Author's Note: Damn you all to hell. Really now, I was expecting a nice easy week doing nothing much besides what I need to in order to keep a roof over my head and bread in my belly and what do I find not even three days after I upload this? Two hundred plus follows, nearly as many favorites and almost two thousand views! How the hell am I supposed to ignore that? And then I get more shit on my other stories and pleas to update? Thanks, now I have to try to get something out or else risk looking like a complete asshole.

Seriously, though, I appreciate you all, and to show my appreciation, I managed to pump out another chapter. It's not quite as long as the first one, but it's still something and that's better than waiting a year or so, right? Also, before I forget, I don't really hate Kubo, and I understand that he was pressured by SJ to finish it up because consumerism! and stuff, it just really frustrates me, and I'm pretty easy to rile up.

Disclaimer and Warning still apply from the first chapter.

Chapter 2: ...And Workin' Overtime

By the following week, Ichigo had settled into his new job with all the gusto of a young man far too used to adapting quickly to dangerous situations. His office wasn't much to write home about (if he even could), but it was efficient, and there was a cozy little apartment behind it that was much nicer than the one above Alternative Staffing. He'd managed to get all the supplies organized in a way that allowed him to quickly and easily find whatever it was he needed anywhere across the campus. Apparently, Goodwitch had been forced into the role of maintenance worker thanks to the utility of her Semblance, and she hadn't really used much in the way of tools and other necessities for those not gifted with Telekinesis.

The most difficult aspect of his job wasn't really anything to do with the work itself, however, but the people. Ichigo never really considered himself much of a people-person; his close circle of friends before the whole shinigami business was a testament to that. It seemed, though, that once Yang and Nora had realized he had somehow become the full-time custodian of Beacon, it was all he could do to find time to himself.

Energetic people didn't really bother him as much as he went on about it, otherwise he would have had nothing to do with Keigo whatsoever. Still, having more than one in the same place with their attentions all focused on him was more than a little irritating.

Yang seemed to have decided that rebuffing her advances meant that he was just playing hard to get, since she never failed to find him when work was slow to pester him. Nora, too, had taken up that particular habit, offering to show him how well her warhammer (which was also, coincidentally, a grenade launcher) could break legs every other waking moment of his life. The worst part was that their respective partners, Lie Ren and Blake Belladonna, seemed to encourage the behavior. Ichigo had a sinking suspicion that they only did it to get their bright-haired comrades to leave them alone for a while. It worked worryingly well.

Then, there was Yang's younger sister, Ruby Rose, who had gotten into Beacon two whole years early. It was a sure sign to Ichigo that she must have been a prodigious talent, and it showed when she would fall into an info-dump of technobabble every time he got curious about the mech-shift mechanisms. The little redhead was a legitimate genius when it came to the wondrous weapons, and it showed in the masterpiece that was her scythe that doubled as a high-impact sniper rifle. The fact that she went on and on (and on and on) about it to him more often than Nora waxed lyrical about Magnhild just let him know that she was also a complete nerd about it, too.

Pyrrha, to Ichigo's relief, didn't bother him as much as the others, but she would still sometimes stop to greet him whenever they passed in the halls. However, it was her partner, the blonde kid he'd met in the showers, that caught his attention the most. In the past few days, Ichigo had observed the many Hunters-in-training, along with the teachers themselves, quite closely. They were definitely trained warriors, judging by the way they moved and how they all seemed to have a certain sharpness to their gaze. All, of course, except Jaune Arc.

He was so out of place it was almost laughable, until Ichigo remembered that this was a place where the future protectors of humanity honed their skills to fight monsters. His eyes were always uncertain, despite apparently being the leader of his four-person team. The few times Ichigo had watched Jaune train were very close to physically painful to witness. His form was sloppy, his strikes were pitiful (at best), and his shield handling was atrocious. Jaune's only saving grace was that his footwork was paradoxically incredible, and his movements were actually very graceful, though it was more in the way a dancer was than a fighter.

It confused the hell out of Ichigo for a while that even Ruby was more skilled than Jaune despite the two-year age gap. It also didn't help when Ichigo had spotted some well-armored student with orange hair straight-up bullying the blonde, and he was taken back to the days before he was the gruff punk who didn't take shit from anyone and kids would routinely pick on him because he was different.

Ichigo almost brought it up to the other teachers one morning during a faculty meeting (and why he'd been asked to attend was anyone's guess). Almost, but the words didn't quite make it out of his mouth when he realized that perhaps there were some extenuating circumstances he might not be aware of, something that could have been construed as some faux pas in this world's customs. So he held his tongue and headed off on his rounds through the campus.

It was during lunch on the tenth day of his official employment when the first incident at Beacon occurred. He had been sweeping up some spilled food in the large dining hall when a cry of pain brought his attention to a girl with long brown hair and a matching pair of tall rabbit ears. Crowding around her were Jaune's bully and his team, with the orange-haired boy yanking on her ears brutally.

"See?" he guffawed loudly to a kid with a mohawk. "I told you they were real."

"What a freak," came the reply.

Ichigo glanced around, waiting for someone to interfere, and was mildly disappointed (but not surprised) when none of the other students spoke up in the girl's defense. Bystander syndrome in action, he though bitterly. He had been a victim of it himself, and the only person to have ever done something to help was Tatsuki (though he was fairly sure that the first time had only been because she was just a belligerent contrarian by nature).

So, in typical Kurosaki manner, Ichigo strode up right up to them and loudly said, "Oi, cut it out." Simple, to the point, and also quite able of silencing the entire mess hall in an instant.

For a moment, the boys seemed taken aback at the interruption. Then Orange scoffed and jerked a thumb at the girl, who was looking at them both with wide eyes. "Why? She's just some dumb animal."

Ichigo had to grit his teeth to avoid knocking this idiot kid's block off. "Faunus aren't any less sapient than humans, brat," he snapped angrily. "And even if that were the case, what sort of overcompensating little punk intentionally harms animals in the first place?"

Orange turned fully to face Ichigo, rising fury mingling with utter bewilderment on his face as a few snickers were heard in the dining area. "Look, Mr. Janitor," he sneered. "I don't know what your problem is, but you should butt out before you get hurt."

"By who?" Ichigo asked, feigning ignorance. "I doubt you and your little posse of barely-pubescent boys could so much as give me a nosebleed."

With a snarl of outrage, the other three jumped to their feet. Orange bared his teeth in an ineffectual effort at intimidation. "You know that hitting a civilian is just fine if the Huntsman was provoked into it, and I'm sure everyone here will agree that you're pushing it."

"No doubt," Ichigo agreed. "I bet you four could rub all two of the brain cells you've got between you to come up with a decent lie."

With four strangled roars, Orange and his compatriots attacked.

Ichigo smile felt reminiscent of the White Bastard's.

Jaune Arc was a pretty underwhelming person, and he was realistic enough to admit it. For the last month or so, he had been regretting his decision to fake his way into Beacon Academy more and more as the days passed. His team was amazing, his friends in RWBY as well, and he was learning quite a bit about Grimm and history that he probably never would have learned at a civilian college.

But the fact remained that he was a barely competent fighter at his best, and his inadequacy was hammered home every time he saw one of the other students fight. Sure, he'd survived initiation by the skin of his teeth, but that was more to do with Pyrrha saving his bacon, unlocking his Aura, and keeping him alive long enough for the others to enact a plan he'd come up with on the fly than any actual talent. His bout with Cardin earlier that day didn't help matters, especially since he'd seen Ruby hand the armored jerk his ass without breaking a sweat a few days before that.

For a while, he toyed with the idea of asking his friends to help train him, but they had enough on their plates as it was without adding his own woes. He certainly couldn't ask any of the teachers because that would lead to questions which might expose his lies and end up with him in jail or something. Using ViewTube tutorials on how to exercise and get better at fighting only led to disappointment and strained muscles.

It was as he was on the way to bus his tray at lunch a month or so into the school year that Jaune found the perfect solution to his problems. He'd lost his appetite after finding himself willing but unable to help Velvet with Cardin's harrassment, but a clear, calm voice stopped him halfway to the trash cans.

"Oi, cut it out."

Four words (three if you didn't count interjections), and the whole room fell silent. Jaune had seen the new custodian around the past week as he'd done his duty with a sort of grim determination that impressed Jaune greatly. Yang, Ruby, and Nora seemed to enjoy bugging him, but Jaune hadn't heard anything about Ichigo getting angry with them (though he frequently heard Yang gush about how adorable the guy looked when he was annoyed). To be honest, Jaune had already put him out of his mind until that day.

After dressing Cardin and his team down with simple, yet scathing remarks, CRDL jumped into action. Jaune watched in morbid fascination as the push-broom in Ichigo's hand became a deadly weapon, whirling about with enough force to drop every single member of the all-male team before anyone even had a chance to take out their scrolls and start recording. Russel went down first, his olive hair dissheveled and parted oddly by the broom's bristles as it struck him over the head, followed quickly by Sky, who got his legs literally swept out from under him with a quick flick of Ichigo's wrist. Cardin and Dove attempted to double-team him when they saw their teammates drop, and while Ichigo was distracted by whacking Cardin across the face with the handle, Dove managed to crack Ichigo in the side of the mouth with his armored elbow as the orange-haired janitor leaned away from it, only to get flipped over Ichigo's shoulder and the metal-clad young man's head met with his leader's, sending them both into unconsciousness.

It was as marvelous a thing as Jaune had ever seen. A civilian had just taken out an entire team of Huntsment (albeit ones still in training) with a cleaning implement. And the only injury Ichigo had received in turn was a split lip and slightly bruised jaw.

Snorting in annoyance as he dabbed at the blood, Ichigo began to pull CRDL over to the wall and then continued sweeping as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. A buzzing noise filled the cafeteria as everyone began talking at once, but it was silenced once more by none other than Glynda Goodwitch as she burst through the doors. Her wintergreen eyes zeroed in on the unconscious forms of her students before turning to Ichigo.

"Mr. Kurosaki, would you care to explain what I just witnessed on the security cameras?" she asked pointedly.

"Just doin' my job," Ichigo replied with an impressive amount of nonchalance, considering Goodwitch was leveling her patented 'soul-crushing glare' at him.

"And what part of your duties involve assaulting an entire team of students?" the deputy head challenged, her voice rising steadily.

Ichigo, to Jaune's (and likely everyone else's) astonishment, actually smirked at her. "Taking care of the trash, Ms. Goodwitch, nothing more."

Goodwitch deliberately closed her eyes, rubbed her temples, then lifted Team CRDL in her Semblance. "I will deal with them for now, but you and I will be having words about this," she warned.

The custodian's eyes narrowed as he nodded. "I look forward to it," he said levelly. "Maybe you can explain to me why such blatant bigotry is allowed here; it must be some cultural difference I don't understand."

With a reluctant sigh, Goodwitch turned and left the dining area, and after a moment Ichigo finished sweeping and departed as well, leaving most of the students within stunned at the display and Jaune's mind whirling with possibilities.

He was quite distracted for the rest of the day, barely hearing a word of Doctor Oobleck's lecture about Captain Legume's doomed assault on Palace Mansion as he tried to come up with a plan of action. Even Cardin's pestering didn't bother him enough to sway his mind from its task, such was the zeal of his focus until eventually, the school day came to a close. After making sure Nora ate an actual dinner that didn't consist (solely) of pancakes, gently bullying Ren into getting a shower in before he collapsed in his bed (because he surely wouldn't wake up in time for one the next morning), and adamantly stopping Pyrrha from logging her twenty-third hour in the training simulator that week ("All work and no play makes Pyr a dull girl."), Jaune was ready.

Ichigo's office was actually within the dormitory building itself on the ground floor, and according to Nora led into a small apartment where the custodian lived. Jaune hesitated for a moment, his anxiety preying on him mercilessly, but he shook it off and knocked loudly.

To his surprise, it was Professor Goodwitch who answered. "Mr. Arc," she acknowledged with a small nod. Then she turned back inside, where Ichigo was standing near a small desk and said, "I suppose we'll continue this discussion later, Ichigo. Once again, I apologize for earlier today."

"It's fine," the orange-haired man brushing off her apology, his seemingly constant frown easing slightly. "Have a good night, Glynda."

With a departing wave to the both of them, the deputy headmistress of the school left down the hall and out of sight. Which left Jaune by himself with Ichigo. Suddenly, his whole plan seemed pretty stupid, and he almost left.

"So, Jaune, was it?" Ichigo's voice drew his attention back into the room. "Anything you need?"

"I-I...that is to say—" Jaune stammered, his brain locking up and leaving him unable to say much of anything.

"Well, spit it out, man," the custodian grumbled, scowl back in full force. "I've got a busy day tomorrow."

Jaune closed his mouth and eyes before taking a deep breath, then let it out in a whoosh and steeled himself. "Mr. Kurosaki, sir," he practically shouted, bowing at the waist like he'd seen pupils do to masters in old fighting movies. "Please, teach me to fight!"

Seconds ticked by with no response, and Jaune chanced a glance up to find Ichigo looking positively baffled. "Uh, you want me to... huh?"

"I saw you take down Cardin and his team at lunch earlier today," Jaune explained, still bent over. "I... I wanted to do something to stop him from pulling on Velvet's ears, but I... I'm just not strong enough to do anything." He clenched his eyes shut so the tears wouldn't fall as all of the frustration and misery that accompanied his thoughts since he'd started at Beacon—no, since long before that—welled up within him like a rising tide of despair. "I need to be better, and I want you to be the one to help me."

This time when he looked up, Ichigo was wearing an unreadable expression, but his gaze was sharp as he inspected Jaune. It was like being dissected and observed through a microscope, and Jaune fought his body and its natural response to squirm under such scrutiny.

Finally, Ichigo jerked his head and said, "Come inside, we'll talk about it there."

Letting out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, Jaune straightened up and hurried inside. The office was small, but not cramped, and incredibly tidy (though that was probably to be expected from someone whose job was keeping the school clean and running smoothly). As Jaune closed the door, Ichigo headed to another at the back of the room.

"C'mon, I've got dinner cooking," Ichigo beckoned. Within was a sitting room that had a table, a chair, and a sofa arranged around a simple holovision set. To the left was an unobstructed entryway that opened into a kitchen-slash-dining room where another table and a few chairs rested with the usual kitchen stuff. There was a door off to the side of the sofa where Jaune assumed the bathroom was, and another that likely led to the bedroom. It was all pretty plain, obviously, due to Ichigo having only been a resident here for about a week or so. There were a few personal touches, like a well-stocked bookshelf near the sitting room chair, and a picture frame that held a few pencil-drawn portraits of a pair of girls and an older couple who bore a strong resemblance to Ichigo, along with others who must have been friends of his.

As Jaune stepped further into the apartment, the smells of cooking rice and curry filled his nostrils, and he drifted toward the dining table to find Ichigo at the stove, making himself a plate.

"Before I agree to anything," Ichigo said, gesturing for Jaune to sit down even as he did so himself. "I need you to confirm something for me, though you being here pretty much does that anyway. You were never trained to fight, am I right?"

"N-not really," Jaune admitted. "When I was little, my dad tried to teach me how to be a Huntsman, but I was always blowing him off to play with my sisters."

Ichigo nodded, taking a few bites of his food as he listened. "So then how the hell'd you manage to find yourself at a school like this?"

Jaune paused to gather his thoughts so he could tell the story properly without messing anything up. "About a year ago, I was all set to head off to some regular college, maybe find a girl and settle down or whatever," he began, smiling ruefully at his naivete even as he fought back the water-works again. "Then the Grimm attacked my village and killed everyone there."

He said it as bluntly as possible to lessen the ache in his chest, even if it didn't dull the pain in the slightest. In his peripheral vision, he saw Ichigo grimmace, but he pressed on. "I had been away, taking campus tours of different schools, so when I came back to find everything had been ruined..." He drew a shaky breath as visions of the half-destroyed house swam to the forefront of his mind. "The only thing I could salvage was my dad's old sword, and in that moment I knew what I had to do."

"Fake your way into a school designed to teach kids to kill monsters?" Ichigo guessed, and it was Jaune's turn to wince at how close he'd gotten to the truth.

"Pretty much," Jaune agreed despondently, trying and failing to smile sheepishly. "I managed to find a forger and got some false transcripts, and somehow was able to luck my way through the initiation. But even after I've pushed myself half to death to catch up to the others, I just can't seem to even get close, no matter how hard I try. I don't wanna bother my friends; they've got enough to worry about without having to baby me. And if the teachers find out I can't fight I'll be kicked out." He raised his eyes to meet Ichigo's inscrutable scowl. "I was never an exceptional guy, always just average at best. But I can't be that here, or else I'll never become a Huntsman. I want to help people, to be a hero, so that I can stop what happened to me from happening to someone else. That's why... that's why I need your help to become strong."

Ichigo held his gaze for a long moment, dark eyes seeming to search for something within his own. When the scowl deepened Jaune nearly faltered, but just managed to keep from wavering. Finally, Ichigo sighed, closing his eyes as he shook his head and let out a brief chuckle.

"Okay." The word sent Jaune's spirits soaring up higher than Ruby and Weiss when they'd hitched a ride on that Nevermore (and he was still unable to get a satisfactory answer whenever he asked how they'd actually gotten there in the first place). "I'll make stronger, teach you to fight, even help you figure out a style all your own. On one condition."

Jaune cringed, wondering what that condition was. "Y-yeah?"

"You need to tell your friends what's going on," Ichigo said.

"W-what! Why?" Jaune queried as his heart began to thunder. "I-if they find out..." He trailed off as he considered exactly what would happen if they learned about his less-than-legal acceptance into Beacon.

"The only way to become truly strong," Ichigo's voice cut through his thoughts forcefully. "The only way you'll learn to respect that strength is to understand what it is you're fighting for. You can spout all that grandiose bullshit about not wanting others to feel the way you felt after your family died, and it might even be true... but the only way to gain power without it corrupting you is to remember that you're doing it for the people you care about." Jaune stared with wide eyes at Ichigo, who looked like he knew a thing or two about such matters. "Your friends and your team are the ones you're trying to protect now that your family is gone," Ichigo continued more softly. "Plus, I think you're worrying over nothing anyway."

"What do you mean?" Jaune asked, curious despite himself.

"Your team is Ren, Nora, and Pyrrha, right?" When Jaune nodded, Ichigo snorted. "Those three really care about you, Jaune. I dunno what it is you've done, but you've earned their loyalty. Trust me, I have to listen to Nora prattle on about how much she loves her new friends whenever she breaks into my place, and Pyrrha's never had a bad thing to say about you whenever we talk."

"And Ren?"

Ichigo shrugged at that, looking almost nostalgic. "I don't talk much to Ren, but he reminds me a lot of an old friend of mine. The strong, silent type, y'know? But I can see the respect there."

Jaune gulped, then bobbed his head. "Alright. I'll tell them once I get back to the dorm." He scratched his head as he considered something, then asked, "Should I tell Ruby and her team, too?"

"Ruby, at least," Ichigo confirmed, an odd smile breaking through the frown. "She talks about you almost as much as Pyrrha does. And I guess Yang, too, if you want. I'm pretty sure you and Blake don't really interact much, and I don't know much of anything about the other one... Ice?"

"Weiss," Jaune corrected with a dreamy sigh as his snow angel drifted through his mind before shaking it away reluctantly. "Yeah, I don't think she'd take it that well."

"Okay, then," Ichigo said, finishing off his dinner and standing up to put the plate in the dishwasher. "You go do that, and I'll figure how we're gonna do this. If you want, you can drop by tomorrow and show me your schedule so I can work out when we'll meet up for training."

Jaune rose to his feet as well, only to bow once more. "Thank you so much for this, Mr. Kurosaki. I don't know how I'll ever repay you."

"Enough with that shit," the custodian's tone sounded exasperated. "This ain't some kung-fu wuxia movie, and I ain't a wise old master. Call me Ichigo. And if you really want to repay me, tell Nora to stop picking the locks to my doors and just knock like a normal person."

"Uh... alright, Ichigo," Jaune tested the word out. "I dunno if she'll listen to me, though. I guess I'll take off, then?"

"Sure, I'll walk you out."

Jaune didn't quite remember the journey back to his dorm, but as he stopped off at the RWBY dorm and brought Ruby over to his team's room, Jaune knew that he was going to have his work cut out for him.

After-Action Report: Okay, so now we see the actual reason why I wanted Ichigo in the school in a non-teaching role: Jaune needs someone to show him the ropes, and before the Jaundice arc, he was pretty stubborn about who he wanted to go to for help, even though he knew he needed it. In my opinion, the canon blow-up at Pyrrha after she offered didn't really have anything to do with some dumb machismo thing, but him getting slapped in the face by all his worries and anxieties by someone he thought he could trust. Granted, he's an idiot, but seventeen-year-olds are just like that.

A lot of this plot thread where Ichigo trains Jaune will be greatly influenced by a marvelous fanfiction called Swinging Pendulum by cywscross. Now, she doesn't upload anymore on this site, and all her stories were deleted thanks to some ass-hat threatening her for updates (I can sympathize), but you should check her out on AO3. My writing has been heavily impacted by hers, and they're out of this freakin' world. But I digress. In Swinging Pendulum, Ichigo is sent back in time to a little before the events of the Turn Back the Pendulum arc in canon, and he ends up tutoring a student at the Academy to make up for his shitty kido grades. If you've read cywscross' story, you'll probably see where I'm headed with this. Jaune will become a badass, and much sooner than he would have in canon, but there will be no easy going; by the time Forever Fall comes around he'll wish he'd just asked Pyrrha.

On the note of why Ichigo didn't get into trouble for assaulting a bunch of students, he's technically a civilian without aura, as far as the law is concerned, and while there were repercussions job-wise (he took a ten lien pay-cut and got a slap on the wrist), the only real consequence that'll come from this is Cardin being pissy about it. Ichigo really doesn't care on both counts as long as it means stopping such a naked display of racism and bullying.

I may or may not eventually write something from Glynda's POV that covers what they talked about before Jaune interrupted (and no, it wasn't anything shippy or whatever), but that'll be later on. Basically, she was telling him how seriously fucked up the situation with faunus is and how any act from a teacher that stopped something like that would be construed as favoritism from a well-known Beacon teacher. Ichigo then countered that he's neither respected, nor an instructor and to send any problem students his way. There will be more on that later.

Jaune's backstory is something I've pieced together over the course of my love-affair with RWBY. To me, it's the only thing that makes enough sense to matter, and I'm sticking to it. Where was his family during the Vytal festival? Why didn't he head home instead of gallivanting through Mistral with RNJR? Why was he so devastated by Pyrrha's death (besides the obvious)? Because his family died before the start of the series. Boom. One and done. Also, it hits Ichigo right where it hurts and gives them something to commiserate over, although Jaune's circumstances are a little more... Grimm than Ichigo's. (I'm not sorry.)

Next chapter will probably have a Blake POV in it, because curiosity killed the cat and satisfaction brought it back. Any questions, comments, outright hateful remarks, and otherwise are all welcomed and appreciated. I thank all of you from the bottom of my heart for all the support this has already garnered, and I hope you all have a most excellent day!