Dedication: This is for all those awesome fathers out there, especially the stay at home homies. You guys who do a good job raising kids? You rock.

Disclaimer: I (probably for the best) don't own RWBY. I also don't own the song 'Househusband Macho.'

Summary: Jaune left Beacon for a SAHD life. It's not a step down by any means: Jaune Arc may have failed to graduate as a Hunter, but he totally passes as a Stay At Home Dad. Behold the life of the even more impressive Papa Arc, who does what many a badass never dares do: manage a household. A series of shorts, each between Jaune and the lady of RWBY/JNPR that is the mother of his children. (Parallel AUs, not harem.) (Updated daily)

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A Househusband Macho Or Something

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IV

He gets everybody on out the door/

Then he tackles a mountain of domestic chores/

Cleans the whole house, and when he's through/

He still has time to watch "Oprah" too!

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The only problem with having Ren as best guy friend and informal marriage counselor is that Ren can't always keep a secret. Jaune doesn't blame him- it's not even entirely his fault really- because that's what you get when you happen to marry your confidant's childhood friend. If Nora couldn't read Ren's silences like an open book, they never would have been together (but not together together) when they got to Beacon.

Jaune doesn't mind. Heck, if it weren't for Ren there's probably no way Jaune and Nora would ever have gotten together in the first place.

(How they got together even with, especially with, Ren around is still a whirlwind of circumstances and happenings that Jaune still hasn't quite figured out. One month they're platonic friends, the next they're hanging out doing things that could just barely be called casual dating if you really tried, and next thing he knows Nora's rosy cheeks seem rosier than they used to and Ren is giving him the 'protective Big Brother' talk. It was weird. Good, but totally unexpected.)

But bottom line is that Jaune trusts Ren, and will keep trusting Ren, and keep talking to Ren about Nora even if the topics of conversation probably go into the realm of the uncomfortable for Nora's childhood friend. He doesn't for a second believe that Ren would ever willingly spill a secret shared between men in total confidence, not even to Nora.

Jaune's just saying that it's probably not a coincidence that shortly after he admits to Ren that the house feels too quiet and empty now that the kids are at elementary school, Nora starts talking about great ideas for home improvement.

A man's house is his castle, but Nora is Queen of this castle, and the Queen's orders are absolute. Even if it means that he's making a giant birdhouse. No, seriously- Jaune is remodeling their over-sized attic into something better suited for birds than people, because almost everything that isn't a work bench is hanging or suspended off the ground.. It even has a landing perch outside the window, because opening and closing the ladder each time to get up there is too inconvenient. Hunters and Huntresses prefer to just jump.

The jokes, and the puns, are plentiful, as Yang helpfully demonstrates. The oversized and empty attic with naught but a hammock just shows how Jaune is suffering from empty nest syndrome. He's going cuckoo for company, and a little home improvement is just the thing to keep this lonely lovebird's mind off the quiet while waiting for school to be over so that the kids can come home to roost. Heck, it may even improve the property value for if/when they finally sell it, a little something to help their nest egg before they fly south for the winter and retirement. It's kind of surprising how clever birdbrained Nora can be when-

(He punches Yang somewhere around that point, partly to defend Nora's honor but mostly just to make Yang stop. Even though he naturally loses, Yang apologizes in good humor, and she's actually impressed enough that he's stayed in decent form and kept training at home that she volunteers to help with the handiwork a few times when she has free time. He's grateful for the company even if he has to put up with the puns of his fellow blonde of a feather.)

It's a silly project, but it really does help get his mind off the quiet once the daily chores are done. The kids think it's awesome too- there's a play area that gets updated across the years, a TV for movies, a little fridge, and he even puts in windows and a skylight eventually. They love that they get to help build it- even if they worryingly try to use Mother's Magnhild to hammer nails and end up setting his progress back weeks with the hole in the wall. Still they sand and soap and paint with the best of them, doing the little things the children can do and proving that many hands make light work and lighter hearts.

But his favorite part is what everyone calls 'the Perch-' the landing pad that once was a reinforced plank of wood for jumping to but now is a full-blown third-story porch with a bay-window that can open inside. They've held dinner and even a BBQ grill out there, and whenever there's a friend and family reunion it's always the most popular spot, especially once he installed the safety net underneath to catch any careless small children. His wife thinks he's a little crazy for all the time and energy he's put into building the thing, and this is Nora we're talking about.

But seriously. Bay windows. That was class right there- made him glad he'd taken that shop class in school pre-Beacon.

Years later, when it's all done and even the wood has a nice coat of finish, he an Nora spend a rainy day up there, cuddling in the hammock after watching a movie, just listening to the rain beat against the glass.

"Did it help?" Nora asks out of the blue, no context or clue or anything approaching a lead-up. But Jaune's gotten to know her by now- seen how she was admiring the handiwork, seen her seeing him looking proud of the same.

"Loved it. Thanks," he answers, not missing a beat, and her dimples show as she smiles. They're still cute enough to kiss, and so he does, and because it's a rainy day without much else to do and because the kids are out with their godfather, because they have a perfectly good new hammock that Nora's just itching to break in, they really do make the most of their little love nest.

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Author Note:

I think I just committed some kind of heresy or something. I can hear it right now- 'why Nora? She's never shown romantic interest in Jaune and already has her eyes on Ren.' To which I would remind that the first argument applies to every female in the cast sans Pyrrha. And yet here I am, posting this fic. Just consider it a novelty experience.

I'm actually a tad proud of this one: not because it's shipping-heavy but because it works on a number of different levels. I got to poke fun at the conceit of starting the story after the relationship is already established. Once we got that head-scratcher out of the way, it's simply a smooth-flowing piece. An outside friend to remind us that Team RWBY still exists? Check (Yang). A certain level of sillyness and had an unexpectedly intelligent undertone? Check (the puns) and check (the reason for the home project). A brief touching on one of the challenges of family-raising, without letting angst or doom and gloom dominate? Check. Including the kids into the story, however briefly? Check. Keeping the characters recognizably in shouting distance of canon, utterly non-canonical pairing put aside? Check . Thematic integrity of spreading the focus across the entire RWBY/JNPR cast, and not just skipping one because I'm not crazy about the ship? Check. And did I get an entire chapter dealing with/around Nora without flandardizing her into a sloth/pancake obsessed woman-child? Check please.

I'm hardly a die-hard shipper by any measure, and I don't intend to sell anyone on Nora in particular, but if I ever do another 'Jaune and -x-' romantic short series, I'll be sure to include Nora just for sake of Nora. It was surprisingly fun to try and find a way to write her without the fanon tropes of sloth-pancake insanity.