Chapter 2

Jaune woke up screaming. The pain was gone, he was back in his room, lying on his bed. He covered his face with his hands, panting heavily.

"What's up?" Nora asked. "You want to have a shouting contest?"

She took a deep breath and screamed uncontrollably, a sound loud enough to shatter glass. Jaune grimaced, pulling his hands away from his face.

"Nora…" Ren sighed, throwing in the towel before even starting.

Pyrrha came out, dressed in casual clothes, a white t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and black, tight pants. She walked over to his bed. He had slept in his Hunter attire, he hadn't even bothered to put on pajamas. He figured he had been too tired for that.

"Jaune? It was you first, wasn't it? What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing. I had a nightmare."

He stood up and walked into the bathroom, limping slightly. He examined himself in the mirror. He ran a hand over his face, slowly, digging his fingers into his skin. None of this seemed real to him, like images born in a dream, a mirage in the desert. He saw Pyrrha reflected in the mirror, looking back at him.

"You're acting very strange," she said. "What did you dream about, Jaune?"

He closed his eyes and took a breath.

"Jaune? Please tell me."

"I could do that…," he said, opening his eyes again "but it's none of your business, okay?"

[T/N: ...Eh, it does sort of fit with how Jaune is when he's not made into a hero later on in the canon, and even then he's sort of a b*tch.]

She reacted as if I had slapped her.

"Yes, you're right. I'm sorry… for butting in."

He bit his lower lip. He shouldn't have reacted like that, it had been an impulse, he wanted to apologize but he didn't dare speak for fear of bursting into tears. He had seen her dead many times, during the numerous loops, those images now floated in his mind's eye.

He walked out of the bathroom, past her, grabbed his sword and shield, and headed for the door.

Nora stood in his way, her arms spread out to the sides, furious, or as angry as a person like her could be.

"That wasn't nice. Apologize."

"Let him go," Pyrrha said.

"But…"

He took advantage of that moment of distraction to go around her and leave the room. He walked a little down the hallway, stopping in the middle of one, with his back against the wall. He took a moment to calm down, catch his breath, think.

He watched the students walk by, talking to each other, laughing. They were so close, but they didn't belong to the same world or the same time as him. He wanted to reach out and touch one of them, whoever it was, just to make sure they existed.

His vision blurred. He sighed heavily and wiped his tears with the back of his hand.

He headed towards the library, it was a good place to organize his thoughts and make a plan.

He found an empty table, pulled out a notebook and a pen, and sat on a blank page for a long time, tapping the paper with the tip of the pen, thinking. He decided to start with the basics, writing down every step of the woman in red's plan that he had witnessed, what he had improvised on the occasions when he had thwarted parts of her plan.

'Ruby must be the reason I'm in this situation,' he wrote, 'the light that shoots from her eyes, that's the only thing that makes sense, the way I see it. But she already has a semblance, I don't understand the nature of that power. Is it possible that she possesses the power of a maiden, somehow? Ozpin and the others told me that none of them are capable of doing something like that, that they are powerful, but not so much as to bend the laws of time and space.'

What had he tried? Tell Ozpin and his friends what was going to happen, warn Yang of what Mercury was going to do in their fight, prevent Penny from dying at Pyrrha's hands. Whatever was within his reach. All his attempts had invariably ended in tragedy.

He heard familiar voices, raised his head, saw the entire team RWBY enter the library, looking around, as if searching for something or someone. Ruby fixed her eyes on him, put on a stern expression, and ran to him, using her Semblance. She raised a blizzard that made one of the bookshelves shake. Jaune closed the notebook.

Ruby brought her face closer to his, so much so that their noses touched and their lips almost did the same. Once again, Jaune felt like crying, remembering the eyes of the Ruby he had fought and died with the last time. That girl no longer existed. She was still the same Ruby as always, innocent, cheerful, unable to stay angry with someone for too long.

The others approached, amused.

"We heard what happened. Do you have anything to say, young man?"

"Look, I didn't mean to talk to her like that, okay? It's just that... you caught me at a bad time."

"Then apologize. It's not that difficult" She extended both hands towards him "Come on, let's go."

"Later," he said, picking up the notebook from the table.

"What is that?" Ruby asked, and the notebook, without warning, disappeared from his hands, as if it had never been there.

Jaune turned around, seeing her standing at the side of the table, notebook in her hands.

"Do not open it."

Pyrrha had bought him that notebook, it was like a chronicle of his progress as a Hunter, so the notes about his plan weren't on the first page, or the second, but it was a risk. If he told them what was going to happen this time, he wanted to do it on his own terms, not because they read it by accident.

"What's so important?"

"Ruby, I'm warning you..."

"Hey, watch your tone, vomit boy!" Yang said "It sounds like you want to kill someone."

In response, Jaune unsheathed his sword. Ruby gasped, frozen. Any of them could easily defeat him, even kill him, if they wanted to, she knew that much. What had surprised them was that he had pulled out a weapon, that he had gone so far.

"Okay, calm down," Ruby said, putting the notebook down on the table "I'm just worried about you. I didn't mean to… make you mad."

Slowly, he returned the sword to its sheath, steel ringing.

"I'm sorry," he said, bowing his head. "I'm sorry, but I'm not ready to talk about that yet… or about my nightmare, or about what's in the notebook. Maybe I never will be. I'm sorry."

"What happened to you?" Weiss said, her arms crossed in front of her chest with her usual imperious expression. He looked into her eyes with a painful longing. In what seemed like another life, he had loved this girl. "You seem like a completely different person."

Once, she had died in his arms, mortally wounded by Adam Taorus's sword, weakly begging him to change things, to not let the sacrifices they had made be in vain. He could almost see that scene now. The blood she had vomited trailed over her white neck, her eyes, white and empty, staring through him.

What had never been and what he was now witnessing blended together like a deck of cards.

"Is this little act because I rejected you?" Weiss asked, misinterpreting the reason why he was looking at her.

Jaune shook his head.

"I'm not interested in you anymore, not like that. Just leave it, okay? You're not going to get me to tell you what I'm hiding no matter how hard you try."

Weiss snorted, but didn't say anything else.

Jaune sat back down.

"I need to be alone, so if you have to do something in the library, please find another table."

They walked away. Ruby, passing by, said "Take care of yourself, okay?"

"You too."

He opened the book again, looking at his notes. He couldn't remember how many times he'd returned to the week before the Vytal festival, he'd stopped keeping track a long time ago.

Maybe it was time to approach his problem from a different point of view…

He stood up, put away his notebook, and ran out of the library. He would go get Cinder and nip the problem in the bud before she could do anything.

[T/N: That wasn't that bad, it showed how something like this can affect someone. Anyway, why don't you leave a comment, write a review for this new book, and drop some stones. If you don't know I've got a few good books I'm busy with right now so why not check them out, just go to my profile, or search for the books, Invisible-A Harry Potter FanFic, and A Gamer in Game of Thrones. Or if you want to read some advanced chapters then check out the P@treon, or the Ko-fi.]

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