Alter (RWBY/Fate cross with Jaune as Jeanne alter demi servant): chapter 3: colour of the soul

Good news, Jaune Arc hadn’t gone crazy.

Bad news, he, Jaune Arc, hadn’t gone crazy.

That was the problem. That was the part that made his stomach twist and his heart feel like someone had reached into his chest and squeezed. If he had lost his mind, if everything was just some delusion painted across the inside of his skull, he could blame it on madness. Madness was clean. Madness was explainable. Madness was a diagnosis. But he wasn’t mad. The fact that he had been able to beat the snot out of Cardin Winchester as if Cardin was his red-headed stepchild, even though he’d never trained seriously before, even though he had only unlocked his aura days ago, even though he had been the weakest first year in the entire academy, was proof.

Proof stacked on top of the white hair that glittered beneath the moonlight. Not silver. Not blonde. White. And he didn’t have to look in a mirror to know what he would see. He could feel the strands fall against his cheeks when the wind blew. He could feel the wrongness of it every time someone’s eyes flicked toward his head and then away again.

Everything about that moment in the fighting class arena, when Cardin went down, when Jaune’s aura burned like molten iron spilling through his veins, should have been impossible. He shouldn’t have been fast enough. He shouldn’t have been strong enough. He shouldn’t have felt like someone who had been fighting their entire life, like someone who had stood in mud and ash and blood and driven a sword into the chest of an enemy taller than a house. He had never held a blade like that. He had never marched with an army. He had never given orders that would end in death.

Except that part of him had.

Jeanne had.

And the aftermath of that fight had been weird. Uncomfortably weird. The kind of weird that followed you like a shadow that didn’t belong to you. One day, people had looked at him and seen a bubbling fool, a would-be class clown, a try-hard who slept in armor he didn’t know how to use. They had looked at him like a joke. He had felt it. He had lived it.

Then suddenly, he wasn’t a joke.

They looked at him differently. They looked at him with respect. They looked at him as if he was interesting, as if he wasn’t just the background noise of Beacon Academy, as if he had a place among them. They looked at him as if he was worthy.

So, it wouldn’t be logical to call the aftermath weird, right? He had the respect he had wanted. He was strong now. He was a proud would-be hunter. He was a hero in the flesh.

He was also the guy everyone had seen go Grimm on a defeated opponent, the guy who had needed an instructor to intervene because Jaune Arc had looked like he was about to kill another hunter-in-training. That part didn’t fit with the rest. That part polluted everything else.

They respected him, yes, but it was the type of respect you gave a mangy dog that could tear your throat out if you breathed wrong. You didn’t pet that dog. You didn’t trust it. You backed away slowly and hoped it stayed on its side of the fence.

And the worst part was knowing that they weren’t wrong to fear him.

Yes, he had been able to win against Cardin. But it hadn’t felt like him. Not really. His hands had moved on their own. His stance had shifted without thought. His heartbeat had been calm. His expression had been cold. It had felt like Jeanne again, except this time, it wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a nightmare. It was his body, his voice, his strength.

He had won, yet Pyrrha didn’t smile at him the same way anymore. Pyrrha and Ruby watched him with concern they seemingly didn’t know how to hide.

The others from RWBY and JNPR spoke to him with care, as if every word had to be tested before it touched his ears. It was like everyone was worried he would snap.

The difference wasn’t good.

Nora’s jokes had always been loud and ridiculous. Nora was the kind person who would the first day she met you,  tell you that you had a punchable face and then hug you five minutes later.

She was unfiltered sunshine. Now her smiles were forced. The kind of forced that someone who had grown up with Seven Sisters could spot instantly.

Growing up with seven sisters meant knowing when someone was lying. It was a survival skill. If he didn’t learn to spot dishonesty, he would have walked right into the kind of trap where Nora’s exact opposite or same in behaviour depending on how you saw it of a sister with a bone-deep hatred for boredom wanted to put him into a dress and take pictures.

Having sisters was war. But it also taught him how to see people.

Ren was quieter than usual. Ren’s quiet was normally calm and steady, like a lake. Now, his silence felt tense, analytical, measuring Jaune’s every movement as if he were watching a potential threat instead of a teammate.

Ruby was a nervous version of Nora’s problem, but in a dorky way only she could manage. She wanted to talk to him. She wanted to be his friend. But every time she walked toward him, she flinched first. Her eyes flicked toward his hair, then his face, then the ground. She talked too fast. She laughed too loud. She backed away too soon.

And Yang… Yang needed to stop glaring at him every time he spoke to Ruby. He could practically feel her eyes burning holes in his spine. What did she think he was going to do? Bite her? Break her? What kind of beast did they think he was?

He was supposed to be the leader of JNPR. Leader. Yet because he’d gone psycho on another first year in front of the entire campus, things were weird between them. And because things were weird, he avoided them. And because he avoided them, things got even weirder. Every interaction was stiff. Every conversation felt wrong. Every smile felt fake.

The only times he saw his team now were when he was too tired to do anything except drag himself back to the dorm and collapse on his bed. Sleep was supposed to help. It didn’t.

Whether good or not, he didn’t know if it was because of his nightmares if you could call them nightmares anymore, because dreams didn’t feel that real but he rarely felt tired. He rarely felt the need to sleep. Most nights, he didn’t go back to the shared dorm at all. He stayed in the library until it closed. Or on the roof of the dorm building, staring at the stars like they were hiding answers he didn’t have.

Which was what he was doing now.

Sure, the reason why he was here sucked, but the night was calm, and the air was cool, and the sky was beautiful. The world at night was peaceful in a way the daytime wasn’t. Nobody stared. Nobody whispered. Nobody wondered if he was dangerous.

He was still the same Jaune. He believed that. He wanted to believe that. More than that, it wasn’t like Cardin was a perfect victim. Cardin was an ass. Cardin was a bully. He was mean. They hadn’t been at Beacon long, yet everyone already knew that.

So why was Jaune Arc the bad guy?

In his opinion, Cardin deserved worse.

Cardin should have burned as badly as he had in Jaune’s dreams. Burned the way Jeanne did, with flames that licked bone and skin, with smoke that filled your lungs until you couldn’t scream anymore.

Jeanne had burned alive.

And somehow, Jaune remembered every second.

He closed his eyes and exhaled. The air tasted cold. Metallic. Bitter.

Beacon was a hunter academy. He used to dream about it. He used to imagine what it would feel like to stand here, surrounded by the people who would one day fight the Grimm and save the world. He thought he would be inspired. He thought he would be impressed.

Most days were just boring Grimm studies with Professor Port. Long stories about hunts Port had gone on decades ago. Classes where students pretended to listen while the professor talked mostly about himself. Then came history with Professor Oobleck, and that was a different kind of torture. Oobleck talked so fast his words blended together. Half of what he said was interesting, and the other half made Jaune want to lie on the floor and rethink his life choices.

Then there was combat class with Miss Goodwitch. Except Jaune didn’t participate anymore. Miss Goodwitch didn’t say it directly, but the message was there. He was benched. He was a risk. Everyone thought he would go crazy again.

There were first aid classes too, given by Nurse Peach. He was… too good at those. He didn’t know why. It felt less like learning and more like remembering. His fingers moved the way they shouldn’t. His instincts were too sharp. He remembered doing stuff he had never been taught. He could hear Jeanne’s voice when he touched bandages, when he pressed pressure points, when he checked a pulse.

His memories felt as if they merging with someone else’s life.

Someone who lived, fought, killed, and died.

Someone who burned.

Ever since he realized that his dreams weren’t just nightmares, he tried to find explanations. He started with genealogy. It made sense. His family had been a noble one once, long ago, when Vale still had a king. The Arc family had knights in their bloodline. Records existed. He searched every name. He searched every hunter. He knew every ancestor who had ever fought, every one who had ever been called a hero.

There was no Jeanne d’Arc.

None of them had been betrayed by their liege. None of them had been dragged through a sham trial. None of them had been tied to a stake and burned while crowds watched.

So he searched something else.

The soul.

How it worked. How it tied to Aura. He didn’t know much at first. He only learned about aura and semblances because of Pyrrha. Hunters literally had superpowers based on their souls. Aura was a shield. Aura was strength. Aura was… something more.

Everything began after Pyrrha unlocked his aura during initiation. Which meant maybe, if he understood aura better, he could understand what was happening to him.

The problem was every book he found fell into one of three categories.

Either it was a manual about fighting with aura, which wasn’t helpful. Or it was filled with complicated theories written in a way that made him feel like he was reading about how to build the most complicated Atlesian war robot while philosophizing about nothing and everything at the same time. Half of those books contradicted each other. None of them answered anything. The last category was full of fairy tales and legends.

He didn’t bother with those.

He decided to focus on aura itself.

Aura was the manifestation of the soul. That was what every book agreed on. Except if aura was the manifestation of the soul, why did people talk about the soul separately? Why did only aura have proof of existing? Why wasn’t the soul itself measurable? Why did everyone treat them as different when they should be the same thing?

Because if aura was the soul, then aura shouldn’t be able to break.

If aura was the soul, you shouldn’t be able to deplete it.

If aura was the soul, breaking it should kill you.

When someone lost their aura, they didn’t die. They just passed out. Which meant aura and soul weren’t the same—or if they were, something was wrong in how people understood them. And if aura represented the soul, then what did it mean when an aura broke? Did that mean the soul cracked? Did that mean people walked around soulless after a fight?

That didn’t make sense.

And if aura could recover after rest, didn’t that imply the soul was finite, like mana in a video game? That did not fit with the idea of something infinite. Something immortal.

So what was aura?

What was the soul?

Why, after unlocking his aura, did he start dreaming about Jeanne d’Arc? Why did he start feeling her knowledge in his bones? Why did he start fighting like her?

For a moment, he thought it was his semblance. It was the only explanation that didn’t feel supernatural and absurd. Semblances could be anything. They could be tiny and useless. They could be overwhelming and dangerous. One person could smell good forever. Another could only talk to fat squirrels. Someone else could control fire, or hold conversations with ghosts, or always throw a weapon straight into a heart.

There were semblances that let people fly. Semblances that let them copy every movement they saw. Semblances that let them survive death nine times. Semblances that let them heal.

So maybe, maybe it made sense that he who wanted to be a hero, who wanted to honor his ancestors, who wanted to be like them, would unlock a semblance that showed him the life of a hero.

Except there was a problem.

If it was a semblance, the color of his aura should have never changed.

Because the color of aura was the soul. The true self. Professor Oobleck had rambled about it for half a lecture once. The Color Revolution had been about the right for people to express their own colors, to be unique, to be themselves.

Aura color was the ultimate expression of that uniqueness.

People had written books claiming you could study aura colors and understand a person’s personality. He didn’t know if that part was true, but every single source agreed on one thing.

Aura was you.

Your soul.

Your identity.

And his aura wasn’t the bright gold it had been when Pyrrha unlocked it.

He lifted his right hand. Summoned his aura. It sparkled around his palm in a dim glow.

Not just yellow.

There was black. Thin lines of black. Smudges of shadow twisting through the gold. It made the color darker. Tarnished. Wrong.

Something told him that if he didn’t get control of whatever was happening, if he didn’t find an answer, his aura would keep turning darker. Until it was as black as the hide of a Grimm. As black and hateful as the flames Jeanne saw in her last moments, the flames that Jaune felt every time he closed his eyes.

He sighed and dismissed the aura. The air around him felt colder without it.

Somewhere on the horizon, the sky shifted. The first strands of light stretched faintly across the dark. Dawn was slow, but certain. Birds began to stir. The shadows started fading.

The sun rose, and its light brushed across Jaune’s hair. Strands of silver were everywhere now. Not a streak. Not something he could hide. It glittered in the sun like frost, like moonlight.

He looked at his fingers.

He looked at the ground.

He felt something break in his chest that had nothing to do with aura.

He whispered, soft as breath, looking at the rising dawn.

“I just wanted to be a hero. Why did everything have to be so complicated?”