Here we go. Bit scattered chapter due to health scare.
Cover Art: Kirire
Chapter 55
As Blake settled down in the living room with the laptop and a cup of steaming coffee, she couldn't help but wish she was snuggled up in a haunted bed with an over-protective six-foot spider. At least then she could die in her sleep and not have to know about it. Instead, she was wide awake and high on a heady mix of fear and caffeine. The first thing she'd done was eschew the sofa and table in favour of wedging herself into a corner where no one – or thing – could sneak up behind her. The lights were on full blast, the windows open so she had an escape route if needs be, and Gambol Shroud lay on the floor to her right, just within reach.
What the point of all this was, she wasn't sure. They already had evidence the figure didn't show up on cameras, so all she could really do was look for changes. That might have been easier if she were familiar with the house enough to spot them, but she wasn't. Unless this thing actively moved something while she was looking, she wasn't going to see anything.
Jaune, at least, she could watch – as creepy as that sounded. Timothy was curled up over his entire body like a wet spidery cocoon; he moved occasionally, indicating he wasn't as relaxed about falling asleep here as Jaune was. The anomaly was smarter than Jaune sometimes.
Blake brought the mug up to sip at the bitter coffee and flicked through a couple more cameras. No movement, no changes as far as she could tell, and none of them had been turned off for once. That was a relief. Or was it? What if the anomaly had given up on that and decided to stalk them instead? Her? Blake's eyes came up from the screen and scanned her surroundings, her free hand drifting to Gambol Shroud to caress it. There was nothing, and she reluctantly let go of her weapon once more.
One hour and two cups of coffee later, Blake set the laptop down and rubbed at her eyes, fighting her lapsing attention. She had another seven hours of this – unless she wanted to wake Jaune up early and switch places. He'd probably do it, but he'd also know she was too much of a coward to spend a single night alone in this place. Pride won out in the end, even if she did dimly consider using her Slaved Anomaly (though whether it or she was slaved, she wasn't sure) and seeing if it would accept the trade of her fear for something else.
"No," she mumbled. "I'm not that desperate. I can do this. I can handle this."
The light in the living room flicked off.
The darkness she was cast into didn't really blind her with faunus vision, but the suddenness of it had her entire body locking up and her heart leaping into her throat. The laptop clattered down and she was on her knees, Gambol Shroud aimed at the light switch.
"Who's there? Show yourself!"
Blake didn't expect them, or it, to do so, but the sound of her own voice was calming. Rising, she crept around the room keeping her back to the wall until she was near the switch. Then she reached out with the barrel of her weapon and flicked it again, turning the lights on. They came back on without complaint, the single bulb in the middle of the ceiling bright and clear.
Nothing had changed in the room as far as she could tell.
Even so, she waited there, back to the wall, to see if the anomaly tried again. Seconds passed by, turning slowly into minutes, and then those minutes ticked. Blake's weapon had come down as her arms began to ache, but she kept her aura up and at the ready. At what might have been the sixth minute, the light switch clicked again, and the room went dark. Not four seconds later she slapped her hand against it to turn it back on.
"I can play this game as long as I need to," said Blake.
Inside, she was trying to piece it together from her experience in ARC Corp. I had my eyes on the switch and nothing touched it, so it must not have a corporeal body – or it's both invisible and intangible. It's more likely to be something related to the house right now, but why the delay? It took that much time to turn the light back off. A limitation? Does it cost energy? Is it slow to react? Or was it trying to avoid me?
Nothing about it so far screamed "direct threat" in the way the Welcoming House had. The anomaly wasn't trying to keep her indoors and hadn't made an aggressive action toward her or Jaune. That was a lesson she'd learned early with Timothy. Of course, just because it wasn't aggressive didn't mean it wasn't frightening. Blake licked her lips and tried to calm her racing heart. This would have been easier if she had something to look at. Her imagination was no doubt making this worse than it was.
The light blinked out again – followed seconds after by a nasty crash from the middle of the room. Gambol Shroud whipped around to point at the scattered shards of the lightbulb, now exploded on the floor. The anomaly had unscrewed it from the fixture and let it drop. No amount of switching the light would fix that.
Clever, thought Blake. Did it knowingly do that to stop me turning the lights back on? Should I take this as a sign of aggression or playfulness…? It didn't matter either way because she wasn't going to sit in here where it was active. Blake moved quickly to pick up the laptop and retreat to the kitchen nearby. She set it down on the counter and turned the light on in there, moved to place a stool by the counter and then froze when the lights went out.
"You don't like the lights being on, do you?" There was no answer. "Okay. What happens if I just leave them off? Is that enough to calm you down?"
It seemed to be. Blake sat in the gloom for ten minutes without interruption. The moonlight coming in the kitchen windows made it light enough that even without night vision she'd have been able to see easily. As the minutes ticked on, she decided to open the laptop and check the cameras again. There were a bunch of blinking red lights. Blake cursed. Jaune's camera was still on, and he was fine, but a lot of the downstairs cameras were off.
It's down here with me. And it doesn't like lights being on. Joy.
Tucking the laptop under her arm, she moved out into the hallway to the first camera. It was still standing on its tripod and the battery was in place. It had just been turned off by the large "on/off" switch on top. Blake's finger touched it but hesitated. The thing couldn't be seen anyway, and it was actively turning them off. Maybe the better thing to do would be to go to one of the cameras still online and try to catch it in action.
And hunting it would make it feel a lot less like it was hunting her.
The stairs creaked as she made her way up. The lights were already off on the top landing, and she left them as such, moving instead away from Jaune's room and towards the bedroom the parents had been using, which they'd set a camera in. The door creaked open to reveal it inside, light still blinking green. Curious, Blake turned the light in the room on as well, then closed the door and moved inside, ready to see if the anomaly came.
"I am the hunter," she whispered to herself. "I am the one who hunts. I'm not the one being hunted; I'm in control; I'm the predator."
The empty room didn't respond to her mantra.
"Aaand I'm losing my mind. Great. Jaune is going to laugh this up."
Blake moved to the bed and took a seat on it. The mattress flexed beneath her, and she took a deep breath, watching the doorway. If whatever it was even needed to come through the doorway, that was. Sighing, she laid back for a moment. The ceiling was dotted with swirling patterns of plaster, and there was a tiny web in the corner home to one of Timothy's far less monstrous cousins.
The anomaly must have been busy turning cameras off around the house. Blake opened the laptop to check, and sure enough they were down to just three. One was in Jaune's room, and she trusted Timothy to keep an eye on him. Pushing herself up, she moved to the window to draw the curtains shut and not have to worry about the light coming in and obstructing her vision. As she took the two curtains in hand and made to draw them shut, something outside caught her eye.
There were people in the garden out front.
Two of them, but it was dark out and she couldn't make out details beyond that. They were visible though and talking to one another. Had the couple come back? She was sure they'd have rung first, but she wouldn't put it past some people to want to check what their contractors were up to. Or it could be thieves – in which case they'd be in for a nasty surprise when they entered the house and found a huntress inside. One of them looked up and pointed at her, a shadow in the gloom, and she leaned back from the window, choosing to abandon it instead of draw them shut.
I left the camera at the front door off. Of all the times… Do I wait here or…? There was a sound from downstairs as the front door opened with a creak, closing a few seconds later. Damn it. A home invasion is the last thing we need right now! I'd better go make sure it isn't the clients. If they see Timothy…
Well, there were better ways to keep anomalies secret. Maybe they could convince them it was part of her Semblance – a spider-summoning Semblance. Yeah, no. Blake growled and pushed out the room, jogged to the end of the stairs and looked down.
No one was there.
Blake wasn't even surprised.
It was the anomaly after all. Wonderful. What was it doing outside? And there are two of them now?
As if this wasn't hard enough. Blake had half a mind to go and wake Jaune up, but he wouldn't be impressed if she did that on a hunch and without any proper evidence. The whole point was to let him stay there and see if the anomaly made contact. "I'm experienced now. I can solve this. The clues are all here." Blake grimaced. "Probably. Ugh. Think, Blake. Think. The anomaly likes to turn the lights off, it turns the cameras off, and it can go outside and inside. An electrical based creature? Something living in the mains? No, that doesn't make sense. It physically moved the light switch and removed a bulb."
Blake leaned against the nearest wall, the better to close her eyes and just think. About the only thing she could come up with was trading something with her own anomaly for the answer, but that would defeat the point. This wasn't a life-or-death situation, and she'd never improve if she didn't work this out on her own.
A whoosh sounded from downstairs, followed by crackling and splintering wood and… was that fire? Panic gripped her and she raced down the staircase. If this was a pair of arsonists, then she had to stop them fast! The moment she hit the ground floor however, she realised there was no heat. No warmth. The house was as cold as it had been since when they arrived, and it would doubtlessly remain do. The sound of fire had been obvious, however. Blake crept toward the living room, past the turned-off cameras, and peeked inside.
No fire. Nothing. Not even the lingering traces of warmth in the air. The fireplace still had the remains of the dolls they'd burned in them as well, reduced to little more than ash and scraps of their former clothing.
"I could have sworn I heard someone start a fire down here…"
A blinking green light flashed from the kitchen.
The camera had been turned back on. Tearing out her laptop, she checked and confirmed it – they were all on. Every single camera. It was too much. Sprinting for the staircase and up, she hit the landing and dragged herself left, slamming bodily into Jaune's room. Timothy jumped and screeched, which woke Jaune up and had him almost falling out the bed in panic.
"B-Blake!?" he stammered, on realising it wasn't an anomaly. "You scared the living-"
"Get up! Something is wrong!"
He clambered out of bed, having gone to sleep in his uniform. The suit was crinkled but in one piece. "I'm up. I'm up. What's the problem?"
"I… I think we're stuck in a loop."
Jaune stared at her.
"A temporal anomaly. I saw two people arrive, I saw them enter the house, I heard the fire start downstairs and now the cameras are all turning on. Like someone is setting them up for the first time!"
Jaune's eyes widened. "Fuck!" he shouted, almost screaming. He leapt up and rushed past her to the window, hands slapping on the glass. "We're outside!" he rasped. "You're right, it's – oh shit, I've been seen. No. That happened. That's fine. That-" He backed away quickly. "We need to leave. Now. If you're right and we're caught between timelines, then I don't know what'll happen if those timelines meet."
"But the anomaly-"
"Doesn't matter! It'll destroy itself! Or we'll cordon the place off and destroy it. We need out now!"
Jaune raced to the door and through it, and she ran after with Timothy hot on their heels. He leapt the last four steps of the staircase and yanked the door open, ready to throw himself out, only to freeze. Blake slammed into his back but managed to catch him before he was knocked out.
Out into the void.
A swirling, chaotic whirlwind of black and purple light.
"What the-"
Jaune slammed the door before she could finish her question. "Crap. Crap, crap, crap." He paced left and right agitatedly. "Us not being able to leave doesn't make sense. It can't be a loop unless the beginning and the end meet somewhere."
"Jaune-"
"Temporal anomalies," he said, "are some of the most dangerous to exist. They're not sapient, not properly, but they draw people into events from which there might be no escape. They can collapse too, and we have no idea what happens to people inside them when they do. Our best bet is that they're erased from the timeline. Like, fully. Anything they ever did or ever affected in the real world is reversed. A retroactive erasure of a person's reality in the world – and we can't know for sure because any evidence that they ever existed in the first place is gone as well. For all either of us know we had friends or family who were erased like this. We'll just never know."
"Then how do you know all that?"
"Survivors. We've found people who got out while others didn't. They remembered the people lost inside, but no one else could – and no evidence of them existed. But the people who survived it sometimes carried evidence with them that they had. It's confusing and not something we run into all that often." He wiped a hand down his sweaty face. "And we need a way out. No. We need a way to reconnect this house to our timeline, so we can walk out and into our world again. Something has happened to shunt us off the path."
Blake gasped. "The lights!"
"What?" asked Jaune.
"The lights kept flicking on and off. Was that another person trying to escape? Or another me?" A Blake on another timeline trying to turn the lights off. "It's causality! I can't turn the lights on if they're not turned off. Jaune, go upstairs, find every camera, and turn them off. Don't move them. And the bath!" she gasped. "Turn the bath taps on and let it overflow."
He caught on. "Because that happened to us, so it must happen to those who come after us. Of course!" He sprinted back up the stairs, feet stomping.
Blake ran to the nearest camera and turned that off, then ran through room after room doing the same. When she got to the living room, two things immediately struck her as wrong. First, the light was on despite the bulb being destroyed earlier. Second, there was a misty figure in the room, a hazy mass of smoke about her height.
"I'm sorry," hissed Blake, flicking off the light, "but if you're me then you should be able to escape this as well!"
The shape leapt and crept around the room just as she had, eventually passing through Blake to touch the light switch. Immediately, Blake hit it off and the shape snapped it back on. Blake knew her part at that point and whipped Gambol Shroud up and around, smashing the blade into the bulb and sending it shattering to the floor.
The misty shape flinched and swept slowly toward the kitchen.
Blake ran back to the hallway. Jaune was already coming down the stairs. "I set the bath to fill and disturbed the pile of dolls as well – like they were for us. I can't believe I didn't notice those things were back in the room."
"Did you turn all the lights off?"
"Yes." He brushed past her and tried the door again. It opened to the garden, to the driveway, and to their van. "Success!" he yelled, rushing outside. Timothy followed, not fully understanding, and Blake was last, slamming the door shut behind them and hitting the grass in a dead sprint. "You did it, Blake! Good lord, imagine if we'd slept through that and-"
He trailed off, eyes widening.
"What?" asked Blake. When he didn't answer she turned to see if the house had vanished, grown legs or opened its eyes – all very possible things given the situation – but it hadn't. The house was the same. The only possibility was her. Without waiting for him to answer, she ran to the van and leaned down to peer at herself in the sideview mirror.
A significantly older woman with brown hair looked back at her.
"B-Blake…?"
"It's me." Blake touched her fingers to under her eyes, feeling her new skin. "It's still me. I look… Wait, I look like our client, don't I?"
Jaune unlocked the van and ushered Timothy into the back. "Get in. We need to finish the loop."
Blake swallowed and got into the passenger side. Knowing what she had to do meant knowing what had been done to her, to them, and she suddenly felt a lot less guilty for leaving another pair of her and Jaune in that place. This might have been something that had been happening for tens of thousands of years, and this had been their turn. Their time to enter, explore, and leave the manor, and preferably without destroying time and space as they did.
Jaune drove like a man possessed. He was silent. Shaking. His hands gripped the wheel so tight his knuckles turned white. They screeched to a stop in front of their apartment, and Blake raced in while Jaune sat in the van, not knowing what to do. That was fine. She knew what to do. Blake tapped her foot impatiently in the elevator and almost ran someone down when it pinged open on their floor.
"I'm sorry!" she blurted out at the stunned white-haired girl she'd nearly flattened. "Sorry!"
"Why, I-" Weiss Schnee might have shouted something at her back, but Blake was too distracted to notice or care. Her fist pounded on the door to their office, and seconds later herself opened the door.
It was unnatural.
Blake looked at herself, and at Jaune, and she could hear Timothy scratching on Jaune's bedroom door. It was all the same. It was all real. They – both of them – weren't in their timeline. They were in the timeline of another of the two of them. They were caught adrift and had to bring the timelines back together. Blake flinched as she realised the other her had asked something.
"Coffee, yes, that would be lovely."
Blake moved to the sofa and collapsed into it, exhausted. Her shaking hands accepted the mug a moment later and she took a sip to try and calm herself. "Thank you. You are- I mean, are you the ghost hunters?"
Her memory wasn't perfect, but would the words matter? Surely it was the actions. It was about making sure the timeline followed the same route, and the odd changed word here or there shouldn't have a big impact. Blake nodded with their answer, not even hearing it, her mind working overtime.
"I thought so. You're surprisingly well reviewed online."
Seeing her own reaction to that would have been funny in any other situation.
"I don't believe in ghosts. Never have and never will, but my husband and I have just bought a house in Val." It was a lie, as it had been back then, and the husband had always been Jaune, in his van outside, while she made sure the world didn't fall to pieces. I'm sorry, thought Blake, knowing what they – what she – would go through. "The agency selling it said it was cheap because everyone claims it's haunted, but we obviously didn't believe that."
"But something has happened," said not-her-Jaune.
"Yes. We – that is myself, my husband and our son – moved in two days ago. We moved out today. Two nights is two nights too many in that place. Things move, there are noises, and my son came into our room saying there was a person in his bedroom watching him sleep! When we went to look, his clothing had been pulled out the drawers and thrown all over the floor." Blake tried her hardest to look afraid. "I don't know if it's someone sneaking in or hiding in the walls or what, but we got out of there immediately."
"Where are you staying now?"
"In a hotel. We've booked a full week there, but we can't afford a new home and the agency have said they won't take it back because it was hard enough for them to sell in the first place." Blake's shoulders hunched up, the guilt eating at her. She kept her eyes down. "You're ghost hunters, right? And this sounds like ghosts. We've told the police but all they did was sent two officers over to talk to us. They can't do anything without a crime happening, and the word of a four-year-old to tell if something did. But I trust my son, and he looked so afraid!"
Jaune, Director of the Containments Office of ARC Corp, smiled confidently. "We'll take the case, ma'am."
Thank goodness.
"That's great. I…" Blake swallowed, standing. She didn't want to risk it any further. "Here are the keys," she said, handing over the keyring that had been given to them. "I'll write the address down. Please go there and solve this case. I'll leave my number here." Blake jotted a random string of digits down. "Good luck – and please be careful."
Blake wet her lips. Would it destroy everything to give them a hint? She was too afraid to. She and Jaune had escaped without it, and what if she changed things? If she gave them the hint they needed to solve the case quicker, then they might be lost in time, or they might cause someone else to be lost instead.
I have to let this play out. We entered the loop, and we have to leave it. I'm so sorry.
"We'll try our best, ma'am." said Jaune. "And as you said, we're well-reviewed."
Blake's smile almost cracked. "Thank you."
/-/
Jaune was waiting in the van for her, and he looked over as she climbed in. "You're back to yourself."
The words had her pulling down the sunshield to look in the little mirror there. Black hair and yellow eyes looked back at her. "So I am," she said, leaning back. "Now what? Is it done? Are we back in our time? I didn't feel anything."
"Neither did I." He pulled out his scroll. "But the date is tomorrow. Sorry, today, but a day on from when we took the job, which should be the timeline we're in. But that might just mean our scrolls are a day ahead."
"Drive back to the house," said Blake.
"Are you-?" He sighed. "I guess you're right. It's the only way to know. But we're not entering it. Not a chance in hell."
He wouldn't find any disagreement there. Blake strapped herself in as Jaune took a more sedate drive back the way they'd come. It took a painful amount of time – and time was something very much in the question-mark territory at the moment. Blake held her breath as they pulled onto the road between the tall, old homes that made up its street, and when Jaune eventually pulled up outside where it was.
Or should have been.
The wall was there, and the gate, but they were locked and the scene beyond was a construction site, with diggers and cranes parked beside pallets of building material, and with a new sign advertising the opening of a restaurant in four months' time. Jaune collapsed over the steering wheel and let out a breath that came almost as a whistle. "We did it. We're out."
"And another pair of us go in…"
"We can't fix that, Blake. The only way we could have been to sacrifice ourselves – and there's no guarantee that would have saved us. It might have doomed all of us. It might have erased everyone."
"Doesn't that mean we could be erased at any moment as well, if all it takes is one of the infinite numbers of us making a mistake?"
Jaune licked his lips. "This is why we take temporal anomalies so seriously. And the answer to that question is: I don't know. Maybe that could happen one day, or maybe we're safe because causality is set. We left to bring a new group in, so we can't be erased because that would mean the group that caused us to be erased would have never entered. But that's all just hypotheticals. We could cease to exist tomorrow, or in an hour, or in the next ten seconds."
Blake counted them out in her head, and she was sure he did as well.
The world kept turning, and they kept existing within it.
Neither knew what to say for the longest time.
And then Jaune said one word. "Breakfast?"
"Breakfast," said Blake, leaning back in the passenger seat. "The biggest, greasiest, nastiest breakfast you can find – with coffee so strong it burns my throat. I need to forget this ever happened, and fast."
Jaune shifted the van into gear, and they pulled away. Behind them, the shape of a house flickered for a fraction of a second in the construction yard, and then vanished. Blake made a promise to herself that she would never eat at that place when it opened. It didn't matter how nice the place ended up being.
"Good job today," said Jaune. "You saved both our lives figuring that out."
"I was meant to. Every other Blake before me did, and hopefully every Blake after me will too."
"Still, you did good. I'm glad I have you here with me."
Blake laughed, eyes closing. "Show me how grateful you are with food. I feel like I haven't eaten for fifteen years. How long were we in there for anyway? I feel like you only went to sleep for two hours, yet it's already morning."
"Temporal anomaly. There's no saying how much time passed in there. We could have been in there two hours, eight hours, or those fifteen years you mentioned – waking up and repeating every day until you figured it out. We'll never know for sure."
"Then how do you know I got us out in one run?"
"I don't." He kept his eyes on the road. "But I'm going to choose to believe you did, because the alternative is too terrifying to consider."
Blake shivered. "Yeah. Let's… Let's go with that…"
Temporal shenanigans.
Next Chapter: 5th June
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