6,476Please see the notes on Knight of Salem for answers on where Rabbit Among Wolves went – it has not been cancelled and will update next Tuesday as normal. Long story short, I was busy looking after my sick mother and pushed writing aside for that.
This chapter… well, I won't say it's dark per se because it isn't, and it doesn't cover any traditionally nasty topics (apart from, you know, dead people and resurrection) but it's certainly the type to make you dislike a lot of people. Let's call it emotionally charged.
While I've always loved "alt-semblance" fics where someone gets a different ability and things change because of it, they've always (or as far as I've read them) seem to focus more on how cool and awesome they are, and how much the character benefits from having it. Yeah. We're gonna see the other side of it here.
Cover Art: GWBrex
Chapter 2
Theirs was a house under siege.
The windows had all been shut and locked and the blinds and curtains were drawn, casting the rooms into constant shadow and obscuring those within. It didn't stop the occasional tapping, the quiet tap-tap of what would sound like a branch or bird curiously pecking at the glass. Little Amber had curiously peeled the curtains of her bedroom window back to look only to scream as a woman's face met hers, peering through the glass of the second-floor window from atop a ladder with a piece of paper pressed to the window and the words `bring my son back` written on it in big, bold letters.
No one dared look since.
Juniper moved around the kitchen like a ghost, removing plates from the kitchen cupboard and wincing every time the pottery lightly clicked or clinked together. She would freeze, look to the windows and let out a silent breath when no one started hammering or shouting for them. Anxiously, she moved to the long table and set the plates down, again careful not to make a sound, allowing the girls to help share them around, all without a word and all tense and withdrawn.
"We can't keep living like this." Nicholas broke the silence and everyone shushed him, desperately waving their hands until he growled and said, "No. I refuse to let us live in silence, terrified of what's going on outside. What are we going to do – hide in here forever?" He stood, chair scraping back. "I'm going to put a stop to this."
Juniper tried to stop him whispering quiet words but he wouldn't have it and gently picked her up and set her down to the side. She looked to the rest of them for help but they were all tired, jumpy and angry. Jade and Hazel, the teenage twins, looked positively bloodthirsty about it. He reached the door, took a deep breath, twisted the handle and opened it.
The noise that spilled in was deafening. It had always been there, but the people outside – some hundred and fifty strong – hadn't been able to tell if the Arc family was present or not. Now, they had proof. Voices were raised, women screamed and people fought their way toward the door, threatening to overwhelm Nicholas in a tide of human bodies.
"Bring back my son!"
"My mother needs help!"
"Bring him out – bring him out!"
"A comment for the Ansel Times-"
"Let us see him! Let us see the miracle worker!"
"My son! My son!"
Those were just the cries they could make out. There were more, most of them garbled and lost as the people drowned one another out. The recurring theme, however, was that they wanted Jaune Arc. They wanted him to come outside and address them all, and it was becoming readily apparent that their patience was running out. It had gotten so bad that someone jumped Nicholas. A poor choice as he caught their arm, yanked and twisted it back and pushed them into the oncoming crowd, but it was still a bad sign.
The onslaught came to a very sudden halt when the ring of drawn steel sounded, however. No one made a move toward Nicholas when he stood with Crocea Mors in hand. The very real, and very dangerous, threat hung in the air.
"Enough!" Nicholas shouted, taking advantage of the shocked silence. "You lot have done nothing but crowd our family, blockade our home and terrify my children. You should be ashamed of yourselves!"
One or two may have been. Faces fell, some looked away, but not all. There were too many who were desperate, including one woman who took her chance in silence to scream, "My baby died last month – if you won't come save him, you're no better than a murderer!"
At the table, Jaune flinched and looked down.
"That's it." Nicholas swore, grabbed the woman by her collar and shoved her back. She was swallowed by the mob as more hands reached out pleading and begging for Jaune to come out and save their family, their friends, their loved ones and so much more. "Back the fuck away right now or I'll take your actions as a threat towards my family and act accordingly. I am beyond caring right now."
So were they. Maybe it was desperation or maybe they figured death wouldn't matter with the promised Semblance nearby. The story had spread the second the party returned despite Nicholas and Tommen's best efforts to keep it under wraps. Now, the whole of Ansel knew, and the mob of frenzied people paid no attention to Nicholas' threat of bloody harm and surged forward. Even he, a hardened huntsman, gasped in shock. Nicholas twisted his body and lashed out left and right with the flat of his blade, his fist and whatever else he could. He'd obviously expected them to back down, to give up in the face of a huntsman. At any other time, they would have. This was not `any other` time.
Nicholas was driven back into the doorway as Juniper screamed and the girls panicked. They scattered, while Juniper rushed up with her husband's shield, hoping she could do something to help. There was little an untrained woman could, however. As Nicholas was driven back into their own kitchen, people squirmed their way past him. Juniper swung the flat of the shield at one man and caught him in the shoulder, knocking him back, but the second grabbed the edge and wrestled it down, throwing her to the floor.
"Mom!" Jaune cried along with his sisters. Coral and Sable hurried in to try and save her, but Jaune's cry of shock proved the last thing she needed. It drew attention to him.
"There he is!" someone yelled.
"Jaune! Save my father!"
"Jaune, please-"
"I'll pay anything!"
"I can't see him! I can't see him!"
"Bring him out! Bring him out!"
The crowd pushed and pushed, and for all his skill and strength there was no way Nicholas could hold so many people back. There was a tipping point, a moment where too many people tried to push through at once. The wooden doorframe splintered, the door cracked off, and grown men and women surged in. Juniper was lost under the mass, screaming as she was swept under the feet of at least twelve people, drawn down as they stumbled over her, then pushed further out of sight as more clambered over the top.
Amber, his twelve-year-old sister, clung to a stunned Jaune in terror, shrieking as the bodies pressed in. Jaune returned her hold, but the people reached out to him, hands filling his vision, grabbing his arms and shoulders, his hair and even his face in one case. His vision was covered by someone's hand and they tugged – they all tugged, pulling him off his feet, pulling Amber – still screaming and sobbing – away from him. Jaune screamed as well, in anger and fear, the sound drowning out the furious cries of his father and the desperate attempts by Jade and Hazel to fight their way to their mother using chairs as weapons.
It was chaos. Madness. Jaune was drawn into the mass of bodies like a victim in a zombie apocalypse, and he reached out hopelessly for his father, trying to fight his way to him. For a moment, Jaune felt them grip his arms and pull, and knew he was about to be ripped apart by the mob.
BLAM!
The gunshot was close enough to deafen. People gasped and shrank back, and Jaune fell the short distance to the floor, landing on his back and rolling onto all fours with a grunt. He pushed himself up and skirted back away from people who had once been neighbours and were now no more than feral beasts. Like animals, they shrank back from a single man in the doorway who had a handgun raised up toward the sky.
BLAM!
They flinched again.
"Out the house!" Tommen ordered. "Out now!"
Those closest to him squeezed their way out in fear, but those inside, those who had invaded the Arc home, hesitated. At least until Tommen brought his gun down and shot between the feet of the closest. The woman jumped and darted out, and the rest soon followed, though they hesitated in the garden, milling about and staring inward, whispering and pointing.
"Juniper!" Nicholas cried out in a voice filled with dread. Crocea Mors clattered to the ground and he skidded on his knees, cradling his wife. His wife's body. Still on all fours, Jaune felt the entire world lurch as he saw the bloodied and broken form of his mother. She had been drawn under the crowd and stamped to death; her neck had broken somewhere under the crushing weight of so many people and lolled unnaturally to one side. "No!" Nicholas cried. "No, no, no!"
No.
Not her. Not like this.
Heat burned in Jaune's body and poured off him in waves. It burned visible, a shining white that rose off his back like steam. His eyes flashed and he heard the crack of aura – or of his mother's neck. It realigned with a gruesome crunching sound, her body healing and her eyes snapping open with a frightened scream.
Alive. Resurrected.
Nicholas sobbed and pulled his terrified wife into his shoulder, the two of them crying. The girls were crying too – some from seeing their mother's body and some still just in fear and pain from the people crashing into their home. Lavender was on her side clutching her arm, Coral doing her best to help her to her feet.
"It's real…" someone gasped.
"Back to life."
"He saved her – revived her."
"My son!" a desperate mother shouted. "My son, please!"
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
Three shots into the air and three painful flinched from everyone. Tommen turned his back on them and faced the people outside, the once-dead man blocking their doorway with his body.
"I've half a mind to start shooting after you monsters killed an innocent woman. Look at you – worse than Grimm, you are."
"His Semblance!" someone yelled. "He should be helping people!"
"Saving people!"
"He's a boy!" Tommen roared. Like Nicholas, his attempts to shame people into compliance fell on deaf ears. He wasn't even sure if these people thought of their actions as cruel at all. In their own minds, they were justified. "And he's been through hell before, then hell again thanks to you lot. It's a miracle he wants to help you at all." He sighed. "But he does. And he's agreed to work with Dr White at the Ansel Hope Hospital."
Shock, silence, cheering. The three came in that order, as everyone outside began to celebrate as if they hadn't just broken into someone's house and killed a woman. It was sickening. Jaune bit his lip and tightened his hands into fists until his fingernails drew blood.
"So now that that's out of the way, you bastards can go home. Go home and think about your actions. And I warn you now, anyone who hassles or hangs around will be put to the back of the queue when it comes to asking for his services."
"When?" someone shouted, ignoring the threat. "When will he start?"
"As soon as he is able," a new voice spoke. The crowd parted to reveal a man in brown trousers and a tweed suit jacket. He had a medical bag at his side, and everyone knew him as Dr White, Ansel's practicing doctor and surgeon. "That is why I am here after all. However, I cannot well arrange anything with Mr Arc with you all crowding his home, can I?"
It would have been a lie to say reason prevailed. Reason had failed, and it was only the promise of their victory that finally convinced the mob to disperse. They had won, or so they felt, and the results justified whatever means they might take. Perhaps the news crews saw it differently, recording the whole thing as they were, but it was all Jaune could do to sit on his knees, hands on the floor, simmering with rage as he looked at their ruined home. The kitchen door leading outside was broken, the frame cracked and the door on the floor, the dining room table had lost a leg and come crashing down, and plates lay shattered and spread across the floor. It was as though a bomb had gone off in the room.
"Mommy!" Amber threw herself into Juniper's arms and wept like the child she was. It was all too much for her, and Nicholas and Juniper both wrapped her up in their arms as she wailed.
"I'd thank you for the timely save, Tommen," Nicholas said. "If I didn't want to know when exactly my son agreed to do anything for those bastards. It's not been one day since he saw us all killed – not one day since he unlocked his Semblance!"
"One day and the people do this." Tommen said. He holstered his gun and stepped inside, shaking his head as if he couldn't believe what he'd seen. Jaune couldn't either. It was like something out of a horror movie. "I'm sorry, Nicholas. I expected this might happen and came as quickly as I could. I didn't think they'd have the guts to actually rush you, though."
"Me neither. I've faced crowds twice their number that have backed down in front of a huntsman." He looked down to Juniper and swore. "I'm so sorry. I… This was my fault for opening the door."
Juniper shook her head. "It's their fault for coming at you."
"This would have happened anyway, I fear." Tommen said. "They'd have come through the windows or would have broken the door down themselves if you hadn't shown yourself. That's why I had to give them something. They'd have never backed off otherwise. You okay, lad?"
The question was directed to Jaune, and he scoffed from the floor. "A-Am I okay?" he stammered. "W-What am I supposed to say to that? I just saw… they…" Jaune clenched his eyes shut. "No. No, I am not okay!"
"If I may." Dr White tipped his head as he came into the room. He looked quickly about and moved toward Lavender, kneeling and opening his bag. "Hello there, Lavender. Not quite time for us to meet again, hm?"
The young girl, sickly and frail, had met Dr White many a time before. He was responsible for looking after her health. "D-Dr White. G-Good morning."
"There's such a thing as being too polite, my dear. This morning has been anything but good to you. Here, give me your hand." He quickly pressed a cold compress to it. He continued to speak as he did. "Tommen came to me this morning and asked my aid in conducting a little ruse to buy you some time. We'd claim your son had agreed to testing his Semblance with me at the hospital. At least, it was supposed to be a ruse. I'm not sure it can be anymore."
Nicholas growled. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"It means that your son, through no fault of his or your own, has become a figure of incredible interest. Not just in Ansel, I would wager. When news of this spreads – and it inevitably shall – people across Remnant will want to know what he can do and how he does it. If you thought the crowd just now was bad, imagine it ten times this number or more, with every single person who has ever lost a loved one the world over clamouring for his time."
The picture he painted chilled Jaune to his very feet. He imagined it, their garden filled with people and overflowing to the street beyond, then further, atop nearby rooftops and the roads and all around until their home was an island in a sea of faces. Looking around again, if so few people did this much damage, how much worse would it become? He coiled his hands around himself, fighting for warmth.
"That's insane." Nicholas gasped, imagining it himself. "We can't – they wouldn't…" Even he didn't sound convinced. If over a hundred had come from Ansel alone then it would likely be a hundred times that number from a city like Vale. Not to mention Atlas, Vacuo and Mistral too. He swallowed heavily, looking over them, and Jaune had the horrible feeling Nicholas was considering that his family was more than just one son. He had to think of them all. "What… What do you suggest then? What is your idea?"
"Jaune comes to work with me and for the hospital." Dr White said. "He lives here, of course, and he'll be paid for his service, but knowing he is putting his Semblance to use as they want him should convince people to back off. Bothering him at work only reduces the odds of them being seen after all, and I can easily say he needs rest at home to recover his aura. At the hospital, we will test and probe the limits of his Semblance. Nothing bad," he assured them, wrapping Lavender's wrist. "There won't be any blood tests or needles. What we really need to do is find out important things like how long ago a person who has died can be brought back. If there are limits then that will immediately put a stop to people whose loved ones have crossed them."
It didn't sound too bad, at least not from Jaune's point of view. If it stopped a nightmare like this happening again then he was all for it.
"He's fifteen!" Juniper said. She was cradling Amber's head and stroking her hair, but even after just dying had the strength to speak. "He's just a boy, doctor. Is this… Is there no other way?"
"If there is, I haven't been able to think of it."
"That's-"
"It's fine." Jaune spoke up, drawing all attention to him. This was his fault – or not his fault, but those people had been after him. If he now chose to hide away knowing they would come back then whatever happened next would be his fault. "It's just working a bit for you, right? Like a part-time job?"
"Very much like one. You wouldn't even have to do long hours like I do," the man said with a chuckle. He tapped Lavender's hand and slid her some painkillers to take, then stood with a creak of bone. "I expect your Semblance will be taxing on your aura, especially if the fact you passed out after bringing your patrol back to life was any indication. Knowing those limits will also help fight people back. They don't know what to think of you right now. To them, you're potentially a limitless font of energy that you're not putting to use. We need to counter that assumption before it gets much worse, and the best way to do so is with evidence."
Jaune nodded. Tell the people what he could and couldn't do and show them he was playing along with their demands. They weren't bad people really. They were just desperate. They were people without hope who had now been offered a shred and wanted to cling onto it. It was hard to be sympathetic here, with his home in disarray, but those same people had once been neighbours and friends. They'd been people who would pass him by on the street, wave and say hello.
"I'll do it."
"Jaune…" Juniper said.
"It's okay, mom. I… I kind of want to do it." Not right now obviously, and preferably after more rest. He hadn't wanted it to be quite like this. Beyond that, though, he'd always dreamed of having a Semblance that was cool and powerful, one that would make a difference.
You couldn't get much more so than this.
"I always wanted to help people as a huntsman," he said. "But maybe I can help people like this, too." He looked to his father. "We can still train, right?"
"Of course we can." Nicholas said. "Nothing wrong with wanting to know how to defend yourself." Under his breath he added, "Especially if today ever happens again. Those bastards."
"I spotted a few names and faces I recognise." Tommen said. "I can help press charges if you want." He smiled lopsidedly. "Least I can do for bringing me and my son back. I only wish I could have stopped this."
"You did enough. If you hadn't shown…" He let out a quiet breath. "I'm not sure what they would have done after they saw him bring June back. They might have torn him apart out there!"
Jaune shivered.
"All the more reason to get started." Dr White said. "Before any decide we're delaying too much and come back. You're all welcome to come along. I'm sure you have some scraps and cuts for me to take care of."
"I'll get your door repaired while you're gone." Tommen promised. "And I'll have people set up to guard your home tonight. There won't be another repeat of this, Nicholas. I promise you that."
/-/
The Ansel `Hope` Hospital did not look like a proper hospital. Ansel, as a frontier village, was not large enough to necessitate one. Instead, it was a large former home that had been converted, with several guest rooms set aside as wards and another as an operating theatre. Over the years more and more extensions had been built on, including a new waiting room, some testing rooms and more. It still had the look of a normal home to it however, despite the many medical posters taped to the walls and the nurses who came and went.
Lacking a university or college of any kind, Dr White was the only real medical practitioner in Ansel, though he had two apprentices working under him and eight other nurses, male and female, to help look after patients. They had regarded Jaune with naked awe when he arrived. It made him uncomfortable to see them stare at him, but they were thankfully much more polite about it than the others had been.
Dr White had busied himself taking care of the family's minor injuries before agreeing anything with Jaune, and the first thing was payment. Jaune had tried to wave it off as unnecessary, but the doctor wouldn't have it.
"That's a slippery slope to step down. It's all well and good to want to help people but fail to put a price on this and you'll be swamped with people wasting your time for low priority cases."
"How can death be low priority?" Jaune asked.
"When it's a ninety-nine-year-old man dying of cancer who won't live more than a week after you bring him back. Do it for free and his family will bring him back every week anyway, and you'll never get a moment's rest. Worse, they might take up time you could be using to help those in real need."
Put like that, it was hard to disagree with Dr White. Death had always seemed like a binary thing to him but it obviously wasn't. A child killed in a car accident who was otherwise perfectly healthy and could have lived a normal life was, according to Dr White, a much better candidate for resurrection than an elderly person who wouldn't have much time left regardless. It sounded wrong and cruel, but since they didn't know how many people Jaune could bring back before collapsing there had to be limits set.
"Working in medicine is a painful task. You must decide how much time you can afford to allocate to any one person, and in your case it's going to be worse because no one else can do what you do. I will help you of course but there will come a time when you need to make that decision yourself. For now, I'll have every request routed through us."
"R-Right." Jaune answered nervously. He didn't feel ready for this at all. Doctors got years of training and study; he was getting the crash course. He recognised it wasn't by choice though, and that Dr White was doing his best to help him. "Thank you."
"Before that however, we need to run some tests." Dr White paused before a door to say, "I'm going to show you a dead body, Jaune. I realise this isn't normal – little about your Semblance is – and I wanted to forewarn you. They will be covered by a sheet. You won't see anything and the causes of death were illness, so there won't be any blood or viscera. Are you okay with that?"
He was going to have to be, wasn't he? It couldn't be worse than the horrors he'd seen when they were attacked by the Grimm. He took a deep breath and nodded his head.
The room was cold and clinical, metal walls and cabinets. A morgue. Jaune's face paled but thankfully it wasn't as bad as he expected. The air had a clean, anti-septic smell to it and every surface was meticulously scrubbed clean. In the centre of the room were two medical trolleys with a shape on each, both covered in a bluish-white cloth from head to toe. Dead bodies. Jaune's breathing picked up but as Dr White promised, he couldn't make out any detail. There wasn't a spec of skin showing.
"Are you okay?" he asked anyway. "Do you need a moment outside?"
"N-No. I'm fine. I just… It's not as bad as I thought it would be…" Jaune took a deep breath and forced himself inside. "What now?"
"Now, we begin to test your limits." He moved to the body on the left and took a clipboard from the bench. "This man died one month ago of pneumonia. The other was much more recent, dying either last night or in the early hours of the morning. I want you first to try and resurrect the most recent one, then we will try with the second."
"To see if I have a time limit, right?"
Dr White smiled. "Exactly. There is much different about a recently fresh corpse and a cadaver some weeks old. Decomposition to say the least, but also a lack of brain activity. I want to see if that affects you in any way."
It felt good to have something make sense, and to feel like he could be useful. If I can be, he thought. What if I can't bring either of them back? What if I can't do anything at all? No. He'd done things already. He'd saved his father and the patrol, and this morning his mom. The limit might be too tight to work with here, but he could at least try.
I have to try. If I have a Semblance like this then I HAVE to use it. If I don't, if I let people stay dead when I could help them, then I'm practically killing them myself.
Jaune stood before the first body and reached back for that feeling – for that heat. He took hold of his aura as he'd been taught by his dad and flooded his body with it, unsure if that would help but remembering that he'd done the same out of fear when the Grimm attacked. He'd been trying to protect himself then as well.
When he did it, something clicked. It was hard to say what or how, but there was a sudden shift in his perception. Suddenly, he was more aware of the dead man in front of him, as if the man was glowing faintly to his eyes, except they were shut so it wasn't that. In some way, he could feel or sense the man's body, though. Only the one body. He felt nothing from the other.
More, he felt a connection, like a funnel, forming between him and the body. Taking hold of it, he gasped as his aura rushed down it and out of him. It was as sudden as it was shocking, a raw sensation of pouring himself out of his body and into another.
Suddenly, the sheet lurched back and the dead man rose with a gasp. Young – only about twenty. He gasped and choked on fresh air rushing back into stale lungs. His eyes, crusty and pink around the edges, gazed around in shock and panic.
Dr White moved quickly. "You are in a hospital. Please calm down. You have woken up from treatment." A lie, though right now Jaune felt the man probably needed to be lied to. "Can you hear me? Please nod. Good. Good. Don't try to speak – you've very weak. I'm going to call a nurse to take you back to a ward and look after you. Please try and calm down. You've had quite the scare, but you're going to be alright."
It took a minute or two to call a nurse, and the woman who showed up covered her hands with both mouths. It wasn't everyday a corpse came back to life after all. She was professional enough not to say it to the man, though. She played along with the doctor and wheeled him out, while the man continued to gather his strength and breath.
Once they were gone, Dr White breathed out. "It really is true. My goodness. I knew but… to see it." He shook his head. "We'll tell him the truth soon obviously but I don't want to frighten the man until he's a little stronger. He will be given a full check-up, both for his prior illness and to make sure his time here as a cadaver hasn't led to any further complications. Do you feel strong enough to try with the other?"
His aura still felt pretty decent and the scroll Dr White had out showed it at 95%, so he nodded his head. Even so, he had a feeling it wouldn't work this time and said so.
"What makes you say that?"
"He just doesn't feel there. I could sense the other body but not this one."
"Hm. Many Semblances come with some ability to sense or use them properly or protections built into them. It wouldn't do for someone with the ability to control fire to burn themselves to death the first time they use after all." Dr White scribbled something down. "Try anyway. In truth, I hope you are limited. Being able to resurrect anyone regardless of age would not only be a crippling burden for you, but also for the population of the world. I wouldn't wish that on anyone."
Jaune tried – he really did. He summoned his aura and he concentrated and he forced it and he even, after a moment to gather his nerve, reached out and laid his hands on the dead man's body. No matter what he tried, no matter how much he pushed himself, nothing happened. No light, no tugging, no aura and no resurrection. The poor man remained as he was.
"Enough." Dr White said softly and laid a hand on Jaune's shoulder. "Enough, Jaune!" he said, louder. Finally, Jaune drew his aura back, guilt burning hot and heavy in his gut. "You've tried your hardest. He is too far gone."
Frustrated tears prickled at Jaune's eyes. "I'm sorry," he whispered.
"Don't be. You cannot fail someone who has already died, and long before you unlocked your Semblance no less. You must focus on the good you can and have done, not those you were unable to help. That is a lesson all of us in medicine are forced to learn sooner or later."
They tried again and again, with Dr White checking his aura each time and narrowing down the time limit. The first victim had been incredibly lucky, because it turned out he could only resurrect someone if they had died four hours or less.
The threshold was discovered thanks to the hospital's meticulous timekeeping, and because someone who died five hours before Jaune saw him couldn't be brought back. The exact time limit might have been more specific to the minute, or maybe it was more about brain activity and was different for each person, but Dr White was content to chalk it up as an arbitrary time limit and advised Jaune not to argue with that.
"Otherwise, you'll have people knocking your door down telling you to try anyway. A waste of your time. It's better to let people come to terms with their grief than live with forlorn hope."
The first man must have died in the early morning and only been discovered after. If they'd waited even a little longer, he might have crossed the threshold. Jaune supposed that made him lucky, though maybe `not dying` in the first place would have been that. In the end, he brought back five more people and watched them be wheeled away. After those five, with the time limit discovered, Dr White called a stop to testing and, ignoring Jaune's protests that he could do more, forcefully marched him out the morgue.
"There are no more, Jaune. Not who have died recently enough. Ansel is not so large that we would have that many dying in the early hours of this morning. You've resurrected everyone you can."
"Oh." That was it – he was done? It made sense, he supposed. If the people had to die within the last four hours, and Ansel's population being what it was, there would have to be a tragedy to have more than five bodies. "Oh, I… I thought there… never mind. What happens now?"
"Now, I compile the results and provide them to the local newspapers, who will spread them across Ansel. It's the only way to make sure a repeat of this morning doesn't happen again. Though…" He sighed heavily, "I expect that one or two will not believe what we say. They'll believe we're hoarding your Semblance or refusing to help them and act out. That's how people are. Tommen and the guards will keep you safe."
There was a fresh commotion in the entranceway to the hospital. Jaune looked over, past Dr White, to see numerous people crowding the front desk, many crying and others holding their hands over their mouths. Some were cheering, though. Some were holding onto one another.
"There he is!" one shouted and pointed.
Jaune flinched back. It was a repeat of the morning, with the crowd suddenly breaking ranks and racing towards him. Dr White stepped forward protectively and spread his arms out wide. "Please do not crowd him!" he shouted. "He is exhausted after resurrecting your loved ones. Please, respect his space!"
To his shock, it worked. Where before the crowd had attacked a trained and armed huntsman, they now stopped, skidding on the floor and holding themselves back. They continued to look at him, awe and disbelief and gratitude written across their faces. They also saw his fear however, lingering terror from the morning, and several knelt, making themselves smaller.
"Thank you," the nearest man wheezed. "Thank you so much. I… My wife. You've saved her. Our children won't have to grow up without their mother because of you. You're a hero."
"My brother," another shouted. "You brought him back. Thank you! Thank you! If there's anything I can do-"
"My father!"
"My boyfriend."
"My daughter!"
They held out their hands as if to touch him and Jaune, buoyed a little by their words, reached out nervously back. There were too many to shake the hands of, but they touched and ran their hands against his, one grasping him tightly before letting go. They weren't bad people, he reminded himself. Like him, they were people who had lost someone, but unlike him they'd thought they would never get them back.
Jaune smiled shyly and said, "I'm glad I could bring them back…"
The words, innocently spoken; earnestly whispered, were immortalised on the front page of every newspaper in Ansel by the next morning.
And, over the coming weeks, across every newspaper on Remnant.
If that final line doesn't strike an ominous tone, then let me just say it should. This chapter was surprisingly fun to write, mostly because it encapsulates what I feel is so often missing with alt-semblance pieces. I'm sure someone has done something similar (I probs just haven't seen it) but all too often it never is. It's always just "hey, cool semblance – let's go kick butt, form a harem and be amazing". We never get to see how the world reacts to such a Semblance, or how people would react.
And people, sadly, can be terrible.
Driven by hope and desperation they can do things they normally never would and be driven to mob behaviour at the drop of a hat. I mean, if people can turn into savage animals during black Friday of all things, then imagine how bad it'd be if you found out a miracle doctor who could bring back your loved ones lived in a small house in the next town over. You can bet your ass people would travel from hundreds of miles around to beg, demand, bribe and try to guilt them into saving their loved ones.
When planning this, I honestly considered the mob at the start getting hold of him, hurting him badly, carrying him to the nearest graveyard, throwing him down and crowding around him chanting for him to bring everyone back. Jaune, with a dislocated shoulder, covered in dirt and surrounded on every side, would have cried that he couldn't, only for the mob to not listen and keep hounding him until Nicholas and other retired huntsman would arrive to disperse them and rescue a shaken, badly hurt and traumatised young boy.
That felt a little too nasty though.
Though maybe trampling his mother to death in front of him was no less so. My standards are a bit messed up here, it seems.
Next Chapter: 22nd March
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