AUTHOR'S NOTE: (12/9/2017) There's a bit of a revamp since I decided to go back and flesh out Jaune's four years of apprenticeship, as well as tweak a few details that I realized would cause plotholes further down the line. This means that the previously posted chapters will be pushed back to make room for the new content, and several edits to previously posted chapters have been made. Thus, there's still one more missing chapter that needs to be written between the current update, Chapter 4, and the old chapter 6. Sorry for any confusion.

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Chapter One

In Which Being Gainfully Employed Is Bad For Your Life Expectancy

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The Arcs had produced huntsmen and huntresses of superior quality for generations. Stalwart, loyal, and indomitable, they stepped onto the battlefields like heroes and heroines of yore, brandishing the golden sigil of their house to inspire hope in the hearts of their allies and terror in the hearts of their enemies.

So it was acutely embarrassing to the Arc family that their youngest son had about the same amount of talent for combat that you might find in a petrified cockroach. It wasn't that he didn't try his best, but he had an oblivious, clumsy way of trying that everyone around him soon learned to dread. There was something about it that inevitably ended up hazardous to not only his own health, but also counterproductive to whatever aim he was trying to achieve. He was the kind of boy who might leap out of a tree to catch a falling maiden, then realize in midair that neither of them had a landing strategy. His heart was in the right place; it was his body that failed to follow suit.

Said body was currently hurtling across the back yard towards a straw dummy, flailing and screaming the entire way.

For a brief moment, his charge actually looked promising - he had raised his wooden practice sword high over his head, his expression was, well, not exactly fierce, but certainly enthusiastic, and he had enough speed to actually do some damage.

He promptly stepped on his own loose shoelace and had a magnificent tumble, arse over teakettle, that planted him facedown into the dirt. He skidded until he was about half a foot short of the straw dummy. As if to add insult to injury, the practice sword that had gone flying into the air when he fell came down with perfect precision to clonk him right in noggin as he attempted to get back up.

Through the window of their home, his father applied his face to his palm for the umpteenth time while his mother cringed sympathetically. Even the straw dummy seemed to look down at the fallen boy with pity on its blank straw face.

"He's going to get himself killed," his father said somberly. "Won't even be a Grimm. It'll be something humiliating like tripping over a rock or swallowing a poisonous bug."

"Perhaps if we unlocked his aura...?" His mother trailed off with a sort of resigned hopelessness that made it rather clear she didn't think it would solve anything at all.

"With no skill to back it up? Might as well just dump some syrup on him and serve him to the beasts on a platter. It'd be faster and less painful," his father growled. He shook his head and continued, "No, I'll take him into town for the hiring fair. With all the craftsman that'll be attending, I'm sure at least one will be willing to take him on as an apprentice."

"It'll break his heart. He had it set on becoming huntsman like you," said his mother.

His father heaved another heavy sigh and said, "I know. But I'd rather he be alive to regret it than too dead to care."

Then the man pushed open the window and hollered across the yard, "Jaune!"

The boy flinched at the sound of his name and fumbled the practice sword that he had just picked up. The tips of his ears were red with embarrassment as he jogged over with the realization that his parents had seen the entire kerfuffle with the dummy.

"Get inside and clean yourself up," his father barked, "You'll need to be presentable when we go into town."

Jaune awkwardly tried to brush some dirt out of his hair as he asked, "Why're we going into town?"

"To find you a proper trade," his father answered.

Jaune's eyes widened. He opened his mouth to protest, but his father cut him off, "You're already thirteen. Any older and there won't be anyone willing to take you on. You don't want to end up as a worthless layabout, do you?"

The boy hung his head in shame.

"...no," he answered glumly.

His father clapped him on the shoulder and said, "Then no more griping, and get changed. Unless you're aspiring to become a swine keeper, all that dirt's gonna give people the wrong impression."

. . .

As it turned out, Jaune was not in danger of being apprenticed to a swine keeper. He was, in fact, in greater danger of not being apprenticed at all.

The fact of the matter was that Jaune was uniquely ill-suited to the task of standing in line and waiting to be picked. The nervous fidgeting combined with the desperate urge to flee resulted in the unfortunate overall impression of a woodland critter who was about to throw all caution to the wind and toss itself snout-first into a much larger predator. As this was not a particularly desirable quality in anything except hunting bait, Jaune consistently remained the last person to be chosen whenever there was any sort of choosing to be done.

Granted, professional tradesmen generally looked for a wider array of qualities than children choosing teams at recess, but Jaune seemed just as deficient in those additional qualities, because he still found himself standing awkwardly in the middle of the town square even as all the other kids were plucked from the line like the least offensive piece fruit from a grocer's cart.

It wasn't that Jaune even particularly wanted to be chosen; he didn't want to be a tinkerer, or a cooper, or a travelling shoe shiner. It was just that the kids who turned up at these fairs were already from the bottom of the barrel - the ones that had either failed to get into combat school or had been deemed too incompetent to entrust with the family business. Since the Arc family business was combat, Jaune had the ignominious prestige of fulfilling both conditions in one fell swoop.

"Dad, let's just go home," he sighed as the street sweeper who had started cleaning up the fairgrounds gave them a pitying look. No offer of apprenticeship though. Even street sweepers had higher standards, it seemed. "I can always just...become a farmer or something." 'Like a huntsman,' he thought, but didn't dare voice aloud.

"Fair's not over until midnight," his father rebuffed him. There was a steely glint in his father's eyes that made Jaune shut up without further protest.

The young Arc scion glanced up at the sky and shivered. The shattered moon above was almost completely obscured by clouds, and there was an ominous rumble far off in the distance that promised rain. His father seemed immune to the brisk cold settling in, but Jaune had to clench his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. He wondered if he would every become anything like his father. If his father was a towering tree, then Jaune was an acorn that had not just fallen far from the tree, but had also rolled off the edge of a cliff, into a river, which then swept it out to sea.

A sharp gust of cold wind whistled through the fairgrounds. A stray tumbleweed rolled through town square. By this point, it was quite clear that no one else was coming, and Jaune felt both ashamed and just a tiny bit relieved.

The clock tower tolled for midnight. It tolled once, twice, thrice - eleven times total, but then it stopped. Everything stopped. The twelfth toll never came. In fact, the entire town seemed to fall completely silent, save for a sudden 'clip-clop-clip-clop' of staccato hooves on hard paving stones that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at all.

Jaune squinted through the gloom until the blurry white shape resolved itself into a horse. A rather lovely horse, in fact, with a pale white coat and a shimmering mane that trailed in the breeze even when there wasn't any breeze to be had. She was the sort of mare you might expect a prince charming to ride in on during the climatic scene of a children's fairytale.

The rider, however, was about as far away from charming as you could get without being an eldritch abomination. Or at least, an obvious one, since there was something distinctly eldritch about the rider even if it seemed to be making a token effort to appear humanoid. Said eldritch being was probably not a prince either, unless the fashions of the defunct nobility had changed drastically since the last time Jaune had the misfortune of reading a celebrity tabloid. The rider was swathed from head to toe in a black - well - Jaune hesitated to call it a cloak, because it seemed more like a patchwork of black fabric that a Beowulf had chewed up and spat back out. The rider glanced around the empty square for a moment before looking straight at Jaune.

Jaune found himself looking straight into orbs of cold blue fire hidden in the depths of the rider's cowl. He also noticed the alabaster fingers curled around the reins and the oversized scythe strapped to the rider's back. It was obvious that the rider was no prince charming, but then, prince charming was not the only fairytale who came riding in on a pale horse.

The rider finally spoke in a voice that sounded like a slab of marble being dropped over a tomb. Jaune didn't hear the words so much as they was suddenly there, grinding against the inside of his skull like a bad migraine.

GREETINGS. MY ARRIVAL IS SUITABLY LATE, I HOPE. I WAS TOLD THAT THIS IS THE FASHIONABLE THING TO DO.

Jaune felt a bone deep chill that had nothing to do with the temperature whatsoever. The rider dismounted and stalked towards him in a way that suggested any attempt to flee would be ill-advised. Even more worryingly, his father, who would usually have reacted to such a threatening figure with liberal amounts of violence by now, was completely frozen in place. Everything was completely frozen in place. Everything, that is, except Jaune.

In a very calm voice that only cracked because of puberty and certainly not because of existential dread, Jaune said, "You're Death, aren't you?"

WELL SPOTTED. I SEE MY REPUTATION PRECEDES ME.

Jaune swallowed what felt like a lead block that had suddenly gotten crammed in his throat. His voice frustratingly remained an entire octave higher than normal as he asked, "Didn't...all the gods abandon Remnant after they finished making everything?"

Death made an annoyed-sounding 'click'.

ONLY THOSE TWO IRRESPONSIBLE BROTHERS. SOMEONE HAD TO CLEAN UP THEIR MESS. IF THEY HADN'T MEDDLED, THERE WOULD NOT BE ALL THESE 'HUNTSMEN' TYPES WHO NEVER SEEM TO DIE WHEN THEY'RE SCHEDULED TO.

Feeling incredibly alarmed on his father's behalf, Jaune sidled as nonthreateningly as he could between his father and Death, painfully aware that his weedy five-foot-zilch did basically nothing to shield his father's towering six-foot-eight.

"W-well, my father doesn't kill anything unless he really has to. He's also a very good man who really deserves to live a long time. There are a lot of people who still need him, you see. So, I would very much appreciate it if you left him alone." Jaune found the hairs on his neck rising in concert with the pitch of his voice. The last few words came out so high that they were nearly inaudible to the human ear.

Then there was a terrifying rattling sound that Jaune belatedly realized was the sound of Death laughing.

I AM NOT HERE FOR HIM. I AM HERE FOR YOU.

"Oh," said Jaune, his voice coming back down to a normal pitch, much like a deflating balloon. He wasn't sure how he ought to react to being told so bluntly. He wondered briefly what had killed him, because there didn't seem to be anything particularly dangerous in the immediate vicinity (because describing Death as dangerous was a bit like describing water as damp), and prior experience indicated that you couldn't actually die of embarrassment.

But then, he was hardly in a position to argue details with the grim reaper literally bearing down on him, so Jaune swallowed the lump in his throat and asked in a very small voice, "Can I at least say goodbye?"

YOU MISUNDERSTAND, Death said. I WAS TOLD BY A COLLEAGUE THAT THIS IS THE MOST FOOLPROOF WAY TO ACQUIRE AN APPRENTICE.

Jaune's previous train of thought ground to a screeching halt. It took a few tries before he could get a new one started.

"An...apprentice?" Death nodded. "Don't they, uh, need to be, you know?" Jaune drew a finger across his neck and made a gurgling noise.

BEING DEAD IS NOT A JOB REQUIREMENT.

"Huh. Okay." Jaune's heart sank. He wasn't sure what else he could say. He really didn't want to be any sort of apprentice, and even if he had to pick one, an apprentice Grim Reaper was pretty much at the very bottom of the list. It was about as far from being a hero as you could get. He wished he was brave enough to flatly refuse, but he had a feeling that Death didn't exactly take 'no' for an answer. There were a few moments of awkward silence before Jaune spoke up again, saying, "I'm, uh, not exactly cut out for killing people. There's probably someone a lot more qualified."

DON'T BE DAFT. PEOPLE GET KILLED ALL ON THEIR OWN. I SIMPLY COLLECT THEM AFTER THE FACT. IMAGINE THE MESS IT WOULD CAUSE IF PEOPLE DID NOT DIE WHEN THEY ARE KILLED.

Well, that certainly wasn't wrong, even if it didn't sound quite right.

Jaune said lamely, "Are you sure there isn't anyone better suited?"

Death shrugged. PAST EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT AWKWARD YOUTHS WITH NO APPARENT PURPOSE IN LIFE MAKE THE BEST APPRENTICES. CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE THE MOST AWKWARD AND PURPOSELESS YOUTH I COULD FIND. I'M SURE YOUR ABSENCE WILL MAKE NO DIFFERENCE IN THE GREATER SCOPE OF THE TIME-SPACE CONTINUUM.

'Well, if Death itself says that I'll never amount to anything, that's kinda the final nail in the coffin, isn't it?' Jaune thought hollowly to himself. It was better than wasting his entire life chasing a dream that would never come true, but not by much. Given that the alternative was apprenticing himself to personification of the Worst Case Scenario, wasting his life sounded like a surprisingly attractive choice. Unfortunately, turning down Death's offer of apprenticeship face to face sounded like a Very Bad Idea - capital letters and all.

Feeling a little sorry for himself, Jaune hedged, "Then can you undo whatever you did to my dad? I'm still a minor, so he's the one who has to agree to it." If anyone could say no to Death, it would be his father.

OF COURSE. IT'S NOT LIKE I CAN KEEP TIME OUT FOREVER ANYWAY. Death paused, then amended, OR RATHER, I COULD, BUT IT WOULD BE TERRIBLY RUDE.

Death snapped its fingers, and an odd purplish light seemed to wash over reality, followed by what could only be described as a 'pop' before the long delayed twelfth toll of the courthouse bell finally rolled through the town square.

Jaune's father seemed to unfreeze gradually, his eyes glossy and disoriented for a moment before he stumbled backwards, suddenly confronted by someone who clearly hadn't been there the moment before. He blinked a few more times before his gaze seemed to focus on an indeterminate point behind the figure.

"Sorry, didn't see you for a moment there. Mind must've wandered," his father said, apparently seeing nothing wrong with a cloaked figure with fire for eyes and a massive scythe strapped across its back.

NO HARM DONE. I WAS ABOUT TO MAKE YOUR BOY AN OFFER OF EMPLOYMENT.

His father's demeanor immediately changed, his expression becoming much more engaged. "Is that so? What was your profession again?"

I USHER SOULS INTO THE NEXT WORLD, said Death.

"Ah, should have guessed, from your outfit," his father said with a nod before turning to Jaune, "What do you think, son? Think you can hack it as an undertaker? It might not be the most glamorous of jobs, but it's still very respectable and necessary work."

"I don't think -" Jaune began, but never got a chance to finish.

"He'll do it," his father said without waiting for him to answer.

EXCELLENT, said Death, clapping its bony hands together. I HAVE PREPARED A CONTRACT WITH ALL THE RELEVANT DETAILS. IF YOU WOULD READ IT, AND SIGN IF THE TERMS ARE AGREEABLE, THEN WE CAN HAVE EVERYTHING SETTLED RIGHT HERE. I AM VERY BUSY, AFTER ALL, AND HAVE BEEN AWAY FROM MY POST FOR TOO LONG ALREADY AS IT IS.

A piece of paper appeared out of thin air in a flash of blue fire. Once again, his father failed to react as if anything out of the ordinary was happened. Jaune took a peek at the contract, and found it entirely blank, even as his father seemed to be reading it intently.

He looked over at Death, who showed no signs of being apologetic about whatever strange supernatural mind tricks were going on.

"These are generous terms. Very generous," his father said, his eyebrows rising up to his hairline after perusing an entirely blank piece of parchment for five minutes. "This will be a very intensive apprenticeship, I take it? Will he have time to visit home? Where exactly do you practice your trade?"

HE WILL BE WHERE HE NEEDS TO BE AND HAVE AS MUCH TIME AS HE NEEDS TO HAVE. I AM SURE YOUR PATHS WILL CROSS AGAIN. AS FOR LOCATION, HM. IT WOULD NOT BE AN EXAGGERATION TO SAY THAT THERE IS NO CORNER ON REMNANT BEYOND MY REACH.

To Jaune's dismay, his father looked impressed. "Not many firms operate cross-continents. It'll be a good experience for the lad to see a bit more of the world. Under what name should I look for your company, by the way?"

DEATH, said Death.

His father paused briefly, then let out a dry chuckle.

"Well, that's straightforward, at the very least. A man oughta be upfront and honest about what he does, eh?" He grabbed the magical ballpoint pen that also materialized out of thin air in a flash of blue fire and signed at the bottom of the blank contract. Then he handed it to Death.

The bony fingers closed around the rolled parchment, and Jaune imagined them closing around his neck as well. There was no going back now.

Death tucked the contract into its voluminous sleeves, then the orbs of blue flame flickered towards Jaune. Despite the fact that the rest of Death's face was still entirely concealed in the shadow of its cowl, Jaune got the sinking feeling that it was smiling at him.

EXCELLENT. I MUST REMEMBER TO SEND MY COLLEAGUE A FRUIT BASKET TO THANK HIM FOR THE GOOD ADVICE. LUCKILY, I NOW HAVE AN APPRENTICE TO DEAL WITH THAT ON MY BEHALF. I LOVE IT WHEN THESE THINGS WORK OUT NEATLY.

Jaune gulped audibly. He briefly considered praying for someone, anyone to save him, but he had no idea which deity would hear him, and if it happened to be Death, then his pleas might be interpreted entirely the wrong way.

. . .