Work Text:
In A Roundabout Way
It was going so well. It was going to be the end. After all this time, it was supposed to be over, but if there was anything the Dragon God Orsted had learned from his life, it was that failure was always one step away from him at any time.
He failed. As simple as it was to admit it, it stung like no other loss he had ever experienced in his impossibly long life. That was, truthfully, because it was supposed to be the loop. He failed when he was supposed to succeed the most. He failed Rudeus. He failed everyone, and now he was left with nothing but a sense of guilt and dismay as to what to do.
It didn’t matter anymore, not to him, but he also couldn’t just give up. The world, however, made it so painfully easy for him to do so.
“Rudeus isn’t here.” The wails of a mother hit his ears like nails on a chalkboard as he listened from far away on the outskirts of Buena.
Zenith Greyrat was mourning the stillborn clutched in her hands. Paul, beside her, held her close to him, the tears in his eyes threatening to spill at any moment, but he wouldn’t let himself cry, not at a moment like this while his wife was hurting.
Orsted thought he’d find salvation here. Instead, he only found more helplessness.
Roa wasn’t any different. There wasn’t any anomaly hanging above the citadel. It was just a normal backdrop without a single oddity. The only true oddity around was that the Dragon God stood there waiting for years, hoping anything would happen. Anything at all.
Nothing ever did.
“So this is how it is.” Orsted had always been alone. Painfully so. For as long as he could remember, he never had a single person he could confide in. The only person even remotely close to him was Luicelia. The daughter of Ruijerd and Norn. The first person he could call a comrade. A woman who, despite still fearing him for his curse, understood him and cared for him deeply as if he were her family. Orsted would go so far as to give his life if it meant she’d live readily, but never before did Orsted meet someone as brash, as foolhardy, or as caring for the people around him as when he met and began to learn about Rudeus Greyrat.
Nor did Orsted know what it was like to earnestly and honestly travel with someone as he did with Nanahoshi Shizuka.
Both of them had become irreplaceable in the lonely Dragon God’s eyes.
Without them, so many others that brought life back to Orsted’s monotonous cycle would go back to being bitter enemies, and so many more would cease to be.
“But they’re already gone.” Those words spilled out of his throat. The reality of his world seeps back in through his halcyon memories of years past.
“We had one chance. It was do or die, and I still failed. Rudeus is gone, Nanahoshi is hopefully finally back at home, but I—” That was where his mind stopped.
“Rudeus died.” He watched the man go; that much was certain. He was there at his deathbed, and what happened to his soul the Dragon God did not know, but Nanahoshi was the unknown that jogged Orsted’s mind.
“If I lost Nanahoshi should be somewhere. Because she’s not from this world, she shouldn’t abide by the same rules as everyone else does in my loop, but—” Then where is she? Where did Nanahoshi Shizuka spirit away to?
“Japan.” If he was right, the answer was always right in front of the Dragon God.
If Nanahoshi isn’t affected by his curse, her soul isn’t from this world, and her body doesn’t belong to it either, then the only place where she could be was back in her homeworld.
“I see.” It was asinine, idiotic even for a man as calculating and fact-driven as Orsted, but he wanted to believe. No, he had to believe that there was some hope. He needed there to be a path forward with the two of them in it.
“If they’re not here anymore. Then the only solution is to go to them.” For the first time in the new loop, and for the second time in his life. Orsted threw away his own mission to seek companionship once again.
It had been far too long, even in the eyes of the Dragon God Orsted; a measly thousand years had felt like a sentence of eternity, but those thousand years did not go to waste.
He had long known of the ancient dragon ruins. Ever since he found himself cognizant, he had slowly learned of their locations, and with the reformed Laplace in a loop past, he had learned of even more of them from his forebearer, and in them was something he had never dug deeper than surface level.
Time magic. Or at least the ability to manipulate time.
It was always useless to Orsted. It didn’t let him reverse his curse, nor did it seem practical considering his mana supply took years to fully recharge after a singular fight, but now, it was his only shot in the dark.
An older Rudeus had managed to sneak himself back in time and warn the younger version of himself of the true nature of the man-god, and the old temporal instability between the realms detailed in the ruins and Laplace’s personal accounts held an uncanny similarity to both the anomaly above Roa and time travel.
Truthfully, it was almost insane, but Orsted had readied himself. Five loops it took him. Five painful loops of methodical planning for something that may not even work, but if Nanahoshi was anything to go by he knew determination would more often than not lead to success, and unlike the girl, Orsted was not necessarily bound to this world by any greater power, but he had a feeling his travel would not be a permanent thing, if anything it could only last for moments, like a flicker of being or a blink of an eye. Or maybe it would last for an hour, a day, a month, or even years. That he would have to worry about when the time came.
Orsted knelt, beneath him an inexplicably large magic circle intricately woven over the years. Each layer, each stroke painstakingly drawn with the most care he could give it. After all the trials and tribulations that led here, after all the time he had spent meticulously planning for these next moments, it was finally time.
The summoning circle was complete.
With his hand placed on the center of the diagram, magic began pooling outside of his body, the uncountable lines of the circle beginning to glow a dull blue. Then, as if a wire had been tripped, the circle began pulling from the reservoir of magic stones Orsted had collected, cascading into it and making the entire room glow a bright white.
Weightlessness soon hit the Dragon God. The familiar feeling of teleportation settled in, but this time it was somewhat different. Uncanny in a way, but also inexplicably right.
There were no deformities. There were no mistakes in his creation. He was confident he was going to see them again.
In K407, the Dragon God Orsted mysteriously disappeared, a measly day before Rudeus Greyrat would be born into this world.
Sound was the first thing that Orsted was welcomed to as his consciousness came back to him in a blur. Everso familiar raindrops hitting his skin, the sound of whistling wind, and the slow but monotonous beat of his heart. However, there were many more sounds completely foreign to him. In came unfamiliar whirring, the sound of a language he shouldn’t have known, and things passing by him far too fast to be human.
Without much trepidation, Orsted opened his eyes and was met with a sight of colors, sights, sounds, and people he’d never seen or heard of before.
“You wanna go to karaoke after?”
“We still have to study for that test, though.”
“You want to go somewhere quieter?"
“You know we're just friends, Takashi.”
There was a veritable ocean of people around him, enough that it even made the Dragon God’s vision swim. But what made his heart skip a beat was not the looks people were giving him; it was not the same sense of helplessness he felt whenever he saw those same expressions of fear.
No one paid a singular thought to his existence. The only people who even bothered to pay him any mind were the ones he got in the way of, or the people who simply were curious about the tall, white-haired man looking helplessly around himself.
“You lost, mister?” A singular woman’s voice cut through the air, Orsted turning his head to be met with two women A lascivious smile on one and an almost smirk on the other.
“I’m—uh…” Orsted silently thanked Nanahoshi and Rudeus for bothering to teach him their home language, but he also couldn’t help but notice something was off with these two.
The woman in the back snaked her arm around Orsted’s without a shred of fear for the man. “You a foreigner here on vacation?”
The Dragon God, who was typically unbreakable, cracked just a little then.
He had realized then. For the first time in his entire life, Orsted was being hit on…and almost shamefully, the Dragon God let a small amount of pink flush his cheeks.
He swatted it away, though, cursing the total absence of mana in the air as the reason for his changed demeanor. He straightened himself, shrugging the women softly off of himself in the process. “I’m—uhh… Taken.” The lie was painfully obvious. Especially to the two women looking up at him.
They deftly nodded along, their bodies feigning acceptance, but their faces telling the Dragon God that they knew he was simply trying to get away from them.
“Well, why don’t we all go to a mixer then. We’d love to show you two around.” The woman who’d initiated the conversation approached Orsted again, but this time the man was quick to react and pull himself away.
Unfortunately for them, Nanahoshi had, now and then, regaled him with stories of her world. Particularly of pick-up artists, as she called them. Apparently, the young girl suffered from her fair share of success—or bad luck in this kind of scenario.
“I’ll be going now.” Orsted didn’t know how much time he had, but the lack of mana was already getting to him. This entire place felt so surreal yet suffocating. The lights made him wince, the people made him dizzy, but he could still feel the magic in his body swirling in contempt against everything else. This very world was trying to repel him back to where he came.
Where are they? Orsted began walking, the two women calling out to him, but he couldn’t bother to entertain them for even a moment longer.
With an effortless action, one that he’d done more times than he could count, he used his eyes to search for Nanahoshi. The magic in his body was straining from use in a foreign environment more than he’d like.
It didn’t matter where she was; he was sure he could find her. Rudeus, however, would be an issue.
Orsted never learned what Rudeus looked like in his previous life. Nor did he bother to ask the man; he seemed quite hesitant about that certain subject after all. So Orsted only had one lead to fall back on. Nanahoshi Shizuka. Without a moment's hesitation, his search came to bear fruit.
Like catching lightning in a bottle, almost missing her in the process, Orsted found her. She looked just like she always did. Long black hair, unlike anything in the other world, and the same face she had worn for over one hundred years. Alongside her was unmistakably Akihito.
The pair meandered in a building, completely unaware that a man from a different world was coming to whisk them away to a world completely different from their own.
He really should have thought this through completely.
The issue infront of Orsted now was just how to actually go about this whole scenario.
Nanahoshi had just started to argue with Akihito. From what Orsted could recall, that had been the inciting incident before a truck came and hit them, an incident that Rudeus also tried to save them from.
There was, however, one glaring issue.
Orsted had no idea what the fuck a truck was.
Could you fault the man? He was from a world of swords and magic, where scientific discoveries were limited to basic lamps and pseudo-electricity from rocks. All he knew was that they were hit by it, and Rudeus died while the other two were whisked away to the other world.
If he had any inkling of an idea what a truck could be, it would have to be—at that exact moment, as if god himself had intervened, a slow-moving truck parked beside him. The driver seemingly none the wiser to Orsted’s inner thoughts as he went inside the building next to them, a box in his hands.
That would do. Without another second of thought. Orsted entered the automobile.
Another issue, however.
How did anyone even operate these things? It was complicated to a fault, and all the buttons and dials inside the vehicle did nothing to tell him how or where to start.
Nanahoshi’s argument was starting to spill out into the crosswalk. If he needed to pick this car up and just throw it at them, he would.
You know, I never understood how anyone could drive. I feel like I’d put a car in drive from park and just end up hitting someone. A singular, lone memory came to Orsted. One of the numerous talks he had with the man as they sorted out paperwork and mission planning.
Orsted never thought something the wife-crazed pervert ever said would actually come to help him, however. Now though? He just thanked god he actually kind of paid attention to his rants.
There was a shift next to him, the letter P lit up in the dark cabin, and with a movement, Orsted could only call the work of a miracle. It moved to D, and then, without a moment later, Orsted almost started panicking as the fright of the sudden forward momentum made his feet slam down… Right onto the gas pedal. Causing him to careen toward the unsuspecting youths who were squarely in the middle of the road.
Unbeknownst to the Dragon God, he was going to be participating in what many would call vehicular manslaughter.
Orsted didn’t care, though. The sight of a man far too heavy to be running anywhere, coming from his peripheral and reaching out to Nanahoshi and Akihito to try to at least push them out of the crazed truck driver.
“So that’s what you looked like.” Orsted laughed quietly to himself as he felt the world tug at his body one last time, everything going white around him as the feeling of teleportation began to set in. “Nanahoshi was right about you… One major glow up.” Then, a flash of light came, and taking Nanahoshi, Akihito, and now, in the new reality he had made for himself, Orsted as well, along to a different world. Before the sick crunch of the moving metal box crashed into the man.
This time, he wasn’t going to fail them. This time, they weren’t going to be alone. For even if neither of them knew it, they both had a friend waiting for them on the other side—and in Rudeus’ case, his murderer as well.