Chapter 5: Outer Heaven

"Violence is inescapable. Inseparable from life itself. Permanent. It is fixed in your cosmology. Forever. I could go on, but that's besides the point."

— 13 —

Fox showing up had been something of a surprise to Shamrock. Even though he was blind, something about his presence made her feel uncomfortable as anything but female. Jetty Shamrock couldn't really articulate the reason why, but things like that were never something she was able to put into concrete words and argue. If you asked Shamrock to provide a thesis or paper explaining how she feels and exactly what face and gender were appropriate at the moment, the best she could do was shrug. Partially, she believed it was just because language hadn't yet evolved with people like her in mind. Valais or Seljuk or any other of the myriad languages she had picked up lacked the vocabulary to describe those particular emotions.

What languages she did know were far more adroit at describing the feeling of dread and questioning as Fox and Jaune talked. No longer alone with her teammate, it felt more and more awkward to try to speak. As if her presence alone was somehow invasive. Unwanted. Like she should just go back to being a shadow on the wall. It made her skin itch. She felt it subtly changing beneath her suit. Still female, but different.

"There is another Jaune," Fox said evenly as they took the elevator up the side of the cliff towards the airship docks. "I have yet to encounter anyone else with a body double. There is no other girl named Shamrock here, no other person named Coco. But there are two of you, Jaune. Why is this?"

Jaune shrugged. He kept pressing the button for the top floor as though that would make it go faster, even though it was one of the only two buttons in the lift. "I'm special."

Fox tilted his head. The way he moved was somewhat exaggerated, like somebody who had a decent grasp of human body language but was rough around the edges. Probably because he was blind. "Elaborate."

"No," Jaune said, blue eyes going to Shamrock. There was a scar on his cheek that she didn't recognize. "Honestly, it's more interesting that people are breaking out of this little simulation. We're realizing things aren't what they seem. And present company is taking it rather well."

Something in his tone shifted. His eyes became a little harder. As if he was trying to look through Shamrock. Honestly, it was a little scary. It was the opposite of the happy-go-lucky drunken idiot she had known for… No, she didn't know him.

This reality wasn't true. Her memories were messed up, like she had been raped in the brain. There was no way around it. It had been a complete mental violation, and this place was evil for existing. She kept having to look back at her perception, what she just accepted as true, and question it. But it was hard to do unless you caught yourself in the moment.

Life operates on a system of assumptions. You just get used to the way things are and stop questioning them. In a very real sense, Shamrock might as well have been born yesterday. Nothing she seemed to remember was internally consistent. It was like when you reached for a pen with the intention to write, you just naturally reached with your left hand. Or well, for most people, their right hand. But the point stood. You were going to write, so you didn't have to pause and remember which hand you wrote with before deciding on it. You just knew what to do without thinking. It was like that on a preconceptual level. She naturally presumed that she knew Jaune as a complete waste of space who had his chance and blew it, but the moment she paused to remember those incidents leading to there, she came up blank, just a feeling that what she knew was true. When coming to the realization, nothing quite lined up, which had led Shamrock to chasing Jaune down and demanding answers from the only person who seemed to be internally consistent with themselves.

Shamrock felt the urge on the back of her tongue like words threatening to bubble forwards. She moved her mouth, and a second later she was speaking. "It's just—it's kind of scary, but not surprising. In some ways I'm just trying to think of getting this all over, and rubbing it in Weiss' face that I am right and the gods are real. No two ways about it, this is magic. The work of the old gods. But even in the old stories, people like us destroyed them."

"And so you think we can definitely destroy this place?"

Shamrock clung to her weapon, Saint-Gede, and nodded. "I don't know why we wouldn't. You think we can. Fox here does. With a two-thirds majority, I'm inclined to agree. Besides, Dam Lan did once. I've offered her my prayers before."

Fox was staring at her intently. "You mean the stories of the Wheel's Keystone Garden."

Jaune hummed under his breath. "On a quest for Tanelorn, I guess."

Shamrock ignored her teammate, looking back at Fox with wide eyes. "You're from Vacuo. How do you know that story? It's old Valais stuff."

"I have been around for a while," Fox said with a shrug. "When you cannot see anything, you learn to listen. It has served me well."

"I'm still not following the metaphor," Jaune said.

Jetty Shamrock adjusted her hat. "It's not a metaphor. It's—it's why we call this world Restavec. Remnant, in non-Valais. It's a remnant of something better. The world was a garden, the linchpin of all the worlds the gods lived in. A great wheel of the cosmos radiating spokes to other worlds, four by four. This little place is like that, a little pocket world of divine energy. But the first humans followed their mother, Dam Lan, into the golden, innermost gardens of the great mother-father of creation. They broke into the central spoke of the wheel, intent on stealing creation's secrets. And in setting foot within the divine, destroyed all realities. The corruption took four days, four hours, four minutes, and four seconds to take hold across the wheel. Until all that was left was a pale imitation of paradise, this remnant of a planet."

"That's an oddly specific time frame."

Shamrock held up the appropriate amount of fingers. "Four is a divine number. Its multiplications are sacred. There are four seasons, the world has coalesced into four great powers, Huntsmen come in teams of four—you see it repeating throughout nature."

"I'd say two, really," Jaune said. "Vacuo and Mistral are more like persistent, unfunny memes than real countries, I get the impression."

"Doesn't matter. They're still real. Humans keep doing the number four because it reminds us in our souls of what was lost."

He gave her a curious look. "What about faunus?"

"Four ears," Shamrock said with a shrug. "They came from another world that was shattered into ours when we destroyed the divine."

"What about the ones with claws or tails?"

Shamrock made a face. But before she could argue the topic, the elevator hit the top and opened out onto the airship docks. Fox stepped out promptly, and Jaune followed.

"Now we're sure we can find my other self back in the dorms?" he asked.

With a sigh, Jetty Shamrock flushed the annoyance away. Back to business. This Jaune was all business, the only throwbacks to the person she knew showing up in more idle moments. "You don't usually leave. Except to go bother people and get drunk."

He nodded once. "The fact that there are two of me but only one of y'all each is the only thing that really stands out as different. Confronting that is our best shot at breaking this little world apart."

She hesitated to reply. "Are you sure that's reason speaking or just the feeling of being angry drawing you to that conclusion?"

Jaune flashed a sharp look. "I don't think it really matters. It's the only idea I have worth pursuing."

Fox nodded. "I agree. It is too weird to simply overlook. I do not know why you are special. But I don't see any other more practical option. We should go there at once. This place sucks and I want out."

As irritating an explanation as it was, Jetty had to admit it was the only thing that made any vague amount of sense. Even in an abstract kind of way. She had escaped worse situations than this on even longer odds. Shamrock remembered a similar feeling after the Vaka-i Şerriyye, the so-called "Unfortunate Incident." Her kabile had come into conflict with a migratory tribe from the borderlands between Vale and Vacuo where national allegiance was more a matter of personal opinion than hard law. The Sheikh and Mollas had run out of Lien from their partying and extravagance. Lacking options, they had appealed for help from the Valean Royal Army's garrison all the way in Tesifon, the capital of the Eranstan region. In a legal sense, it was a violation of Vacuan national sovereignty when the 3rd Motor Rifles had driven in and put Shamrock's kabile under the twin axes and fought off the desert nomads. Suddenly, the Sheikh was nothing more than a figurehead, his power gone, and Colonel Fedmahn Kassad was making all the real shots. The Schnee Dust Company's local representative didn't care; the Dust was flowing safer than ever. And Vacuo barely had any power within its oasis heartland, much less these distant borderlands.

Jetson's people had traded destruction for a tyrant. No one knew who to listen to: the traditional leaders of faith, or the men with trucks and guns. But Shamrock had seen an out. She had come to them, trying to look like a poor, innocent white girl from Graad, and showed off her Aura to Colonel Kassad. It wasn't exactly an unheard of situation, if rare for a human. Restavec, the term was called. The same name as the planet. For good reason. Slavery on the continent of Sanus had never taken the institutionalized approach as it had an Atlas or helots of Mistral. The kingdom was, after all, the birthplace of capitalism. Once upon a time, mankind had trespassed on the divine, and been rendered destitute of the soul. They sold themselves off to the land of this Grimm infested rock just for a chance to survive here. They were the ones left behind when heaven shattered. But a restavec was usually a child of destitute parents, who sold off the fruit of their loins to wipe away their debts. Getting to enjoy some peace and financial stability in exchange for losing a child to what amounted to slavery, domestic or agricultural or however else. For many, it was a depressingly good deal. Even if it condemned their children and grandchildren to being little more than property in all but polite fiction.

So her story had checked out to the Eranstani Colonel. Poor parents in Vychodnograad, being offered up as a restavec, eventually being traded and abused her way to Vacuo until the trauma triggered her Aura. If you ignored the lie about the city of her birth, the story was actually entirely true. Those were the best kind of lies. In exchange for asylum in Eranstan, she would become a Valean "again" and offer her talents to the Satrap of Tesifon. A couple of faces and genders later and they had escaped, only to nearly die in the mountains. Until meeting a man named Esfandiyar. He had really been the first Huntsman she had ever met. The man hadn't asked questions, hadn't pried, and barely even raised an eyebrow when he saw Shamrock changing faces. Shamrock hadn't even been able to sully her conscience by lying to the man and making up some kind of story. He simply offered his assistance in getting her to Vale to start life with a clean slate. No conditions, no terms, not even any sort of inappropriate touching she was used to from men as old and powerful as he was.

Then it was the care of the Vaudou people under Cemetaire, and her eventual way to Beacon.

When no one knows what to do, when there's no direction, there was always a chance to slip away and start again with a better hand of cards this time around.

But here? There was no slipping away. Shamrock had leaned against the walls of this place and had been repulsed by an invisible force. The shadows here would be too easy to blend into, but what good was that? She couldn't escape this by simply standing back and letting it play out. Things looked bad and she felt trapped. She had to see this through. She had to steel herself and help in any way possible. It wasn't like she could just go back to her old instincts and run away to, like, Atlas or something.

It was ridiculous.

About as ridiculous as everyone's own solution being to have Jaune meet his body double and just kind of hope things worked out from there.

Which made her wonder.

"So what even is your plan if you meet yourself?" Shamrock asked.

Jaune almost seemed to snap back into reality when she spoke. He had just been focused on walking forwards, his armored boots almost stomping on the concrete. Even Fox was paying attention to him in particular, waiting for a response.

"You say humans defiled the divine, right?" Jaune asked. "One way or the other, this is magic, some kind of divine thing. A little pocket world. We're stuck in a kind of hell."

Shamrock nodded. "Yeah. What of it?"

Something flashed in his eyes. An almost gremlin-like tug at the corners of his lips. "Then it's simple. When you're in hell, the only way out is through. And as the Good Book says, to those damned to the inferno, come judgment day and the punished shall be brought to heaven."

She made a weird face. "That's not my religion and I don't agree with that, but okay. What does this mean for your plan?"

"Simple," he said, cracking his bloodied knuckles through his plate gloves. "Reach heaven through violence."

"No," Fox said simply, giving Jaune a deep frown.

Jaune's expression dropped. "But, I mean, what else is there to do? That piece of shit is all you remember. He's been making your life a living hell for as long as you could remember, even if it's not real, it's the kind of shit I would have done. If I hadn't dug myself out of the pit. Life slapped me across the face with its iron hard cock. I figured the same thing here would set things right."

"We are back to you thinking on gut emotion, not reason," Fox said. "I say, you should try talking to your other self. Maybe then we can actually learn why there are two of you. I think if we learn more instead of resorting to brutal violence, it would be more conducive."

"Conducive to what?" Jaune scoffed. "Fuck outta here with your ten dollar words."

Fox walked a little faster to keep in pace with Jaune, meeting Shamrock fell behind the two of them. "If Shamrock had just presumed you were different and guilty because of what you did, and tried to fight you, we would have learned nothing. We would have been in a worse place. The fact that she bothered to ask you and talk to you first proved useful. It answered questions. It helped us to sort things out." Before anyone could ask, he held up his hand and said, "Yes, I was listening in on you two talking for a while before I stepped in. I understand the gist of things."

Shamrock made a noise, more to bring herself back into the conversation. "He has a point. I was angry. A little scared. Freaking out. But I still thought it made more sense to try to ask you what was going on than just, I don't know, fighting you. Especially since with the last person you fought, you did kind of bite his fingers off, and I like having my hands." Shamrock waggled her fingers.

Jaune rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Goddamn it, okay. I'll try yelling at him or something. I don't know. Bring out my inner drill sergeant. But I don't think it's going to get that long. Because I want to fight me. So I'm pretty sure he wants to fight me too. The difference between us is, I'm going to win."

"Because you have an Aura?" Shamrock asked.

He shook his head. "No. Because I have something worth fighting for. I have friends I care for and love. People who feel the same way for me, even if you can't remember it. He doesn't have any of that. Blake hates him, you seem to mistrust him, and even Weiss wants nothing to do with him. That's why we're different. That's why no matter what happens, I can't possibly lose, not in a fight, not even in an argument. Because I have something worth fighting for, worth living for, and worth dying for." He looked up towards the CCTS Tower and sighed. The boy only increased his pace towards the dorms, somewhere not quite a walk but not quite a jog either. It was hard to keep up with. "Because I have you, Shamrock. I have you, Weiss, and I have Blake."

— 14 —

Blake thought the worst part was she knew how she should be feeling, but the emotions didn't come. At least, not the one she expected. She had carried Sun to the hospital on campus, a surprisingly lonely place without any staff except for the doctor. Maybe it was because it was a weekend. Croaker, who insisted that he was the physician and not a doctor, took Sun in without question. But that was the thing. He almost didn't seem to care. It was like he was running through the motions, like some kind of machine. He didn't even bother trying to listen to Blake when she desperately explained what had happened to him, who had done this. The physician had simply grabbed the boy with the broken face and brought him to an operating room, closing the door behind him.

And Blake was alone.

She sat outside on the bench, feeling inappropriately dressed for the winter. Burning her Aura, she just kept staring at her hands. The way that Jaune had kept doing to himself even after spattering Sun's blood across himself. She flexed her fingers, rotating her hands around, feeling almost like she was drunk while being sober, if that made any sense. It didn't make sense to her. The campus looked so empty.

She felt so empty.

Blake knew what it meant to be so tired you couldn't feel anything. Sometimes that was the default state when she was with the White Fang. Out on the frontier when you were being harassed by Colonel Bind, Torture, Kill, you rarely got a full night's sleep. That was one of his tactics. While you were moving on foot or, if lucky, horseback, he'd have his airships staying on top of you the whole time, never letting you sleep, never letting you rest, and trying to run you to death. If he killed you without a fight, he considered that a victory. She remembered coming across a village with Adam. There had been faunus living there, undisturbed, almost primitive. Adam had stolen their food and water just to keep the White Fang alive and moving. He promised to one day repay them, naturally, but Blake had just… been too exhausted to feel anything. She knew it was wrong, she knew it was evil, it made them the same kind of monster they fought—but she couldn't find the willpower to argue. But she could find the willpower to hate herself.

That's how she felt now. She kept examining her hands and sleeves, at the flecks of blood on them. Sun Wukong. Even just forming the name with her mouth in silence felt wrong. Like it was someone she didn't know. Foreign syllables on her tongue. Like someone had put the name on her tongue. Distantly, she recalled talking with him in the student center, and just thinking of him as the boy until he introduced himself to Jaune. That didn't feel right. She knew they had to have been friends for a long time. She remembered meeting him a month ago, accidentally throwing a mudskipper off the docks downtown and into his face and… yeah. He was pretty openly flirting with her. You don't just do that to someone you don't know. That would be weird. She knew that she and the boy had some kind of rapport. But the more she stared at his blood on her hand, the more she began to wonder. She almost wondered why she felt that caring for someone she knew was her friend, someone who was definitely romantically interested in her, felt like she was faking it somehow.

The only thing she didn't wonder about was Jaune. Not in the way she might have expected. She didn't wonder where his Aura came from, where his outfit had shown up from, or what he was trying to accomplish by repeatedly harassing her. She had all the answers she needed from his eyes.

She had tried to escape his grasp, and he had seen right through her. Known exactly how she would move. And used it to pin her against the wall and strangle her. It had put a mix of fear and butterflies in her stomach, and that made her disgusted. It made her feel like a piece of meat. It made her feel like the way Adam had.

Blake balled her hands into fists, staring out across the snow strewn campus. She hadn't seen Jaune in his eyes. She had seen a boy who looked at her almost like a possession, with some kind of warped affection. Who knew how she moved and how to fight her as if they had trained together. And who, with just the slightest provocation, hadn't thought anything of killing someone in his way. He probably would have gone through with it if she hadn't grabbed him and made him stop. A fit of jealousy like something that wasn't real, from some kind of trashy romance murder novel.

She hadn't seen Jaune in his eyes and actions. Blake had seen Adam. And that thought was what froze her to the spine. No matter how hard she leaned into her aura, the cold didn't go away. The sheer feeling of wrongness compounded. It was like she didn't know the boy—no, he has a name, it's Sun—like she didn't know Sun at all and was just pretending to care. The weird way the doctor had acted, the way the campus seemed so empty. And the way her partner had become a completely different person.

Burning her Aura just to pretend to be warm inside, she almost thought she sensed someone at the very fringes of perception. She didn't know why, but her gut instinct was to hide. She kicked forwards at nothing, activating her Semblance. Her leg hit her shadow clone as she threw herself backwards into the bushes just outside the hospital. She caught herself in a spin, perching herself in hiding, the kick to her clone destroying it.

She saw him again. Jaune. With eyes that didn't belong to him. A determined, hard edge to his expression as he led two people behind him, Shamrock and… some sophomore. She couldn't place his name. Fox? No, that was a really obvious faunus name that was in poor taste. And the boy looked human. Then she realized that she was looking at Shamrock, Weiss' partner, her teammate. She was just walking alongside Jaune, engaged in some kind of low conversation with the other two. Blake felt her heart skip a beat. Even with bits of Sun's blood on him, Shamrock obviously didn't know what was wrong with him. And all three of them were going in the direction of the dorms. The direction of Weiss and everyone else.

That look in Jaune's eyes.

Blake grit her teeth, her cat ears drawn back. Once upon a time, she had faced down Adam, and been terrified. She hadn't been able to fight him. Had never been able to argue with him on a level beyond superficial. He knew all the tactics, how she operated, how she thought, and knew how to use it against her to always win. So when she finally had a conviction of her own, she hadn't told him. She had simply run away. But this was different. Beacon was her new home. She had nowhere else to go. No one else would take her in. And that look in the boy's eyes spoke murder. She didn't know for whom, but she didn't think it mattered. Once upon a time, Blake had faced down her demons, and ran away.

But this was different. She was different. She was better. She… didn't know how she was better or different. Blake had a mental blank moment, and shook it away, feeling a nosebleed coming.

What mattered was that this time, she had people to protect. And a monster before her eyes. Blake was done running. She would get her answers one way or another and figure out what was going on.

And she had to race them from the shadows all the way to the dorms.

— 15 —

Cue Megalovania music. My heart throbbed in my throat as we rode yet another goddamn elevator. Team BASS lived on the third floor. And we decided to take it up instead of the stairs. I had been here maybe a couple of hours ago. I had declined going into the room because I was terrified of meeting Weiss at the time; which in hindsight was a bit of dramatic irony, given she was basically the next person after Cards I'd chatted up to find Blake. But in exchange, I had met Ruby again, and even if she wasn't the real Ruby, she reminded me of why I had to fight.

Ruby Rose, for all her bizarre gremlin-like behavior, was somebody worth knowing, worth fighting for. Not in a romantic sense or anything. But the kind of friends you would do anything for, because you knew they would do anything for you. In my time here at Beacon, I had learned two things would always summon a friend. One of them was smoking a cigarette, which would invariably prompt someone to show up and tell me smoking was bad. The other was wallowing in despair, which would typically prompt someone to show up and tell me that brooding was bad. I still kept an emergency cigarette on hand just in case I needed to call for help like some kind of native American smoke signal. The point being, whenever I indulge in the worst parts of myself, someone would always show up and be there for me when I needed them most. Ruby had done it, and so had Blake. Even if this world wasn't real, I had to make it up to them. I owed them my life and my soul. Literally in the case of Blake, who was the reason I was currently able to run a comfortable burn of Aura just to keep myself grounded in reality. My soul was real if nothing else. Or souls.

The elevator dinged. We stepped out and walked towards the dorm commons.

"Weiss!" Shamrock shouted, rushing forwards. I leaned to the side to let her pass, and watched her run up towards the girl in white. Weiss was just kind of sitting there in the kitchen, legs sprawled out beneath her like she had collapsed midway through a curtsy.

Weiss looked up with a woozy expression, bleeding profusely from her nose. It mixed with ugly, black looking chunks of mucus down her face and onto her white dress. "Hey, Jetty," she said, slowly raising her hand. With a flash of aura, her semblance activated, and she was holding a playing card that looked like it was made from glowing ice. "Is this your card?"

I don't have time for this, I thought with a certain bitterness. I got three steps past Weiss before I realized what had just passed through my head, and then I froze. The only warmth left in me was from my aura and the shameful blood rushing to my cheeks. My first reaction to seeing my friend and teammate in pain and trouble was that she wasn't worth it. That I had more pressing concerns. Namely, to find my clone me a couple of yards away down the hall.

Hours ago, I had been questioning Weiss. Trying to pierce through her and to get information, using her like an instrument. That had been my first hint that she wasn't just some kind of mirror reality clone or whatever. She started to remember things, things only the real Weiss would. And I had left her alone for Shamrock to later find and collect because I had, for some goddamn reason, presumed that when she was like this I wouldn't get anything useful out of her.

The last thing she asked me was about skinwalkers who got so used to being human they forgot they were monsters. I looked down the hallway where a monster lived. My hands were still covered in Sun's blood. I could still taste his fingernails on the back of my tongue.

Walking past my friend in pain because I saw her more as a problem to be ignored than a person was just what he would do.

"Help me get her up," Shamrock said as I crouched down beside Weiss. I put one arm under hers and together we lifted the girl up, carrying her towards the couch.

The Semblance playing card in her hand vanished. Instead she just looked back at the oven and weakly grabbed at it as it got further and further. Fox stared at us impassively.

When we set Weiss down back on the couch in the common room, she reached up and grabbed me by Ruby's necklace. "I started thinking. I started remembering. I can't remember what happened yesterday or last week. But, I can. There's so many things jumbling around. Why do I know how to cheat at cards?"

"I—" I said, and faltered.

"I look at you and a part of me thinks I should feel disgust and hatred. But I'm trying to remember why. And the things that spring to mind are so old. Back during fall before the snow came," Weiss said. "I started to remember names. I started to remember the way you looked at me."

I screwed my eyes shut, unwilling to face her. "I'm sorry."

She grabbed the necklace harder and pulled. I moved towards her to avoid breaking the chain, until our faces were uncomfortably close. Some paranoid part of me half expected her to try to kiss me, and the thought filled me with a negative feeling there wasn't a word for.

"I asked you and you didn't say anything. So I'm going to ask you again. You look different. You look familiar but I don't remember you. Who is Simone?"

I hissed in a breath, shoving her hand away. She grunted as I stepped back. I burned my Aura stronger and harder, putting it up as a shield and instead of just a passive comfortable feeling.

Shamrock snapped her fingers in front of her partner's face. "Weiss, look at me. Look at me and calm down. Right now, look at me. Okay? This place isn't real."

Of all the things she could have done, Weiss looking offended was the most surprising. "You don't think I haven't realized that? I'm not stupid. It just doesn't make sense."

Shamrock scowled. "Dog babies."

Weiss scrunched her brow in confusion, and then gasped in horror. In a small voice, she said, "Oh my God I told you that story too. I—I—"

The response took Shamrock off guard. "I… yeah, you told me that, but when did you… Papa Gede's mocking me again. Our memories are broken. This place is doing something to us. Everyone but Jaune. At least this one. I think we can use him to break out of this place."

"What makes him so special?" she asked softly. "He still looks like himself. I don't even have my own face anymore."

Weiss reached out her left hand and made the gesture. Pardonne-moi, Celiphie. Before she took her fingernails and so to scratch above her eye where her new scar used to be. Almost morbidly fascinated, I watched as she started getting harder. Until she was downright digging into her skin and the blood ran down her eye and mixed with her nose. "My face is wrong. This is my face. I told you that story because Blake punched me. I have a scar. It's not there. It should be there!"

"Weiss!" Shamrock screamed, grabbing her hand and pulling it away. "Stop that, stop hurting yourself!"

"I don't want to be in this place," Weiss said. "I want to go home. But I don't know where home is anymore. I keep thinking of times when I was happy and things, I don't know. And all I get is this feeling of being with you, with Blake, with Jaune. Like that's the home I deserve but there's holes in the memories. Like I can't remember who I am anymore. I can't remember being happy. I don't want to be alive if I can't remember that. And I know it's about you all. My face is wrong!"

Weiss and Shamrock fought for control of her hand. I hugged myself, stepping backwards, casting my eyes towards Fox for some kind of support. He just arched an eyebrow in silence.

"Weiss!" I snapped, and she actually paused to look at me, eyes widening as if seeing me for the first time. I didn't really know how to follow up with that. I just let the words tumble out in the hopes they would do something. "This is my fault. This world isn't real, and I'm going to destroy it. I'm going to save us all. But I need you to calm down and trust me. I need you to try to remember making bagels and being hilariously domestic. I don't know what the hell dog babies means, but maybe remember that too. You never told me."

"I was starving myself and missed my period and thought I got pregnant from petting a dog," she said evenly.

That completely killed my train of thought. "I-I-I, what?"

"I can't make myself forget that. I've tried. It doesn't work."

I stared. "Uh, okay. Wow. I miss five seconds ago when I didn't know that. But, I mean, now we can suffer together in that knowledge? Because, y'know, suffering together is cool." I cleared my throat. "You're one of my best friends. I know you can't remember. Not all of it. But maybe you could remember the feeling of trusting me. Maybe you can remember that no matter what happens, I'll save us all. I just need to deal with the other person wearing my face. Even if it costs me in my life, I'll do anything for you."

A door slammed open. "Yeah, and I'd do anything to make the noise stop," someone with my voice said. "Would you fucking mind having an emotional breakdown somewhere else? I'm trying to panic about how I'm basically simping for a Eurasian bitch with a degree in cock and ball torture."

I turned from the couch in the common room and saw him. Jaune Arc. Myself. The sight made my nose feel wet with blood, and I couldn't help but ball my fists. To say we looked the same would be wrong. Putting a side-by-side together, you'd never make that mistake. The hair, the posture, the coked out look in his eyes. My eyes moved him up and down, scanning him, memorizing every detail. And let me tell you, both of us could hold a pencil between our tits for entirely different reasons.

"Ah shit," we said at once, and even our voices didn't sound alike. It was like we had the same mouth, the same accent, but just the way we carried ourselves was nothing alike.

"Uh, hey, Emerald?" he asked. "That's the name, right? Why are you here? Was it because I ruined your Cinder ship? You can still have her on weekends. I still call dibs on her nudes, though."

I stared.

"Wait, you mute? Uh, uh, fuck," he said, rubbing his head. "Who's the dwarf girl who can look like other people. Uh, Neo? Ice cream lookin' ass? I'm sorry I tried getting into the drug trade and undercut you by selling crack to preschoolers. You're not here to get vengeance on me, for that?"

I felt my spine going rigid. "No, Jaune," I said as if my every tooth was a dagger. "No I am not."

The false me blinked. "Oh. Well. Huh. Fuck!" And slammed the door shut behind him.

I made the gesture for pardonne-moi, Celiphie and ran after him. It felt like only a couple of steps down the hall. The edges of my vision felt blurry. I raised my boot to kick the door down, when Fox shouted.

"Jaune!"

I turn to look at him, staring at me with his blind eyes. Weiss was trying to sit up on the couch, one arm draped over Shamrock shoulders. They were all staring at me in some form or the other..

"Talk," Fox said.

I stood there for a moment, I screwed shut, focusing on my breathing. Trying to get my blood pressure under control. Without looking, I withdrew my room key and slid it into the door to undo the electronic lock. It opened with a mechanical noise and I pressed down on the handle.

Jaune slammed against the door from the other side, forcing it shut. "No! Stay away from me, you fucking demon! I just want to sit here, enjoy my fire water, and raise my garloid in peace. Fuck off!"

"Are you seriously making a 4chan joke?" I asked, leaning into the door. I had to hand it to the man, he had a lot of weight to put behind the wood, and not for the right reasons.

As soon as I asked him, the door slammed open. I nearly tripped and fell onto my ass, or let it catch myself on the handle. Jaune, the other me, was standing midway into the room, holding his sword in its sheath upside down. Red streaks of burst blood vessels surrounded his blue eyes. His blond hair looks somehow tarnished. He wore no pants.

"Who the hell are you and how do you know about 4chan?" he asked. "Why do you look like me? Who the fuck is you?"

I bit down a sudden wave of bile rising angrily in my throat, a hot, burning mess. "Because I'm you, but stronger," I said, stepping into the room.

He waved his sword uselessly at me. I grabbed it in my armored glove and ripped it from his hands, only to toss it to the side. "Are you literally just here to spout bad memes at me?" he demanded, trying to back up further. Until he'd pressed himself up against the wall.

I took several breaths, looking over his pathetic imitation of my body. The scared, frantic look in his eyes. That was the one good feeling. There was something primal about being the object of another man's fear. Something in my lizard brain that told me to be strong, to bite and snarl, to fight for women's attention. It told me I was successful, and he was a failure. He was less than a threat. He was a worm. It was almost a drug in and of itself.

I knew I'd been in his place with my own father, at his feet. Until the day I refused to cover and bloodied his nose in a drunken rage. And he had just curled up, refusing to fight.

I looked at my hands, and Sun Wukong's blood. The fingers I spat out scratched at the back of my tastebuds. I could feel Fox's dead eyes on the back of my neck.

With a breath, I looked away and swallowed. "I… think I'm here to talk."

Jaune laughed, a desperate sound. "Okay, Gabriel. What about? Is this where you tell me you're a metaphor for my self doubts? Or, or—fuck, is you the real Jaune? I done seen you before. Is this where you kill me for stealing your body? Because—" Another unhinged laugh. "I got me no explanations for it. I don't know why I'm here. So, there! Happy yet?"

My tongue writhed in my mouth as I searched for words, like a maggot about to burst. My spit felt thick and viscous. "That's—no, that doesn't matter. I think. I don't know."

The more I tried to think about what I even wanted to talk about, the less of an idea I had. The best I could come up with were vague half formed notions that I couldn't even put coherent thought to. Maybe this idea that he would know and I could just piggyback off him. Turn this into one of my comforting philosophical discussions like I had with Coco or Ruby or any other number of my friends

"Then what, Cousteau?" he demanded. "If you're not here to ask me shit, then lemme try. Why you dressed like a stripper? Ya finna twerk over my dead body as some kinda object lesson?"

I blinked. "I—no. Jesus, no. It's fashionable. Mixing armor with good style like Coco suggested."

"Who the hell is Coco?"

"Beret and sunglasses. Purse unfolds into a minigun."

"Oh great, someone else to not pay attention to." His eyes zeroed in on my necklace. It almost looked like it took him a force of will to focus his sight on anything. "Why you wearing a crucifix? Real horsemen of the apocalypse shit going on right there."

"It was a gift from Ruby."

He sneered. "Why would she ever give you anything? All she ever gives me is uncomfortable sexual attention from the way she yells and gets up in my face."

I hissed. "That's disgusting. She's, like, sixteen."

"Well, then maybe she's older than me. I'm pretty sure I was only fifteen a couple months back!"

"Y'know, maybe this wallowing in your despair and being a creep is why she don't like you!" I snapped. "Maybe if you actually tried talking to her instead of ruining the microwave, you'd see her as a person too!"

He rolled his eyes. "Gimme a break, clone boy. No one here ever liked me. What would be the point in doing anything else? Fuck 'em. It's more fun this way."

I took a heavy step towards him. "Is it fun when Shamrock thinks even being around you is uncomfortable? Is it fun that your very presence makes Weiss feel like she's being perved on."

"Not my fault she's hot. She should learn to dress better," he said.

I threw my hands up. "Is it fun when Blake considers just being around you hell itself?"

He compressed a breath. "Okay, stop just naming random names. Give me somebody I know."

A part of me felt like it just short-circuited. "Blake."

His expression was blank. "Try again, hombre."

Crouching down to get eye level with him, I said, "Our teammate."

"I'm a lone wolf. Who needs other people when you can suck your own dick?"

"Our best friend?" I tried, even though I knew I was getting even further from the point.

"You mean Jack Daniels?" he asked.

"The girl who wears tights and a hair bow? The one pretending she's a human because she doesn't want people to know she's faunus. Basically a ninja. Former terrorist. The beauty allegory to the beast."

"Are you describing a fetish? This feels like a fetish. I'm adding it to the list of things I'll jerk off to in the shower over."

I threw my hands up and screamed. "Our partner who somehow started developing feelings for us, and I don't know how to handle it, because I'm not sure I feel the same way, even though I do love her, and I just can't see a way out of this without hurting her and that's the last thing I fucking want to do in the world! Her! That Blake! The most important person in the world to me!"

His eyes glossed over. "Now I know you're just making shit up to make me feel bad."

"Mittens," I said hoarsely. The word made me choke.

Jaune's eyes lit up. "Oh, shit, her. Holy shit, are you telling me that if I clean my act up, I get to fuck a hot cat GF? Hand me my bourbon; I need to do some serious thinking on this."

I grabbed him by the collar and shoved him up against the wall with my Aura. As heavy as he was, I barely noticed. "Don't you fucking talk about that after everything you've done!"

He screamed in pain. "I ain't done shit! You're the one spouting out this weird fetish fuel shit. I just want to keep my goddamn head down and keep surviving. How the hell did you even get an Aura? What's it like living that male power fantasy we've always wanted? With superpowers and strength and a girlfriend whose ass you can bounce a quarter off."

"You shut the fuck up!" I shouted, shoving him into and through the wall with a full force of my Aura. He snapped through the drywall, breaking the wooden support beams. We broke into the common room, sending up clouds of dust and destroyed drywall into the air. Someone gasped. His shirt ripped under his weight, and I threw him forwards. He hit the ground hard, rolling until his back slammed into the sink.

I was on him in seconds. He tried to grab the counter and steady himself, flailing a hand towards me. I grabbed his fist and twisted. He collapsed down onto his knees, angling his body to prevent his arm from snapping into.

"I tried to be nice!" I said. "I thought maybe we could do what I always do and talk shit out. But you're just a piece of shit, aren't you? You don't even know Blake's name. You don't know anybody. Do you even care about anyone but yourself? Or is all you want to do crawling on your dick day in, day out, drinking yourself awake and asleep just to avoid having to deal with the unbearable possibility of having a single self-aware thought crawl through your pathetic mess of a head?! Answer me!"

He tried to kick me. I couldn't feel it through my Aura. I bent his arm until something snapped. He screamed, leg twisting at a funny angle. I backhanded him hard enough to nearly cave his cheek in, and he stumbled backwards against the kitchen, slamming his head against the counter.

"Stop trying to fight me!" I said, the spittle flying out and hitting him in the face. "Look what you're making me do! You can't fight me. You can't beat me. Look me in the eyes and be self-aware for once in your miserable excuse for all life, you fat piece of shit! Think about the people around you and give a shit! Stop hitting yourself, bro. Stop trying to fight and listen!"

He spat blood towards me. It didn't go far, just dribbling out of his face. "Why? None of this is real. None of these people are real. Mittens, Netflix, that goddamn shadow. What do it matter? You expect me to care about some Nazi princess cunt, or a poorly animated allegory for Little Red Riding Hood, or some mean-spirited cat bitch lookin' like she would cancel me on Twitter if that thing existed in this world? Why do you even care? RWBY fucking sucked and so do you. Fuck you. Fuck them!"

The first punch to his face sent blood spattering back across mine. The second knocked him to the ground. I picked him back up just to break his jaw with the third. When he tried to grab my hand, I wrapped my fingers around his and bent them backwards until they snapped.

"They're none of those things!" I screamed. "Stop trying to dissociate from them. Stop making up excuses for yourself. Stop acting like your actions don't have consequences to them. They're no different from us. You're no different from them. Face them like people!"

"No different?" he slurred, spit and blood and bits of bone dripping from his mouth. "I tried that once. Back in Brockton Bay. You remember, don't you? But then we died and here we were. We are different. We're not the same as them. You can't kill me in a way that matters. We'll just show up somewhere else and do it all over again. What the fuck is the point in caring about them? Transient pieces of shit. It's like trying to fall in love with a mayfly."

I kicked him square in the chest. And then hit him across the face. And again and again until he couldn't backtalk me.

"Fuck your philosophy. Fuck your pity. Fuck giving up. This is all your fault. Their hatred, their suffering, is because you just don't give a shit about anything but yourself. For once in your goddamn life, give up the middle school solipsism and think. Think about more than yourself. Think about other people. Think about what you do to them when you don't care. Think, Jaune, think!"

He muttered something. I got down to listen.

"Still think you can talk, boy?" I asked. "What, Jaune—what did you possibly have to say for yourself after this? I looked into Blake's eyes and I saw hatred. Because of what you did to her. I saw disgust in Weiss' face. Because of what you did to her. They remember. And they can think, Jaune."

He coughed and sputtered and choked and made incoherent noises. Until finally I could make out words. "That's not my name."

I stood up, shaking at the edges of my vision. Breathing harder and harder until I was nearly hyperventilating. Covered in his own blood, both of us. The taste of fingers in my mouth.

"What's wrong, Dad?" he croaked, and bubbled out a laugh.

I screamed, lifting my foot to crush his mangled face into one final pulp.

Until the glowing snowflake appeared in front of Jaune. It took me a moment to realize Weiss was using her semblance to shield Jaune. I stood there, leg raised, and stared. How dare she! What did she think she was doing? I was about to turn towards her and demand answers when the sword and the ribbon attached to it came flying from left field. It wrapped around my arm, and yanked me backwards.

I rolled backward across the floor until I grabbed the corner of the kitchen island and came to a halt. When I looked up, I saw Weiss breathing heavily, her hand outstretched. The blood staining her dress. Her eyes were wide and looking not at me, but at the girl in the window.

At Blake, holding her weapons in her hand. Whiteknuckling them hard enough that her hands shook. Just the sight of her made the blood drain from my face, like cockroaches fleeing the kitchen lights. I saw spots in the corners of my vision. It made me wish I had killed the other Jaune sooner.

I tried to get up. I grabbed the ground, and my hand slipped in the blood that coated it. "Blake?" I croaked. "No, Jesus, you don't understand what's going on. He isn't me. You have to remember!"

"I remember," she said in a shaky voice, her teeth grit. There was fear, real fear, mixing with hatred in her amber eyes. "I remember what you did to Sun. What you tried to do to me. And I remembered that I'm never going to let you hurt anyone else ever again, Adam."