Chapter Text
"…Is that something you have a problem with?"
Link gave his head a quick shake and closed the distance between him and Symin, pulling out a paper and throwing a question onto it.
"From out of town?"
Symin nodded, shifting his gait slightly. "She heard about us some months before the Upheaval, from Parga. Started traveling soon after she heard, but… given recent events, they ran into quite a few delays. Spent a hefty chunk of rupees on stable stays—says without the stables starting that sleepover ticket racket, she probably wouldn't have had the money to continue onward." He cleared his throat. "In my opinion, it's a wonder they got here at all. Roads were dangerous, even more so before news came in that you'd reappeared at Lookout Landing."
Link looked down and considered that, though he didn't think too hard, lest he forget where he was and get too close to the edge of the bridge.
Once across, he wrote, "Where's mom?"
"As in 'where did her mother go?'" Link nodded. "She said she needed to double back to the stable to wrap up some loose ends, but she told me she planned to head to the inn first to try to negotiate a lower nightly rate with the innkeeper to stay for an extended period of time. If she can't haggle it down, I believe she intends to stay at the wayhouse Calip used to maintain, at least until she can secure closer long-term accommodations."
Link frowned. That was near Fort Hateno, which was normally swarming with monsters these days. He had helped the monster control crew clear it out on his way into town, but… he dearly hoped a blood moon was not near.
"Kid staying with her?" He chewed at his chapped lower lip.
"If she manages to nab a spot in the inn, yes," Symin said with a nod. "Otherwise, I assured her we'd find a place for her daughter to stay in town so she could be close to the school. Might ask Medda—pretty sure that Bolson house he's moved into has an extra bed." Link followed his gaze as he glanced in the direction of the house they were passing. "Or at least that he and his daughter have wildly different sleep schedules. Sometimes Aster mentions he's still out farming when she goes to bed." He puffed a sigh out of his mouth. "At any rate, we'll figure something out, even if it means she stays with me on the second floor of the school. …Assuming we can get her to come inside."
"Does she sign?" Link mostly meant the girl, but if he had put some thought into it, he might have realized some part of him also meant her mother, her family.
At that, Symin hesitated. Eventually, he said, "…We can talk more about the 'why' later, but… no, she doesn't. As far as we know, she doesn't have any kind of language."
Link pursed his lips. He knew before the Calamity that a choice not to sign if it might be helpful was uncommon in Hyrule, usually chosen because a kid was "just" hard-of-hearing or because the family was well-to-do and overly concerned with keeping up appearances.
Heck, that was half the reason he and his family had started learning—the idea that it might aid him, particularly given the demands for communication usually expected of a knight of his station.
He wondered if things were the same, a hundred years later.
…That Symin wanted to discuss why did not have him hopeful.
But he didn't push. For now.
"How old?" he wrote, changing the subject.
"…Six."
"Pretty young for Hateno's school." …Pretty old for zero language.
"Yes; the rest of the children are around 9 to 12, I know you're aware. We agreed to try, though, given the circumstances of her travel and given the preparation she'd need in order to have the skills for school once she were to reach the other children's age."
"You don't have enough teachers." As he showed his next sentence to Symin, Link tried to sigh quietly enough that the man beside him wouldn't hear. He heard anyway.
"Indeed," he said, short and matter of fact.
Link's hand hovered over the paper, considering his next sentence's wording carefully, before he settled on, "That why you wanted me to teach so bad?"
Symin stopped walking and turned right to face him. "Link, I can honestly say we received no advance notice she would be arriving until she showed up." Link's skeptical expression was subtle, but Symin still noticed it. "You don't have to teach her anything today. We just didn't want her getting lost, when we don't have the faculty to cover two areas like that."
Symin kept to himself the thought that Link's incessant questioning sure made it seem as if he might change his tune and try out what Symin was already confident he could do.
…Call this kid a lucky chance for a test case.
Link wrote out part of another question but found himself stopping about halfway through, drumming his pencil on the paper before simply deciding a gaggle of question marks at the end would get his point across.
"So you want me to just .. ????"
They started up the hill to the school as Symin rattled off the instructions.
"Keep an eye on her until school lets out, and then I'll be able to take over. I would prefer you stay in and around the schoolyard, though I won't fault you if it's easier to, say, walk around town with her. Just need her accounted for." He tapped each of his fingers in turn as he listed the next prohibitions. "No wilderness, no fighting, no weapons, no leaving town." Spoilsport, Link thought with a smirk. "If she ends up coming inside, you have time for a break, but I'd like it if you stayed close. In case she bolts."
…Link would have been lying if he said that didn't sound like a harder job than teaching.
In fact, he was about to say as much when a kid a little smaller than Narah shot down the path faster than an arrow from the Great Eagle Bow. Link slid into action, his sudden movement to block her stopping her in her tracks, at least for now, as she looked up at him with wide eyes.
Link's next message, held in Symin's direction as he didn't take his eyes off the kid, was short, sweet, and to-the-point. "Name?"
Symin cleared his throat. "Hana."
After her, Seldon barreled a bit more haphazardly, breathing a sigh—of exertion or relief?—once he saw Symin and Link.
"Oh, thank goodness," he said, resting his hands on his knees. "I didn't know how much longer I could hold out; that's the fourth time she's slipped away from me. …I am not the young man I used to be."
Considering there was no way it had been more than twenty minutes, Link did not need to be told he would have his work cut out for him.
Link grabbed Hana firmly by the hand and unceremoniously dragged her to the schoolyard, an act at which she made her displeasure known by the volume of her screams.
He sat her on the rings by the left side of the school and shook his head, a gesture he hoped she had seen enough to understand.
She flashed hateful eyes at her new captor before looking down, as if in deep thought, making a repetitive motion Link didn't recognize with her hand. Then she eyed him again, glanced at the edge of the schoolyard… and bolted.
Link sprinted at her, pulled her back, and sat her back down again.
…Normally, he might have had more patience for a literal child.
And normally, Purah's admonitions were more friendly advice and less veiled doctor's order.
He had run into two sets of gloom spawn at once for the first—and hopefully the last—time, no free moment to react or fight, the clothing he had with him insufficient protection for the volleying they did of his body from one hand to another.
…Why was it always hands?
By the time he stopped being manhandled long enough to warp out of the depths, dropped down at Lookout Landing's tower, and promptly collapsed, he was a quarter-inch, a quarter-heart away from death, near-delirious from the shock. If Karson hadn't been inspecting the tower when he warped in… well…
Recovering from that kind of incident was no joke—Purah had not hidden her surprise at his being able to take a walk a mere five days after the incident. Link had only been cleared to leave, with his break caveat, after he gestured to his right hand and reminded her that he was used to fighting lingering gloom taking hold in him.
But he wasn't even back to his post-Upheaval baseline yet, still shaking off bone-deep exhaustion that his sunny porridges and sunny pizzas and sunny stews and sunny pumpkin pies were taking their sweet time chipping away at, and a pint-sized powerhouse trouncing him in a battle of wills would… not be helping. To put it lightly.
If he was functionally 21, then right now, he felt 100. If he was literally 121, then he felt 200.
After the fifth escape attempt, he pulled a rope from his things, tied it around his waist, and Ultrahanded the other end to the back of her dress. He crossed his arms, nonplussed, as she strained against this new tether and then, begrudgingly accepting she'd been had, she lowered herself to sit on one of the schoolyard's rings.
…And then she started crying. Loudly.
Crap.
Maybe he should have had more patience.
Guilt overtaking him quickly and almost very sure that the little girl would freak out at an attempt at physical comfort like a hug or even a shoulder pat from a stranger like him, he did the only thing he could think to do—grab a stick off the ground.
The picture started simple, a sun and some clouds… and the raindrops Hana was adding from her cries. Oof.
He narrowed his eyes as he tried to concentrate on the drawing and wondered if what he was doing would actually calm her down even if she were looking.
Once he'd finished laying down the rudimentary sky, he made the decision to poke the stick at Hana's hand. Maybe if he could effectively distract her, she'd stop?
Her sobs quieted to loud whimpers as he handed her the stick, and she stopped entirely other than some continued sniffs once she caught sight of the drawings.
And then she started drawing something.
A circle—a face, Link realized—then some straight hair and a smile. She looked over at the exit to the schoolyard again, but she made no moves to bolt, knowing the rope would stop her. She looked back down and added a second, smaller face not dissimilar to her own. She made the gesture Link didn't recognize once more.
…A suspicious epiphany started to come over him, but confirming it would take someone who had been with Hana earlier.
He whistled, hoping that would draw the attention of Symin to show up outside. For a second, he wasn't sure it had worked, but right as he was about to try again, the teacher emerged from the building. He took one look at the rope solution, decided he didn't get paid enough to ask about it, and simply said, "What's going on?"
Link gestured to the drawing she'd made, then leaned over to draw a question mark in the dirt beside it with his finger. Hana glanced up at Symin for only a moment and then turned Link's question mark into a flower.
With a smile, Symin tapped his chin. "Hard to say without color," he started, "but it appears to bear close resemblance to her mother."
He tried to mouth something at Symin, but he found himself simply opening and closing his mouth before he sighed and wrote, "How sure?"
Symin squinted at the face and fiddled with his glasses, and said, "I think I'd put money on it." He looked from the artwork to Hana to Link. "…Is that all?"
Link nodded, and Symin headed back inside.
He let Hana flesh out her drawings as he tested out Hana's gesture to himself.
…He was pretty sure it was a home sign.
They hadn't spent an inordinate amount of time on the topic in his classes, but he knew, though it wasn't like he had a specific memory of learning it, that his teacher had described them as the sorts of signs deaf kids came up with on their own within their family, before they were exposed to HCSL.
…He couldn't say that didn't track—they hadn't seen much use, but when he started going more and more quiet outside the house, he'd devised a couple idiosyncratic signals intended for quickly communicating to his dad when they crossed paths in public, around the castle. Today's been good; today's been bad; do you want to eat lunch together; that kind of thing.
Maybe the sign Hana had used was a sign she'd coined to represent her mother? As good a guess as any, and it fit in context.
He lightly shook the rope until it detached from her dress, hoping she would take it as a peace offering and not as a license to leave.
She perked up and gave a sidelong glance toward the entrance to the schoolyard.
Link placed his hand on her shoulder as if to remind her: yes, I'm not afraid to stop you again. He hoped he'd managed to rest the hand softly enough that maybe she understood that he could see where she was coming from now.
She turned to look at him, and he pointed at the stick, then held his open hand out.
Nothing.
Gently, he wrapped his fingers around the stick, though he didn't pull.
Hana did, however, eyes mischievous.
—At least it wasn't the teary-eyed heartbreak or worry-tinged escapist rage they'd held before.
He rolled his eyes with a snort. When she got to the point of joining in with things the other kids were doing, he imagined she'd fit right in with the energy Nebb and Narah gave off some days.
She giggled and let go of the stick, and Link went to work, starting to draw a woman… only to realize…
—He had no idea what his mother looked like.
The Calamity was probably only partially to blame for this; his mother had died years before Ganon broke free, almost before he'd pulled the Master Sword from its place in the Lost Woods. He'd gotten back plenty of memories about her, just none of her—even the ones she was present in seemed to conveniently omit her face.
So he tried to come up with something he could say was his mother, putting down a face about the size of Hana's mother's and adding curly hair on a whim—it just felt right.
Hana lowered herself off the ring she'd been sitting on and knelt on the ground to look more closely at Link's handiwork.
He added what he hoped was a reasonable facsimile of himself next to his made-up mother's face.
Hana looked from the image of Link to the real thing, as if studying its accuracy, and that was when Link decided to try.
He raised his hands in front of him…
…and froze.
Oh, come on, she's six!
Still a person.
A child person. Not like she's gonna leave you a one-star talking review in the Lucky Clover Gazette!
…What if she does?
—She doesn't even know any words. She literally can't take what you tell her the wrong way if she doesn't know what you said.
…She doesn't know any words yet. She'll know them eventually.
……Wait. She has at least one home sign.
…………Why not work with that?
Link blinked, grabbing the stick and pointing at Hana's drawing of her mother.
He used the sign she'd used, and she lit up, standing ready to bolt across the schoolyard, but Link pulled her wrist and motioned for her to sit down. To his relief, she listened.
He pointed at her drawing and used her sign again, and then pointed at his own drawing and signed, "mother".
"Mother," he pointed and signed again.
She looked from one picture to the other, and then she pursed her lips, trying out this new sign of Link's experimentally.
"Mother," she said, and then she followed it up with the sign she used for her own mother.
When she looked up at Link, eyes inquisitive, he added three letters in the dirt under each image.
M-O-M. Mom.
Hana's brow furrowed as she compared the two, and then she looked over at Link, clearly a bit confused.
He pointed with the stick to her drawing again, though the connection between his thoughts and his hands hit a speed bump, causing him to hesitate before he said the phrase. "Your… mom." He did it again, pointing the stick at Hana—"Your"—then the word on the ground, first letter-by-letter—"M-O-M", he fingerspelled—and then the word—"Mom"—and then the picture. "Your mom." He followed the phrase up with the sign Hana used for her mother.
He did the same with his image, but when it came to naming his mother, he realized the gap in his memories extended to her name. On the fly, he found himself fingerspelling, "Sonia."
…From the dragon tears he'd found so far, he imagined the first queen of Hyrule wouldn't mind standing in for the sake of demonstration.
Even as she looked from the drawings to the words and tested out the HCSL sign against her own, Link wasn't entirely sure she really understood what he'd been trying to impart, but he was at least content that he'd tried his best.
—She was staring down the path again.
He tapped her shoulder, and reluctantly, she turned to look at him.
"Your mom," he said, following it up with her sign and then repeating himself, "Your mom, she left to go toward Dueling Peaks, but—she will come back, and she will hug you."
Link didn't know if Hana's mother was a hugger, and his sentence overall—while just as spatial as he might have otherwise conveyed it—was a little more mime and traced her mother's path much more closely than he might have with someone more fluent. But considering he was trying to tell a little girl who had never learned a language before that her mother was not gone forever, the concessions felt worth it.
Her shoulders seemed to relax, and so Link was satisfied that even if she hadn't gotten the full picture, she got the core sentiment: your parent will come back, and they still love you.
She pointed in the direction of the peaks, did her sign for her mother, and looked at Link.
He nodded.
She grabbed the stick and went back to drawing.
She stopped running from the schoolyard after that. Not that Link didn't watch anxiously the first time she jumped up again before he could make contact with her arm.
She'd been busy at work drawing pictures that looked like her and her mother doing all sorts of things, occasionally experimenting with copying Link's written "Mom" in her newly minted, scribble-class penmanship, and she'd looked up just in time to watch Nebb and Narah run into the schoolyard for the third loop of their daily rounds.
At first, she seemed content simply to watch them from a distance, but as they retreated from the schoolyard, she stood up and ran after them, all the way to the sign signifying the entrance to the school, Link tensing and ready to stand and run, if he had to…
…And she stopped, eyes tracking the two as they ran down the path and around a corner. And then she walked back toward her drawing spot by Link, stopping by the pull-up bars and swinging from the shortest one to burn off some pent-up energy. And finally, she went back to drawing.
Link found himself relaxing after that, drawing alongside her, letting her run around the schoolyard on her own, even giving her a small portion of the sunny rice balls he cooked for his lunch.
He was about to check the Purah Pad for the time when students started filing out of the school door, ready for afternoon heroism, helping in the fields, or waiting for their long-lost teacher outside the house she once shared with the hero of Hyrule.
He looked back down for only a moment when a voice above him startled him upright once more. "Looks like you got a lot done today," Symin said, eyeing Link and Hana's handiwork in the dirt.
He stood up as Symin continued, "Do you want me to take over?"
Link shook his head and looked down toward the art, though more an excuse to look anywhere but at the other man as he managed to shakily sign, "Wanna… teach." His hands tensed, his newly pointed finger refusing to move into the next sign and let him finish his thought. "O—…Only her," he finished jerkily.
Maybe he could take on other students, in some far-off future, but for now, what he knew he could handle was this one single kid.
Response given, he cautioned a look at Symin's face as he responded with an understanding smile, "I think I can make that happen."