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Calm yourself.
He leaned against the wall, trying desperately to calm down before someone noticed. Mercury grabbed his head in his hands, struggling. Calm down. He's dead and gone. He can't hurt me anymore.
It was true. Marcus Black was long dead. So why should he get a say in how Mercury felt now? Hadn't he scripted enough of Mercury's life already? Hadn't he hurt him enough already?
Hadn't he already taken everything important from him?
"Buddy?"
Calm. Try...just calm down...
"Buddy?!?"
Calm. Calm. Calm, dammit!
"Breathe. Focus on your breath. Breathe."
An order. Sharp focus cut through all else, clearing Mercury's mind. A command. I can do that.
In. Out. In. Out. Slow and steady, he breathed, and somehow, felt himself grow calmer. He slumped down, falling to the ground, still focusing on his breathing. Then he realized that someone had seen him in his panicked state. Shit.
He looked up. Another student, blonde haired, stood before him. "You good now?" he asked.
"Yeah. I don't believe we've been introduced?"
The student looked offended. "Yes we have. I'm Jaune. Jaune Arc? Remember?"
Mercury thought back. "Nope. Don't remember you. Nice meeting you...again, Jaune."
Jaune looked offended.
"And, uh...thanks for the help." Mercury rose, dusting his suit off.
"No problem," Jaune said, giving a thumbs up. "My aunt was a Huntress in her youth. She sometimes gets panic attacks when reminded of a certain event that happened." He paused, looking Mercury up an down. "But, uh, you're a little young to be suffering from something like that, aren't you?"
Mercury stepped around Jaune, on purposely not answering the question. "Thanks for the help. And if you ever tell anyone about this, I will bury you alive."
"Eh? That's a joke, right?"
"Take a leap of faith," Mercury said with a sly grin over his shoulder.
Over the next few days, he did his best to avoid Jaune. He wasn't as successful as he'd have hoped, given they shared classes together, but managed to avoid giving any indication that he knew Jaune. Which was well enough, as Jaune apparently took Mercury's threat seriously. Mercury had been exaggerating, but Jaune Arc certainly didn't need to know that.
He sat down in the cafeteria, a tray of food on the table in front of him. As he started eating, two hands slammed down on the table in front of him. "Alright, buster!" a ginger-haired student cried. She glared down at him. "What did you do to Jaune?"
"I'm sorry?" Mercury looked up at her, and the other two students who stood with arms crossed behind her. He considered saying, "You're gonna have to be more specific", as a jest, but decided against it, especially when he saw Cinder and Emerald's curious look. "I didn't do anything!" Mercury said quickly.
"Well, he said he had a meeting with you in one of the hallways, and we noticed that you two have been avoiding each other," Nora stated, jabbing a finger at Mercury's neck. "So, spill it!"
"It's nothing more than that," Mercury said. "We bumped into each other, and both said sorry, and both walked our separate ways. If he's avoiding me, that's on him, not on me."
"So, you're not bullying him or anything?" one of the other students asked.
"Uh, no." It wasn't that he wasn't that kind of person--it was that he simply had better things to do with his time. But he wasn't going to tell that to, he guessed, Jaune's teammates. He recognized Pyrrha Nikos among the two in the back.
The one who'd slammed the table looked like she didn't believe him. She pointed from her eyes to his, repeating this gesture as she proceeded to walk backwards and trip over someone's chair. Rising, she turned and walked away normally. The other two students stayed a moment longer before following their friend.
"Did you do something to him?" Cinder demanded, staring at Mercury.
Mercury's immediate response was an indignant, "No!" After thinking back to the meeting, he said, "Okay, so I half-jokingly threatened to bury the guy alive, but I'm sure he didn't take me seriously. Right? Right?"
There was a stunned silence among his teammates. "Oh, Mercury," Emerald said, rubbing her forehead. As if he did it way more often than he actually did.
"It's nothing, really," Mercury said.
"You better hope so," Cinder muttered, returning to her meal.
Later that day, Mercury decided to spend some of his spare time time beating up a punching back. Except he was kicking it. After a particularly heavy blow, the bag swung backwards and hit something with a metallic crash and a cry of pain. Mercury caught the bag as it swung back towards him, then peeked over at the fallen Jaune Arc. "That's kind of what you get for coming in without saying anything," he said casually.
Jaune glared up at him, then sighed. He rose to his feet, dusting himself off, before saying, "Well, I suppose that's fair."
Angling his attacks so the bag wouldn't hit Jaune, Mercury asked, "What's up?"
"I just wanted to apologize for my teammates," Jaune said. "They...might have jumped to a conclusion."
"A fair one, honestly."
"Yeah."
Mercury stopped, raising an eyebrow at the blonde, who, suddenly flustered, said, "I mean, uh..."
"It's okay. I'm well aware of how I look. And, actually pretty glad about it." After a couple of kicks against the poor sand-filled bag, he added, "I normally don't like talking to people. Emerald's described me as 'introverted' on multiple occasions."
"Oh. Do you want me to leave? I-I can go, if you don't wanna talk."
Mercury stopped, balanced on one foot. After precariously swaying a moment, he set both his feet down. "Actually...I don't mind. Which is a surprise...but not one of the bad ones." He grinned at Jaune, when a thought occurred to him. "You know, I've seen Pyrrha in action, but I don't know what kind of damage you can pack. Test match?"
Jaune seemed surprised by the abrupt change of topic. Then, he nodded. "Sure."