Jaune and the Real Girl.

Chapter 4

Howling. It was all Jaune could hear as the freezing wind battered him, ice showered him clinging to his damp clothes and stinging his face. The cold flurry that surrounded him turned his world a cruel white as if the world itself had been destroyed leaving him alone. He forced himself to move, his fingers and toes were numb but his muscles burned as he forced himself to put one foot in front of the other. He fought the wind feeling it push him, keeping him back or threatening to push him down into the snow. He squinted his eyes and shielded them with his hand just to keep his eyes open and watch where he stepped. The dying light was slowly removing what little visibility he had left and the thought of being left in the pitch black surrounded by these stinging and howling winds as the dropping temperatures suffocated him until he didn't feel anything anymore.

"Jaune!" He heard feeling a grip on his hand pulling him up. He hadn't realized that he'd stopped kneeling in the snow. He looked up seeing Penny, even in the dim light of the setting sun she was a bright splash of color in this white void. Her copper red hair blew off to the side whipped about by the frigid gusts.

"Penny?" His weak voice didn't pierce the deafening roar of the wind, he felt like he was being swallowed by the storm and only Penny was keeping from being consumed.

"We're almost there!" Penny told him projecting her voice over the screaming gale, "hold on!"

He felt like he was floating, he couldn't even feel himself walking. He numbly trudged through the the deep snow wading through it, mindlessly focusing on moving forward and clutching Penny's hand.

He forced himself to look up seeing the silhouettes of buildings through the white haze. Refuge. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to move faster spurred on by the promise of shelter.

The sound of creaking boards and clattering shutters joined the symphony of the storm and together they approached the closest building. Jaune could see boarded up windows and an old door with peeled paint. Jaune could barely get a grip on the rusty doorknob, Penny managed to force the door open and pushed him inside.

The front room was dark and musty, it smelled like an old dusty attic. Penny forced the door closed behind him and locked it. Jaune scanned the dim room before it, it looked like it'd been a house at one point, long abandoned and left to decay. It was mostly empty save for a layer of dust and some cobwebs, an empty fireplace, some furniture was left here and there, an old moldy couch sat in one corner and an old table with chairs in another, a dirty rug lay decaying on the floor.

Jaune dropped to his knees and rubbed his hands shivering violently. Penny didn't waste time looking around the dilapidated building. She moved across the room to where the table was splintering  it with a punch.

"Let's get a fire going?" Penny said shattering the wooden furniture with ease and moving to the fireplace. She shoved the scraps of wood into the fireplace forcing the flue open, a single blade from Floating Array deployed and morphed into its laser gun form shooting a single green beam of light at the collection of wood burning it. Penny added a few bits of trash letting scraps of old paper or cloth catch fire helping it catch to the table pieces.

A dim orange glow filled the dark room and Jaune held his hands out feeling the heat. He moaned at the heat feeling it wash over him. He sat there for a long moment and Penny moved about adding wood to the little pile they had.

"Uh... Jaune?" Penny asked.

"Yeah?" He asked, looking away from the fire.

"I do not mean to embarrass you," she began tentatively looking away as he caught her eyes reflecting the fire, "but you need to get out of those wet clothes."