Well, this has been sitting in my drafts folder since May of last year. Exactly since May last year, to the day, actually. About time I actually did something with it, even if it's just to post the first chapter and never touch it again. Who knows, maybe somebody out there might actually like it enough to want it to continue. I won't lie and say it's a great story, but it helped to break my writer's block, so who knows.

Thanks to Robert Waldron, Eclectic Bunny, GIGGY and Maxstroid for supporting me this month! I really appreciate it!

Oh, and Systema's next chapter is coming ASAP, I promise.

Death.

Life's greatest nemesis, it's finality, the end of the cycle.

It was supposed to be a time of eternal rest, an unending relinquishment of duty, responsibility, and pain.

Jaune Arc had died over a hundred years ago.

Now he'd be one hundred and thirty five, give or take a few months.

Only one person was still counting, though.

And it wasn't as if they were truly a person to begin with.

To them, death was less of a finality, and more of a… choice. One that he lacked.

He'd been Ozpin the first time Jaune saw him. He'd been Oscar the last time Jaune saw him.

Now, he was once more someone else, but the mind was the same.

"I'm so sorry, Mr Arc. The world has need of you once more."

Awakening.

He was not supposed to have another one.

His mouth moved, but no sound escaped his lips.

His eyes swivelled and rotated, looking around, but he could not see.

Bright. Too bright.

He could hear things. Too loud.

Deafening, almost.

He could make out voices, screaming in agony, and others speaking softly.

The light flickered, the bulb blowing in his face, and already it was back, burning his eyes.

He could feel restraints on his arms.

Why? Why could he feel restraints on his arms?

He pushed against them, felt a hand against his chest, pushing him back.

He didn't like that. He pushed harder.

The hand left, and a sharp pain replaced it, and soon he felt nothing again.

Another awakening. This time it was less bright, less loud. His senses were working overtime just to keep up, but now they were able to distinguish features. White ceiling. White walls. White lab-coats.

So much white.

But the sights and sounds gave him pause, time enough to reflect.

The where wasn't important right now. Neither was the why, the how, nothing.

What was important was the who.

Who was he?

A name floated past any and all barriers that lay in his scrambled mind.

Jaune Arc.

He knew that name. It was his own. And yet it felt foreign, old.

He was still restrained. More restraints, this time. Leather bindings over his arms, legs and chest.

"I'm sorry it had to be like this, Mr Arc."

That voice. Unfamiliar, yet all too familiar.

It was the tone. The very way his own name escaped the mouth of the one who spoke.

Jaune turned his head to stare at the newcomer. A man, dark-skinned, glasses. Details that mattered little. Jaune knew who he really was.

He tried to speak, but all that escaped was a guttural growl that made him seem more animal than human.

"You were never supposed to be brought back."

Back?

"We've placed some… mental barriers, to prevent the memories from assailing you. They will come back with time, of course, it is just for your own good."

Jaune tried to speak again, another growl.

"As for now, rest. Your nurse will attend to you."

The man left the room, a white door sliding open to both let him out and let in a brunette woman in white scrubs, who quickly began checking a chart at the foot of his bed.

Jaune's senses had returned to him, now. His throat still felt like razor-wire, and he couldn't speak, but he could feel his Aura.

The nurse turned her back, and Jaune moved.

Tearing leather was never easy. In fact, it was almost impossible for a normal person.

Jaune had never been normal. This wasn't even the first time he'd been bound in a hospital bed like this.

He didn't know how he knew that. Memories, he supposed. They must have been trickling back in. He knew it had happened, he just didn't remember specifics.

The nurse turned around in shock as Jaune glowed bright, brighter than the room, and the sound of tearing escaped the glow.

Then Jaune stood, one arm resting against the wall.

"You- you shouldn't be up!" The nurse exclaimed, frantically trying to push him back down.

Jaune placed a hand against her shoulder and gently pushed her backwards as he stepped towards the door.

It didn't open.

"Open it," He growled, his voice sounding like it was through shredded vocal cords.

The nurse looked as if she was contemplating a declination of his request. Jaune simply narrowed his gaze, and she obligated quickly.

Jaune stepped through the door, into a hallway that was far too familiar for his own mind to comprehend.

He took a left, instinct controlling his movements as his conscious mind reeled, and he stepped past a doctor, who looked at him in shock, unable to react.

Jaune paid him no mind, still walking.

Beacon.

He was in Beacon.

Why was he in Beacon?

Jaune kept moving. He knew the layout of this building like the back of his own hand, and soon he was at the exit.

He was surprised no one had tried to stop him yet.

Then again, could anyone here stop him?

He didn't know. The fact that Ozpin was in a new body told him a lot of things.

His memories were still coming back.

A woman, hair redder than blood.

The memory sprung into his mind unbidden, and sent him reeling, both physically and mentally. He stumbled backwards, nearly losing his footing.

He shrugged it off, pushing through and maintaining his heading.

He wasn't sure what he was going to find.

Now, though, he knew it would be wrong.

Something wasn't right. Multiple things weren't right.

Windows that had been previously walls. Buildings missing, or buildings where none had been before.

Beacon was not as he remembered it.

Jaune stumbled outside, pushing through the final door that held the barrier between the inside and outside of Beacon's infirmary.

A balcony? This wasn't right.

"What?" Jaune exhaled, hands coming to rest against the railing.

"I underestimated you once more, Mr Arc. I should have known those restraints would prove futile against you."

Jaune turned to his side, and the man that held Ozpin within him let out a sigh.

"This is a shock to you, I imagine."

"A shock? A shock!? Vale's gone!" Jaune shouted, gesturing to the skyline. "Everything I knew is gone, isn't it?!"

His voice was as hoarse as before, spittle flying.

The man nodded. "Yes. You have been brought back from the dead, Mr Arc. A hundred years have you lain dead. Or, so we thought."

"What?"

"Vale was destroyed twenty years ago. As was Mistral. As was Atlas. As was Vacuo. As was Menagerie."

Jaune stared in mute shock at the skyline, the information almost refusing to permeate his brain.

"This is our final stand against the forces of darkness, Mr Arc. Welcome to Bastion."

Bastion, the final stand. It was advertised as such, and with no homes left, people of every kind flocked to it.

The last refuge of humanity and faunus-kind, Bastion was a city in name only. It was more akin to a massive military base.

Obligatory conscription, propaganda, the works.

Bastion was a militarized state.

The information sent Jaune into shock, even more so than he had been before.

Beacon floated, now. Gone were the cliffs he was so familiar with, gone the Emerald Forest.

Now it was suspended, much like Atlas had once been, tethered to Bastion.

"I thought we killed Salem."

The man sighed. "We did, Mr Arc. You did. But Salem was not the progenitor of the Grimm, only their controller. She reigned them, true, but her reign came with restrictions. They were never truly let off the leash, never truly allowed to run wild. After over a hundred years?"

Jaune rested his head in his hands. "And what's this iteration's name?"

"I am Ozian."

Jaune let out a bitter laugh. "Ozian, huh. Do you ever have someone whose name doesn't start with Oz?"

Ozian didn't answer that, instead choosing to wait for Jaune's next question.

"What's left, Oz? Who's left?"

Ozian leant against the railing next to Jaune, looking out over midday Bastion.

"I'm afraid that there's no-one left of the Vanguard, Mr Arc."

Jaune knew it was coming, and it still felt like a stab to the heart.

"So why bring me back? What could you possibly want me for?"

Ozian turned to face Jaune. "Two reasons. The first, is that you are the only Arc who ever knew how to wield Crocea Mors properly. Second, it wasn't us that brought you back, technically."

Jaune decided to wave away the first reason for the moment. "What do you mean it wasn't you?"

"Councilman Schnee ordered a raid on an abandoned facility that had been suspected of housing Cultists," Ozian began, noting the confusion on Jaune's expression. "We'll fill you in on the details later, just know that we hadn't been expecting anything but pockets of resistance and minimal resources. It was supposed to be a low-priority target. What was planned on being a ten-minute operation became a four hour siege, and all to protect one single asset."

Jaune paled. "Me?"

Ozian nodded. "And the tomb you came in. Something had preserved you, for years. Your body was perfectly maintained by whatever it was you were contained in, and all the preparations to resurrect you had been completed. They were hours away from bringing one of the Vanguard back, and we believe they were planning on using your disoriented state to brainwash you. To turn you into a loyal member of the cult."

"You mentioned the cult. Explain."

Ozian obliged. "The day of your death, the rest of the Vanguard decided to bring the truth to light, and reveal to the world exactly what the Second Great War had truly been about. There was public outrage, of course, but at no point was it ever directed at the Vanguard. It was always directed at the politicians, and, when the politicians revealed that they too had been in the dark, it became directed at Oscar. At no point had we revealed my tendency to reincarnate, so the public were left with many questions, but at no point were the Vanguard ever treated as anything less than heroes."

Jaune watched what looked like a sleeker, smoother Bullhead take to the sky from a landing pad on the closest edge of Beacon. "That hasn't answered my question."

Ozian sighed. "I hadn't wanted to ask you this question so soon. Do you remember how you died?"

Jaune shut his eyes.

Flashes of red, black and white. Pain. Suffering. Screaming.

"Glimpses. Nothing concrete. I barely remember."

Ozian nodded. "As expected. We know it wasn't the cult that killed you, at least, the known cult. Perhaps they'd been around for longer, amassing a force, but regardless, when we came out about the Second Great War, there was a schism. One that forced many to accept a bitter truth. That we were our own greatest enemy. The cult spawned from this feeling, perhaps, or some other reason. To be honest, I couldn't tell you when or why they appeared. But they did. Five years after you died, we lost a village south of Vale. Razed to the ground, all the villagers sacrificed in a ritual in an attempt to bring Salem back from the dead."

Jaune's eyes widened. "Did it work?"

Ozian shook his head. "Of course not. Rituals don't work, they never did. Magic was different. But that hasn't stopped the cult from both amassing a following of people who either want to bring back their dead, or simply want to burn us to the ground. Whatever the individual reasons, the cult went from being an annoyance no bigger than a small group of bandits to a threat that led to the destruction of the five kingdoms. Attacks en masse from cultists that led to immense Grimm attacks. We lost them all."

Jaune's fists clenched against the railing.

"Now, Bastion outlawed any and all worship of anything the cultists might have been linked to. They're still a threat, but we believed we'd mostly stamped them out. It appears we were wrong."

"So, we know that they tried to bring me back. Why continue?"

"That leads us to the first reason. You are the only person who truly knows how to wield Crocea Mors to its fullest extent. The knowledge was lost with your death."

Jaune scoffed. "Not much good it'll do. It needs an Arc to wield it, and I used my connection with it to kill Salem. It won't accept me again. We know that already."

Ozian nodded. "Which is why I am not asking you to wield it. We just need the knowledge to be passed on."

Those words captured Jaune's attention like no other. "Passed on?"

"Yes. Your great-granddaughter, Blossom Arc."

Jaune had fallen silent. He'd allowed himself to be led back to his room in the infirmary, and was resting in the bed, thankfully not restrained.

The nurse he'd had before seemed almost frantic anytime she came near him, but he paid her no mind.

He had a great-granddaughter.

It was a strange thing.

He'd known he'd had a daughter, of course. She'd been ten when he'd…

More flashes. Red. White. Blood across the floor, arterial. His own neck.

She'd been there. His wife hadn't been there, Yang had been out with the rest of Team RWBY, on some cleanup.

His daughter, Daisy.

His daughter was dead. So was his wife, his friends, his family, everyone.

But he had a great-granddaughter.

Blossom.

Jaune almost laughed aloud. So many things had gone wrong in his life. Now he was given a second chance of a sort, only to find out that instead of losing one person close to him, he'd lost them all.

The only person who really knew him was an immortal, reincarnating wizard, one that Jaune despised.

And what, he'd brought him back to teach the girl how to use a weapon that was so outrageously outdated now that it had fought in both Great Wars?

Jaune supposed that Crocea Mors was older than that. It was possibly the oldest weapon in existence, if you didn't count the amount of times it had been upgraded and reforged.

Then again, he was also quite old, now. One hundred and thirty five. He was now the third oldest person to grace Remnant, at least, so he thought. Salem and Ozpin, or Ozian, as he was called now, took that record for first and second respectively, though one was dead, so technically Ozian was in first place.

His mind was wandering again. It had been a habit for so many years.

Jaune actually did laugh out loud at that. He was lucky the nurse had already left.

After all these years, he'd developed an impatience for the games Oz played.

Jaune got out of the bed and put on the clothes that the nurse had brought him. She obviously expected that he wouldn't be able to leave if she wasn't there to let him out.

The door was biometrically encoded to Aura signatures, Jaune knew. So, he reached out.

His Aura glowed, and he felt around the complex. It didn't take long to find someone who he knew would be encoded into the security.

His Aura connected, and Jaune felt the person. A doctor, the one he'd passed in the hall.

The door hissed open and he quickly stepped through, relinquishing his connection as he did so, the door sliding closed behind him with a pneumatic hiss.

He was going to go wander around Bastion. It was a dumb idea, even now he knew that. He didn't need any fancy retrospection or hindsight to know that something would go wrong.

But he had to go anyway. There was something he had to find.

All he had to do was search for it.

Sneaking onto a transport to Bastion from Beacon was a bit more difficult than Jaune had expected, so instead he decided he'd just cling to the outside of one.

It sounded more difficult than it was, to be fair. The transports he'd been used to sneaking onto, or hanging onto, more often than not, were much less rigid and angled than these. They were pretty much designed for his somewhat unconventional method of catching a ride.

A trick he'd learned from Sun, so many years ago.

Once he was close enough to the ground to drop without attracting too much attention, he released his grip and fell, landing in an Aura-assisted roll on a rooftop, of which he quickly scaled down, using the fire escape to descend rapidly into the alley at the side of the building.

He was lucky his beard had grown long, as had his hair. They would prove to be valuable for disguising his appearance, because already he was getting stares of vague recognition.

At least what he was wearing wasn't ostentatious or obviously 'Arc'. That'd bring more attention that he was willing to accept.

It took him almost no time to find an information booth in the center of a plaza he'd wandered into, and he quickly found where he was headed.

And then, after a walk, he arrived at his destination.

"Second Great War Memorial Monument, huh?" He muttered to himself as he stepped into the large park.

The monument in question was something that brought back a pang of nostalgia.

It was not a single statue, but eight separate ones, four on each side of the path.

Ruby, Weiss, Blake and Yang stood on the left, standing tall.

Ren, Nora, Pyrrha and himself on the right, standing equal.

All surrounded by mingling people, all paying their respects.

Some of the people stood at attention, their uniforms ones that Jaune did not recognize, unsurprisingly. The rest, civilians, taking the time to pay tribute to the people they viewed as heroes.

Seven of the eight statues deserved the praise and respect.

His own did not.

There were a few people crowding around his monument, but most paid their tribute and moved on. None had the connection with him, or any of the Vanguard, besides respect. No one knew the Vanguard.

There was one that he noticed, however.

A teenager, blonde hair, blue eyes. She stepped back from Yang's monument, and walked over to his.

And, in that instant, the familial resemblance was too much for him.

The same hair as Yang, the same colour as the both of them, and she held herself the way he had once held himself, without the confidence he felt when he'd killed the Queen of the Grimm.

Without the fury. Without the anger. Without the rage. Without the sadness. Without the regret.

It was innocence, he knew.

He was walking up to her, he didn't know why. He wasn't in control of himself anymore.

"Who was he to you?" He asked, though each word was out of his control.

She whipped her head around, surprised to be addressed.

"He- he was my great-grandfather…" The girl said, trailing off in that awkward way that reminded him so much of himself when he'd been her age.

He nodded along to her words. "I see."

"What… what about you?" She asked, almost like she was struggling against the words that left her mouth.

"Lost."

With that, Jaune left.

This had been a mistake. It was all a mistake.

"Do.. do I know you?" The girl asked his retreating form.

Jaune simply shook his head. "Not yet."

Finding a place to drink wasn't difficult. Finding one that wasn't busy, that didn't pay any attention to their clientele, that was somewhat more of a challenge.

But, then again, it wasn't like he had anything to steal, or, for that matter, anything to pay with.

So, Jaune was going to have to steal a drink.

Oh, what a low he'd fallen to.

He didn't care, though. What were they going to do, arrest him? He'd only end up back in Oz's hands again.

"Two shots of the strongest stuff you got," Jaune said, slumping into a seat at the bar.

The barkeep raised an eyebrow. "Thirty lien."

Jaune shook his head dismissively. "Lemme teach you a little trick I learned from an old friend of mine. You see someone ask for two shots, first, you give 'em the two shots. Then, when they've drunk 'em, you hit 'em again. Once they're well and truly out to it, you tell them the price, 'cept you triple their total. They'll be so out of it they'll pay whatever you ask, and you keep the change. Easy trick."

The bartender raised an eyebrow.

"Go on, try it on me. I promise I'll be too hammered to remember this conversation."

The bartender rolled his eyes, but grabbed two shot glasses and filled them with a liquid that Jaune didn't recognize. Though, once again, that was no surprise.

Jaune downed the first shot within a moment, and shivered involuntarily as the liquid nearly threatened to come back up. "I know I asked for your strongest stuff, but you'd think they'd make it taste a little better…"

When he got no response, he figured that the bartender was used to listening to drunken ramblings, and had blocked out most of what was being said.

Maybe he'd try again, though. Couldn't hurt. With another shiver, he downed the other shot.

"My wife made me stop drinking when we got married. Told me it wasn't a great way to raise a kid. Figured I'd agree with her, she'd had some pretty shitty role models when she was growing up. She knew it from personal experience, so I did as she asked."

The bartender was not paying him any attention. He turned to serve another client, and reached under the bar for a new glass.

Jaune slid off the bar stool with a single movement and slipped out the door with practised ease.

It had been a while since he'd had to do something like that. Since Atlas at least.

This was for a far less noble cause, though. No great quest, no war to fight, no ultimate evil to stop.

No, Jaune had stolen some drinks at a bar.

And yet, already it appeared that some of Bastion's soldiers were searching for him.

He wasn't an idiot, though some would have disagreed with that, long ago.

Oz had sent them out with his description. And they'd been tracking him.

Tracking him rather well. He imagined that had something to do with the floating camera drones he'd seen hovering above the streets.

Jaune hadn't been a professional for no reason, though. Evading a bunch of soldiers was almost easy.

Almost. The fact that they had constant surveillance made it somewhat more complicated.

Then again, was there a reason he was slipping between crowded streets, pushing through people and ducking through alleys?

All they'd end up doing is taking him back to Beacon.

He didn't need to avoid them, really.

He was testing them, now. That was his excuse, the reason he'd come up with to give his mind a chance to rest, no longer straining to achieve a concept of stability in this unstable environment he'd found himself in.

Now he had a goal, something to reach. Now he could focus, eliminate all excess thoughts, ideas, concepts, problems.

He moved with the grace and efficacy only someone with decades of experience in the field could muster, and whilst his destination was unknown, his path was clear.

He pushed past a man selling something from his jacket, ragged as it was, and slid in between a couple loudly talking to each other, as if they were both deaf.

He dipped through an alley, noted the six guardsmen that were searching through the crowd, and doubled back, ducking into a doorway.

The door wasn't the most solidly constructed, and neither was the lock. With a sharp but simple nudge, Jaune popped the mechanism free of the wooden frame, closing the door behind him as he walked into the lobby of what looked like an old apartment building.

One that still housed people, of course, but this wasn't exactly an upscale neighbourhood.

The other side of the hallway he was in, aside from the stairs, was another door. Unfortunately, there was also about three soldiers currently trying to open it.

"Shit."

Jaune took the stairs three at a time, not even bothering with subtlety anymore, simply kicking down the first door and stepping through.

A woman shrieked in surprise, dropping a frying pan and reaching behind her kitchen counter for something.

Jaune ignored her, grabbing hold of the window on the far side of the apartment, yanking it open. He was midway through climbing through when he heard a loud gunshot, and felt his Aura flicker in agitation as the round dented it, ricocheting off and breaking a vase on a shelf.

Jaune paused for a moment to raise an eyebrow at the woman before continuing out of the window and onto the fire escape behind it.

He decided against the obvious route and quickly began climbing, metal clanging underfoot as he trekked up the external staircase, until it was just a short ladder to reach the roof.

He ignored the ladder, instead just leaping the remaining distance, one hand grabbing the ledge and hauling himself up.

It turned out to be a bad decision, but considering he really hadn't expected the soldiers to have a near-silent aircraft above the building, he was at least confident that, had he tried to pull something like this off a century ago, he'd have been very successful.

As it was, there were a lot of weapons aimed at him.

Jaune slowly raised his hands. "Well, gents, it's been fun."

"Drop him."

Jaune barely even had time to register the words before everything went black.

Maybe this'll get a second chapter, who knows. I certainly don't, we've all seen how great I am at starting crap I never finish :P

Is it weird that it's Dragonslayer? Yeah, a little. Am I a sucker for pretty much every more-common pairing in RWBY? You bet your ass.

Well, I hope you enjoyed what little of this there is, and I hope I'll be able to bring some more to the table at some point. If you want, you can head over to my Pa Treon and demand I write more of this, and maybe toss me a dollar while you're there?

If that's too much to ask, and I can understand why it would be, but you really want more of this, let me know. Public appeal goes a long way for motivation.

And, as always, see you next chapter! (If I ever write it, good gods am I bad at sticking to deadlines)
~AFatFlyingWhale