Yo!
Second to last chapter of Cinderella! Where did the time go, huh?
Start Chapter 67
Cinder's sort of expecting the next few days to consist of nothing but more and more people arriving, and her being grilled by Jaune's family and given the stereotypical shovel talk.
This doesn't happen.
Well, the first part does. Jaune's father arrives the day after they've gotten there, and Jaune's older sisters all begin to trickle in over the course of the week.
The story they tell changes every time, mostly because it's a lot easier to make something up than to admit that Cinder had had a hand in blowing up Vale, and killing several thousand people.
"So, how did you first meet?"
"Ah, well… uhm…" Jaune looks towards her, and she gives a look that tries to communicate as much as possible that she has absolutely no idea what he should say. "…At a coffee shop!"
Cinder just sighs.
It's a coffee shop, then it's at Beacon, then it's at Beacon but at the end of the year, then its at a coffee shop, but while they were at Beacon, then…
Well, Cinder gets the feeling that Jaune's parents know they're bullshitting at this point, but Cinder isn't going to be the one to tell the truth. Not for a while, at least.
It feels a little dirty, but then, she kind of wants this to go well.
Aside from Jaune's family arriving, not much actually happens. That's mostly due to the fact that there's a record snowstorm in Vale at that time, and a good foot of snow is keeping them inside the house unless it's absolutely necessary for them to leave. Mostly, those consist of big runs done by Cinder and Jaune to the store that's only a few hundred feet from the house, and even then, it's pretty much only Cinder's semblance that makes the trip anywhere near palatable.
"Y'know," Jaune comments one day as they're making their way back towards the Arc family home, carrying enough groceries to hopefully last the twenty-or-so people staying within the building a day or two, "When I invited you all here, this isn't exactly what I had in mind."
"Life always seems to have other plans."
"Yeah, well, frankly, I'm getting really tired of life's shit."
Cinder snorts under her breath, even as she raises her own temperature to be just a little below what will begin to set the paper bags that they're carrying aflame. She can't feel the heat her semblance gives off, of course, but Jaune can, and she wants him to be as comfortable as possible.
"I mean, c'mon, we already battled astral god dragons in a different dimension; can't the universe cut us a little slack?"
"No rest for the weary, it seems."
"Yeah, you can say that again." Jaune says, but his voice is only barely audible above the howling winds circling them. "Gods, even with your semblance it's cold."
Cinder nods her head, fully cognizant that Jaune can't really see that. She's used to the cold – had slept in an unheated supply closet for the majority of her childhood in the middle of Atlas – and yet even she has to admit that this sucks quite a bit.
"Think of how warm we'll feel once we get back inside?"
"We don't have central heating! It'll barely be better than out here!"
Cinder shoots Jaune a flat look that is apparently obvious enough even through the blizzard, because although her soulmate grumbles something under his breath, he does eventually acquiesce, "Okay, so it'll be better, I just wish it was actually hot."
"Take a shower."
"Cinder it's barely noon and I've already taken two showers today. My parents are going to kill me already when they see the water bill, I don't need it to be any more painful."
She shrugs her shoulders, then, sort of just giving up on this particular topic of conversation. Jaune sighs, but the two of them continue trudging their way through the snow back towards the house. Eventually, what feels like hours later, they push open the door, step on inside, and do their best to warm up.
"We're back!" Jaune calls, even as he covers his face with his elbow and sneezes. "Ugh, I'm not going on the next one of these."
"I can go myself."
"No, you can't," Jaune corrects her, pointing a finger in her direction. "It's freezing out. Maybe take Yang with you, since she can set her hair on fire if she's angry or something."
Cinder finds herself grinning a tad teasingly. "And what's the strategy there, then? Sit there and poke her with a stick to annoy her as much as possible."
"Hey, if it works, might as well throw marshmallows on the end of them, make an event out of it."
Cinder rolls her eyes.
"Ah, welcome back, you two."
Cinder looks up to see Jaune's mother walking into the entryway, and immediately reaching down towards the bags the two of them had set down to take them back into the kitchen. "Thank you for doing this for us. I'll have to give you two some lien for the trouble."
"You don't have to pay us, mom," Jaune shakes his head. "Really. We're the ones eating all your food in the first place. It's the least we can do."
"It would be the least you could do if it wasn't cold enough to kill an ox, and snowing enough to bury it a moments later. It's the least I can do to compensate you for going out there."
Cinder listened to the two go back and forth a while with a smile on her face. It was oddly adorable seeing how much the two clearly cared about one another, even if they had an awfully roundabout way of showing it.
Eventually, however, she and Jaune retreated to their room, and got about warming themselves up. Cinder makes that much easier, of course, given that they can huddle under a blanket, and she can heat herself up. Sure, Jaune gets warmed a bit more by this arrangement, but she won't turn down the warmth he offers.
The days keep going, and eventually, the snow stops. Saphron and Terra-Cotta Arc arrive, alongside their young son, who Cinder will admit is rather adorable, and they end up choosing to stay at the same hotel that Summer, Raven, and Qrow have been holed up in the entire time they've been here.
Honestly, their group had only supposed to be staying in Domremy for a week, but that timeframe had come and gone, and their bullhead pilot hadn't seemed particularly enthused to fly in such horrid conditions.
They can probably send a request to leave whenever they want now that the storm has stopped, but frankly…
Well, Cinder, at least, is having a nice time. She doesn't want to leave. Not quite yet.
The others seem to be in agreement with her, albeit in a far quieter manner, given that no one has brought up the idea yet. This surprises her with some people more than it does with others. Mercury and Emerald, for instance, simply because she'd not thought the two capable of adapting to a civilian household. And yet, here they are, just…
Well, not quite relaxing, but existing without blowing anything up, which is a good substitute.
It probably helps for Emerald that Ilia is here with her, and even if Cinder finds it a bit strange, Blake and Mercury have quietly become rather good friends while she hadn't been looking. Perhaps that has something to do with their shared pasts that they'd both wished to shy away from. Or perhaps it doesn't.
Hell, maybe they both enjoy reading adult novels or something. Cinder honestly doesn't care about the particulars.
Though she is happy that her former enforcers have both seemingly managed to acclimate themselves somehow to a real, honest life. Such a thought might have seemed so foreign once upon a time, and yet now, here they all are.
Well and truly domesticated.
Cinder snorts, even as she puts a beanie on her head and around her ears, and steps outside of the Arc family home. The snow hasn't melted, and likely won't for quite some time, but at the very least, no more is falling from the sky, and according to the weather reports, no more snow is expected for a while.
Then again, given the reliability of meteorologists in general, perhaps they shouldn't put so much faith in this as to be out and about in the snow.
Cinder is thinking about this, about whether or not they should be goofing off when a storm could be coming their way, just as a snowball pelts her across the side of the face.
It actually hurts a fair bit, which makes sense when she thinks about the fact that she'd been struck by roughly an eighth of a pound of, essentially, ice.
She looks over to see who it is that has thrown such at her, and sees Nora Valkyrie, of all people, staring triumphantly over at her from behind a barrier of snow in the shape of a castle wall.
Impressively, it even has little lines carved into it in the general shape and style of stone bricks. Cinder will admit she finds it rather remarkable.
"Ha-ha-ha!" Nora annunciates each 'ha' rather fiercely. "You fools! To stand against the dread lord Nora is akin to suicide!"
"You won't win, dread lord!" Ruby Rose calls from behind a far more shoddily created wall of snow, where she is joined by her teammates, and also Penny and Oscar both.
"Ye' heroes are all the same!" Nora calls back, even as she stands up, and places one of her legs atop the wall. "Come, then, oh heroes! I will give you a quick dea–"
A snowball strikes Nora directly in the face, and when Cinder looks back, she sees Penny Polendina looking over at Ruby with the clearest 'praise me' expression she has ever seen.
"I have struck the dread queen!" The android girl says.
Yang snickers. "Yeah, we see that."
"A cheap shot!" Nora doesn't give up as she rises from behind her wall once more, even as she tries to use her breath to push snow off of her face. "Just like ye' foolish heroes, indeed! Why I–"
Nora ducks to avoid another snowball thrown by Penny, which had been about to strike her in the exact same spot.
"Okay, this is unfair, how come you guys get Penny!?"
"I will fight on the side of justice!" Penny answers.
"Really!?"
"And also, because friend Ruby is on the side of justice!"
Nora groans, before turning her face towards Cinder, and yelling out, "My ally! Come to me! We must strike these heroes down!"
Cinder cocks an eyebrow and crosses her arms in front of her body. "Didn't you hit me with a snowball the second I stepped outside?"
Nora purses her lips rather tightly. "…Er…"
Cinder makes a show of tapping her finger along her arm, as if growing impatient.
"Jaune is on my team?" Nora offers.
"Yeah, that'll work." Cinder admits, trudging her way over to Nora's fortress.
Cinder crouches down behind it, and smirks as Jaune hands her a snowball, then points her towards where he, Pyrrha, and Ren have been assembling a great many more while Nora has been distracting their opponents.
"I see. So, Nora's blustering served a purpose, then?"
"Hey, I'm not blustering!"
"It did." Ren says.
"Rennie!"
Pyrrha chuckles under her breath, even as she shivers and runs her hands up her sides to try and keep warmth in her core.
"We need to move before they can respond," Jaune says, taking charge even in a low stake's environment like this one. "If we try and play a reactionary game, we're going to get annihilated, given that their semblances make it too easy for them to maneuver and flank us. I wish I could come up with an idea faster, but I say we play it by ear, and storm them before they realize what's happening."
"It's as good a plan as any other." Ren speaks. "If that's the case, we'd best get moving."
Jaune nods, turns towards each of them, and gets the same acquiescence to the plan. Once it's clear they're all following, Jaune places his hand in the center, between them all.
"On three?"
They count to three, throw their hands in the air, and then the 'battle' begins.
Given they've been told to improvise, Cinder has no qualms with simply utilizing the Maiden's powers to get a leg up on the competition. It feels a tad bit ridiculous to go so hard in a contest such as this, but frankly, Cinder finds such things incredibly entertaining.
Except when she reaches for the Maiden's fire, into her chest towards that ball of power, she finds…
Nothing.
There's nothing there. Nothing at all.
Huh. Cinder supposes that makes sense. Ozma, the man who'd supplied such power, had left the world for good, and even then, the Brothers, who'd originally supplied such magic, had been erased from existence as well.
So, the Maiden's fire is gone, then. That's…
Well, Cinder will just have to make do.
Even without a fire-powered boost, she's still faster than any besides Ruby utilizing her semblance. She shoots off of her left leg and gathers heat in her right hand, even as she reaches down towards the snow and feels it begin to boil within her grasp.
She cannot feel the heat, cannot experience the pain that would normally come from it, but she can still utilize it.
For as Blake Belladonna peaks her head around the corner to get an eye on the competition, she is met only with an icy mist.
"Huh?"
A moment later, she is struck in the back of the head with a snowball.
"Ah, we've been flanked!" Oscar shouts.
"Shit!" Yang flings a snowball her way, and Cinder dodges beneath it with ease, finding a smile coming to her lips as she sees Jaune and the others rounding out from behind their 'castle wall' just as she's bought them the attention of Ruby's group.
And just like that, before it can even begin, the battle is over.
RWBY, Oscar, and Penny are struck from all angles by snowballs aplenty, and even as Ruby herself playfully begs for mercy as Nora steps over towards her, she is met with only one response.
"There is no mercy." Nora says, before taking a pale filled with snow and upturning it onto Ruby's face.
The poor girl never had a chance.
"Ruby, nooooo!" Yang rather dramatically falls to her hands and knees. "I will avenge you, oh sister of mine!"
Jaune flings a snowball at Yang's head, which hits her hair, and is perhaps the first real mistake any of them have made so far.
"Oi." Yang turns towards her soulmate with crimson eyes. "You must want to die via snowball, vomit boy!"
"Ehehe… I'm sorry?"
A snowball to the face is Yang's response.
"Ah! Our fearless leader has been stricken down!"
"I'm fine, Nora–"
"Stricken! Killed before our eyes!" Nora screeches. "Blood for blood, pain for pain! Vengeance will be ours!"
This starts a good twenty or so minute round of what is, essentially, free-for-all snowball fighting. Of course, they'd stuck to the teams for a bit, but the moment a snowball had struck off course for the first time, hit a teammate, well, those connections had evaporated quickly.
Snowballs fly everywhere. No one is left unscathed. In the end, it's all Cinder can do to keep herself standing as she pants beneath her breath, utterly exhausted. One might think that the colder temperature might've kept her from sweating, yet no, that is about as far from the case as could be. She's absolutely drenched in sweat, which is doing her no favors, given it's only leading to her feeling colder.
And yet, despite that, in the end, she can't quite help but smile. She can't quite help the way that her lips open, and a giggle bubbles up from within her, one somehow untethered from the things she's dealt with across her entire life.
How had she ended up here, she wonders in that moment, surrounded by people she honest to everything cared about, by someone whom she trusted with her life, whom she loved, and friends that she valued.
She'd been a little girl, holding a knife to her own heart, once. She'd thought about ending it all then and there, and the thing that had saved her had been a tiny, absent feeling within her breast.
Now… now she looks towards the source of that feeling, and sees him just…
Watching her. watching the ease with which she laughs, with which she enjoys the moment.
He's crying. She's not sure he realizes it, but there are tears falling down his face.
She steps towards him, trudging through the snow, until she's right there next to him. she reaches up, idly, and wipes the tears from off of his cheeks.
"I love you." She says, as she always seems to, as she always feels.
"I love you too." He answers.
They would kiss, but then, they get hit with a pair of snowballs launched by an ex-Schnee heiress and her partner, and suddenly they have things to be doing, a battle to be winning.
And as Cinder reaches down, scoops up enough snow to be used as a weapon in their coming fight, she finds she cannot help but cackle beneath her breath, openly and without restraint.
She feels free.
End Chapter 67
Not a ton to say. I'm taking some time off of writing once this story finishes, and I might not be doing anymore RWBY fanfiction at all. We'll have to see. I do, technically, have a RWBY fic idea, but I'd probably want to gauge fan sentiment before writing that. And even then, it would be much shorter.
I do have some writing I want to be doing, but it's for another book (I wrote my first, but it was... well, I'm not sure what to do with it at present).
Anyways, thanks for the love, as always! I'll see you in a few days for the finale!
