smashing to bits the thing that happened to be trying to climb through the broken glass, hard enough to nearly knock him off his feet even from several yards away. But the concrete shattered, the wall holding the window collapsed into a pile of rubble. Clouds of dust kicked up into the air.

For a split second, he had enough time to marvel at how quickly the locker arrived, and then wonder just how dangerous a tool this was and why on Remnant anyone would let a bunch of stupid kids have this ability on campus. The locker burst open, and Fox felt the peculiar sensation of knowing what his weapons looked like as he grabbed them from the locker. Coco went limp in his arms, dropping his scroll. He didn't care.

With the last of her effort, Coco had just bought the two of them the ability to get away. Even nearly dead or whatever condition she was in, the girl was a fighter. On some level he respected that. But on another level, he was too busy making a break for it to really dwell. Fox didn't know where to go. He just picked a direction and sprinted, carrying Coco awkwardly. She couldn't even put in the effort to grab on to him anymore. And then he realized he was going towards the dorms, past the central fountain and its courtyard, beyond the little bookstore and cafe and the student center, and into the place he had called home for nearly the past two years.

He didn't know what he was doing. He didn't even know where he was going, not exactly. Not until he opened the door to his room and put Coco down on her bed. He locked the door and then put a chair up against it for good measure, as if that would do anything.

But realistically, coming here, sweating and panting, his arms so sore from carrying the girl that they were nearly falling off from the awkwardness, all he had done was trap himself in a tomb. He looked around for any signs of Velvet or Yatsuhashi. They still weren't here. And more importantly, he hadn't been listening when they told them where they were going. Stupid, stupid, stupid! If he hadn't been so goddamn self-absorbed he might have run to them instead of trapping himself here with Coco.

But he was armed. He had a marginally defensible position. They were a couple of stories up. This wasn't the worst place to make a last stand, but, did he really want that?

…if he died keeping his partner safe, maybe it would be worth it. He remembered his Uncle Copper, one of the few people back home to treat him almost like a normal kid. He remembered screaming and holding his uncle's dead body. And he remembered the sounds of a man choking to death as his tribe lynched the desert drifter who had killed his uncle in a fit of stupid violence. Pointless deaths for no reason, for no purpose, to no end.

But that was the thing about life. It wasn't a story. It didn't neatly bookend or dovetail, have arcs and crescendos and volumes or anything. Life just was. And sometimes, life was just as petty and cruel as it was completely pointless.

That's why he had come to this place, to Beacon. Because at the very least, being a Huntsman let him pretend like he mattered. It let him pretend that if he died, it would be to some end, for a goddamn point.

The door rattled. Sucking in a breath, he prepared himself. Fox stared at the door, conscious of the weight of the weapons strapped to his arms. The doorknob rattled, still locked. Until someone banged against it. No one said anything.

He turned around and looked out the window. Dozens upon dozens of frozen faces. They stood like motionless statues in the courtyard below the window, and then all as one snapped their still faces towards him. They didn't smile, they didn't leave, they didn't hiss or make noises. They just kept looking happy or engaged in conversation or any other normal activity stuck to their face.

He backed away to the center of the room. Coco moaned from the bed. He felt the sweat running down his back as the door banged again. As someone tried to force the door knob and couldn't get it open. He swallowed and his throat was dry. With every fist against the door, every attempt to twist the knob, he felt himself shaking more and more. Those things were outside the window. If he tried to jump, they would tear him limb from limb. He had no doubts. And they were outside the door too. There was nowhere to run in this world.

Pray to your favorite God it works, came a voice in his head. A memory he couldn't place. It made him choke up inside.

"Please," he whispered, rubbing the sweat out of his eyes. They stung and rendered him nearly blind. But somehow, that almost felt better. Not seeing this horrible world. He'd give anything, even this newfound vision, if things returned to normal. If you could just save his friends.

Or at the very least, if my death could have meaning.

At the end of his freshman year Fox had gone to the hospital on the academy to get himself patched and stitched up after a particularly brutal mission Coco had volunteered them for against everyone's recommendation. He had met someone on the hospital staff claiming to be a "medical Huntsman," a term as stupid as you can imagine. Yet the man insisted that was what he was, refusing to use conjugations, and speaking with a vague northern accent. Frustrated by his treatment, Fox had straight up asked the boy if he was autistic or something.

The boy, who called himself Oleander, had merely regarded him before asking, "Would it change anything if I was or was not?"

"Yeah," Fox spat back. "It changes whether you're a freak who doesn't know any better, or if you're just an asshole."

"Freak," Oleander had said ponderously. "I am the way I am. I have learned by force to be happy with this. Like you have learned to be happy being blind."

But Fox hadn't been happy with being blind. He knew he was different. He knew he was disabled on a fundamental level. All the positive reinforcement and prep talk and PC language that insisted he was just "differently abled" completely missed the fact of his own existence. A fact that no one ever let him forget when they tried to be nice or overly caring for the boy they thought was just a blind waste of space. He had to learn to thrive and cope with this almost out of spite. A refusal to back down. To never let pity be proven the correct way to handle him. But that didn't change the fact he would give up being blind in a heartbeat just to be normal, just to achieve the baseline that everyone else was blessed with by default.

And yet, right now, Fox would carve out his own eyes just to make the vision go away if it fixed everything.

"Please," he whispered again as the door banged and rattled, as the sweat soaked through his school uniform.

"Oh, I guess, but just cuz you asked so nicely," a girl said, her accent foreign and vaguely nasal.

Fox spun around towards Coco's bed and saw the girl sitting beside her. Her long hair felt like early morning sunshine. Her dress was made of feathers and silk the color of the feeling of being freshly showered after a long day's work. With her legs crossed, she was idly bouncing one leg, playing with a high heel on one foot. The girl winked and blew him a kiss, and he saw her flash in a moment, becoming a plume of pure Aura like someone who was real. Before jittering back into place as a visual creature. It was inconsistent. It was like she had a soul and didn't at the same time. Her eyes and face looked like they'd been scratched out of some drawing, appearing in bits and flashes when she shimmered from Aura to visual.

And suddenly, he caught a glimpse of them, eyes the color of the feeling of cold stones. Fox realized he knew this girl. The memory made him choke and cough, and feel light-headed. He had seen this girl in a dark place. She had been the first thing he had ever really seen. He grabbed his head and remembered Montluçon. And he remembered a boy named Jaune with an Aura that was hostile to his very perceptions giving this girl a name.

Her name, her name, her name!

She is the darkness.

The thought struck him at once, and the girl smiled as if she could read his mind. It was an expression that sent a lance of pain through his skull. Montluçon. Skinwalkers. The same motherly creature who had claimed she granted Fox his eyes. At first, he thought these were the same people. They looked so similar, except this one, the girl in front of him—she is the darkness—struck him as being somehow smaller, somehow more young. And the way she looked at him, she was—

She is the darkness.

"Who are you?" he asked breathlessly, watching the way she flickered between having a soul and having nothing. It was inconsistent, with no pattern he could determine.

"I'm Queen Bitch of the Universe for all that matters to you, Fox," she said playfully.

His nose felt wet and bloody. "How do you know my name?"

The girl shrugged. "Oh, I'm fucking with this place. Mother is completely panicking. She's wondering how a bunch of random kids managed to turn on an old magical communication device. It doesn't gel with her worldview. She built this little place out of your collective memories and preconceptions. It's not real, y'know. But it's not not real either. The more I dig into this place, the more voodoo I find stitching the seams of this reality together."

"I know this place can't be real," he said weakly.

The girl clicked her tongue. "I know. It's why you've been breaking this place down the moment you woke up. Mother doesn't presuppose people of your abilities. She just scrambled with the tools on hand to try to extract as much information out of you. Your friend Coco there, she decided didn't know anything of value. Honestly, only my boy really does, but he's too stupid and shortsighted to willingly let himself put two and two together without pain. But that doesn't mean you're entirely helpless. You've piqued her curiosity. Bravo!"

"What do you want?" he asked, his jaw feeling heavy.

She laughed and stood up. He saw the way her dress exposed her thighs, wrapped together with little strings in a Mistrali fashion. "Oh, Fox, did you already forget? You were practically begging, almost praying. She won't answer prayers, but I do. And I've got this little goddess complex I've never quite been able to shake." She made a circular gesture with one hand. "She didn't realize that by trying to get into our minds, I could get into hers."

"Who is she?" Fox found himself demanding.

The girl's smile was all teeth. "Now we're getting into the things that can get you killed. And I wouldn't want to get you killed; I've got a weakness for keeping around a pretty face." She winked.

She is the darkness, Fox thought again, finding himself more disgusted than anything. His skin crawled. For a moment, the girl became Aura again.

Fox didn't back down.

When the girl spoke again, her words were slow, carefully articulated. "Mother is a sad creature. An image of a lost love burned into her mind—and between her thighs." The cadence was almost hypnotic, like some kind of song in spoken word. When she flashed back to being a visual creature, he couldn't help but stare at her mouth. Her tongue touched teeth and lips with every syllable. "She'll burn for her lust in her own kind of hell, I think. You have to remember that lust is more than just sexual. It is an intense craving. Overwhelming desire. A perverse want. Forever just the breadth of a fingernail away from her possession."

"You're not her daughter," he said. "I don't know what you are. I think you're the same person. You look so similar. You're just trying to fuck with me."

The girl looked genuinely hurt. "Oh, no. No, no, no. I'm being metaphorical. But only because I'm being literal. We were cut from the same cloth. She was wronged, you know. Not by betrayal or a broken heart. But by the simple fact that she didn't know better. Couldn't have known better. She knew enough to know she was wrong, but not enough to fix it. He loved her, and she wanted to love him, but she didn't know how. She only knew she couldn't bear to be apart from him. That, in a way, he completed the part of her she was missing. Until the only way she could process 'love' was as something to possess. Something that could belong to her. He was her humanity, her only real link to the life the stories and fairy tales told her were hers by right."

She sighed wistfully, looking out towards the window. A moment later she said, "And when he died, she didn't experience loss or sorrow or grief like you or me. She felt something, but like everything else about her, everything she knew about herself and people had told her, she was fundamentally wrong. And she knew it. So instead, she raged like a child whose toys had been broken by some cruel parent. Her possession destroyed. Her love stolen from her.

"Mother was wronged. And could conceive of no other explanation. That is what defines who she is."

The girl shrugged. "And then you have me. I'm not defined by a broken child's rage against the divine. I'm defined by the fact that I'm kinda retarded."

The sudden shift in tone and topic abruptly made him laugh in disbelief. Only to have the humor die in his throat with a choke as the thought came again.

She is the darkness.

The girl smiled apologetically. "Yeah, I know. About the only thing we have in common these days is we've both hitched our rides onto a boy we consider our property. A necessary evil." Her eyes went wide, yet her expression was oddly blank. They were terrifying eyes. Something Fox wanted to run away from if only his legs would work. She spoke in that same hypnotic way that made him nod along, to want to listen to her, and kept him in place. "For her, it gives her a reason to hate and keep going. For me, well, it's more personal. Love and hate aren't opposites, y'know? They're yin and yang on the same side of the coin, circling each other for all eternity. Their opposite is distance, is apathy. And he and I have been circling each other for so very long. He'll never learn his lesson; he prefers punishment to forgiveness. And I enjoy him suffering on his knees as he repeats the same mistakes time and time again. We and mother are the same that way, too."

She shrugged. "The heart is as that useless little muscle does. But were you honestly expecting something more concrete and coherent?"

Fox found as she fell silent, he could move again. Think again. He snapped out of his mental stupor and folded his arms. "A little, yeah. Things with frozen faces are banging at the door and standing outside the window. My partner is nearly dead for reasons I can't understand. I don't even know how I can see. Nothing is making sense anymore."

The girl gave a so-so shrug. "Mm, I can try. Honestly, I thought about it. I was going to just appear, smile all evil-like, and say something like uh… 'Here, at the graveyard of our achievements, where the old gods are fearful to receive prayer, where the divide between dream and reality is at its thinnest—I come to warn you of the Endmost Night.' But even if this world is running on borrowed time, I just really can't make myself do it for more than a couple of sentences. Just feels wrong. Like I'm forcing myself to be more dramatic than I really is."

He blinked. "What was that about the world ending?"

The girls snorted a laugh. "Do you care? It's not like you can do anything about it."

"Do you?"

She thought it over for a moment, and then tilted her head to the side fractionally. "She does. The one who put you all here. But her plans are so grandiose that they've gone full circle into being stupid again. The only thing I care about is enjoying myself and putting that bitch in her place: beneath me. What is why when you asked for help, I decided you were the more entertaining investment."

With a relaxed movement, she sat back down on Coco's bed. "She really went hardcore trying to break Coco here, hoping maybe she was the answer to her questions. Went too far and threw all the fears she could get her claws on at Coco, and this is the result. She wants to know how a bunch of random kids turned on an ancient magical communication device that got her eye. But that was my fault. So Coco here is broken until further notice. Because I don't care enough to do it myself." Fox stepped forwards sharply as the girl ran her hand through Coco's hair.

"Don't touch her!" he hissed.

The girl looked up at him curiously. "Do you really wanna take that voice with me?"

"I don't care who or what you are. You can be the darkness itself for all I care. But don't you touch my partner!"

"Hm!" the girl hummed, raising her hand to Fox. "Sit, boy."

Fox felt as if gravity had increased on him a thousand fold. He heard his knees cracking and popping before they bent at a funny angle. He collapsed hard enough onto the floor to nearly break his chin. The pressure didn't give in. He groaned, but the air he expelled from his lungs was the last precious gasp of oxygen he'd get. His body pressed against the floor in an awkward tangle of limbs, threatening to break and snap. He couldn't breathe.

"Lemme be mucho clear, Fox," she said simply, more a statement of boring fact than the threat it was. "I don't have to take that tone from you. Not you, not Eric, not anyone. I've drank enough magic from the Dust and dearest mother that I'm almost back at full power. I can do whatever I want. Do you understand?"

Fox grunted, a throaty noise.

She snapped her fingers and Fox sucked in a breath of air. He sat up sharply, gasping and panting, looking up at the girl. She smiled sweetly. "Good. You can listen to me. That makes you best boy in my opinion, which is the only one that matters. You're lucky what I want is to fuck over Mommy Salami dearest. Now do you want to save your friends or not?"

"Yes," he choked.

"I'll keep it simple. This world isn't real. It's a little pocket reality of sorcery like those old bags of bones can create, drawn from your own nightmares and memories to try to answer her burning curiosity. It's why it's so flawed and breaks apart under nearly any scrutiny. How, with effort, you can still remember the truth. Your real bodies drown in liquid Grimm so she can tinker with your heads."

"How do I escape?"

"You'll never get out like this," she said, and clicked her tongue. "Mother grants eyes to those who can't see, but her gifts are poison. They only see what she wants you to see. You can see Auras, souls. That's how you know who is real and what isn't. That's why you can see. And until you start seeing reality for what it is, all you'll be able to process and see is what she created for you."

"My eyes?"

"They belong to her," she said, bringing a finger to her eyeball and poking it. The sight made him wince. "A human's most basic desire is to survive. To avoid harm. Preserve the self at all costs. But people still kill themselves all the time. Someone I love once told me you don't jump because you want to, but because the fire behind you will burn. You know if you stay there in the window, your flesh will split apart at the seams from the heat, your every cell breaking and bursting and hissing, your eyes pop as the water within them cooks. All while you're alive enough to feel and understand what's happening to you as you're helpless to stop it. So you make a choice and you jump. Because the alternative is so much worse."

She smiled again. "This world is the alternative, Fox. So long as you have those eyes, you can do nothing to stop the fire."

With a last wink, the girl vanished. And Fox was alone with his thoughts.

The things pounded on the door again.

Fox was on his knees. He looked at his hands, at the outline of his Aura that made up his body as far as he could see it. The floor below was the color of the feeling of drunkenness. The beds were beds that he could see. He didn't need to run his hands along the wooden posts or the cotton sheets to understand them, to form a picture in his mind of them. But they weren't real. He could only see them because his eyes didn't belong to him.

He looked at the blades strapped to his arms. Without pushing on his Aura to encompass himself and his body, he could see the sheen of the metal. The glistening reflections within them of the room. Just like the mirror in the bathroom, he couldn't see himself in the reflective metal. Fox didn't belong in this world. He could see where things broke down at the corners, like himself, his partner. But everything else?

His eyes belonged to her. Whoever she was. But his soul remained his own. And through it, he could see the truth.

So long as you have those eyes, you can do nothing to stop the fire.

Fox had always wanted to be able to see. To just be normal. He might not have been able to see everyone's face, but he could read between the lines of their tones, their body language. So many of them looked at him with pity as a blind boy, and that was all they saw. But that was the weakness of the human eye. With just the tiniest amount of effort, it could be fooled into seeing whatever it is someone else wanted. That was how people could trip on things lying on the floor that they clearly saw, but just mentally tuned out.

The human eye was a remarkable organ. One that until today he had lived without. He would have done anything to be able to see. To keep this ability.

He looked at Coco, lying there on the bed, nearly immobile. But he could see her blood pooling on the pillow from her mouth and nose. Hear the way she choked in breath after breath. Even dying, the girl fought to the very end. It had been a small thing, but it had saved his life from those frozen face creatures pounding against the door even now. That stupid, arrogant little brat had been his team leader for nearly two years, constantly doing her best, and constantly viewing Fox as her partner and her friend before ever thinking of them as just that blind boy.

And now?

The door knob rattled. Fox stared at his blades, at the shining points where he had sharpened the metal to nearly surgical specifications.

As long as I have these eyes…

Was being able to see worth it? Was it worth risking the lives of his teammates? Was having them worth just a couple more minutes to see the world as was the human birthright denied to him?

"No," he whispered, and coughed out a noise somewhere between a sob and a laugh.

Fox angled the tip of his blade towards himself and stared it down. This was what the girl who was the darkness wanted. To remove the gift that that motherly thing had given him.

She had granted him eyes to see. But it was her world. And now, he felt more blind than ever.

Fox wanted to see more than anything in the world.

But he wanted to see the truth.

It was the strangest thing. Did you know that the closer an object got to your eye, the bigger it became? It was like a distant glimmer of Aura becoming stronger the closer it was to Fox, the more easy it was to perceive and react to. One moment, the tip of the blade was nearly invisible. With morbid fascination he watched as it grew massive and gigantic. Until it was all he could see out of his right eye. Until it slid into the membrane of his pupil and he could see nothing.

The human eye doesn't like being touched. It's not a perfectly round ball, either. It's a weird, oblong shape, with the pupil jutting out ever so slightly. When you stick something into it, it flinches like any other injured part of the body. Fox screamed, his right eye trying to look away as if that would make the pain go away. But his sword was sharp. All it did was rip itself apart against the edges. He pushed into his eye and twisted. It was like staring into the sun after coming out from a room someone told him was dark. Even though he couldn't see the light, he could feel the warmth, and some instinctive part of his lizard brain wanted to avoid the pain. He flinched and looked away, and felt something oddly jelly-like seeping onto his hands. It mixed with blood. It was the color of the feeling of bad.

He fell backwards, screaming. When his eyes closed, it felt wrong. It felt like your teeth after getting a new filing. Something was missing, something was added, and the texture was all wrong. There was a hole where his pupil should have been. The jelly-like vitreous fluid seeped through his eyelids like tears. It felt like leeches writhing.

The things outside slammed into the door. "Fox?" he heard Velvet's voice call out. Because of course this was when she'd show up. "Fox, is that you, are you in there?"

The door knob rattled again, unlocking. Fox tried to get back up onto his knees, but all he could do was hold his ruined eye, dripping fluid under the floor. Tears, blood, vitreous fluids pulled into a slurry of gore beneath him. The thing outside tried to open the door, but the chair he had used to keep it closed did its job. A moment later and the pounding got harder, and the door slammed open.

Yatsuhashi stepped back, surveying the damage he had caused by forcing the door in the chair. And it was really him. Fox could see his Aura. Velvet too, down to the way it covered her rabbit ears. They weren't using it, but he could always see it. He knew for a fact that these were the real Velvet and Yatsuhashi.

"Coco!" Velvet screamed, before her attention snapped to him. "Oh my God, Fox! Fox, are you okay!"

"Go away," he hissed, holding up his arm and the blades attached to it.

"Fox, something is wrong with this place, something is very wrong—oh my God, what happened to you!"

He tried to bring the blade to his left eye, the only one remaining. And Velvet grabbed onto him.

"Fox, tell me what's going on! Fox, what are you doing?"

"I'm saving all of you," he said, shoving Velvet away.

And shoving the blade into his eye as she watched. He could hear the laughing of the girl with the feather dressed in the corners of his mind as everything went black.

oooOOOooo

Darkness wasn't normal. That was the thing people didn't understand about being blind. Fox had once tried to explain it to somebody.

"Right now, what do you see behind you?" he had asked.

The person he was talking to had turned around, and Fox shook his head. "No, don't look. Look at me. But what do you see directly behind your head?"

The person had stared. "Nothing. I can't see anything."

"That's what it's like being blind. Except that's everything."

But right now, Fox looked up, and he saw darkness. It was like little trails punctuating the field of nothing that was everything he normally saw. It was like the branches of a tree spread out before him as a path he could walk. He took one step forward and realized he could see himself like normal. As Aura.

And the further he walked down the path, the more he could sense. Seeing was always the wrong word to describe how he perceived Aura. But language was a tool devised by people who had eyes. It was the best approximation he had in his vocabulary.

He saw the trails of Coco and Velvet and Yatsuhashi. They were lying to the side, off branching paths of darkness. But he knew in his bones there was something up further ahead. He didn't know where he was, but he knew that forwards was where he wanted to be. Velvet wasn't grabbing on to him. Yatsuhashi wasn't staring in horror. Things with frozen faces weren't clawing for him and his partner.

He saw it at the end. A place where the darkness stood up like a doorway. Touching it was tactile. It felt like tar.

Fox stepped through it and gasped.

Everything became normal. He felt himself standing up from a pool of dark tar, that tickled his senses like Grimm. It was all around him up to his waist. He could see the Auras he recognized as his team floating in the liquid. He grabbed Coco and dragged her out.

Liquid Grimm. It didn't make sense. But it was what he knew the stuff was.

It didn't last forever. It formed a bank against broken concrete and masonry. He hauled Coco to shore and went back for the others. Velvet was easy. She weighed nearly nothing. Yatsuhashi was harder. He needed to burn his Aura to lift the muscle bound giant and drag him to safety.

By the time everyone was safe, Coco was coughing. Sucking in greedy breaths of air. She moaned in pain, grabbing at herself.

"Fox," she said weakly.

The others were starting to wake up. He had no idea where the freshman team was in any of this mess. He didn't even really know where he was.

High above, he heard the roar of bullhead engines flying. Distant gunfire and explosions. The howling of Grimm.

"We're on the surface," Coco moaned, and coughed. "What—how?"

Fox collapsed to his knees, rubbing at his eyes. They were there. They weren't destroyed husks of flesh in his face anymore. "Don't talk," he said, feeling the last ounces of his willpower seeping away through his voice. "Rest."

"The city is burning," she said. "Everything's gone wrong. Montluçon. Where's Team BASS?"

"I don't know," he breathed.

Coco reached out and grabbed his forearm. "This is my fault. This is all my fault."

"I said don't talk," he whispered, begged. The gunfire got louder. Something exploded in the distance, multiple explosions like a hail of artillery. He had woken up from one nightmare and dragged his friends out straight into another. "Because it's about to get so much worse."

— 12 —

I exchanged glances with Shamrock. "Fox? What the hell are you doing here?"

He regarded us both grimly. "The same as her," he said, gesturing to Shamrock, who was still visibly male right now. "A couple of things did not add up. I put the pieces together. Saw you acting weird and followed. I got most of the story by listening in. I want to save my friends by any means necessary. So if there is a way I can help you destroy this world and get what you want, I am in."

"I—" Shamrock said, and paused. He shifted until she looked more feminine: a certain sharpness of the cheeks and other facial features. She looked really awkward, like someone caught with their penis in the cookie jar. "I guess I'm not the only one who realized something was wrong."

Fox didn't react in any way to the shift. "No. I think the pieces have been falling into place for a while now. I want answers. But the only way we are going to get them is by destroying this place and facing our demons."

I hesitated, before sticking out a hand. I nearly slapped myself when I remembered he was blind, but that didn't stop him from reaching out and taking my hand. The way he reached out was stiff, like his joints didn't quite work right. His skin felt cold and dry. His smile was all teeth.

"Well, Fox," I said, "I don't really know you, but when has having zero idea of who I'm working with and what I'm doing ever stopped me before? Let's get. This. Bread."

a/n alternate chapter title, local blind Kenyan teen escapes reality marble through the power of being unfathomably based. In case it's not obvious, yes, Team CFVY did escape. And this isn't actually Fox with Jaune. I hate Simone.