Guess who wrote several paragraphs for this chapter and was forced to restart their computer because it was acting up? And didn't notice they copied and saved from the old document and not the recovered one, making an otherwise productive day all a waste?

I don't have much else to say, so I hope you all enjoy this chapter!

Chapter 4: Wandering and Wondering

Tonnura slowly walked down the mansion's halls in a light blue robe.

Despite feeling exhausted from the day's events, the quarter-elf boy found himself unable to sleep. The dinner he ate was tasty and filling, the bath he took was nice and relaxing, the bed in his guest room was soft and comfortable, and there was a variety of sleepwear for someone his size. He was being accommodated quite well for someone who spontaneously showed up at the mansion's doorstep.

Yet something was still making him restless.

He finally had enough of rolling around on his bed like a fish out of water and decided to wander around until he was sleepy. He put on a pair of slippers and headed out.

Walking down corridor after corridor, each one virtually identical to the last, reminded Tonnura of the times Beatrice had used magic to make the hallways around the castle loop. He had to rely on his father to find the little Great Spirit and have her undo the spell.

He was surprised that there weren't other people in the halls. He was used to seeing numerous servants around the castle at this time of night, quietly moving from place to place in order to not make a racket. So it came as a shock to him that, despite this being the mansion of a prominent noble, there were only four servants. It didn't make sense to him, even if he personally knew how incredible Petra and Frederica were.

Walking down the empty halls with no one else in sight felt eerie to him. He half-expected some ghastly creature to emerge from around the corner, lock eyes with him, and charge.

Tonnura's heart jumped a little when he suddenly heard a doorknob turn. He whipped around to see Emilia standing in the door frame to her room. He didn't realize he had been holding his breath until he let it out.

"Tonnura? Isn't it past your bedtime?" She closed the door to her room and walked towards the boy, his heart still pounding in his chest.

"I can't sleep. I just can't get comfortable at all here." The boy realized something and spoke again. "I-I didn't mean I'm not grateful for what you all have done for me. It's just-"

"Trying to sleep somewhere that's not your home is hard, isn't it?"

Tonnura stopped his hurried speaking. Like his father would say, she had hit the nail on the head.

"In that case, would you like to sleep together with me?"

"No way." The boy said without hesitation. He crossed his arms in front of him like an 'X'. "I'm old enough to sleep by myself. Having to sleep together with my Mom is… uncool."

"I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of. Oh, would you prefer Subaru and not me?"

"That'd be even worse!" The silver-haired boy recoiled at the thought of having to share a bed with his father, younger version or otherwise.

Emilia pondered with a finger on her chin. How could she help this boy, who was like a younger Subaru, be at ease and fall asleep?

Suddenly, Emilia clapped her hands together.

"Tonnura, let's go back to your room." Emilia offered Tonnura her hand. "I think I know how I can help."

The quarter-elf hesitated but took her hand. Emilia noticed how much smaller his hand was than hers. The pair then walked hand in hand back to Tonnura's room. Emilia didn't know just how the boy managed to discern which door lead to his room; to her, they all looked identical from the outside.

When they entered Tonnura's room, the boy walked towards a desk and turned on the lagmite lamp on it.

"Wow, I didn't think this room would feel so… empty."

A chair off to the side had Tonnura's clothes and identity-concealing cloak hanging off it with his shoes placed neatly at its feet. The bed was slightly unmade; no doubt from its last occupant's tossing and turning. Other than what was standard for every guest room in the mansion and the boy's clothes, the room was utterly bare.

"Well, I only brought the clothes on my back, so..."

"Maybe it might look more lively if your clothes were hither and thither?"

"That'd just make it a messy room," Tonnura said in a flat tone. He frowned slightly when Emilia giggled in response. "Leave it to Mom to always suggest the weirdest things."

"I guess it was a little weird. Now then…"

Emilia knelt down on the carpet and patted the spot next to her. Tonnura was confused at first but realized she was motioning for him to sit next to her. He complied and sat down next to her.

Emilia took the boy's head in her hands and gently laid it onto her lap.

"M-mom, what-"

"Up-bup-bup, stay right there, mister." When Tonnura tried to sit back up, Emilia gently pushed his head back onto her lap. She started to comb her fingers through his hair. "This is to help you relax. It's something I do for Subaru from time to time, so I thought it would help you too."

"If it's something special for Dad, are you sure it's alright for me?"

"Of course I'm sure. Subaru might feel a little jealous, but he'll understand."

Tonnura smiled a little at the thought of Subaru throwing a tantrum over his current situation. He made a mental note to tell him about it later.

After a few minutes, Emilia spoke.

"When I left my home in the Elior Forest," Emilia said, "I also had trouble sleeping. There would always be this… unease in my chest. I would toss and turn every night, trying to get comfortable. Puck would have to help me fall asleep.

"I'm sure it's really strange for you. You know who we all are, but at the same time we're complete strangers. It must feel… lonesome."

Emilia felt the head on her lap shift a little.

"But don't think you have to handle everything by yourself." The visage of her black-haired knight flitted through her mind. "We'll all be here for you, so please… If you need help with anything at all, just ask."

Tonnura could only respond with a faint mumble. Emilia's voice combined with the stroking of his hair had a hypnotic effect on the boy. His eyes tiredly rolled in their sockets as he stubbornly tried to keep his eyelids open.

The experience made him remember something from years ago. Whenever Tonnura had a nightmare, Emilia would join him in his bed and hug him until he fell asleep. The warmth of her body, the fragrance of the shampoo she used, the gentleness with which she treated him…

Tonnura felt like he hadn't really left home at all. As if he was back in his own time and his mother was comforting him from another bad dream.

Before long, Emilia heard the sound of soft breathing coming from her lap. She lifted the now asleep boy, careful not to wake him, and put him on the bed. She pulled the blanket over him and stroked his silver hair one more time. She couldn't help but smile at how peaceful his sleeping face looked.

Emilia was about to move towards the lagmite lamp and turn it off when she felt a slight tug on her side. She looked down to see a small hand grabbing her nightgown, its owner still asleep.

"It can't be helped then." She giggled a bit as she sat beside the boy. "I'll keep you company a little longer."

Subaru was lying in bed staring at the ceiling, his contracted spirit cuddled up beside him.

No matter what he tried, Subaru just couldn't fall asleep. He was no stranger to insomnia, what with the constant nightmares of his failed loops haunting him, but this time was different. In place of debilitating regret and anxiety was only confusion.

Theory after theory of Tonnura's identity and how he somehow ended up in the past kept popping up. One question led to another, then another, then another…

Before he knew it, Subaru had spent the last couple of hours speculating. It reminded him of when he was a kid, being excited over his favorite shows and theorizing about future plot points. If it weren't so maddening at the moment and not regarding an actual person, he would even say it felt nostalgic.

Eventually Subaru couldn't stand it anymore. He carefully got out of bed so as not to rouse Beatrice and walked to his desk. He grabbed a quill pen and the journal he used for writing out each day's activities. It also doubled as a way for him to keep writing in Japanese, so as not to lose a one-of-a-kind skill to an entirely different writing system.

He was grateful that he was writing the journal exclusively in Japanese. Some of his entries brought up the taboo of Return by Death. It wasn't the same as speaking to someone to get it off his chest, but he had conceded that it was better than the alternative. He shuddered to think what would befall anyone who stumbled upon it and read its contents had he used this world's writing system.

It didn't take long for him to jot down all his errant thoughts. Before long an entire page had been filled with simple words and phrases that had popped into Subaru's head for how the silver-haired boy could have wound up in the past, with a few crossed out.

In the middle of the page was a straight line going from left to right. The line had Xs dotted along it with some words written above or below them. The X closest to the left side said 'I Arrive in Lugunica'. Towards the opposite end, it said 'Emilia wins Selection', 'Tonnura is born', and 'Tonnura time travels'. At that last point, another line loops over and back to another X, which said 'Tonnura arrives'.

Subaru leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling and sighed. He felt a bit relieved now that his thoughts were mostly out of his head and on paper.

Out of most everyone he knew, and probably anyone in the world, Subaru knew the most about time travel. Return by Death let him go back to a previous point in time upon his death. It was an unnatural ability, one that seemed to surpass the capabilities of conventional magic. Roswaal did say that the best magic in the world wasn't capable of such a feat; and that meant something coming from the Court Magician of Lugunica.

To Subaru, Tonnura having travelled backwards in time was concerning. And so far, the only lead that immediately sprang to mind was a power akin to Return by Death sending him back.

The thought of his own son having a similar power disgusted Subaru. He wouldn't wish that level of suffering on anyone, let alone a child.

There was also another issue that bugged him. Any change to the past via Return by Death altered the outcome of the future. If Tonnura had travelled back in time with a similar method, then that meant history had already changed. Any hints about future events would be practically worthless.

Not to mention, how were they going to send him back to his own time?

"You seem troubled, I suppose."

Subaru nearly fell out of his chair when he suddenly heard a young girl's voice right beside him. He was so lost in thought that he didn't notice Beatrice had left the bed and approached him. She was too short to see what Subaru had been writing.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to wake you." Subaru gave the girl a small smile and put a hand on her head.

"Are you perhaps unhappy with this development?" Beatrice wanted to tilt her head a little at her question, but didn't want to stop Subaru from patting her head. "A boy claiming to be your and Emilia's future son has appeared. Betty assumed that would make you happy, I suppose."

Subaru was about to ask Beatrice if she knew what was going on, but immediately stopped himself. If she did, she would have told Subaru the moment the quarter-elf literally crashed into his life; no, even before that.

"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little happy. I'm just… confused," he said with a sigh. "We don't have any idea how he travelled from the future. He was asleep when it happened, so he's just as much in the dark as us."

"Unless he's lying."

"Yeah, that's true," Subaru said as he took his hand off Beatrice's head. "Kids lie all the time. But I still want to give him the benefit of the doubt."

"So do you believe him, I wonder?"

"The physical resemblance is definitely there. He talks like I do and says things like Emilia does. He even knows everyone in the mansion- well, almost everyone." Subaru still felt upset at the thought of Rem not being with him in the future. He took his hand of Beatrice's head, which made her pout a little.

"Those are all rather superficial, I suppose. If someone had been sent to observe the mansion's residents, those are all things they would have learned."

"I thought of that too. But if he is some kind of spy or whatever, he could have come up with a better cover story than time travel. He could have said he was Emilia's long-lost cousin or something but he didn't."

The mere fact that Tonnura had used time travel as his reason for being there was enough for Subaru to believe him. In all his time spent in this fantasy world, Subaru had yet to either see or hear of any story about someone travelling forward or backward in time.

But Subaru couldn't deny that Beatrice was right. He couldn't prove it, but he wanted it to be true.

There just had to be some way of confirming the boy's identity, something that went further than what was on the surface…

Subaru shot up from the chair and snapped his fingers; Beatrice flinched a little at her contractor's sudden movement.

"That's it!"

"Have you realized something?"

"Beako, do you know any spells that can find out if two people are related? Like, if they share the same genes or something?"

Beatrice took a moment to ponder over Subaru's question.

"Betty… does recall something like that. Although is was more of a ritual than a spell, I suppose."

"Magic DNA tests really exist here!?"

Beatrice closed her eyes and recalled what she had read a long time ago.

"The royal families of old used it to determine the legitimacy of any heirs, in fact. However, it fell into obsolescence and eventually disappeared entirely."

"So they stopped using it? Why'd they stop?"

"There were a number of reasons, I suppose. Firstly," Beatrice raised a finger, "The dominant trait of the royal family was their golden hair and crimson eyes. It didn't matter if the mother or father was from outside the family; their child would always have those features, in fact. After centuries, when every heir produced met those conditions, use of the ritual was deemed no longer necessary."

"That sounds way too easy to cheat at! If someone just dyes their hair and gets some colored contacts, no one would tell the difference!"

"In which case the ritual would be employed, I suppose."

"And that would scare any would-be imposters off? I can't imagine the charges of trying to impersonate royalty being light." Subaru nodded in agreement but still found it baffling. He guessed that any royal family would eventually have a problem with phonies coming out of the woodwork when there wasn't anything to deter them. "But at least now I know it actually exists. So, how do we do it?"

Beatrice looked at Subaru in silence, while her contractor looked at her expectantly. Finally the little spirit grabbed the hem of her dress and looked away with a small frown.

"Betty… doesn't know the ritual, in fact," she practically whispered.

"Huh?"

"Another reason it was forgotten is because it was passed down orally. There were numerous attempts to plant an imposter among the royal family, all of which ended in failure and the perpetrators' being punished severely.

"But there was dissension among those who knew it; some were bribed so they could share their knowledge in order to find a way to bypass the ritual. In light of that, it was deemed necessary to not leave any written records of how it was performed and to have any who knew of it swear an oath of secrecy that was punishable by death."

Subaru frowned. He understood why such high security measures were taken. But it didn't blind him to the fact that it seemed to have worked against them.

"Wait, if that's the case, how do you know about it?"

"Mother believed that anything passed down exclusively by spoken word was all too easy to lose. She had managed to find an individual who knew the ritual and recorded it for safekeeping, in fact."

"And that record was kept in…"

"The Forbidden Library."

Subaru felt his stomach drop.

"Maybe… other places used it?"

"The Vollachian Empire has a different means of determining an heir, so it was never needed. The city-states of Kararagi have no liege and therefore no need for it either, I suppose. The Holy Kingdom of Gusteko may utilize it, but entering and leaving that place would be too great a risk."

"Which brings us back to square one." The knight crossed his arms and gave a rueful sigh.

As it stood, there wasn't any sure-fire way to corroborate Tonnura's claim of being Subaru and Emilia's future son. Their best lead had been reduced to ashes in a closed-off pocket dimension months ago and anyone else who would have known its contents was long dead. The only available option was to see how it all played out.

Subaru didn't like that. He could be patient, but waiting for results these days made him anxious.

"Betty wishes she could be more useful at the moment, I suppose."

Subaru looked at Beatrice, who had her head turned down despondently. He reached out and put a hand on her head, making her look up at him.

"Beako, you don't need to apologize for that. It's not your fault a bunch of corrupt nobles made it next to impossible to know how that ritual was done." Subaru knew it wasn't directly their faults, but they did push the Royal Family enough that the ritual was kept so secretive, making his current dilemma harder.

They also made his contracted spirit sad by proxy, so Subaru was going to be petty and blame them as much as he wanted.

"For now, let's keep an eye out. I did say I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt."

"Even though he constantly argues with you?"

"I guess he's entering his rebellious phase. And it's not like I'm entirely blameless either." Subaru remembered being around Tonnura's age and how he would butt heads with his father over the dumbest things. Of course, his father would always turn the tables and tease him.

Now that his future son was here, he was starting to sympathize a bit with his father in that regard.

"Subaru can get along with him, I suppose, but Betty refuses," Beatrice said with a huff.

"Oh come on Beako, at least give him a chance. He's just a kid."

"Nevertheless, shouldn't the son show his own father more respect, I wonder?"

"Well, it's not like my family was that big on filial piety." Subaru scratched the back of his head but suddenly grinned. "Wait, did you just call him my son?"

"B-Betty said no such thing, I suppose!" Beatrice let out a squeal as her contractor pulled her into a hug.

"It's fine, Beako! I want him and his adorable big sister to get along!"

"Don't you start with that too!"

Subaru couldn't help but laugh, which only made his contracted spirit pout hard.