Two minutes silence for the dead
Two minutes more for the dying
But no silence at all, for those still to fall
'Til the widowmaker hears the children crying
Heat: searing, incredible, agonizing heat, heat that turned the very air to lava in her chest, burning her lungs from the inside-out as her body fell to ash, as the yellow-orange of flames flashed white before her broiling eyes-
Weiss came to herself with the strangled gasp of a swimmer breaching the surface, staggering backwards. There was too much light, but the light was different, and the air moved soft and cool over her skin, and the sounds were all wrong-
She bumped up against a towering, angular obstruction that wobbled and fell behind her with a soft thump. Whirling around and half-drawing Myrtenaster with a screech of metal, Weiss saw, as her pounding heart slowed, that she'd just bumped into the trolley that held her suitcases, knocking a few of them loose.
"…Miss Schnee?" the attendant who'd helped her unload all these supplies asked with palpable hesitation, blinking at her a few times. Weiss cleared her throat self-consciously, sheathing her weapon again.
"My apologies," she told him, her voice crisp and clear. "I was in something of a daze." She fished inside her belt pouch and withdrew a few Lien cards without looking at the amount, holding it out to him. "Please, I can handle the rest of this myself."
Given the way his eyes widened and he hastened to secure his prize, Weiss had probably overpaid him by a lot, but she didn't particularly care. Not now.
She held her chin high, surveying the bright, sunny courtyard around her as Weiss laid one hand lightly on the hilt of her weapon, as though daring anyone to think the worse of her. No one spared her a second glance, and Weiss nodded slowly to herself, before removing her hand and bending down to fetch her errant luggage.
Placing one hand on the brass poles, she began wheeling her cart of white-leather suitcases and valises over to a secluded part of the courtyard, away from the other students as they left the great airships. Once she had reached that spot, Weiss turned around, nudged a few stacks back with her foot, and sat abruptly at the edge of her cart, burying her face in her shaking hands.
I died. Did I just die?
She remembered the pain of it with searing clarity, remembered the despair and agony worse than any she had ever known as she was burned alive in the half-Maiden's flames. And yet, and yet, and yet what was she doing back here? She was here, at Beacon, in Beacon's courtyard, on the first day of the first semester. She was here, just as she had been here when she'd fallen from the paths Ambrosius made, but this couldn't be possible. This wasn't right.
Weiss coughed and swallowed, rubbing her throat. It may be psychosomatic, but her throat felt dry and crackly, as though all the moisture in her had been burned away. She badly wanted a drink of water, but she wanted answers even more.
She could, maybe, understand the fact that falling from the paths had warped the universe in strange and unique ways that resulted in what was essentially time travel. What she could not understand was how a wholly and completely mundane death could result in the same thing.
Still.
Still, she had a job to do, and she couldn't do it if she sat here wallowing in her confusion and fear. Weiss stood up, using the pole of the cart for support again, and looked around. No Ruby yet, but… well, if she stood here long enough, her teammates would surely show. Weiss nodded to herself in satisfaction, and surreptitiously looked around, trying to see if there were any water fountains within range.
A young woman with a shining waterfall of dark, wavy hair was striding slowly towards her, nose buried in a book. Weiss's whole body eased as she saw her teammate, relief washing over her in a wave.
"Blake!" she called.
The silky black bow atop Blake's hair quivered and stiffened almost imperceptibly, and startled golden eyes rose to meet Weiss's as she hurried forward.
"I- I'm sorry?" Blake stammered, closing her book and taking a step back away from Weiss's outstretched hand.
Weiss froze.
"Blake…?"
"I don't think- I mean, you must be thinking of someone else," Blake said, visibly correcting herself as her voice quickened. "I don't think we've ever met before."
What.
Whatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhat-
Weiss twisted her head slightly, looking at the courtyard around them with worried eyes. Why was Blake acting like this? Was there someone here that she didn't want to alert to the truth?
There was no one, just the same merrily-chatting students as there always were, oblivious to the catastrophic future ahead of them as they parted and flowed around the various obstructions in the path, not paying a whit of attention to the two girls off to one side.
Weiss looked back at Blake, staring at her face with wide eyes. Blake was a good actress, but she was also a good teammate, and she would read Weiss's unease and alarm easily, and then she would naturally figure out some way to let Weiss in on the act, or explain what she was doing. Or, at least, reassure Weiss that it was an act to begin with!
There was nothing but matched confusion in Blake's bright gold eyes as the heiress stared intensely at her. There was also a faint trace of alarm, buried deeply and masked as nothing but a flicker of unease in Blake's steady, wide-eyed gaze.
There was absolutely no recognition.
"I… think you've confused me with someone else," Blake said, taking another slow, hesitant step backwards, away from Weiss. She was like a wild animal poised to flee, to bolt the second Weiss so much as twitched. The bow that she had failed to remove was pulled taut, subtly slanting backwards as Blake's ears tried to flatten in alarm against her skull.
She didn't know her. Or rather, she didn't know Weiss as Weiss, as her teammate and friend. She knew her as Weiss Schnee, the heiress of the Schnee Dust Company, who was now peering intently at Blake, a former member of the White Fang, and striving to recognize her.
"I don't know you," Blake gulped again, her retreating feet quickening their pace as Weiss merely stared. "I-I think I should go."
Without another word, she turned away, forgotten book clutched tightly to her chest, and hurried down the path towards Beacon. Weiss watched her go, Blake clearly fighting her own urge to run as she moved with long, distance-eating strides towards Beacon Academy's main building, eager and in fact desperate to put as much distance as she could between the two of them.
Weiss's hand slowly lowered to her side.
Standing there, surrounded by students disembarking from the great transport ships and chattering about their time at Beacon, Weiss Schnee had never felt so alone.
The shock of pain and agony as her beloved Crescent Rose melted like taffy through her fingers, the Dust of her ammo fizzing and popping before aiding to the conflagration in a sudden flare of heat and light that seared her inside-out and seemed to shock her skeleton out of her very flesh-
Ruby's hands opened as she flailed and staggered backwards, instinctively trying to escape the source of the explosion and drop the molten metal burning her hands down to the bone –but her hands opened on air and the level of the ground was all wrong as her heel caught on a raised bump and she tripped backwards, landing on her rear with a yelp.
She heard familiar laughter.
"Aw, man, Ruby, does the thought of your big sis abandoning you freak you out that much?" Yang said from above, and Ruby's head was ducked down from the sudden force as a hand came to ruffle her hair. "You're so cute~"
Yang? Abandoning? What?
Ruby craned her neck back, and blinked as she saw that she was plopped on her butt in Beacon's courtyard, Yang standing over her with a grin and her old Beacon friends crowding impatiently behind her.
"Welp, nice try, but I'll be going now, byyeeee!" Yang laughed, lifting her hand and turning to skip off with her friends as Ruby scrambled to her feet.
"Yang, wait!" she cried desperately, but her sister waved a dismissive hand before the cloud of dust from the fleeing students disappeared in the distance.
Ruby stood there on the hard, untouched pavement of Beacon Academy, feeling like she'd just been hit over the head. Had they won, and someone scraped her charred body off the ship and flown her in for medical treatment? Who had done it? Neo was gone, Torchwick was gone, if they would even do something like that to begin with, and Weiss-
Safe in this new environment, Ruby's heart suddenly squeezed and broke, and tears trickled from her eyes. Weiss was dead. Cinder had- Cinder had- she'd burned her alive.
Ruby choked on a sob –and choked was definitely the right word, as she automatically tried to force down the broken, grief-stricken sound as much as possible. Crying wasn't good, she couldn't cry; even if it was safe for her to cry, she couldn't be seen by others like this, it put a burden on the people around her-
Blindly, Ruby turned, pulling her hood over her head to hide her streaming eyes as she ran into the cover of the decorative trees and shrubs ringing the courtyard. The light was wrong, all wrong, as she ran: too bright, too sunny, it had been evening before and none of this was right-
Weiss was dead. Weiss was dead, and it was all her fault. Ruby should have planned for this better, known to go after her partner immediately –Weiss was her partner, she was counting on Ruby to see her through, she always counted on Ruby–
Ruby sobbed aloud now that she was hidden in the shrubbery, slamming her first against the side of the tree she was leaning against. It shook, a few leaves drifting out of it, but she was beyond noticing or caring.
This was all her fault. Everything that had happened on that airship had happened because of her. She'd chosen where and how they'd split up, she'd brought them to the airship, and she had been the one to suggest teaming up with Neo and Torchwick in the first place.
Weiss would still be alive if not for Ruby's plans.
Ruby knew that, and the simple truth of those words ate like acid into her heart.
Weiss would still be alive if you hadn't messed up.
She slumped down, curling into a little misery-ball on her knees as Ruby buried her face in her hands and simply cried. She'd been trying so hard, and she still messed up. She'd messed up in Atlas, too, that first time around. There was no one else to try and no one else who tried as hard, but Ruby still wasn't enough.
Not enough. No one else to rely on. Your fault.
Black thoughts whirled around and around in her aching head like a cluster of windblown leaves, but Ruby couldn't shut them off and couldn't shut them out. The only thing she could do now was try not to cry loud enough to draw attention, because that was the last thing she needed –even if a tiny sodden part of her wanted it, wanted the reassurance of an arm around her shoulders and a concerned voice raised in her direction.
But no. Yang couldn't know –she didn't know anything, didn't know that Ruby had failed again and her partner was dead and everything was messed up all because of her. Ruby couldn't put that kind of burden on her sister, particularly not when Yang lacked several years of forced maturity. She couldn't out that burden on anyone.
So she cried alone.
Ruby didn't know how long she had spent hidden in the bushes before there was a tentative scuffling, crackling sound of broken twigs at the edge of the small garden space. Her head whipped up, and Ruby hastily scrubbed one sleeve over her face, before putting one hand on the trunk and pulling herself to her feet.
"Sorry," she began, turning. "I'll just-"
Weiss.
Ruby's mouth dropped as she saw her partner standing a few meters away in front of her, looking fragile and uncertain but with not so much as a speck of dirt on her glittering, lacy dress.
"Ruby…?"
"WEISS!"
Weiss cried out and nearly fell as Ruby hit her like a missile, wrapping both arms around her and clenching them tight in a bear hug that would make an Ursa look tame.
"Weiss!" Ruby wailed, squeezing harder. "Weiss!"
"Yes, Ruby- I- ah-" Weiss wiggled a little, giving one arm enough freedom to bend her elbow slightly and, somewhat awkwardly, pat Ruby on the side. "I'm… okay…?"
Ruby blinked at the uncertainty, but Weiss kept talking before she could raise the question herself.
"I –oh gods seriously you're going to strangle me– I assume, f-from the way you're trying to break me in half, that you remember… that?"
Ruby whimpered at the reminder, hugging Weiss tighter even as she heard several vertebra pop in her back.
Whoops.
"Ugrk!" Weiss choked, and Ruby finally, reluctantly, let go.
"You mean with the…" She swallowed, but continued bravely, waving her hands a little in vague gestures as she spoke. "The whole thing with the airship and Cinder…?"
Weiss nodded, her mouth tucking into a displeased little corner as her eyes slid away from Ruby.
"This doesn't make sense," she hissed, mostly to herself. "I woke up near where you exploded Dust all over me, and I saw Blake, but she didn't recognize me or remember anything. I've been wandering around trying to piece together what today is –still Beacon's first day– and where everybody else is, and I even got a text from Neo a minute ago-"
Ruby's eyes widened, and she pulled her Scroll off her belt with surprise. Sure enough, she had been so wrapped up in her tears that she'd missed a short string of texts from a "mystery" number just a few moments ago.
UNKNOWN:
Red what fhe fuck.
Where are you
The fuck
UNKNOWN:
Schnee's at Beacon and I'm coming to DRAG some gods-samn sense out of one of uou
"Oh," she said, and Weiss gave her a sharp look.
"Ruby?"
"You-" Ruby swallowed a little, but continued "-y-you know you died in the airship, Weiss?"
"I'm abundantly aware, yes. It's not like I could forget being burned to a crisp."
Ruby winced, but bravely continued.
"Well Neo, she, uh… she died too. J-just before I did."
Eyes widening as she stared at Ruby in horror, Weiss opened her mouth –and then closed it again thoughtfully.
"I wonder…" she mused. "Apparently, her rapscallion of a partner has no memory of the past few months. Did he die too?"
"Yeah, but he didn't…" Ruby wheeled one arm in the approximation of a clock hand. "…the first time, either."
"True. True…"
They were both silent for a moment.
"You think this has something to do with the mechanism thingy Jinn wasn't sure about?" Ruby asked after an extended pause. Weiss frowned, pinching the base of her nose and looking downwards as she tried to think.
"She said that time flows like a river, and changing or blocking it –even for some unknown cosmic force– needs a certain amount of structure," she replied slowly. "We slipped through the cracks the first time, somehow, but she wasn't sure what structure facilitated that, or what its potential side-effect –or effects– may be. It's quite possible that this is one of them."
"So what is it?" Ruby asked, quite fairly, as she folded her arms across her chest. "We're back, but Yang and Blake aren't…"
"The obvious conclusion is that we died and they did not," Weiss said after a moment, grimacing. "Which is… concerning on a number of levels."
Ruby tried very hard not to think about it. "I'll say."
"Do you remember when you came back?" Weiss asked. "I was supervising my luggage being unloaded from the airship. Neo messaged me perhaps ten minutes later."
"I don't know the time, but I was with Yang in this part of the courtyard," Ruby said. "If Neo texted us both at pretty much the same time, that would've been about ten, maybe fifteen minutes after you… after Cinder…"
Weiss's icy eyes softened, and she put a hand on Ruby's shoulder.
"I'm sorry," she said sincerely. Ruby shook off her glooms and gave Weiss a bright, if somewhat brittle smile.
"That lines up though, doesn't it? We came back in the order we died in?"
"And without a watch, we can't be certain, but I think we can comfortably assume that we also came back more or less across the same space of time, as well," Weiss said. "Myself, and then a pause of less than half an hour, and then you and Neo within five minutes of each other. Hmm…"
"Hmm," Ruby nodded, having no idea what that signified. She looked at Weiss expectantly, and her partner sighed.
"No, I don't know what that means, you dolt," she said. "Still, it's worth noting, if nothing else. If Neo's coming here as fast as she can –which she probably is– we probably have about an hour before she gets to Beacon, assuming she can board or hijack a ship. Let's see what we can gather in the meantime."
Whirling at the hatefully familiar voice as she brought Gambol Shroud up, and then an ear-popping thud that hit her straight in the chest and brought her up short, a barbed stinger piercing through her Aura in a bone-chilling lance as numbness and pain spread away from it and her extremities began to prickle like a chorus of needles and the world blurred and dropped away in a cloud of darkness-
Blake's first thought upon waking was recognition.
The second was terror.
Her hands slammed out into the wooden surface a few inches away from her face, strangled panic rising like a monstrous black tide within her soul.
Buriedaliveburiedaliveburiedaliveburiedaliveburiedalive-
The words ran in an incoherent stream through her brain as her body trembled like a leaf in a storm, but between one heart-stopping moment of fear and the next, the rest of her senses finally caught up with Blake's eyes and her spatial awareness, which had told her that she was in a dark, cramped space.
The scent of cardboard, glue, and office supplies had rushed into her lungs as she took in the deep breath to fuel a scream.
She was standing upright, and her heel had bumped against a box as she instinctively shifted it back to kick with all her strength.
And as her ears tried to flatten back frantically against her hair, they pulled and tugged on something holding them upright –a silky and smooth something, like fabric.
Blake's hands dropped from the door they had been braced against, and slowly, she lifted one to her head. Her fingers felt over the satin smoothness of the ribbon wrapped tight around her feline ears, knotted neatly between them like the bow it disguised them as.
Beacon, a part of her whispered. You're at Beacon, you've never worn the ribbon except then-
But that wasn't right.
What was she doing?
Blake's fingers dropped from her ear as she tried to think. First the field by the docks, and then Adam, and then killing him, and then Tyrian and-
Oh.
Oh.
Blake swallowed thickly as her mind finally caught up with her reflexes. She had panicked upon awakening in this closet because a part of her mind fully expected to be buried alive, if she ever awoke again. After all, she had… she had…
She had died.
Or she'd been near-fatally wounded, at least, and Blake's instincts had put together that most recent injury with her current cramped quarters and arrived at the natural conclusion before her mind could fully catch onto her surroundings. Her hand gripped at her chest over her heart, but there was no hint of blood, and as she tugged her neckline down and suited at her chest, no discoloration or the raised edge of a scar.
But that realization that she was alive and fundamentally unharmed ignited a new flurry of questions, starting with why she seemed to be back at the early days of Beacon and running the full range of urgency and confusion down to what had she been doing standing in a closet?
Blake shook her head slightly, closing her eyes.
Focus, Blake, concentrate.
Every problem in existence could be subdivided into smaller, easily-dealt-with issues. She just had to be calm and do the work in breaking everything down into smaller problems she could solve.
First, there was absolutely nothing she could do about being… wherever she was now instead of the burning shell of Beacon. So, ignore that problem for the moment.
Second, there were no sounds outside the closet, so whyever she was in here, it wasn't that she was hiding from someone or something nearby. Blake therefore grabbed the handle and turned it.
It turned freely, revealing that she wasn't locked in said closet either. Blake shrugged to herself, took a deep breath, and pushed the door open, stepping out into-
A hallway. One of Beacon's service hallways, between the dining hall and the main building, leading to the kitchen. Blake recognized it easily, since she'd had a habit of sneaking down to the kitchen for midnight snacks when her past troubles came creeping up on her and she could no longer bear the confines of the dorm rooms.
"Oh…kay?"
Blake blinked a few times, and thought some more.
She looked down at her hand and curled her nails into her palms a few times, pushing hard enough to sting. It hurt, which argued against this being a delirium dream.
Several theories on whatever the hell was going on immediately presented themselves. Blake had been rescued but was in a coma, and was hallucinating wandering around Beacon. Blake had died, and for whatever unknown reason, reincarnated back to the start of Beacon again. Blake had died, and this was a weirdly touching form of the afterlife.
For the first answer, well, she'd presumably wake up from the coma (or die) eventually, and Blake could deal with whatever was happening to her then.
For the second answer, Blake would bang her forehead against the wall, and quite possibly cry.
For the third answer, Blake would find the gods-damned gods and use every iota of skill and experience in rhetoric she had acquired from her years dealing with the White Fang to spend a few very cleansing hours haranguing the two Brothers for their many, many faults and how said faults had variously fucked the people of Remnant. Damn them if they damned her, Blake had some things to get off her chest, none of which were complimentary.
But she could accomplish none of that ranting by standing around in a service hallway looking bemused, and so Blake gathered her nerve and marched towards the courtyard and the Beacon atrium. In every scenario she could think of, proceeding forward on her "normal" schedule was the most logical course of action. She'd read enough fantasy novels to have a rough idea of coma dreams, and if this was the afterlife, then everything should be in the place that it, well, should be.
And if this was some… weird second rehash of things, well, Blake knew where to find her friends. Assuming that this was the first day of Beacon before initiation, of course.
Reaching up to brush her hand over the comforting weight of Gambol Shroud's hilt for a moment, Blake took another deep breath, before reaching up higher to pull the bow off her ears. Black tangle of ribbon in one hand, she pushed open the exterior door with one hand, stepping out into the courtyard.
Her eye newly keen to any irregularities, it seemed like this was about midway through orientation: most of the new students had arrived and were trailing towards the atrium, and most of the older years were nowhere in sight, those with younger friends or family already having said their goodbyes and those with no relation to the new students simply doing their best to avoid the heavy foot traffic.
Trying to be subtle about it, Blake found the nearest tree and swiftly jumped up onto one of the lower branches, putting her hand against the trunk as she scanned the crowd. She didn't see Yang, or Ruby, or Weiss, but she did see Jaune, and almost called out to him before she realized he was bent over a trashcan and in no condition to reply back.
A hop, skip, and bounce through a few trees later and she was closer –close enough to not need to shout– and she was about to call down to him when Jaune groggily brought his head up on his own, and stopped her cold as he slurred out "Does anybody –ulrp– k-know where the nurse's office is?"
That- this wasn't her Jaune. Not the Jaune she knew, not the Jaune she'd fought and nearly died beside time after time. Blake knew him better than anyone who wasn't his teammates –or Ruby. She knew his optimism and his dogged determination, his tendency to people-please and self-sabotage, and she knew he was an absolutely terrible actor.
This Jaune, green about the gills and looking around himself in a pleading, nausea-fuzzed fog, was not her Jaune. This was a scraggly noodle in borrowed armor who was so astronomically in over his head that it looped all the way back around to forced calm.
This was not a Jaune who knew Pyrrha.
This was not a Jaune who had seen the Fall of Beacon.
This was not the friend that she knew, and Blake nearly slipped out of the tree as she forgot she was on a branch and took an involuntary step back. Jaune looked up as the leaves around her rustled loudly, but Blake was already gone, dashing off with all the speed and sneakiness she had once employed for White Fang missions, and never mind her current location.
Jaune wasn't Jaune. Who else wasn't who they were supposed to be? Was she the only one who had come back again, and if so, what was happening to the others? Where were the others?
Jinn. Jinn had said that the first time they'd returned, at least, it wasn't a dimensional slip. Time had rewound, and their souls had just… speedrun themselves while their bodies stayed in place. Blake had come to Beacon seventeen years old, ears firmly hidden beneath her ribbon, and yet by the time she encountered Weiss, her spirit had aged several years in the space of a moment and she'd remembered everything from a now-hypothetical future.
So if Blake had re-rewound, she now had memories from a further six months of a future that still didn't exist, added onto her prior two or so years after the Fall of Beacon.
Okay.
So.
Logical enough so far, even if juggling these concepts and almost-timelines and future-that-wasn'ts made her head start to hurt.
Blake was still missing several rather alarming pieces from this particular puzzle, though. Overlaying two cycles of memory over what had been her then-current one was one thing, but the fact that she didn't remember what she'd been doing before she'd "woken up" worried her. Why was she in a closet? Why couldn't she remember why she'd been in a closet?
The first repeat hadn't been worrying, because they'd all been in exactly the same place as they remembered being on the first day of Beacon. Blake had been in the courtyard, reading the exact same book she'd been reading on this day and walking on the exact same path, and she'd looked up as memory struck her to see the Weiss she knew sitting by her luggage, looking devastated. Everything and everyone had been in their proper places, even if their shared past and behavior had changed.
Now Blake looked back on that memory, and her skin crawled with concern. How many little irregularities had Blake not noticed –how many tiny details didn't match her recollection of that strange, wonderful first day– because she had simply been too shocked and too happy to see her friends again and her school made whole?
She didn't know the answer to that, and it worried her even more than the strangers all around her. The lack of synchronized memories implied that there was a degree of separation between her and the Blake of before, and even if Jinn had assured them that there was no possession or self-consumption during the first repeat, it was still a deeply unsettling thought, especially when she didn't know if the prior Blake had done or said anything that she would now need to handle.
And when she seemed to have come back alone and her friends were still… what? Caught in the intangible winds of reality? Still in a future that now didn't exist for her? Or-
Blake shook her head roughly, forcing her memories of science fiction plotlines away. Existential crisis and/or thought problems later: focus on the now. What was happening right now, and what, if anything, could she do about it?
She needed to find her team. Whether they were still themselves or not, Blake couldn't make plans to move forward without at least seeing them.
Blake turned her back on the students slowly filtering into the atrium and slipped away, looking for the familiar flash of red or white or yellow.
Sudden movement in front made Jaune look ahead, and then a horrible choking, painful thing lodged in his throat, like he had swallowed a crumpled ball of paper that had turned knife-edged halfway down his esophagus. He coughed out a wet, choking breath laden with blood and –something else, something that burned like acid down his throat as the world started to spin before his eyes and he sank back into a whirling blackness filled with flames-
Jaune's eyes shot open, and then he reversed his backwards-staggering momentum as he pitched forward and hurled every drop of whatever was inside him –onto what seemed like smooth, clean marble flooring. His head spun, because the last thing he had remembered was reeling backwards as someone …stabbed him in the throat?… and the fact that he was now shuddering and retching while on all fours instead seemed distinctly contradictory to that.
Not to mention, he remembered being with his team, and it being night, and the school also being (albeit partially) on fire. None of that still seemed to be true –nobody was helping him now, and the bright sunlight gleamed on marble floor that was unmarred by anything except his vomit– so when his retching at last only produced gritty yellow bile, and the roiling in his aching stomach eased a little, Jaune wiped his mouth on his sleeve and bent his head to look up.
Well, the good news was he was still at Beacon.
Bad news was, he was on all fours in the atrium, and what felt like every single new student was looking at him with a mixture of sympathy, disgust, or cruel amusement. Jaune coughed and mumbled a vague apology, staggering to his feet as his head swam a little. Oough. He did not feel good.
One of the janitors ran up, and Jaune gave him a sheepish smile, attempting to wave the guy off –no, really, Jaune could clean up his own vomit, it was the least he could do and after his probable motion sickness on the airship there wasn't really that much of it left anyways– but was firmly shooed away, the janitor calmly but insistently pointing him to the men's room. Jaune followed his directions with a sigh. At least he could wash the nasty taste out of his mouth with some cold water.
More relevantly, though, as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve and slunk away from the staring and snickering crowd with red ears, Jaune noticed that Ozpin was on stage, and after a little cough, he continued midway through what Jaune swiftly recognized as the welcoming speech to Beacon.
"…as I was saying; when I look amongst you, all I see is wasted energy, in need of purpose, direction…"
Okay, so he was… back at the beginning of things again? Yes?
Quite frankly, with how badly his head was spinning and aching, Jaune was in no condition to ponder that or the implications of it. Maybe after he got hydrated and his tongue wasn't coated in bile, he could start freaking out about weird time travel recursions, but not before. Definitely not before.
Thus resolved, he staggered out into the hallway with no further thoughts in mind than to get to the bathroom and clean himself off. He ducked his head under the sink, gasped as cool fingers of water ran icily through his hair and sluiced off his face, and then filled his mouth, rinsed, gargled, and spat several times to rid himself of the disgusting taste lingering on his tongue. Once he felt marginally more clean, he cupped several handfuls of water and splashed them up to his mouth, swallowing until the ugly sick roil of his stomach finally, slowly began to settle.
Face streaming with water, Jaune gripped the porcelain edges of the sink and lifted his head to stare into the cheap mirror of the first-floor bathroom with haunted eyes.
What the fuck, he mouthed but didn't speak, because really, what the actual fuck?
What the hell had happened to him? The last thing he remembered was running to find Yang and Blake with the rest of his team, and then something humanoid blurring to a halt in front of him as he turned to look, and a sharp pain lodging in his throat as he fell…
He rubbed his throat in consternation, but his skin was as bare and smooth as if it had never happened. So, what had happened? Knives or arrows or whatever-it-was to the throat usually left a mark, particularly when he remembered it piercing through his Aura-
Was he dead?
Jaune remembered his automatic vomiting as he recovered his memory, the laughter of the crowd of onlookers, and shuddered. The afterlife couldn't be that bad –not unless he'd somehow messed up badly enough to be sent to suffer eternal torment in hell, and the worst kind of hell at that: uncomfortable social situations as a teenager in school.
No, gods, no.
He shuddered, then refocused.
Right, okay, so. He was a strategist, he could figure this out. Jaune had no idea what had just happened to him, but it'd put him back at Beacon, and so his next move, ideally, was to talk to someone he could trust and gather more information about the lay of the land. Since no one on his team knew him yet, they were (unfortunately) right out, and he probably wasn't lucky enough to have Team RWBY nearby.
Ozpin.
Jaune's feelings on his old headmaster were mixed even now, but Ozpin had been on their side since before they knew that there were sides, even if any help Ozpin gave was tempered by the fact that he played a game so long it stretched across generations and his attempts to balance the big picture with his work on the ground was… a little wonky, at times.
Shaking his wet hair back, Jaune straightened back up and pushed away from the sink. Talk to Ozpin, establish a baseline, go from there if needed. Yeah. That sounded manageable –for one person, at least– and he could figure out more stuff as he went along.
He'd barely walked out of the men's, though, before someone caught him by the arm and dragged him directly into the gender-neutral option, pulling the door shut behind them both and automatically engaging the lock.
"Uh-!" Jaune squeaked, face flushing, before his brain caught up with him and he recognized Yang Xiao Long, who had turned her drag into a shove as she pushed him up against the tiled wall by his arms and stared at him with wild, disbelieving eyes. He couldn't help but notice –with some trepidation– that all her focus was on his neck. More specifically, his throat.
"Jaune," Yang hissed, her voice shaky with concern. "What the hell happened to us?"
Poison and blood and death and flames playing out before her as Yang's vision blurred and wavered like ripples in a pond from tears or exhaustion or both, a needle-like prickling sensation overtaking her whole numb body as every strangled breath she took felt shallower and more painful than the last and the shards of burnt Dust dug deeper and deeper into her shattered chest-
Yang coughed explosively as she tried to suck in breath for a scream at the same time her air was somehow going out, and she automatically raised her arm as the people nearest to her turned, coughing and hacking out the last of her choked breath into her elbow as she tried to regain equilibrium.
Aside from the murmurs in the larger space and the decidedly not nighttime glow of sunlight all around her, there was also a louder voice, a man's voice, low and authoritative and echoing faintly with speaker feedback.
"-look amongst you, all I see is wasted energy, in need of purpose, direction. You assume knowledge will free you of this, but your time at this school will prove that knowledge can only carry you so far."
Ozpin?
Now that she could finally breathe without feeling like her spit would slide into her lungs, Yang looked up, and realized that she was –some fucking how– in Beacon's atrium, listening to Ozpin's welcome speech. Instantly, her head snapped around, looking for Ruby –but Ruby was conspicuously absent, as was Weiss.
That was… weird. Right? Ruby had been right next to her at this point in the speech, and Jaune hadn't been too far off. Actually, speaking of Jaune… she could see him pushing his way out of the crowd and towards the hallway doors with his head down right now, his face flushed with embarrassment as people rippled out of his way with little smirks and snickers.
Yang followed without a second thought, and only came to a stop, somewhat awkwardly, when he dipped into the men's bathroom. Killer of monsters and defier of Salem she may be… social conformity still kept her locked in place, in a situation like this.
Rather than entering, she found a nice patch of wall and leaned against it, assuming a casual pose. Her mind raced even as she did so, because seriously, what the hell? He'd died, she'd died, Blake had-
Yang's breath caught as her memory of the truth slammed into her, and her fragile calm evaporated on the spot. Her eyes began burning with tears that she held back by the barest of margins because she was still in a public fucking hallway godsdamnit, her hands clenching hard enough to drive her nails into the meat of her palms. Yang struggled to take deep, calming breaths, force it all down the way she had been taught to as a Huntress, compartmentalize, eradicate.
All feelings could be controlled. All grief could be managed. She just needed to –breathe. Breathe.
Her eyelids flickered rapidly as she blinked, holding it all in. She was calm. She was ice. Her partner had died and it was her fault for dropping her guard in a combat situation but Yang was fine. Peachy, even. Oh yes, fucking peachy. Squishing her grief down, squishing her negativity down, and then she could deal with it later in a training room, where she could reduce training posts to dust and dummies to their component clockwork parts.
She was so fine.
Thankfully Jaune didn't take too long in cleaning up, and she could grab his arm and haul him into the genderless bathroom where they could both have a breakdown, if necessary.
"Jaune," she hissed, her eyes flicking back and forth from the unmarked place in his throat to his wide, guileless eyes. "What the hell happened to us?"
Jaune's mouth flapped open and shut a few times as he stared at her, before his brain finally kicked in.
"Y-you remember-?!"
"I remember us both dying," Yang said flatly. "And we weren't the only ones, that bastard Tyrian got Blake too-"
Jaune's eyes widening was the only warning she got, and then he pulled her into a sudden, crushing hug. Yang briefly considered shoving back and pressing him for more answers, but for a guy who wore armor that should have been pressing into her in a bunch of uncomfortable places, Jaune was unfairly warm and cuddly. Maybe it was the hoodie.
Maybe he was just a really good hugger.
Maybe she really fucking needed it right now.
Whatever the reason, Yang sniffed and felt a few traitorous tears leak out as she reached up to wrap her arms around his back, pressing her forehead into his shoulder so that he wouldn't see them. Jaune gently tightened his grip and just held her for a few seconds, and Yang really ought to see if she could make a plushie of him or something, since Pyrrha would get deservedly territorial if Yang borrowed her boyfriend semi-consistently for cuddles and yet being hugged by him felt ridiculously soothing.
"…you usin' your Semblance on me?" she asked hoarsely into his shoulder after some time had passed.
"Nope."
Yang considered that for several seconds.
"Are you part therapy dog?"
"Uh… no?"
Yang had eventually been freed of the cozy entrapment that was a Jaune Arc hug by a worried, cautiously-worded text from Ruby: she'd barely read it before she had grabbed Jaune by the collar and dragged him off to the meeting place listed.
They joined everyone else in Professor Port's classroom, which no one –least of all Professor Port– would be using until after initiation at the earliest. The rest of Team RWBY were already there, with Neo in her disguise of Harlequin Mint, and Weiss wasted no time in filling the blackboard with chalk as everyone recounted their various stories and she tried to work them together into a credible timeline.
"Okay, here's how I have it, as best as I could manage with none of us keeping exact time," Weiss said, tapping the stick of chalk against the board. "Ruby, Neo, and I went to the airships to restore communications: after we succeeded, we split up, with Ruby ascending to the top of the airship and I and Neo, with Torchwick, descending downwards to attempt to find some transportation back to the ground."
She wrote Airship and circled a very wide bubble around it, before writing four other names within the larger circle.
"Our group was interrupted by Cinder, who attacked all three of us. Deciding Torchwick was a liability, we sent him on to Ruby, and Neo and I attempted to engage her alone."
She circled Cinder's name, then streaked the chalk out to connect it to the bubble of three names she'd written previously. Ruby's name still floated off to the extreme right of the Airship bubble, alone.
"Unfortunately… we failed. In hindsight, it likely would have been wiser to call Ruby down –with her silver eyes, it wouldn't have taken her long to eliminate the Grimm– and engage Cinder with all three of us, instead of myself and Neopolitan working as… something perhaps a bit less than a team."
Weiss cringed a little, and Neo squirmed her shoulders without saying anything.
"In any case," Weiss continued, taking a deep breath. "Aside from our lackluster teamwork, we rather underestimated how much of a boost Cinder's Maiden powers would give her –even partial powers– and it cost us. Judging the situation, I pushed Neo to retreat, and although I pushed Cinder's Aura into the red, I'm sorry to say that I was the first person to… pass over, as it were."
They all shuddered, Yang still feeling more than a little creeped out by all this despite the fact that she was, technically, still alive.
Weiss cleared her throat after an uncomfortable moment.
"To the best of my knowledge, I was incinerated," she said. "And while my firsthand knowledge obviously drops off at this point, we do know that no less than ten minutes but no more than thirty minutes later, while Ruby and the others managed to break Cinder's Aura beforehand, Cinder killed Neo and then Ruby within a very short stretch of time –no less than a minute but no more than five minutes apart, give or take."
She wrote Neo's name under Ruby's, and then Torchwick's –with a question mark after it– underneath them, and then circled the second list.
"So much for the airship. Comparatively quite some time later –no more than an hour, though, in all likelihood– Blake was killed by Tyrian after killing Adam."
Weiss circled another large bubble around the words Beacon, and then drew a long dash between that and the Airship bubble. She wrote Blake's name inside the former, and then streaked a line outside the bubble to connect it with Cinder's again, floating along the rim.
"We know that she perished after myself and the others on the airship, because Blake died after Team JNPR managed to finish off Cinder-"
Many smirks were flashed in Jaune's direction as he bashfully scratched his cheek.
"-and both Emerald and Mercury had gotten off the airship and to Ozpin's office."
Lowering her chalk back down to the middle of the long streak between the two major bubbles, Weiss drew the two minions' names. She then wrote Jaune and Yang's names in a short list inside the Beacon bubble, circling it, and then leading it to Blake's.
"Within ten to twenty minutes of Blake perishing, quite possibly less, Jaune and Yang were both killed in rapid succession by Tyrian. Although Blake could not precisely mark when she returned relative to the rest of us, it was definitely after myself and Ruby. However, Jaune, Yang; the two of you …resurfaced in this timeline?… within a minute of each other, possibly less. Is that correct?"
"Yup," Yang said, squished as close to Ruby and Blake as she could get without sitting on them and wishing she could do the same to Weiss.
"I think so, yeah," Jaune agreed, and Weiss turned away from the board, taking a step back as she took up a pointer to gesture at it.
"We cannot be absolutely sure at this juncture, of course, but this seems to indicate that we were reincarnated back here –or returned, or whatever you would call it– in the exact same order of our prior deaths, and on the exact same schedule as those deaths to boot. I preceded Neo and Ruby by a quarter of an hour at least, whereas they appeared within five minutes of each other, and Jaune and Yang were nearly simultaneous."
Neo raised her hand, for all the world like they were in an actual class, and Weiss held up one finger, turning back to the board and slapping her pointer across a specific series of names.
"Thanks to what I can only imagine was a histrionic scene between her and her partner-"
Neo's raised hand turned into a middle finger.
"-we also know that individuals who died alongside us, such as Torchwick or… the rest of Team JNPR…" Weiss very studiously did not look into the tiers of seats as everyone winced and avoided Jaune's face. "…did not return with us, and do not retain memories of any prior events. Furthermore, my conversation with Blake, Ruby's interaction with Yang, and Blake's sighting of Jaune also indicate that, before …our time ran up?… and we died, we were also unaware of any future events."
She tapped the question mark after Torchwick's name.
"In summary, only those who originally fell from the paths in the Central Location retained prior memory of these events, and there is some kind of corresponding record, if you will, of… whatever happened to us then, as we were returned here in the same order and sequence."
Swishing the pointer down to her side, Weiss turned and took a half-step away from the board, facing them all again.
"Ladies, gentleman –Neo–"
A second middle finger joined the first.
"-I am open to suggestions."
"What is this, a business meeting?" Yang asked skeptically, raising an eyebrow, and Blake elbowed her. She tried to choke down the feeling of being weirdly grateful that Blake was alive enough to do that.
"Pretty sure this is some bullshit caveat linked to the time travel thing Jinn was talking about," Neo said after a moment with a swirl of her finger and a sparkle of Aura shards.
"Well yeah, but, like… how?" Ruby asked. "It made sense the first time 'cause it was like- like- like a one-in-a-million cosmic fluke –y'know, like if you discover a game-breaking glitch by complete accident when you clip off the map from just the right pixel– but coming back twice means a pattern, right? And you heard what Jinn said about this kind of thing needing a structure. Stuff this lucky doesn't just happen on accident. Why's it happening to us, now?"
"Ruby's right," Jaune said, starting to frown. "We might have mostly prevented the Fall of Beacon –I mean, I dunno, it seemed to be going that way when me and Yang died– but we didn't really fix the whole thing with Salem. And now we just… get another crack at it?"
"Maybe as many cracks as we want," Yang said, and shrugged when everyone looked at her. "You said it was becoming a pattern, right, Rubes? Pattern means it's gonna keep happening."
"Hands up, who's willing to test that?" Neo asked, raising an eyebrow. Unsurprisingly, there were no volunteers.
"…I think we're gonna need to take this one all the way up to Jinn again," Ruby said, and Yang groaned, her head clonking down onto the desk in front of her. Ruby rubbed her back in sympathy.
"That would definitely be the safest course," Weiss said. "There's too many hypotheticals here for me to feel comfortable with gambling my life, or even making any kind of strategy. While I agree with Yang that it seems most likely that this is some sort of time loop, possibly one that restarts with our deaths, it's definitely worth confirming."
Blake folded her arms tightly across her chest, and her lips pressed into a thin line.
"I don't like this being a time loop," she said, and Yang blinked at her.
"Why?" she asked, baffled. "I mean sure, the whole dying thing sucks, but if Weiss is right this means we get, like, infinity chances to fix everything."
"…you've never seen Magenta Magica, huh?"
Blake saw the baffled look that everyone was giving her after that statement, and sighed.
"Sure, if it's like you said and this is going to keep happening every time we die, we basically have an unlimited number of chances to try and beat Salem," she explained. One finger began tapping restlessly against her upper arm. "But do we know how to make this whole cycling thing stop after we've beaten her? What happens if –after we fix everything, defeat Salem, save the world– we die old and happy in our beds… and then still come right back to today?"
"Ah." Yang went pale, but Blake wasn't finished.
"Not to mention how long it's going to take to beat her –because Ozpin doesn't have any ideas, and we're not much better," she said. "Most of what we were doing last time was playing catch-up and trying to prevent things Salem had already set in motion. Does anyone have any ideas of what new strategy we even want to try to us to beat her?"
There was a conspicuous, wincing silence.
"So maybe it takes years to figure that one out. Maybe it takes decades. Maybe it takes centuries and we can't stop because we don't know how to stop –or, worse, it's impossible to stop unless we fulfill some… arbitrary condition? How would you like that? No backing down, no respite, no breaks from winning and losing this fight over and over again for longer than the human mind can stretch? At least Ozpin gets to die and move onto another host: we'd be stuck living the same stretch of months over and over again ad infinitum."
"Okay, Blake, you've made your point," Jaune winced.
"Stuck in an inescapable cycle," Blake finished with a little sniff, "-because we will always die eventually, and when we do, we'll start all over again from the beginning, so we can't prepare for anything or set anything up."
"Okay, okay! Jeez!"
Blake did look at least slightly rueful when she saw everyone's agonized expressions.
"Sorry," she said, and gave a tiny, somewhat helpless shrug. "But time traveling can cause a lot of problems, and not just because it'll mess with continuity or change the future in ways you don't want."
"We're aware," Weiss grumbled. "Which, if we all agree that a visit to Jinn is of paramount importance, brings us to the next question… what now?"
A somewhat uncomfortable silence fell across them all, as they thought back on the last cycle. Sure, Jaune and the others had killed Cinder –which Yang felt that he deserved the biggest of high-fives for, especially after learning that the bitch had killed her sister- and they'd probably more-or-less stopped the Fall of Beacon, but there had been a concerning amount of damage and setbacks along the way.
Not to mention the fact that, as evidenced by them all fucking sitting here, their plans had gone badly enough that they all had died.
"I think… I think we let having a perfect plan get in the way of having good plans," Jaune said at last, reluctantly. "We got so focused on hitting the right beats and making sure we used our knowledge to our advantage that we kinda…"
"…let the beats dictate how we planned," Ruby finished, her shoulders sinking in realization. "We got caught up in fixing this problem at just this time and didn't try to be proactive enough, didn't we?"
"Foreknowledge can lead you into a trap just as easily as ignorance," Blake said. "It happened a couple times in the White Fang, where we were so focused on capitalizing on information we got from a spy that we missed an otherwise excellent window of opportunity, or didn't bother scouting and came to grief over it."
Her ears slanted back, and her mouth twisted to one side, ashamed, as she looked back on their strategies of solving the Fall of Beacon and dealing with Cinder.
"…hindsight is twenty-twenty, I guess."
"Yeah," Yang sighed, pulling one hand down her face. "All those in favor of saying fuck it, solve our problems early?"
Everyone's arm rose.
"All those in favor of solving the Cinder problem by stabbing her in her stupid fucking face?"
Neo climbed up to stand on her chair, waving both arms in the air like she was flagging a Bullhead for emergency rescue. Even Ruby scowled, raising her arm higher.
"Not that I'm against giving her exactly what she deserves," Weiss said, making them turn back to her. "But we do need a slightly better plan than stab."
"How about crush?" Yang said. "Good solid plan, crush. I like that plan."
"Kill?" Ruby asked.
"Not thinking big enough, sis."
"Maim?" Jaune suggested.
"Now that's more like it."
"Eviscerate?" Neo said, and the cruel gleam in her eyes suggested she would have purred the word if she could speak.
"I meant having a plan with more than one step, you absolute dolts," Weiss groaned, pulling one hand down her face. "Thank you, Blake, for being the sole shining beacon of rationality."
"…I didn't even say anything."
"And yet, my point still stands," Weiss muttered through her fingers. She dropped her hand to glare at them all, putting both hands on her hips. "May we have relevant suggestions, please?"
"I mean…" Jaune began, and he looked like he was pulling out his own teeth with each slow, reluctant word. "I think… we might need to… split up the teams, a little?"
"Huh?" Yang blinked.
"He means that you need to spread out your firepower. Right?" Neo said, pushing the words out towards the center of the room so that they all could see. "One Huntsman on a team of first-years paired with a four-person team of Huntresses –it's obvious who the weak link is."
Jaune winced, but didn't argue.
"You mean you wanna break apart Team RWBY and JNPR?" Ruby asked, looking downright alarmed, and he moistened his lips before speaking.
"…Neo's got a point, Ruby. I can work my team to the bone, but we can't rely on things happening the way we want them to, especially if we plan on solving things early, and I can't… I can't protect all of them at once. Pyrrha's good, but she's not at graduate level, not yet, and I can't leave Ren and Nora out on a limb like that. S-so if we mix the teams around –but keep our partners!– we can, uh… maybe avoid testing that weak link."
"So you're saying, like… me and Blake with Nora and Ren, or you and Pyrrha with us… or something like that?" Yang asked, raising an eyebrow. He nodded. "That's…"
"Not entirely a bad idea," Weiss said, although she was looking like she'd just bitten into a lemon as she did. "Spreading ourselves around will strengthen both teams, and it will also help convince them that we are who we say we are."
"We're telling them?" Blake asked, straightening a little in her chair.
"We'll be visiting Jinn anyway," Weiss said, and shrugged. "May as well use both questions; one to discern what the hell this is, and the other to catch everyone else up to speed. And besides –we did promise to stop keeping secrets from them, and they were upset that we did not find a way to somehow alert them immediately of our new status. If we are rectifying our past mistakes… we should try to start with that one."
"Okay, so," Ruby said, and she folded both hands above her nose, eyes furrowing shut, "-we pair up as usual during initiation, but we try to mix JNPR and RWBY together so it's two-and-two and three-and-one for who knows the future and who doesn't, we tell them about the whole future rewindy thing, and then…?"
"We check with Ozpin," Blake said, throwing her hands up slightly in a to-hell-with-this gesture before they came to rest on the desk. "We tell him what's happening to us, partially to see if he has any suggestions or thoughts on it before we go to Jinn –I don't think he will, since he didn't seem prepared for any time travel– but mostly because we…"
She took a deep breath.
"…we're going to start solving problems early, and we need someone to be working their own line, too."
"And Oz just being himself will distract Salem way better than we can," Neo said, and smirked.
"Too much can go weird between then and now, so let's just leave this there," Ruby said. "We can adjust on the fly, but for now: join up with partners, form skewed teams, tell NPR about time shenanigans, tell Ozpin about time shenanigans, and then settle in again to plan for how we're gonna take care of Cinder and the other baddies."
A tentative smile twitched at her lips, before she punched one fist in the air with an encouraging shout.
"Beacon's Counter-Conspiracy Club, banzai!"
"I thought it was the Counter-Conspiracy Conspiracy?" Neo said after a second, although she was smirking.
"Eh, it's a great name and all, sis, but I'm actually liking Nora's whole Crush Cinder Club idea a lot better now…"
So yeah. Time loop.
(Magenta Magica is, of course, a reference to Madoka Magica.)
To forestall any immediate concerns: I won't repeat scenes or plot threads, and if I do, they'll be shortened and changed. Our heroes tried warning everybody and preparing themselves to deal with the future as they knew it during the first loop, and that didn't work. They're now going to try to solve their problems by adapting and using a different angle, so even if they do something again, the familiar parts will be shortened and it's not going to be identical to the first arc.
This arc is actually gonna get kinda dark because of that, comparatively speaking. It's the protagonists' "fuck everything all to hell, it's time for RAGE" arc. The "can't cause us problems if you're dead, asshole" arc.
The "fuck it we ball" arc, so to speak. Lol.
Regular updates will stop for a bit after this chapter, though: I've been planning a brief hiatus for a while so I can attend to some of my other projects, which I've been neglecting in favor of getting this chunk done. But of course, I couldn't start that break anywhere between 27 and 30 because, well. You know. Pitchforks and knives and torches and so on. I can't stop people from perhaps getting upset about the direction things are going (time loop plots may be my favorite, but they're not for everyone), but I can at least avoid getting hunted for sport by all of you at once.
Also, I've been waiting for *checks notes* nearly three years now for people to finally be able to clock the fact that the first chapter title is, in fact, a pun. So that's great.