Chapter Text
Link’s eyes shot open and his mind woke up just as fast as he had. He sat up and stretched with a yawn to get his blood pumping, and wondered how long the day was going to be. It was his last day before the trip, but one day of school could be long, exhausting, and even painful.
He’d been born with a mutation: his ears were long and pointy like an elf from The Lord of the Rings. He wore a hat to hide them, but in each school he’d been to it had never been long before someone found out his secret and made absolutely certain he’d never be able to “fit in” afterwards.
He never found himself angry about it though. It hurt when they laughed and jeered, sure, but it never made him dislike them, nor did it often give him cause for worry.
Something did worry him though. Something in the back of his mind, always at the corner of his vision a darkness just barely there, yet smothering light. At first he thought it was something everyone experienced, but questioning his family had only given them more cause for worry on his part, something they already had enough of, what with his ears. It wasn’t there at school either so, despite what his therapist said, he knew it couldn’t be anything to do with anxiety from the bullying he received there.
He could sense it even now, but his active thoughts always seemed unable to grab the feeling. He sensed it strongest when he wasn’t thinking about it, it seemed opaque then, solid and tangible like he could just turn, pay attention and find it. But then if he put his mind to it it became clear as clean glass and his focus slid off the feeling like water. To be honest the relief of that sense leaving him at school was worth the social difficulties he experienced there.
There was one more oddity about it though: he’d never felt it before moving here. His father’s job was online and paid him very well. Twice now, thanks to that and due to Link’s school difficulties, they’d moved to a different district so he could change schools, and the second time they’d changed states and moved to a small town in the middle of nowhere. And it was here that had the strange dark feeling. If they left the town for any reason; vacation, shopping, etc, it vanished. The school was distanced enough for the feeling to vanish as well. All very concerning, enough to give him nightmares.
Aside from any of that, he had a great vacation to look forward to after today, and he didn’t think anything could ruin that. He pulled his clothes and hat on and went through the rest of his morning routine and climbed downstairs to make breakfast.
His mother, Carol, didn’t cook, his father could cook but rarely did except for holidays and events and such. Most of their food was prepared by a hired cook, the only of such in the whole town, named Serine. It was because of Serine that Link had any real skill with cooking, his parents didn’t know it, but Serine had been teaching him and he’d even helped prepare most meals for the family.
He had some… innate skill it seemed, Serine claimed it was more than talent, more than any she’d ever heard of at least. He’d edited her best recipes for the better off of pure instinct, which she’d been surprisingly accepting of (he’d rarely known anyone to like it when someone one-upped them) and he supposed it had to do with their friendship.
For all the oddities of his life, this was one he treasured: he and a woman about five times his age had a very real and strong friendship. She’d been cooking for the family since the second place he’d called home, and had moved with them purely to stay with him, or at least he guessed. She’d given various excuses, but they all felt contrived to him. In his younger years he’d cried on her lap more often than his mother’s, and she’d chided him on foolish “adventures” like climbing trees or running on streets even as she bandaged his hurts from them. As he’d grown older and wiser from her life lessons and sayings that he’d never found untrue, they’d grown into friends, which for him meant the world.
He descended the carpeted stairs to the floor level, and turned down the hall to the thin metal latchless doors leading to the kitchen. It was dark beyond them. He’d beaten Serine here then. He walked over and through the doors and switched on the light, checking the list Serine always kept to see what meal she intended for the day’s breakfast, and had only begun the first preparatory steps before his only friend walked in.
Serine smiled when she saw him, and Link smiled back. She easily could have wordlessly and seamlessly joined in the morning’s work, but for some odd reason she never let him help with breakfast without at least pretending to believe he was up too early. As if he wouldn’t have been up anyway.
“Up at the crack of dawn again! I swear you’re far too young to be missing sleep over something as unnecessary as helping me cook breakfast!”
The smile still shown on her face, giving away any chance of severity in her words. She was some 70+ years old and showing no signs of slowing down, though her face and hair held all the telltale signs of age, even when her voice did not. Her long silver hair was tied tight in a bun now, as was her habit when working in the kitchens.
“Good morning Serine, are you sure your tired old bones don’t need another hour or four before you start work?” Link answered with a wide grin. She had never failed to get up on time barring severe sickness, nor had she ever complained of ‘tired old bones’, this wasn’t exactly an everyday game of theirs, but they did play it from time to time.
Unfortunately, today, he would be bitten by carelessness. It was not a frequent occurrence, but occasionally he could let humor lessen his focus and now, laughing hard, he accidentally swirled the now very hot oil in the pan he was working with too hard and it splashed on the bare skin of his arm. Biting back a yell and downgrading it to a mere grunt he quickly set down the pan and moved to run cold water over it.
Serine’s smile faded into worry, but she knew better than most he would be perfectly fine. She did worry about him but she’d watched his worst scrapes and bruises heal in surprisingly, almost supernaturally, fast times. A little burn like this would be gone and forgotten before he left for school today.
He turned the water off and forced the pain to the back of his mind, a little trick he’d worked out at some point. It didn’t help with healing or make the pain not there, just pushed it away so that he could work without slowing. It could be dangerous, theoretically, if he managed to push away the pain of something that truly needed attention but burns while cooking were unavoidable, if infrequent.
It took a little talk to make Serine stop fussing over him, but in short order she gave up and they finished the cooking together, laughing most of the time. When they finished, though, she insisted on inspecting the burn which was already gone.
An hour or so later he was changing clothes again, this time from ‘work’ clothes and into a simple green and brown set for school. He liked green and brown, and the hats he wore to cover his ears were always in those colors even when the rest of his clothes weren’t.
It felt good when the shadow in the back of his mind receded at he approached the school and he breathed a sigh of relief when it vanished altogether. Of his classes today, only one really worried him. He had Latin and History, both were subjects he excelled at, as well as PE, which was the worrisome one. He wasn’t weak or anything, in fact he was both agile and strong, but accidents were common in PE classes, and those that liked causing him grief were good at abusing it. He’d gotten a rib and leg broken on separate occasions as a result of those ‘accidents’.
His fears were not realized, thankfully, and the day passed without trial, for him, at least. It seemed more than a few people had been too sick to attend school that day. Something in the back of his mind poked him and he started asking questions to find out how many had been sick. Sixteen total had called out, and he memorized the names of all sixteen but he couldn’t find any connection between them. He wasn’t sure why he felt that there would be a connection, but eventually he dismissed it as human curiosity.
School ended and he was picked up by Serine for a change. Apparently the family driver, a stony faced man he’d never seen smile nor ever offer his name unprompted, was sick; Link mentally added him to the list of those absent from school for the same reason. She insisted on double checking his burn from earlier in the mourning, which was of course perfectly fine, before they drove home. They had a pleasant argument over spice combinations, and that was the last interesting thing that happened that day.