Mushoku Tensei II – 17 – Being There

At first, it looks like Rudy is going to go scorched earth, flanked by Rinia and Pursena as he marches into Norn’s class where she’s currently absent with a head full of steam. Everyone in that room knows who he is and that pissing him off is not a good idea. But he tries to stay calm and ask anyone who was mean to Norn would come forward.

Those who come forward instead say that their interactions with Norn all involved them bringing him up in some way, comparing her to him, and urging her to follow in his footsteps. It dawns on him that no one in her class sent her to her dorm where she is currently shut in. It was all because of him.

Rudy knows what it’s like to be a shut-in. He was one in his previous life. But now that he’s a changed person he knows that it’s a brother’s duty to protect his sisters, even if its from himself. Only, he simply doesn’t know what to do. Rinia and Pursena laud him for his loyalty to his pack, but obviously aren’t going to help him on the psychological side of things.

What they can do is smuggle him into the dorm to at least meet with Norn, which is the first step towards getting her out of her room. The three are given cover thanks to Sylphy, who asks Princess Ariel to give an address in the common room that empties out the girls’ dorm. Even getting to Norn wouldn’t have been possible without his friends.

When he knocks on the door, the voice he hears is his own, from his past life. He imagines that his own brother must have felt this way as he visited him in his room again and again, giving arguments for why he should come out, telling him he needn’t come back to school, but only take one small step at a time to returning to his life.

Back then, Rudy ignored his brother, until he eventually stopped visiting him. And while he certainly doesn’t blame his brother for giving up, Rudy doesn’t want to give up on Norn. He knows if he leaves, like his brother did, there’s no going back. She’ll stay shut in. Her life will remain on hold. His experience with being in her situation drives him to want to save her.

Even there in the room, he has no idea how he’s going to do it. He just kneels there silently. We switch to the perspective and inner voice of Norn, isn’t sure what to make of him being there, and realizes she never knew what to make of Rudy. When they first met, she beat their dad up, the person she loved more than anyone and who had kept her safe.

The second time they met, it was outside his mansion when he was arriving home drunk with a woman on his back. She feared him because of the violence she’d witnessed, but when he let her go to the dorms without argument, she felt like he didn’t care about her one way or another, which is obviously worse than outright hatred.

At the academy and the dorms, Rudy was a universally respected and feared celebrity, and everyone who interacted with Norn spoke to her in the context of her relation to him. No one saw her for simply who she was. They even struggled to remember her name, because all that mattered was that she was his sister.

As she sits in bed, Norn realizes that all those opinions about Rudy from those at the academy reflected what two people she does trust told her about him: that he’s actually a good guy who has gone through some rough times. They said he’s not the person she thinks she is based on her limited time with him, and now she’s old enough to understand that they’re probably right.

But there’s still the matter of exorcising her mistaken idea of who and what Rudeus Greyrat is, and that can only happen by interacting with him. It just so happens that she calls out his name at the exact same time he calls out hers, and that leads her to pulling back the curtain and getting a good look at him.

Rudy might feel helpless as he stands there, but the words he chooses end up being the ones Norn most needs to hear: I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do either. I’m here for you. I won’t go away. I’ll see you for who you are.

Hearing these words opens the floodgates for Norn. Hearing those words convinces her that her fear was in her head: his clenched fist isn’t one of impending violence, but the same frustration she felt, and that their dad felt. Because her dad and her brother didn’t run, she won’t run either.

When Rudy sits beside her on the bed, Norn falls into him and lets it all out, finally able to see her brother for who he is, and who those others knew him to be. He’s someone who cares about his little sister, is there for her now, and won’t abandon her. He’s someone whose chest she can cry into as long as she needs to.

The next morning, she greets both Rudy and Sylphy with a smile on her face before stepping into the morning light and walking away, flanked by new friends. She and Rudy never exchanged any other words—neither of them heard the words we heard in their respective heads—but it doesn’t matter. You can tell that after that night, they’re both going to be all right.

If anything, Rudy admires how strong Norn is for sorting through her feelings mostly on her own, though he can’t know just how crucial his presence and words were to her finally coming to grips with who he is versus what she thought of him. It’s another heartfelt, happy ending. I could get used to these vibes, though the fact the next episode is titled “Turning Point 3” gives me pause.

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