Mistral – The day after the battle

(Jaune POV)

"Could you do it?"

This was the question that I found myself asking, Slade standing across from me in front of the place the team had been staying at, his dark grey and blue colour palette providing stark contrast to the area around him. The look he was giving me was quizzical, as if he were trying to understand the question I had posed to him.

I had to ask, just to make sure it was possible. Even if it wasn't, he would still give me some closure on the matter: this question had been coming ever since I figured out what his semblance had done – a brief transition in time to alter the outcome of an attack, and had become far more pressing when my semblance manifested yesterday.

This just might work.

"It's possible…" He started, with a tone on possible that indicated he wasn't completely certain. "…but you have to understand that my semblance only typically works for short bursts. There's no guarantee I could go back far enough for it to work."

He was sceptical. I got that.

It wasn't every day someone asked you to do something so extreme, pushing your power to the absolute limit like I was asking him to.

But this wasn't about me: it was about HER.

The first real light to shine on someone like me, and showed me that I might be able to become something more than the bumbling clown I appeared to be on first glance.

Honestly, I had been exactly that when I first met her: an untrained weakling who had cheated my way into a combat school I was utterly unprepared to actually attend…

…and Pyrrha? She was the exact opposite: an elite, already a huntress in her own right when she started to attend Beacon. Thinking back on it logically, she would have no reason to give someone like me the time of day.

But she did.

Even after my screw-ups early in our time at Beacon, she didn't give up on me, supporting me as best she could as her team leader, and even helping to train me to become the kind of huntsman that might be worthy to lead a team, particularly hers.

But that only scratched the surface of what she meant to me, really. It went a lot deeper than that. Even thinking about it now, seeing her face in my head was getting me on the verge of tears thinking about it.

Then, she died. That bitch, Cinder, killed her, while I had been shot away in a locker so that I wouldn't risk myself trying to help her! Practically in the moment where she had actually acknowledged feelings for me for the first time, and she's torn away from me, from everyone!

Now, there was even the slightest possibility that I might be able to avert that fate, and save her from that ever happening.

"I know." I answered him simply at the start. "I know there isn't much chance of this working, but it was never Pyrrha's way to give up on anyone, me most of all, and so, if there's any way at all to save her, then we have to try."

At this, Slade stood silently a moment, as if processing what I had said, looking as if he had read my mind and could somehow access my memories to understand where I was coming from.

That had always been the weird part about Slade, ever since we met him: he seemed to innately understand things he should have no way of knowing, like he had actually been there, and yet, I'd never once actually met him before we found him on the way to Mistral.

"Jaune, I know what you're asking of me…" he started, taking a deep breath before resuming "…I know who you're talking about, and what she means to you, but it's not even that simple." That pained expression on his face was telling of the internal clash that must be taking place inside him: he's been trying to help us since we met, and he knows what happened to Pyrrha, I know he'd want nothing more than to avert the kind of horrors that had taken place the night Beacon fell.

"Even…" he hesitated "…even if I could go all that way and somehow find my way all the way back to Beacon, there's still no guarantee I could actually do anything about it. Besides that, you might not even know if I had: there are several theories on altering the time-stream, and none of them would point to helping the stream you left. You might not even exist anymore." He finally warned, making clear his reservations on what I was asking him to do.

"I know. Like I said, I get the risks." I then responded to him. What else could I say? If it helped save Pyrrha, and possibly put a stop to the Fall of Beacon altogether, then it was worth any risk they might be putting themselves, or this current version of the world through. "I understand it might not work, but if anyone could pull it off, it's you." I had to cede to him, trying to be encouraging at this point. "I don't know how you know what you know, but you just seem to get everything that happened, and, knowing everything that happened, maybe you can stop it before it begins! That's definitely worth taking the chance on, don't you think?"

I had to be hopeful at this point, with this kind of idea, as it was pretty much the only thing that would power this kind of plan.

After hearing this, all he could do was nod sombrely, before looking back up at me, the slightest of smiles making itself known "Well, why not? I mean, the worst that could happen is I jump back a couple of days, then come find you after waiting it out. Let's go."

"Go? Where?" I couldn't help but ask. This part had confused me, as he started to take us out of Mistral itself, and out into the woods far from the city.

"Where are we going, Slade? I thought you agreed to do this!" I couldn't help but make my combination of confusion and frustration known, as he hadn't said a word since he said 'let's go', and had just offered me his back the whole time, as if angry that he was being asked to do something like this.

"We are going, Jaune…" he started, sounding exasperated by my annoyance with him "…to somewhere where I most likely won't be interrupted by someone moving through my space. If you want me to go back in time a year, a lot could have happened in that particular spot, so I have to be somewhere where there would be little to no chance of people passing through. Also…" he resumed, now seeming again as if he had read my mind "…I am trying to concentrate, to pull together every last scrap of my aura to make this insane jump. In order to do this and not be a corpse on the other side of it, I'm going to need all the charge I can get."

"Oh, all right." I couldn't help but concede. After all, he was the one I was asking to take such a dangerous risk: it was actually possible he could die pushing himself that far, and he was still willing to do it. "You're a good guy, Slade." I found myself saying afterward "Don't let anyone convince you otherwise."

"If this actually works…" he then started in response, turning away from me, as if embarrassed to have someone compliment him in any way. "…then I get the feeling not everyone will share that opinion. But thanks. Shall we begin?"

With the way things were at the moment, all I could do was offer a solemn nod, before the pale blue glow of his aura began to engulf him, trying to charge his semblance for a single long jump through time, his aura building up pressure as if building up toward an explosion, the blue light beginning to shake, an unstable power building beyond anything attempted before.

Now came my turn. Holding out my hand, and placing it on his shoulder, I called on my own semblance, rapidly charging his aura and amplifying the energy he was building up, to the point where it was actually hard to look at him, from the blinding blue light that was building up around him.

However, it was clear when he managed to do it, as the feeling of someone being against his hand disappeared before the light had dissipated from the woods, and, by the time the light had lowered enough for him to see, there was no one standing in the spot where he had been.

"Good luck, Slade."