Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I don't have much art specifically made for this side-story, but here's a semi-relevant pic of the two main characters at age 6:

Link sat tucked between two pots in the shadow of a building, doing his best to disappear. Shuddering sobs wracked his body as he did his best to stop crying. If he made too much noise, he might be found!

His fingers clutched the fabric of his new skirt. Gabbi, his sister, had noticed him admiring one like it in a shop window and had commissioned a similar one made smaller for him. Just that morning, it had been all clean and new, with a shiny silk bow on the back. It was green, his sister had told him, like his favorite blanket.

And now the present he’d gotten for this 10th birthday was ripped and stained with dirt and shoeprints. A boy on the street had said hello, and when Link had greeted him back, the boy had been so angry. He and his friends had stomped his pretty skirt into the dirt and stolen its bow, and why? Because Link had said “hi”?

He knew he could be dumb about these things. People never made sense. They never said why they did certain things or reacted to stuff in certain ways, so Link had to put together the puzzle created by repeated mistakes or wait for his sister to explain. Maybe he just shouldn’t greet people anymore. The boys had said he was “lying”. Could you lie with a greeting? Link could lie very well when he needed to, but it didn’t usually occur to him to do so. It wasn’t very nice, and he could never tell when other people were doing it to him. Maybe it was even possible to lie without realizing? It seemed like others saw secret messages in his words all the time, so it must have been possible.

Link rubbed his wet eyes on the short sleeve of his tunic. It was also new, and a shade of yellow-gray-brown only a little darker than his skirt, but the boys hadn’t cared about ruining that. Uncurling from his tight ball, he peeked out from behind the big clay pots. When he’d run away, his head had been full of so much noise and confusion that he hadn’t paid attention to whether he was actually being followed. If he had been, though, the boys must have gotten bored by now, right?

His eyes met the surprised brownish gray ones of a young Sheikah. The small, thin boy looked about eight or nine and wore cream-colored clothes that were too big, like he’d borrowed them from an older brother. He had a dark blue mask pulled up over his nose that extended under his shirt, which made him look a bit like the scary guards that stood in front of important places. His hair was fully covered, but probably long. That bundled-up style was an odd one; Link had only seen it on a few Sheikah grandmas here and there.

Link stared at the stranger, frozen in fear. Would this boy accuse him of lying and attack him, too, if he said anything? Link had learned today that he didn’t understand other people as well as he thought; even worse, he didn’t have his big sister here to explain what, exactly, that lesson was meant to teach him. He didn’t want to do any more wrong things and get hurt again.

A sob jumped from his throat. He wanted to go home! People were confusing! He just wanted to pick up a hammer and work on some horseshoes, or lose himself to the sound and feel of magic as he composed an enchantment. Home was where his workshop was, and the experiments whose explosive malfunctions he could always figure out.

He wasn’t designed to be outside. It had been a bad idea, going out on his own without his sister to protect him and explain things. Every few weeks, it was like he forgot how scary other people could be and he got the urge to walk around town again. Why couldn’t he ever remember how awful it was to get yelled at or hit and not know where he’d gone wrong or how to keep it from happening again? There were no safety practices or standard procedures outside the workroom! People didn’t have simple, easy-to-follow rules about them written in a manual! He knew this all too well, and yet he still kept letting his urge to talk to new people get him into stupid situations like this.

The Sheikah boy stood still for a while, his narrowed eyes sizing him up as Link’s thoughts raced like panicked horses. Then he took a small step forward.

Link squeaked in fright and tucked himself back into his hiding spot. He clapped his hands over his mouth. Stupid! He shouldn’t have made noise. Who knew what he might have done wrong?

“Are you okay? Do you need help?” a sweet, high-pitched voice asked.

Link looked up. The boy was standing right in front of him now, frowning. Uh-oh. He probably wanted to hear words. Link’s mouth opened and closed as he struggled to find some. His ability to communicate, which had always been flighty, had run away from him when he’d been yanked off the main street.

“Let’s see…” The stranger patted around his outfit and pulled out a handkerchief and a wrapped candy from his pockets. “Here. For your nose. And, um, because it looks like you’ve had a bad day,” he said, crouching down and holding the items out.

After cautiously reaching forward and pausing to see whether the Sheikah might unexpectedly decide to kick him like those other boys had, Link took the offerings. He popped the golden honey candy into his mouth and immediately felt better at its warm, soothing flavor. His allowance always went to project materials before anything else, so sweets were rare treats saved for special occasions.

“Is my birthday,” he said once he’d calmed down enough to grasp his words again. He chewed on his lip, looking down at the handkerchief he’d soiled with his snotty, muddy face. He felt bad for dirtying something so clean, but his sister had taught him that it was good to accept help when he needed it. “Birthday candy. I was going to buy some.” He hiccupped a laugh. The boys who’d ruined his clothes had also stolen his wallet. At least he’d been smart enough not to put all his Rupees into it before leaving home, just enough of his gift money to get a few cheap sweets.

The boy’s face fell. “Your birthday? And someone beat you up like this?”

Link blinked in surprise. How did this stranger know that? Link could have tripped and fallen in an unpaved alley, after all. Castle Town still had a few of those.

“You wouldn’t have boot-prints and rips in a new skirt unless either you really hated it or someone else did. That’s a back-stitched hem; you’d have to work hard to tear it.” The Sheikah picked at a section of the hem where the stitches had popped and the seam was coming undone. “You’re a boy, right? Did someone attack you for wearing a skirt?”

“Oh!” Link thumped his fist into his palm. That made more sense than Link’s hypothesis! He didn’t consider himself a boy—“he” just caused fewer arguments than “she”—but those actual boys must have taken some kind of offense. Link understood the significance of fashion styles and what messages garments communicated, since he enjoyed studying other cultures. He’d been wearing the “wrong” clothing for someone with his deeper voice, and those strangers had been angry because he’d confused them with his manner of dress!

“You didn’t understand why this happened?” the Sheikah said in disbelief. “Did you really think you’d done something random to make them angry at you?”

“Thought I’d lied with ‘hi’. They said I was lying,” Link explained. “But it was the clothes! Now I get it.” He was relieved to know what had caused the conflict; few things frightened him more than a mystery problem he didn’t know how to fix or avoid. That was the kind of ignorance that caused repeated, dangerous mistakes in his family’s line of work.

The Sheikah smiled a little. “You’re not very good at understanding other people, are you?”

“Body-language yes, words and reasons no,” Link said, happy to clarify. Then, because they were exchanging questions, he asked, “Why were you back here? Are you hiding, too?” They were in a narrow, mostly un-traveled alley made almost nighttime-dark by the angle of the late afternoon sun. Granted, a dark alley wasn’t too odd a place for one of the Shadow People to be found, but Sheikah usually wore sneaking clothes when they were on a mission.

The boy looked around and tugged up his mask. “…Kind of.”

“From those boys I made mad?”

The stranger’s expression went intense. “You didn’t do anything to deserve that. Don’t think you did,” he said sharply. “Those people are assholes who don’t matter.”

Link gasped softly at the boy’s fierceness. Sure, it hadn’t been nice of those boys to ruin his clothes just because they didn’t like them, but it seemed pretty mean to declare that they didn’t matter. “Is it okay to say that?”

The Sheikah grinned, his eyes crinkling at the edges over his mask. “I can say whatever I want until I get caught.” He held out his hand. “I’m Avoka, by the way.”

“I’m Link.” He shook the boy’s hand. The Sheikah’s skin was soft, with the beginnings of a few swordsman’s calluses. Link wondered whether Avoka was starting his apprenticeship training early, like him.

“I can walk you home,” Avoka offered. “Do you live in town?”

“No, outside,” Link said. “Don’t worry. I know the way.”

“I’m not worried about you getting lost,” the boy replied. He clasped Link’s hand and helped him up. Link winced at the bruises that complained as he moved. Those were going to affect his work, and his sister might kick him out of the workroom until he healed. Maybe she wouldn’t notice them if he wore long sleeves?

“Do you need a healing potion?” Avoka asked, looking him over. He reached inside his wide sleeve and pulled out a curved metal flask.

Link stared at the bright silver material. That was rustless steel. It was an expensive material that few bothered with when enchantments to protect against rust were so much more accessible. Who would commission something as mundane as a flask made from such a valuable alloy?

“It’s not alcohol,” Avoka said, the tips of his ears darkening in a blush. “Normal glass bottles are bulky, is all. Metal doesn’t shatter, either.”

“I’m a blacksmith…almost,” Link said. He was both far too young to claim mastery and more focused on bluesmithing, which was a semi-related field of magical engineering. “I know metals. You’re rich.” He took the flask, made sure there was indeed a Red Potion inside it, and drank the thick, fishy-tasting liquid. His pain lifted immediately.

“Is this expensive?” Avoka asked, holding up the flask after Link had handed it back. “I see this metal all the time.”

Link raised an eyebrow. “You’re really rich.” He had a feeling Avoka didn’t go outside even as much as he did. Maybe that was why this boy didn’t find Link as strange as most people tended to; he was strange, too.

Avoka hid the flask up his sleeve again and looked down sheepishly at his feet. He wore chunky geta sandals, a commoner style of footwear, but Link could see where the straps were irritating the boy’s unaccustomed skin. Link, meanwhile, was wearing rough sandals of woven straw only because the city streets weren’t swept of horse dung often enough for his sister to let him run around barefoot. The Sheikah looked the part of a middle-class kid, except for his fully covered hair, but hadn’t actually lived it before.

“There’s a lot I don’t know. I wish I could get out more. Learn more,” the boy admitted. He hunched his shoulders self-consciously. “It’s just hard.”

“Because you’re hiding?”

Avoka’s eyes flicked away from his. “Yeah.”

Link thought for a moment. “Want to hide at my house?”

The boy’s head jerked up. “Wh-What?”

“You can look at the stuff there. See what less-rich people do,” Link said. He’d observed other kids his age inviting one another to their homes. That was a normal thing to do, right? And Avoka had helped him feel better, so wouldn’t it be the right thing to help him back?

He mentally patted himself on his back. Gabbi wanted him to socialize? Well, he’d just said a lot of full sentences out loud without making anyone mad and he’d offered to let someone his age visit his house! He’d hit most of the steps of a successful social interaction right there!

“Would it…would it be okay?” Avoka asked nervously. “People can just…walk into others’ homes?”

“Should knock and ask first,” Link advised. He pointed toward the southern end of town. “I live that way,” he declared before heading in that direction. If Avoka wanted to come with, he’d follow.

Link led the way down a few dark alleys, navigating by the sound of magic radiating from the Castle Town Bazaar. Whether or not it was busy, the number of enchanted and otherwise magical wares on sale always made that street loud enough to give him a musical headache. That was one of the downsides of his magical talent; he had better senses, and magic-attuned hearing that no one else in his family had, but that also meant his senses were stronger than his brain could handle. Though the headaches he got from all that input had lessened as he got better at dialing things back, there would never be a day when his head didn’t hurt at all unless he wore his hearing dampeners all the time. And he didn’t want to do that! He relied on his ears a lot; even if sharp noises hurt and the sound of magic could be overwhelming, he couldn’t imagine living with anything less.

As he navigated by ear, he took notice of Avoka’s magic singing behind him. It sounded like both a swarm of bees and a choir, the tune muted as though playing from behind a glass wall. It was a sign of disconnection—that the boy’s power had a particular thing it wanted to do, but its wielder was either used to making it do things it wasn’t meant for or held back from using it at all. Link wondered what Avoka’s particular talent was, since his magic sounded so intent on it. It was probably rude to ask. He’d learned the hard way that most questions were.

Link poked his head out between two buildings on the southern end of Main Street. The boys would be more likely to hang around the northern end where the candy shop was, right? They’d stolen Link’s wallet, so it made sense that they’d want to use the money in it.

He chewed on his lower lip and scoped out an escape route just in case. His magic boosted a lot of things about him physically, not just his senses. It was how he’d managed to outrun his attackers the first time. If he had to flee again…maybe he could run up that parked chariot over there, make the five-foot jump to catch the edge of that roof, and—

“If you see those guys, just tell me and I’ll figure things out,” Avoka said. Something ominous colored his cute, mousy voice.

Link gave him a funny look. What was that supposed to mean? “Okay?” He stepped out into the street, keeping an eye on that escape route up ahead so he could make a run for it if need be.

The sparse five o’clock crowd enfolded him. Main Street was always busy until sunset; there were only so many daylight hours and Stalfoses still popped up sometimes without being called upon by an evil mage, so it was common sense to get everything done while the sun was out. No amount of modern magical lightning would override thousands of years of Hylians avoiding the dangers of the dark. Late afternoon thinned the river of daytime traffic to a more manageable stream—one Link’s hearing could better tolerate. The sound of people chatting and haggling was easier to tune out, at least. He winced as a taxi drawn by two fancy white horses went by, the clack of horseshoes on cobblestones hammering through his skull. On his imaginary list of Bad Noises that always pained him, that one floated near the top. It was way different from the comforting ring of metal that filled his family’s smithy, and usually heralded a pile of smelly dung he’d have to step around.

Avoka followed at his shoulder, a loud shadow clomping along on raised clogs he definitely wasn’t used to. He had a serious, grown-up look on his face. Warmth bloomed in Link’s chest. He felt all important, walking down the street with a guard watching his back. Was this what rich ladies in Castle Town’s inner ring felt like when they swanned around with their scary escorts?

When they were almost at the city’s front plaza a voice rang out. It was nothing special, but the tone sent a jolt of fear and recognition through Link. “Hey! It’s the creep! We weren’t done with you!”

Link looked to the left, saw the three boys from earlier peeling away from a wall to come after him, and went into a sprint toward that parked chariot he’d seen earlier. The thing about self-driving chariots was that they were perfectly stable on their three wheels and wouldn’t tip over or wobble if a panicked ten-year-old needed to use them as a jumping-off point. He’d learned about the unreliability of horse-drawn vehicles as platforms a few months ago when he’d run to escape from a shopkeeper who’d mistaken him for a thief. Unlike that incident, he didn’t think this one would be fixed with an awkward, apologetic conversation.

Avoka sprinted ahead of Link—an impressive feat—gripped his wrist, and pulled him toward a side street to the right of what he’d been aiming for.

“What?” Link cried out. This street was a dead end!

“Calm down. I just want fewer witnesses,” Avoka explained over his shoulder.

Okay, forget Link being weird. This boy had him outdone. “‘Witnesses’?!”

Avoka slowed down halfway down the deep alley, turned around, and pulled Link behind him. “I don’t like bullies,” he said darkly, reaching into his sleeve.

The gaggle of boys was still running up, breathing hard. Their persistence was impressive, in a scary way. Link didn’t know how he kept making people so mad that they wanted to pursue and yell at him. It was just something that tended to happen when he left the house. Link put his hands over his ears. He could handle most insults without too much emotional trouble—ignoring words was so easy that his brain sometimes did it without his permission—but he did not like the volume they were usually shouted at. Loud, angry voices were at the top of his Bad Noises list.

“If you could afford clothes like that, why were you only carrying twenty Rupees, you cheapskate?” the boy in front demanded, his voice only half-muted by Link’s attempt to tamp down his magic-boosted hearing.

The boy tossed down Link’s wallet and stamped on it with a sneer. Link bit down on his lower lip and dropped his gaze to glare in frustration at the ground. That wallet had been a birthday gift from his grandma two years ago! Why couldn’t the boy have chucked the bag at Link’s face, or something?

Avoka picked up on Link’s reaction and bristled. “You’re not going to mess with Link anymore,” he growled, accentuating his words with a sharp clack of one of his geta. His hand was still up his sleeve. “If you do, you’re going to have to mess with me.”

“You know that’s a cross-dressing freak, not a girl, right?” another one of the boys said, jabbing a finger at Link.

Link flinched. He really hated that insult—“freak”. It could be applied to far too many things about him. Too quiet? Freak. Stared too much? Freak. Able to hear people’s magic? Freak. It would be easier to list the ways he didn’t creep people out without meaning to.

“I bet we caught him on the way to sneak into the girls’ side of the public bathhouse or something,” the other lackey said. “You should be thanking us, Mousy!”

The lead boy cracked his knuckles. “Yeah, how about you hand over your wallet? I bet you’re carrying more than that stingy freak was.”

Avoka hissed sharply, like a snake, and slid his hand out of his sleeve. A black and silver kunai flashed expensively in the dimming sunlight. Stainless steel, like the flask.

Link’s heart almost stopped. Who had given this cute little eight-year-old a knife?!

The trio of boys shuffled back a step. Avoka was younger than them and a fair amount smaller, but a Sheikah with a sharp object wasn’t someone to be messed with. “If you call him a freak again, I’ll make you bleed,” he snarled. “Now give him his money back!”

“We already spent it,” the lead boy said, puffing out his chest. He reached into his pocket and held up a large sweet wrapped in striped blue paper.

“Aw,” Link couldn’t help but sigh. Blue wrapping meant either Wildberry or violet flavor—it was always a pleasant surprise for Link, whichever one he wound up grabbing.

The sound of Avoka’s magic swelled as he called upon it. Part of the disconnection lifted, allowing the buzz of angry bees to overtake the choir. At the same time, the throwing knife in the boy’s hand flared with piercing white-gold light that momentarily blinded Link. He looked away, blinking after-images from his eyes.

“Drop it,” Avoka said with the most authority Link had heard from anyone under seventeen. His arm started coiling back in preparation to throw.

“A mage?!” the boys squeaked. Suddenly they were all fumbling candy out of their pockets and chucking it at the ground. The boy in front was the quickest to flee, shouting “Screw this!” They ran out onto Main Street and fled in the direction of the Bazaar.

Link waited until they were out of sight before rushing forward to collect his wallet and inspect the sweets his bullies had inadvertently bought for him. None of them was the pure yellow of banana flavor, so he figured he’d be happy with whatever these soft blues and vague browns translated to.

“You weren’t really going to throw, were you?” he remembered to ask only after he’d put his prizes and wallet into his skirt’s deep pockets.

Avoka had stowed the knife back in its hidden sheath. How much was he hiding under those too-big clothes, anyway? How much of it was weaponry he wasn’t supposed to have? “No. I’m not accurate enough to be reliably non-lethal yet, especially with my magic going,” the boy said. “I was bluffing…mostly.”

“It’s bad to threaten with knives,” Link said sternly. It was obvious to him, but maybe it was something Avoka wasn’t aware of. “Could hurt someone.”

“Those guys hurt you,” Avoka pointed out.

“Yeah, but…” Link’s face screwed up as he felt around for the right words. It wasn’t that he considered himself someone who deserved to be hurt more than others, but that he didn’t want to cause more pain just to get back at someone. It wouldn’t make things better if he hurt them back. He could cause a lot of harm to those who threatened him if he wanted to; he simply didn’t want to. “Don’t hit back, please. Not for me,” he settled on saying. “Hurting doesn’t help.”

Avoka stared at him for a while. Link could see thoughts turning like gears behind his eyes, but he couldn’t read the boy’s blank expression behind his mask. “How do you—”

A sharp pop went off at the boy’s feet, cutting him off. In the span of a couple of seconds, the side street was flooded with opaque blue smoke. Link clutched at his pockets to make sure the items within were secure and huddled on the ground. His eyes darted around wildly as he tried to make sense of what was happening. Where had that smoke bomb come from? Were they under attack by Sheikah? Was that who Avoka had been hiding from?

When the sulfur-scented haze cleared, Avoka was nowhere to be found. The only evidence that he’d been taken at all was the burnt-out casing of a smoke bomb.

Link sat there, dumbstruck. What…What was going on? Today suddenly didn’t feel real. He stared at the blackened shell sitting on the ground. There was the proof that he hadn’t made up a boy who’d suddenly disappeared, but…

He put a hand to his head. It was his tenth birthday. He’d been attacked on his way to the candy store and then cheered up by a nice, knife-wielding stranger who’d been kidnapped right in front of him. What a strange birthday!

Chapter Text

Somewhat more relevant art this time! Here’s Zelda at age 6, a year older than she is in this chapter:

“NO!” A small object, bright with gold-edged white magic, flew like an arrow from the child’s hiding place.

Impa ducked and glanced behind her. The apple had slammed into the wall with enough force to splatter it into sauce. “Princess, please, this kind of behavior is below you,” she called out. Her entreaties had become embarrassingly whiny over the last half-hour, but at least the storeroom staff wasn’t around to hear her. They’d cleared out once their irate five-year-old future queen had stormed in screaming and brandishing a knife she must have stolen from the kitchens.

“WON’T!” Zelda yelled. Her tiny hand appeared over the edge of her improvised fort of storage crates, clutching a carrot that flared gold with holy magic. Impa cursed and jerked to the side as the child pitched it with uncanny aim at her face. Zelda had a high affinity for her power as a sacred maiden, an unstoppable drive to achieve her goals, and zero appreciation for how life-threatening her improvised Light Arrows could be.

“Young lady, you will attend your lessons, and you will be dressed as a princess should!” Impa barked. It was a tone that Royal Guard trainees feared and respected, and a surefire way to make them follow orders without argument.

A rain of mushrooms pelted her hard enough to cause bruises through the steel-mesh armor she wore under her uniform. One collided with her temple, making her see stars. After this, she was drinking a Red Potion for sure.

“Not! A! Princess!” Zelda screamed, smacking her fists against her fort. “I’M PRINCE ZELDA TODAY!”

Impa groaned and dragged her hands down her face. She loved her niece dearly, but she genuinely could not fathom what went through the child’s mind. A couple of days ago, she’d been fine with being Princess Zelda, all dolled up in her pretty pink clothes and adorable hennin. Most of the time she was happy that way, or at least not irritated enough about it to do anything more than scowl and stomp around when her mother wasn’t looking. Her hatred of lace, stiff bodices, and skirt supports was a dependable constant that irked Queen Ambi day in and day out, but her affinity for other feminine things was like a light switch that switched off at random. One day it was “yes” and another day it was “no”, and the episodes of “no” had been getting louder and more violent as the formerly mild-mannered child’s temperament continued to sour.

What was Impa meant to do here? A princess was a princess. Zelda had been born into an immutable position in life, one that was absolutely vital for the continued functioning of the kingdom. No matter how much she protested it, the facts of life were set in stone. Zelda could not be allowed to shirk her duties. One day the girl would learn to accept her role. Unfortunately, Impa doubted that day would come any time soon.

“Zelda, please, it’s only a dress,” she said. She had to duck another glowing apple. Impa, Commander of the Central Kingdom Royal Guard, was not someone who cried, but she was steadily losing her grip on her dignity. A five-year-old was getting the best of her. And granted, it was only because that five-year-old could turn any object small enough to throw into a legitimately dangerous weapon, but this still had to be the lowest point of her career.

Magenta eyes—the princess had taken out her blue contacts, because no tantrum was complete without that act of defiance—glared at her from around the edge of one of the storage crates. “It’s not just one dress, Auntie. I have to wear nothing but dresses! Dresses and dresses and dresses. And not even ones I want! Heavy, itchy, fluffy, stupid dresses!” she screeched. “I’m not just one thing all the time! Not just dresses, and not just pink. I’m me, and I want trousers today! TROUSERS!” She stomped her foot, still clad in a delicate pink royal mule despite the rest of her being clothed in only a cotton chemise and bloomers. “And…and boots! Prince boots!”

Reluctance pulled at Impa from multiple directions. Capitulating to tantrums was how one raised a spoiled tyrant. On the other hand, trousers and boots were a reasonable request from a young royal who could certainly demand much more ridiculous things. Queen Ambi and general society disapproved of putting Hylian princesses in trousers, though; it went against long-held traditions that stretched back to the Old Kingdom, much like dressing princesses of the royal bloodline in colors other than pink or allowing them to cut their hair. Giving the princess what she wanted would also feed into the strange delusion she held of occasionally being a prince, which could be unhealthy. Impa honestly wasn’t sure; matters of the mind were for specialized doctors to worry about, not trained killers. On the other hand, refusing to let her niece wear the styles of clothing she often demanded or be referred to in the ways she sometimes wanted didn’t appear to be making the delusion fade. In fact, Zelda had only been becoming angrier and more difficult to make behave since her toddler days of stealing clothing from laundry rooms when left unattended. Now that the princess had figured out how to use a measure of her holy power, the demands she’d always been making had simply gained more weight.

Impa didn’t visibly sag with defeat, for she refused to show such weakness, but she let out a sigh that made Zelda’s expression of implacable fury gain a note of cautious hope. “I…will allow you to wear trousers for the rest of the day if you agree to dress properly for your lessons,” she said haltingly. There weren’t any masculine clothes in the castle that would fit her tiny niece, but that hadn’t stopped Zelda before. “Boots can be commissioned if you show a consistent pattern of acceptable behavior.”

Zelda’s eyes narrowed. Impa knew it wasn’t in confusion; the child was a voracious reader with a habit of looking up unfamiliar words. It took a certain number of bribes per year to convince the princess to keep her growing collection of memorized curses and epithets a secret between her and her aunt.

“For how long?” Zelda asked. She knew a deal when she saw one. “I’m not a princess every day, all the time. I’m not going to be one thing, even if you don’t listen and do the wrong things and make me mad. I’ll just be mad!” She hefted a large carrot like a spear. “If I have to be good, you do, too. It should be fair.”

Impa pursed her lips. “Fair” was giving into a small child’s irrational demands?

But, she supposed, a child was also a person. A very small one with a short list of experiences and a small pool of knowledge to inform their decisions, but an entire intelligent being nonetheless. While young and uninformed, the princess did have some right to choose her own clothes. Zelda could not know how unreasonable she sounded because she lacked the knowledge and experience to understand such things. Impa distantly remembered being that young, so sure in foolish thoughts and actions that had made sense at the time. As far as her niece was aware, her arguments in favor of cross-dressing were logical.

Zelda would grow out of this once she had more years behind her and a greater understanding of how the world worked; there was no harm in indulging her eccentricity in small ways to bribe her into normality, for the time being. As it was, the young royal’s behavior was so far beyond the abilities of her originally assigned governess to manage that Impa had been forced to delegate more of her duties as a Royal Guard commander in order to assume that caretaker role herself. It was up to her to rein this wild child in and assist the Queen in training her to be a respectable, responsible ruler. Impa would perform her duty, even if it required some strange deals made out of sight. The King and Queen wouldn’t have to know; they would only see their darling, well-behaved princess make a return.

She cautiously approached her niece’s box fort. Zelda eyed her warily, but the carrot in her hand didn’t start glowing. With slow, clear motions, Impa crouched down to Zelda’s level. “If you behave properly for me and your parents, I promise to do my best to do the same for you,” she said. “If you act like a good princess in your lessons and stop stealing boy clothes from my trainees, then I will call you a prince when you ask for it and buy the clothing you desire—within reason. Just don’t let your parents or the castle staff see you, or we’ll both get in big trouble.” She held out a raised pinky. “Do you so swear, Prince Zelda?”

The delight that bloomed on the child’s face made Impa’s heart leap. It had been ages since she’d seen such a look of joy from Zelda. How long had it been since her sweet baby niece’s dark moods had started outweighing her bright ones? Zelda had perfected her scowl at age three and had only been getting more use out of it since then.

Zelda dropped her edible weapon and extended a pinky as well. They hooked little fingers and gave a small shake to seal the deal. “I don’t like it when people break their promises. If you’re lying, I’ll find another knife,” Zelda threatened. The one she’d had earlier was currently embedded a few inches into a stone wall.

Impa smiled. Her niece took so much after her birth mother. She could almost imagine her sister Michi’s voice saying the same thing. “Understood, Your Highness.”

Chapter Text

“But why?”

Zelda ignored the unpleasant chill of the wooden surface under his cheek, tears of helpless frustration running down his face. He already knew the answer. His aunt had drilled it into his head since the first time she’d given him boy-clothing, and the punishments caused by his slip-ups in the last four years had only driven the message home.

He would always be nothing more than Princess Zelda, and Princess Zelda had no right to exist in a way that made her happy. She existed for other people’s sake. There were appearances to be kept up and people to stay in the good graces of. Those were things she couldn’t do if she were allowed to speak or dress or be referred to in the ways that pleased her. By her nature, she was a disgrace to the royal family. Zelda’s very birth was a potential scandal, the marks of her mixed heritage something to be hidden as surely as her true personality.

Zelda had been wearing contacts over his magenta eyes and concealing his telltale blond-gray hair under wimples and hennins for as long as he could remember. Nothing could be done for his golden-toned Sheikah complexion, but he was rarely allowed out of the castle and stayed pale enough to almost resemble his father’s Hylian pink as a result. It was just another layer of deception laid over the burdensome lie of him being nothing more than a perfect, gentle, soft-spoken princess.

“You know why your mother assigned a punishment,” Impa said from where she stood over him. “You have a very important role to play, and that role comes with certain rules. That is why I warned you to be careful when dressed in unapproved-of ways.”

“I got locked in my tower for being caught wearing trousers, Auntie! You can’t possibly call that reasonable!” the nine-year-old burst out. “People outside the castle aren’t held to nearly the same ridiculous standard! I’m sure you weren’t at my age, either.”

“Not all of us were born as the future ruler of Hyrule, Your Highness. There are different standards for different people and different cultures,” Impa said. “I will speak with your mother about this. She can be persuaded to lessen the severity of your punishment if you promise to better behave—”

“I’m so tired of it,” Zelda said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “The promises, the giving in exchange for nothing. I can exist as myself only out of sight, where no one but you will see. I’m the ruler of back rooms and unused servant’s quarters. The king and queen of my high, lonely tower.”

“Child,” Impa said with exasperation. “You’ve been grounded for a mere two weeks. It isn’t the end of the world.”

Zelda growled in aggravation. “I’m not saying it is!” He brought his fist down on the table, making his aunt’s eyes widen ever so slightly in surprise. “It’s just another one of the little wrongs that happen day in and day out! Can’t do this, can’t do that, must do this, must do that! I’m the Oni’s doll, is what I am!”

Impa gasped. “Zelda, you must not call the queen such a—”

“She has two horns and she’s evil,” Zelda viciously spat. His adoptive mother had done nothing but shove her horrible, old-fashioned, backward ideas down Zelda’s throat since as far back as he could remember. In front of everything he wanted to do, she would build a wall of “princesses don’t”. Princesses don’t yell, or say improper words, or slouch, or wear trousers, or run in their nice shoes, or wear anything other than nice shoes. Princesses don’t get to also be princes. Princesses don’t get to be anything but what others want them to be; they’re trapped within walls of expectation that others build around them with no escape.

“She doesn’t let me live,” Zelda said, his voice breaking. A sob welled up in his throat and his vision blurred with fresh tears. “I’m not what she wants me to be, and forcing myself to pretend every single day is so tiring, Auntie. I know it’s what the kingdom needs, but I’m so tired and I just…I don’t want to have to do this forever. That’s my nightmare. I wish I could just…just stop.”

Something flickered in Impa’s eyes. Fear? “‘Stop’ how?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Zelda admitted. Every time he tried to come up with a plan, his brain seemed to turn to pudding and his half-formed ideas scattered to the winds. “Run away? Or—or, maybe I could just…” He put a hand to his neck.

He’d had some occasional thoughts. Bad ones.

The castle had a lot of stairs. Tall, spiraling staircases like the one to his tower. Every time he had to go up to his room, knowing it might be days before the sentries would allow him to leave, he felt like he was dying a tiny bit with each step. His room was a cage, complete with bars on the windows and Royal Guardsmen watching the stairs. Supposedly for his safety, but all of those protective measures only made his chest ache when he thought about them for too long. It would be so easy to miss a single step on those stairs. Trip, and trust the unforgiving stone to put him to sleep for good on the way down. A few of his ancestors and distant ancient relatives had died that way. Why not him? Maybe the people around him would finally listen if they only had the memory of his voice to work off of.

Impa picked him up, turned him around on his wooden seat, and crouched down to look him in the eye. “I underestimated the severity of what you were experiencing,” she said solemnly. “This will be rectified. I won’t have my nephew forced to think of such things out of desperation. Your mother wouldn’t want this, either. Queen Ambi isn’t evil, Zelda. She simply doesn’t understand. I…I haven’t done my best to understand, either. For that, I apologize.”

“What?” Zelda said in surprise. He hadn’t expected his aunt to take him seriously for once. Though she was a very serious person, he’d gotten the feeling over the last few years that she was only humoring what she considered a temporary phase of foolishness. He complained to her about these things all the time, as they were things that kept happening like clockwork. Zelda would want to wear something other than his constant stream of dresses, he would get complacent and wind up being spotted by someone who’d report his “misbehavior” to the Queen, and then he’d be ordered to stay in his tower even more than usual for the next few weeks. Then Impa would talk his mother down and shorten the punishment. It was a cycle he was resigned to, even if he sometimes found himself wondering how much it would hurt to escape it.

Impa put her hands on his shoulders. “I will figure something out,” she vowed. “It might not be precisely what you want, but I promise to at least improve your current circumstances to the best of my abilities without causing a political upset.”

Zelda believed her without question. Impa had never done anything less than her best for him, even if his wants and needs often confused her. She wasn’t his mother, and had never claimed to be, but she was his dearest Auntie. He sniffled and nodded. “Okay. I trust you.”

She gravely returned his nod. “It’s a promise.”

A week after her aunt had made that promise, Zelda was called back down to the same meeting spot through the secret Gossip Stone her parents didn’t know about. Zelda looked around for any passing servants, then unlocked the small wooden door she stood in front of with a key her aunt had given her and stepped into the network of hidden Sheikah quarters built between the main rooms of the castle. They weren’t used much in peacetime, and it had been almost a decade since the last time the royal family had been under any kind of threat. Thank goodness for complacency.

Of course, it also helped that Impa intentionally stationed guards elsewhere whenever Zelda needed to have herself a “moment”, as her aunt would put it. She crept along the dimly lit corridor, keeping her head on a swivel and listening for footsteps. Her eyes were made useless in the dark by the Light-oriented nature of her royal magic, and her ears not quite as sharp as those of a full-blooded Sheikah. While being half-Hylian was what made her the first-in-line for Hyrule’s throne instead of a protector of it like her mother, being in places like this always made her feel a bit inadequate.

She came across another door and quietly let herself in. It was an old war room that had become something of a storage closet over the years. It was just one of the various forgotten rooms she was allowed to be a prince in.

Impa stood by the worn meeting table within, a wooden chest sitting on the bench next to her. Zelda eyed it curiously as she entered.

“How long have you been standing there waiting for me?” she asked. “You’re allowed to sit, you know.”

“There is value in being able to stand for hours,” her aunt said crisply. “It’s a ‘Sheikah thing’. Perhaps you might come to understand that yourself one day.” She gestured toward the chest.

“I can’t tell if you’re trying to sound enigmatic or just being weird,” Zelda said, trotting over. Was it a new princely outfit? Her favorite breeches were starting to get a little small.

“I see no reason why those adjectives must be mutually exclusive.”

Zelda rolled her eyes—yes, Impa was definitely both mysterious and weird—and swung one leg over the bench. She ignored her aunt’s faintly scandalized expression as she scooted up to the chest. Being expected to never separate one’s legs was easily one of the stupidest rules of wearing skirts. Why have all those pleats and roomy hemlines, then?

She opened the chest and frowned at what lay within, puzzled. Zelda’s princess clothes were all pink due to dumb old rules her parents followed and enforced to the letter. Her prince clothes were mostly in shades of violet to lavender because purple was Zelda’s favorite color. The clothes in this chest were blue. Not only that, but the garment laying on top had a red Sheikah eye symbol on the front. Zelda looked up questioningly at her aunt.

“Sheikah clothes?” She’d never owned any of those before. While she’d been able to convince Queen Ambi to let her wear less lace and things that required fewer layers of underskirts, Zelda’s feminine outfits were still very Hylian (and occasionally Labryn). The same went for her masculine clothes, which consisted of the same kinds of trousers, breeches, doublets, and tunics her father had worn at her age.

“I took inspiration from a paternal ancestor of yours,” Impa said. “Do you know of the princess who owned the Ocarina of Time before bequeathing it to the Hero of Time?”

Zelda thought back to her history lessons. That ancestor of hers had been the last ruler before the fall of the Old Kingdom. She had survived the great cataclysm that had led to the formation of the Great Sea and spent the rest of her life struggling to preserve what she could of her massacred civilization. After her period of rule, the royal blood of Hyrule had been concealed among the general populace for centuries before the Pirate Queen had established the New Kingdom. That was as much as Zelda knew of the Last Queen; a lot of her family history from before the Great Flood was either patchy or entirely lost.

“I know of her, but not why she’d have anything to do with Sheikah clothes,” Zelda said.

Impa pushed aside a set of shoes made of pale cloth and straw within the chest and picked up three thick, leather-bound journals. “These were passed down among your maternal ancestors,” she said, laying the books down on the table. “For a very long time, your mother’s side of the family has watched your father’s. We’ve often served as confidants for our assigned royals. Your father simply pushed that relationship a tad farther with my sister,” she explained. “I can’t complain with the results, though.” She gave Zelda a wink.

Zelda blushed. “Auntie!”

“People fall in love, dear niece, and oftentimes not in the ways one would expect.” Impa said with good humor. “But as I was saying, these protectors were often confidants, tasked with keeping their ruler’s secrets. Many of those were political, but some were of a personal nature.” She gestured to the journals. “I grew up hearing the virtues and faults of the family I would be tasked with the protection of one day. The language used in such lessons was very formal and distanced—rather mythical, one could say. It made it difficult to think of those past royals as living, breathing people. I was blinded to the real-world truth of those stories by the high pedestal they were placed upon. It took seeing the depths of your distress for me to realize what I heard in those lessons might hold more relevance to the present day than I assumed.” She opened one of the journals to show the careful, but still childish writing within. It was in a different alphabet, but it resembled Zelda’s own at her current age.

“These are the magically preserved journals of the Last Queen, the child and later young woman who assisted the Hero of Time in his quest and went on to lead the evacuation to the mountains before the Great Flood,” Impa said. “Did you know she took the guise of a Sheikah warrior to assist the champion of her era? A male warrior?”

Zelda pounced on the nearest journal and flipped through it. “She what?!”

“My teachers spoke of this as if it were nothing more than a particularly self-sacrificing act of subterfuge to fool the King of Evil into thinking the sacred maiden who could oppose him was still in exile. These journals say differently, however.”

Zelda hungrily scanned the pages of the journal she held. The Last Queen was long gone; she or he was beyond worrying about another Zelda reading these personal thoughts thousands of years down the line.

There—Zelda wasn’t fluent in Old Hylian yet, but she could make out a few sentences that sounded very much like her own thoughts a few days ago. About feeling trapped, made to exist as only part of what she was. This particular journal entry was about her ancestor wishing he could learn to wield a sword, much like Zelda always had. His father had been able to serve as a knight, after all; why couldn’t he? It couldn’t be because he was an only child and sole heir, because his father had been the same and he’d been allowed to fight regardless. It must have been because of the social expectations that snared him like clinging lines of spider-silk and dragged down his every action. Like everything else, the circumstances of his birth had cut clear lines concerning what he could and couldn’t be.

Zelda’s throat went tight. These thoughts were the same. She and the Last Queen were the same. Someone else had known what this felt like!

“As a man, he went by the name ‘Sheik’,” Impa said, her voice soft. “No one recognized him as their Queen until he made the decision to abandon that secrecy at some point in time after the destruction of his kingdom. For years, he was able to fulfill both his duties as the leader of the realm and exist freely under the noses of the citizenry.”

Zelda wiped her eyes and clutched the journal to her chest, for it was a precious thing. “So you think I could do what my ancestor did? Be two people and still do what I’m meant to?” Because Zelda was by no means a slacker when it came to her dedication to her role as the next monarch of the kingdom. She wanted to be the best ruler she could, to bring prosperity to the population and honor the goddess Hylia who brought her blessings wherever her people went. It was the other expectations accompanying the role that brought her anguish—the never-ending list of social taboos that princesses were never allowed to violate, even if they were harmless things that would bring them joy.

“It will be a delicate balancing act, and one that will require rigorous training on your part. The process will not be easy, nor will it be fun; your ancestor’s complaints about my namesake’s strictness will attest to that.” She met Zelda’s teary, hopeful gaze with a level stare. “But yes, I believe you’re capable of being both a Sheikah who may speak his mind and a queen who may put those words into law…eventually.”

Zelda let out a weak laugh at the tacked-on addition. Impa could always be depended on to be brutally realistic no matter the circumstances. “What kind of training would it be?” she asked with excitement. “Acting?”

A small, silly part of her really hoped it would be Sheikah warrior training. As much as she wanted to be a knight, she was well aware at this point that it was a pie-in-the-sky dream. Her parents would never, ever allow such a severe breach in tradition, no matter how much she kicked and screamed. She knew that because she’d done quite a lot of kicking and screaming when calm words hadn’t worked, and it had only resulted in her being locked in her tower until she became “reasonable” (i.e. depressed and defeated) again. Sheikah training, though? Many non-Sheikah thought the Shadow People’s specialties stopped at blending into shadows and sneaking into places, and that sort of thing would be far more palatable to her parents than knight training. Her own father didn’t know much about what the Royal Guard did, other than achieve what he asked Impa to have them do. He didn’t ask about their methods; royals rarely did, and those who thought to do so often regretted it.

“I made a request to your father, and he has granted me permission to teach you certain skills that would aid in your survival should the castle face a future attack,” Impa said. “Your birth mother’s name may or may not have been brought up.”

Zelda’s mouth fell open at her aunt’s confessed audacity. Her birth mother had died as honorably as a protector of the royal family could, in the act of saving her king from an attempt on his life. When Zelda had been a year old, the castle had been breached by an army of monsters and the evacuation effort had gone terribly. Everyone had been caught off guard by the first attack on the castle in forty years, and even the Sheikah on duty at the time hadn’t known the procedures by heart. Michi had fallen to her wounds while holding back a wave of monsters intent on killing the newly crowned young king and the unofficial heir he’d been hiding from the public until his arranged marriage to Duchess Ambi was finalized. Zelda’s father had never gotten over the violent death of his first love, which was why he never let his daughter go anywhere unguarded and only allowed her out of the castle on certain high holidays with a full retinue in tow. Michi’s name was a powerful tool where he was concerned, and not one to be used lightly.

She leaned forward. “What kind of survival skills?” Because whatever Impa must have used her birth mother’s name for, it must have been good.

“As far as the King knows, you will be learning how to conceal yourself from attackers, find escape routes, and defend yourself when absolutely necessary,” Impa said. “These lessons will be conducted in private and are not to be spoken of, so as not to make it known to the castle staff that the princess is learning something inappropriate for one of her station. Your mother insisted on such a caveat.”

“Of course,” Zelda scoffed. Queen Ambi’s adherence to Hylian traditions was admirable for a born-and-raised Labrynnan. Granted, the woman’s home country was much more uptight than Hyrule, so perhaps Zelda should be grateful that Ambi had adapted somewhat. At least her adoptive mother didn’t expect her to wear a boned bodice and giant, swinging hoops all the time.

“What other things will I be learning, though?” she asked eagerly. “Will I get to use weapons?” Sheikah weaponry admittedly played to her strengths more than the heavy emphasis on swordplay in Hylian combat styles. Even untrained as she was, the princess could make herself a force to be reckoned with if she got her hands on a sharp projectile.

Impa raised an eyebrow. “There will be many steps to this process, child, and combat is far from the first.”

Zelda let out a happy squeal. She hadn’t gotten a flat “no”, and that was good enough for her!

“Is the focus here not on you becoming closer to who you truly are?” her aunt remarked. “One would think you were more enthused by the potential for violence than anything else.”

“Violence is part of who I am, Auntie,” Zelda said sweetly, batting her eyelashes.

Impa let out a rare laugh at that. “True, you’ve certainly inherited Michi’s fierceness,” she quirked her lips slyly, “as well as her stature, I believe.”

Zelda pouted. “I’ll be as tall as Father one day, and you’ll owe me a whole box of mochi when I am! You’ll see!”

Her aunt only gave her one of her secretive smiles, the stern woman’s equivalent of a teasing grin. “I suppose we will, won’t we?”

Chapter Text

As he waited for the footsteps below him to fade, the ten-year-old perched on Hyrule Castle’s blue roof tiles closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and reviewed the parameters of his secret mission.

Today, Zelda was Avoka of Hateno, an orphan who had been taken in by Commander Impa as a ward of the state. Avoka had grown up among Hylian commoners in Hateno City, and so he spoke and moved like one. For Zelda to allow himself to lapse into his royal mannerisms was to risk everything, and possibly revoke any future chances like this for good. He had to be as firmly immersed in his Sheikah persona as his year of training would allow him to be. If he was going to severely displease his aunt, he would at least do so in a way that would also impress her.

Once the garden patrollers had walked around a hedge, Avoka clambered over the edge of the roof and scaled down the wall using crevices between the stone blocks and the grip-enhancing magic of his Sheikah climbing gloves. Like his current outfit, he’d “borrowed” them from the Royal Guard trainees his aunt was on the fence about letting him join one day. She might not ever let him join now, after this stunt, but Zelda—Avoka needed to do this. He’d go mad if he were trapped in the castle for another day, getting beaten over the head with all the things he couldn’t do.

Even Impa, well-meaning as she was, had been grating on his nerves like Queen Ambi lately. Being a convincing Sheikah boy took just as many corrections and lectures about his natural behavior as being a convincing princess did. His presence was always too big when he entered a room—too attention-grabbing for someone who was supposed to have inherent shadow magic. He had a habit of walking with short, quick steps, accustomed as he was to dealing with skirts that might trip him and royal mules that didn’t allow one to flex their foot. His Hylian dialect was too prim for a young Sheikah, let alone one of Avoka’s common background, his careful movements spoke of one accustomed to fine and easily-stained fabrics, and his posture was the wrong kind of stiff.

Clothes had become an issue with Impa, too, since she’d started training Avoka to divide himself into strictly separate personae. If he wanted to wear his purple prince clothes, he still had to do so well out of sight. He could wear Sheikah clothes in front of other people if he had red contacts in, covered his hair like he did as a princess, kept his mask up, and had his aunt hovering at his shoulder at all times, but only if he stayed within strict Sheikah colors and styles. No purple, no doublets, and no Hylian boots allowed. As his aunt had promised, his circumstances were better than before, but they weren’t necessarily what he would have wanted.

‘It’s better than thinking about throwing myself down the stairs, though,’ he thought with a shudder as he darted between hedges. He didn’t miss those nightmarish, unasked-for thoughts gnawing at the back of his mind.

After dodging the guards stationed right outside the castle, and reaching the main path down the mountain his home was built into, he breathed a sigh of relief. It was really just the people up at the castle he was worried about being caught by; they would know that he wasn’t a normal trainee and that he was supposed to be accompanied by the commander of the castle’s complement of Royal Guardsmen. They didn’t know why someone so important would take someone like Avoka No-Last-Name under her wing, but they were aware of that state of affairs. The patrolmen down the road, though, would have no reason to know such a thing. Avoka would only need to be careful not to run into any higher-ranked Sheikah who kept better tabs on what their commander got up to in her free time. If anyone decided to call his aunt and interrupt her meeting, Avoka was screwed. Impa would drop everything to snatch him up. As far as she was concerned, he was far from ready to be in public at his current level of acting skill.

Avoka nervously tucked his hands in his sleeves as he walked down the road and did his best not to look suspicious. The feeling of the sheaths on his arms reassured him. Not that being caught with weapons someone his age wasn’t supposed to have would make him appear less suspicious, but he liked knowing he would have something to throw if worse came to worst. While he wasn’t yet an expert marksman with his kunai, nor a master at the art of hidden weaponry, he could defend himself pretty well if he had to.

His knees shook as he entered the first guardhouse on the way down. Though he would have liked to go around, the only alternative was swimming, which his aunt hadn’t taught him how to do yet.

“A-Avoka of Hateno, f-future Royal Guard trainee,” he stammered, mentally kicking himself. He sounded too nervous for someone who was supposed to be here! “I was hoping to r-run some, uh, errands i-in Castle Town?”

The intimidating Sheikah guard he was speaking to quirked a gray eyebrow. “Are you stating or asking, boy?”

Avoka clenched his hands into fists at his sides and took a steadying breath. “Stating, sir.”

“Well, then, be on your way.” A glint of amusement shone in his dark crimson eyes. “I give you about two hours before the Commander catches on. Good luck.”

A lightning bolt of panic went through Avoka. Suddenly he recognized this man as a captain, and one he recalled seeing around the castle once or twice. He definitely knew that Avoka was sneaking out!

“Th-Thank you for the warning, sir!” Avoka squeaked before fleeing from the gatehouse.

His trip through the second gatehouse farther down the road was easier on his nerves, thankfully. It was staffed by mostly Hylians today, and he just looked like a normal Sheikah cadet in civilian clothes to them. His high-pitched voice had garnered a few doting looks that rankled him (he was not cute, dammit), but none of them had asked too many questions.

Avoka walked out the grand open gates that marked his passage from the tiny world he’d grown up, his heart hammering. He was free! For the first time, he was outside the castle with no one watching!

In his excitement, the passive grip he maintained on his magic slipped and sparks of light leapt from his fingers. He shoved his hands into his sleeves and mentally clamped down on his powers until they retreated to a whisper at the back of his mind. His magic was the exact opposite of the kind of talent a Sheikah mage would wind up with, and in fact was one of the reasons his aunt was reluctant to let him join the Royal Guard trainees when he turned eleven. While it had been long enough since the last time Zelda had demonstrated his abilities that few people outside the Hylian royal family would recognize them, the flashy power was a clear sign that Avoka had no affinity for the shadow magic that Sheikah were known for.

He ran down the road, dodging the commoners walking up to attend open court. The loud sound of his wooden geta on the stone brought a grin to his face. Without his mother or aunt watching, he could be as loud as he wanted! He happily clacked his way across the lowered drawbridge standing between him and Castle Town and then stood there for a moment, taking in the sight of the world.

While Avoka had seen the city before, it had been from within a cloud of hovering guards and servants during times when everything had been draped in obscuring decorations and banners. Today it lay in front of him in its natural state, with no expectations to see him. Avoka was eager to see how these people lived when they didn’t have to put on a show for the royal family.

As he walked toward the crowd of people milling around the open-air shops in front of him, Avoka had a sudden realization that brought him to a sudden halt. For all his training in how to play his current character, his aunt hadn’t shown him how to actually blend in. He’d never dealt with a crowd situation before.

Mentally floundering, he decided to employ what training he did have and went with the flow of what those around him were doing. There were people absently scanning displays of wares as they walked along? Avoka did that, too. There were others standing around fiddling with a Sheikah Slate or checking a shopping list? Avoka took a notebook out of his pocket and started writing down crowd-watching observations to look busy. Above all else, he had to appear as though he belonged here. It ran counter to his royal upbringing, in which his mother had encouraged him to look quietly in command whether he had anything to say or not. Right now, the goal was not to emanate importance, but to seem utterly unremarkable.

‘I wore the wrong shoes for this,’ he lamented, taking note of all the straw sandals and boots around him. Geta clogs were somewhat out of style, he knew, but he hadn’t realized how much so. They made him feel tall, though, and he liked their loud click-clack. He would have preferred them to be close-toed, though. The skin around where the straps rubbed against his feet had been complaining since he’d reached the bottom of Castle Mount.

He distracted himself from the annoying pain in his feet by perusing the marketplace. There were all kinds of things here, many of which would have been forbidden contraband if he were here in his other clothes. Adventuring seemed to be a popular sport, despite the many dangers it must have held. He saw all kinds of gear for sale, from shields to magic accessories to weaponry of all shapes and sizes.

Avoka stopped in front of a beautiful display of swords, his wallet hanging heavy in his pocket. He had enough money to buy the most expensive one of the lot—a gorgeous flamberge whose shining blade rippled like water—but he wouldn’t be able to bring it home. It was too large to hide on his admittedly small person, and the only Bag of Holding he had was limited to carrying Rupees. His parents and aunt all agreed that he couldn’t be trusted with the power of a personal pocket dimension.

Sighing, he turned away from the tempting swords and went over to the Potions Shop instead. He liked potions, and had in fact been learning how to apply his magic to them in order to shape their effects. Enchanting on its own was terribly dull to him; he couldn’t imagine spending hours upon hours in musical prayer, only to miss a single note and be forced to start over or abandon the effort. Potions were similarly uninteresting when not customized to his personal standards; sure, a Red Potion was always useful, but the effects of most elixirs were so simple and uninteresting without magical editing! Avoka was hoping to one day craft a drinkable illusion so he’d no longer have to disguise himself constantly, or maybe even create something that would allow him to shift his appearance to match his needs. He’d already come up with a potion that could turn books into frogs for an hour, so it was possible!

“Looking for anything in particular, dearie?” asked Syrup, the old lady running the potion shop. She wore odd black clothes that were neither Hylian, nor Sheikah, but still seemed familiar from Avoka’s culture lessons. Perhaps she was from Holodrum?

Avoka blinked, realizing he’d been staring. “Um.” He looked down at the spread in front of him. Now that he thought about it, he had brought a flask with him. It was for water, because he hadn’t been sure how long he’d be out, but perhaps a potion would be a better use for it. His aunt and parents had warned him many a time that the outside world was a dangerous place. While Avoka was happy to explore, he knew that he’d have to leave Main Street sometime if he wanted to see what Castle Town was really like. “A Red Potion, please. I have a container—hold on…” He took the flask out of his sleeve, chugged the water in it, and then pulled out his wallet to pay.

Syrup took the flask and looked it over with curiosity. “What an unusual container for a little boy to be carrying around,” she remarked before funneling a serving of potion into it.

Avoka fidgeted nervously after setting a red Rupee on the counter. “Unusual? What do you mean? It’s just a water canteen.”

She cackled. “Oh, is it?” She corked the container and handed it back. “Well then, here you are, Young Master.”

An unnerved shiver went through Avoka. What did this lady know that he didn’t? How had she guessed he was rich? Did she somehow sense that he was only a pretend Sheikah, too? “Th-Thanks.” He took his flask back and booked it out of there.

As he came to be more aware of his current moment of freedom growing ever shorter, Avoka’s curiosity about the dark spaces between buildings grew. There weren’t any of those up on Castle Mount. Everything was either spaced apart or continuous, so as to give potential marauders as few hiding places as possible. While the interior of the castle had its fair share of dark corners, those had lost their mystique long ago as he’d begun using them to assist in his various little heists. What went on in these dark corners? Could he hide from his aunt in there?

He poked his head into the narrow slot between a public bathhouse and an apothecary. Hmm, nothing of interest here, just one side of stone and one side of bricks. There weren’t even any pots to hide behind. He trotted down to the next alley. Oh, there were some nice big pots in this one! With his narrow frame, he could maybe even climb into one to hide.

When he was a few feet away from the possible hiding spot, Avoka suddenly noticed he was being watched. Teary bluish eyes peered up at him, round with fright.

Avoka froze, his mind scrambling to find the normal, non-royal reaction one would have to finding a kid his age already hiding among the pots he’d wanted to climb into.

The person he’d stumbled across was an odd one, as one might expect in the middle of a dark alley. They wore a confusing combination of sleeveless ox-themed tunic and ribbon-decorated skirt, both in shades of green. The cute silver owl hairclip struggling to contain some of the kid’s wild green-blond hair said “maybe girl”, but the defined muscle in the kid’s limbs and very masculine ox tunic said “probably boy”.

The boy let out a peep of fright upon seeing Avoka and pulled tight into his hiding place. He hugged his knees to his chest, sobbing quietly.

Avoka was at a loss. He’d never met anyone his age, let alone learned how to deal with someone else’s tears. He barely knew how to handle his own! Why was this kid crying, anyway?

He took in the boy’s disheveled appearance. The skirt was brand new under the dirt, with all the crispness of freshly starched and ironed fabric. Avoka’s mother had spent a lot of time tutoring him in the art of fashion and the surprising amount of observation that it involved. He could tell those tears weren’t from repeated wear, and those blotches of dirt were footprints, not normal stains. His Sheikah training kicked in when he noticed the bruises subtly darkening on the boy’s arms. Defensive injuries, going by the concentration of dark spots forming on the fronts of his forearms.

Was this kid a little bit like Avoka? Born with a mental sex that made it difficult for him to buckle down and live as one kind of person all the time? Impa had told him that one reason he had to be very careful about his identities was because some people in the world were cruel, and attacked what confused them before they asked questions. Avoka was lucky his mother only grounded him and checked his closet when he was caught in unapproved clothing.

He moved forward, causing the stranger to flinch. Avoka stopped trying to approach and instead reached out with his voice. “Are you okay? Do you need help?” he asked with concern.

The boy looked up, seeming terrified. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Had he been scared speechless?

Avoka was tempted to pull down his mask to show this poor kid he wasn’t scary like some of the Royal Guard trainees were. He’d never intimidated anyone before—not without a whole lot of screaming and throwing things, anyway. He didn’t know how his aunt dealt with this.

Wait, mochi. Auntie kept Sheikah candies on her to calm down little kids if she accidentally made them cry, since she frequently oversaw fresh Royal Guard trainees and looked over young prospects.

“Let’s see…” He felt around for his candy stash. While he wasn’t all that fond of sweets, candy was one of the few snacks that wasn’t gross or difficult to eat when he had a mask on. He took out a plain-flavored honey sweet from his snack pouch and a handkerchief from one of the extra pockets he’d stitched to the inside of his haori. Holding them out like an offering to a frightened animal, he said, “Here. For your nose. And, um, because it looks like you’ve had a bad day.”

Much like the frightened animal Avoka had just silently compared him to, the boy reached out, paused as if to test Avoka’s reaction, and then claimed the offered things. Avoka observed as the kid savored the candy and cleaned himself up. Under the dirt that had smeared his face, he was quite…cute. People thought Avoka was cute, but that was just because of his size and voice. This kid was actually adorable. He had sweet blue-green eyes with downturned corners that made him look a little sad, a wide mouth that looked designed for smiles, and a big, interesting nose. His shaggy green-blond hair formed cool, sweeping spikes around his head. Avoka’s long, silky hair couldn’t manage something like that unless he put a lot of styling wax in it.

The boy uncurled a little, seeming less terrified of Avoka than before. “Is my birthday,” he said in a quiet, deep voice. He sounded around twelve or thirteen. “Birthday candy. I was going to buy some.”

Avoka’s heart broke for this kind-eyed, soft-spoken stranger. “Your birthday? And someone beat you up like this?” He didn’t even know this kid’s name, but he immediately wanted to kick those other guys’ asses. No one deserved to spend their birthday crying, scared, and alone in a dark alley.

The boy blinked at him. In surprise, maybe? Avoka realized that, for all its cuteness, this kid’s face was oddly unreadable. Though still blotchy from crying, his features had smoothed out almost like a mask.

Avoka was going to treat that reaction like a silent question and see what happened. “You wouldn’t have boot-prints and rips in a new skirt unless either you really hated it or someone else did. That’s a back-stitched hem; you’d have to work hard to tear it.” He indicated the overlapping stitches meant to hold the fabric together at all costs. In fact, the fabric had torn away from the stitches in some spots instead of the hemline seam popping, it was that secure. “You’re a boy, right?” he prompted, pausing to give the kid time to correct his guess. “Did someone attack you for wearing a skirt?”

Realization flashed across the boy’s flat expression like a spark in a dark room. “Oh!” He dropped his fist into his hand with something close to a smile on his face.

Avoka blinked at him. He wasn’t the best judge of others’ weirdness, but he got the sense that this kid was a little odd. A couple of minutes ago, he’d been seemingly scared out of his mind, and now he was already over it? Didn’t he feel those bruises? And what was with that “oh”? Had he just…had he been sitting here confused? Had Avoka actually solved some kind of mystery for him?

“You didn’t understand why this happened?” Avoka asked, stunned. The boy gave a little nod in reply. “Did you really think you’d done something random to make them angry at you?”

Avoka was reeling. This deep-voiced, muscular, flat-chested kid had gone out in a skirt and hadn’t expected anything to happen? It was an utterly foreign way of thinking to Avoka. At the back of his mind lurked a constant, painful awareness of how others perceived him. His publicly displayed speech, mannerisms, and manner of dress were all calculated to cause the least amount of commotion possible. Even now, out in the open while dressed as the imaginary boy he was playing instead of himself, he had his disguise in place and had been modulating his accent to keep it authentically common. As much as he’d railed against his aunt about it, he couldn’t actually imagine himself stepping out into public dressed in his princely clothes. The mountain of scandal being known as the first Crossed ruler in the entire existence of the New Kingdom would cause—not to mention the amount of questioning about his mental health!

“Thought I’d lied with ‘hi’. They said I was lying,” the boy said, oblivious to the wrench he’d tossed into Avoka’s mental gears. “But it was the clothes! Now I get it.” He hummed happily.

‘I think I’ve found the one person stranger than me,’ Avoka thought in disbelief. This boy was so…so…He couldn’t come up with an adjective. “Pure” didn’t capture the correct feeling, but it was close. The kid genuinely hadn’t known why he’d been attacked, and instead of blaming his attackers, he’d tried finding fault within himself. And he didn’t seem even the slightest bit angry about the wrong he’d been dealt! Avoka had a fair amount of patience for the adults in his life doing things that frustrated him, but he became a wrathful hellion if pushed to it and he could nurse a grudge unto eternity. He would have been planning his revenge as soon as he’d escaped his attackers.

For this stranger to miss something so obvious to Avoka, and probably most people, was definitely odd, but also kind of endearing. It seemed like the boy couldn’t fathom people being cruel for such a shallow reason, and he’d done his best to work his interpretation of the situation around that.

“You’re not very good at understanding other people, are you?” Avoka said, trusting that the other boy wouldn’t take his observation as an insult. Given his simple, slow, and somewhat stilted speech, this kid seemed like a very plain-words sort of person. Avoka liked people who didn’t read double-meanings into things; they were rare in his usual social circle.

The kid gave a crooked-toothed smile that lit up his face like the sun. “Body-language yes, words and reasons no,” he chirped. He paused, tilting his head to one side. “Why were you back here? Are you hiding, too?”

That hit a little too close to home. Avoka fiddled nervously with his mask. Impa was due to appear at any moment; that meeting of hers had definitely ended by now. “…Kind of.”

“From those boys I made mad?” the kid innocently asked.

Anger flared in Avoka’s heart on this boy’s behalf. Maybe he was too nice to understand what had happened, but Avoka knew all too well. “You didn’t do anything to deserve that. Don’t think you did,” he said firmly. He used the same tone that his Auntie did when she noticed him spiraling into thoughts of inadequacy. “Those people are assholes who don’t matter.” He relished the opportunity to swear with no one around to chide him.

Link gasped the same way Queen Ambi did when she caught him saying something off-color, but instead of admonishing Avoka for his language, he asked with a hushed sort of awe, “Is it okay to say that?”

Avoka grinned. For the ten or so minutes he had left before his aunt gave him the lecture of the century, yes. “I can say whatever I want until I get caught,” he told the boy. He was tempted to say more—maybe teach this too-nice kid that it was okay to break some rules so long as no one caught him doing it. Being forbidden from saying “fuck” because of one’s age was stupid, just like having to let strangers kiss the back of his hand at parties.

Speaking of greetings…He held out his hand for the stranger to shake. How could he have forgotten his formalities? “I’m Avoka, by the way.”

“I’m Link,” the boy said, accepting the handshake. He had a powerful, rugged grip. ‘Where does such a nice kid get rough hands like that?’ Avoka wondered, mystified. Schooling shifted into apprenticeships starting at age eleven for everyone but royalty. Maybe this kid really was thirteen and just kind of baby-faced.

Avoka glanced up at the darkening sky. “I can walk you home,” he offered. The guys who’d beaten Link up could still be prowling around, after all. “Do you live in town?”

“No, outside,” Link said. “Don’t worry. I know the way.”

That brought a wry smile to Avoka’s lips. This kid really was innocent, wasn’t he? “I’m not worried about you getting lost,” he said, pulling the boy to his feet. Link winced as he did, seeming to finally notice the bruises decorating him. It had taken long enough. “Do you need a healing potion?” Avoka asked after giving the kid’s darkening forearms another look. He’d taken an impressive number of hits. Probably from multiple attackers. Reaching into his sleeve, Avoka unlatched his flask and pulled it out. Good thing he’d just switched out the water in there for something more useful.

Link stared at the flask with wide eyes. It took several seconds for Avoka to realize why. Booze was usually kept in hidden bottles like these, not potions or water. Impa had a collection of similar, confiscated containers she’d taken from Sheikah agents and Hylian soldiers who dared drink on the job.

“It’s not alcohol,” he said quickly, his cheeks flaming. Thank goodness for his mask and the alley’s darkness hiding it. “Normal glass bottles are bulky, is all. Metal doesn’t shatter, either.” He had tried it once, carrying little glass bottles on his person, but the realization that one bad fall could result in him winding up full of glass shards had quickly ended that experiment.

“I’m a blacksmith…almost,” the boy explained. Oh, so that was where the muscles and rough hands had come from! He must have been well into his apprenticeship already. “I know metals. You’re rich.” With that declaration, he downed the potion in the flask without questioning or complaint, then handed the flask back.

Avoka stared, dumbfounded, at the bottle. It was just…metal. Steel, probably. Most metal was steel, in his experience. He held up the flask and turned it around, as if it would give up the secret of how Syrup and Link knew he wasn’t common. “Is this expensive?” he wondered aloud. A blacksmith would know better than him. Such workers were a very distant reality to someone of his social position; he’d kind of forgotten that every bit of metal in the castle had to have been shaped by an actual human being.

Though Link’s face stayed mostly blank, amusement sparkled in his eyes as he raised an eyebrow. “You’re really rich,” the boy commented.

Though the tone was emotionally flat and without judgment, Avoka cringed. He shoved the incriminating flask back up his sleeve and clicked it onto a cuff on his forearm. How much about him was obvious to the eye of someone outside his tiny social group? As far as he knew, he’d been able to seem fairly convincing as an average citizen in front of people at the castle, but he’d never really spoken to anyone who wasn’t socially higher-up in some way. He didn’t even have much contact with the castle’s servant population because his parents didn’t approve of him distracting them with idle conversation. Servants were paid well to do their jobs efficiently and unobtrusively, and it only caused them trouble to disrupt their work.

How was he supposed to rule Hyrule if he didn’t know Hyrule? Even his father had spent some time as a knight, getting just as tired and filthy as the other men his age fighting monsters on the battlefield. Avoka only had Impa to talk to, and occasionally the guards who watched the stairs to his tower. What did his parents expect him to do once he was crowned, guess at what people he fundamentally didn’t understand would need in order to prosper?

“There’s a lot I don’t know,” he admitted. “I wish I could get out more. Learn more.” He lived in a castle with one of the biggest libraries in the land, and yet there was so much knowledge he had missed purely by not living through it or being allowed to speak to people who had. “It’s just hard,” he said with sadness and frustration. His life was as easy as could be, and yet making it seem worthwhile felt like climbing uphill through cold honey.

“Because you’re hiding?” Link asked. Despite having no way to know what had passed through Avoka’s mind, it felt like the boy could see through him.

Avoka’s skin crawled at the feeling of being perceived. Enigmatic intelligence shone in those vivid aqua eyes. He looked away from Link’s steady gaze. “…Yeah.”

“Want to hide at my house?”

Avoka’s brain tripped over its own feet before taking off at a Pegasus gallop. “Wh-What?” Of all the responses, he never would have expected that one. Inviting a stranger to one’s house? Was that a thing people did? Strangers walked into Avoka’s house all the time, but that was because the King held open court. It was different from casually saying “hey, wanna come over?” Was that a normal commoner thing to do? It must have been, right?

He was tempted to take Link up on the offer. Avoka desperately needed someone who could show him the ropes of being not-royalty. Impa couldn’t do it; her upbringing was even stranger than his. The guards at his tower wouldn’t do it because Princess Zelda was too important for them to casually speak to and Avoka would have no need to ask such things. His tutors wouldn’t tell him because Princess Zelda’s position put her above such questions and she had more important things to be learning about.

“Would it…would it be okay?” he asked hesitantly. “People can just…walk into others’ homes?” The only mental image that brought up for him was of an invading army battering down the front doors of the castle and pouring in.

“Should knock and ask first,” Link said matter-of-factly. He flung his hand toward the south. “I live that way,” he declared, and started walking.

Avoka jogged to catch up, then hovered at the boy’s shoulder like a real Sheikah guard would. Link led the way through several dark alleys with unerring skill. He easily sidestepped small things on the ground that Avoka just plain couldn’t see. Link’s orange complexion, teal eyes, and green-blonde hair weren’t Sheikah traits, but he navigated the dark like he had the Sheikah sight that Avoka lacked. Could Hylians be born with such a thing instead of their usual ability to better commune with spirits?

Link paused in front of an opening to Main Street. Avoka peered around him curiously to see where they’d ended up. The kid had managed to use the alleys to avoid the thickest part of the market crowd. Clever.

He frowned when he saw the fretful look on Link’s mostly un-animated, but highly expressive face. The point of Avoka being here was to keep him from feeling like he was in danger. “If you see those guys, just tell me and I’ll figure something out,” he promised. It was the same kind of thing his aunt would say to reassure him.

Link turned to give him a puppy-like pout of confusion. “Okay?” He hesitantly stepped out of the darkness.

They walked down Main Street, weaving through the crowd. Though Avoka had freely zig-zagged around earlier that afternoon, he took note of the fact that Link preferred to keep to the edges of the road to give the carriages and self-driving chariots a wide berth. Avoka supposed that was logical; getting run over was dangerous, and one couldn’t always see vehicles creeping through the throngs of shoppers. It had been reckless of him to ignore that potential danger earlier.

Avoka scanned the area closely, both to keep an eye out for Link’s marauders and to make the most of his dwindling freedom. He wanted to keep a solid sketch of what his people looked like when living their lives and not trying to impress him. This could be the last time he’d be in contact with the wider part of his homeland for some time.

A voice cut through the crowd noise. “Hey! It’s the creep! We weren’t done with you!”

Link looked to the left, and Avoka followed his line of sight. Three boys, two of them around thirteen and one closer to Avoka’s age, were kicking away from a wall they’d been chatting around. Scuffing footsteps caught Avoka’s ears, and he did a double-take at seeing Link shooting off like an arrow. That boy was fast!

Well, Avoka was nothing if not determined. He charged up with all the speed he could muster, his feet screaming as the straps of his geta chewed mercilessly into his skin. He caught Link by the wrist, causing the boy to slow down a tad in surprise, and steered him toward the nearest alley. He didn’t know what Link had been intending to do by sprinting toward the side of a random building, but Avoka had a better idea.

“What?” Link cried out in dismay.

“Calm down. I just want fewer witnesses,” Avoka told him as he just barely managed to pull ahead. It was an effort to keep the wheeze out of his voice.

“‘Witnesses’?!”

Avoka winced. Maybe that was more of an Auntie word than a normal one. He tugged on Link’s wrist to make him slow to a stop, then pulled the larger boy behind him. “I don’t like bullies,” he said as he turned to confront the jerks running up behind them. He put a hand to his hidden weapons sheath for comfort. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to use it, but Hylia help him if these assholes did anything more to hurt Link. The nice boy had been through enough today!

The three boys hesitated at the edge of the alley, then smirked and walked farther in. Avoka suppressed a smirk of his own. Idiots. If he were a real Royal Guard trainee, that would have been an incredibly stupid move. You didn’t fight a Sheikah in the dark unless you absolutely had to.

Behind him, Link put his hands over his ears. Avoka grimly braced himself for whatever foulness was about to spew from these jerks’ mouths.

“If you could afford clothes like that, why were you only carrying twenty Rupees, you cheapskate?” the boy in front loudly demanded.

Avoka sucked in a breath through his nose. The nerve of a thief complaining about the wallet he’d stolen! Sure, Avoka had always been a bit of a thief himself, but he’d been thankful for the use of the things he’d taken!

As if to hammer home what an ungrateful little shit he was in Avoka’s eyes, the boy who’d spoken tossed down a dark green leather pouch that matched Link’s outfit and ground his heel into it. Link let out a soft cry of distress and dropped his eyes to the ground.

Avoka’s fingers tightened around one of his knives, and it was only by the grace of Hylia that he managed to keep his magic in check. He hadn’t been this angry in years, and never so much on another person’s behalf. “You’re not going to mess with Link anymore,” he said with all the ominous warning he could muster, taking a step forward. “If you do, you’ll have to mess with me.” Damn his high, girly voice! It served him well as a princess, but not during times like these.

The boys snickered at him. Magic sparked at Avoka’s fingertips. He gritted his teeth as he reined it in. Not yet.

“You know that’s a cross-dressing freak, not a girl, right?” the boy closer to their age said derisively, stabbing a finger at Link.

Link flinched, sending another angry spark through Avoka’s hand. His knives were practically singing to him now.

“I bet we caught him on the way to sneak into the girls’ side of the public bathhouse, or something,” the other lackey said. “You should be thanking us, Mousy!”

The leader of the little gang cracked his knuckles. His teeth showed in what would have been a frightening leer if Avoka weren’t fantasizing about knocking gaps into that grin. “Yeah, how about you hand over your wallet? I bet you’re carrying more than that stingy freak was,” he jeered.

Link recoiled at the word “freak” as if stung, and Avoka lost it. He hissed, only because it was quieter than the roar building up in his chest, and slid a kunai from his sleeve. Spiteful glee drew a dark smile across his face as the boys’ eyes flashed with fear. They ought to be afraid for terrorizing that innocent kid the way they had. Link had done nothing but wear what he liked, and these pricks had made him afraid he’d done something to deserve a beating!

“If you call him a freak again, I’ll make you bleed,” he said with a vicious flash of teeth they couldn’t see behind his mask. “Now give him his money back!”

“We already spent it,” the lead boy said with one last puff of bravado. He pulled a pink-wrapped honey candy from his pocket.

“Aw,” Link sighed. It was the only sign of protest he’d shown through the whole interaction, as if he were afraid to be any more outspoken.

Well, Avoka would speak for him, then.

He let his magic go. It eagerly flowed into his throwing knife, making the metal flare a dramatic white-gold. “Drop it,” he snarled, one more warning than these boys deserved. His eyes darted around for a safe spot to aim the knife in the event these idiots still didn’t take him seriously. Maybe the ground; when he’d been little, people had seemed particularly intimidated by how he could plant kitchen knives firmly in the castle’s walls, which was why he’d stolen them whenever he’d wanted to get someone to finally listen.

“A mage?!” the boys shrilled. Suddenly they’d decided he was a real threat. They divested their pockets of their ill-won goods and sprinted off with shouts of fear. Avoka relished his victory. Maybe Link would actually be able to wear his pretty clothes in peace for a while.

Link looked around, then hurried forward to pack his wallet and candies into his pockets. Avoka returned his knife to its sheath kept watch on the exit to the alley, just in case Link’s fear of those muggers returning turned out to be sound.

Link’s flat, stilted voice drew Avoka’s attention back behind him. “You weren’t really going to throw, were you?” he asked.

“No,” he confessed. “I’m not accurate enough to be non-lethal yet, especially with my magic going.” It took more skill to intentionally maim than it did to accidentally kill. Impa had warned him about fools with swords, and Avoka had more sense than to act like one. “I was bluffing…mostly.”

“It’s bad to threaten with knives,” Link chided. “Could hurt someone.” His tone wasn’t fearful, or even angry, just mildly disapproving. Avoka was both flattered that this kid had enough trust in him not to be scared of a stranger armed with hidden weapons and worried that Link might not have a healthy sense of danger or suspicion. He should have been at least a little unnerved after watching all that; Avoka certainly would have been, in his place.

“Those guys hurt you,” Avoka pointed out. What was implied, but politely unspoken was, “and they deserved to be hurt back”. Avoka hadn’t done any more than scare them because he was useless in a fist fight but too potentially lethal with a knife, and so had been forced to take a higher road. If he’d been as big and strong as Link, though, he would have absolutely beaten those boys into the dirt like they did to other people. They’d earned it.

“Yeah, but…” Link’s face screwed up in adorable confusion. Oh, Avoka dearly wanted to hug him. He couldn’t imagine anyone ever wanting to put a mark on that sweet face. “Don’t hit back, please. Not for me,” Link said, his gentle voice firm. His eyes shone with iron resolve. “Hurting doesn’t help.”

Avoka gave him a slow blink. Link would have been happy to just…let those boys get away with it? Replace his wallet, never receive any returns from his stolen Rupees, and move on with his life? Avoka couldn’t fathom it. He nursed grudges accurately and in the long term—wrote down wrongs when he was left to seethe in his tower until his parents found him agreeable again. True, he hadn’t yet acted on those wrongs beyond giving those people a chillier attitude, but he never let them go. He’d always envisioned some distant day in the misty future when he’d fairly distribute his wrath to those who’d earned it. Some part of him had never stopped imagining that one day he’d make the people who’d made him feel small, and like only half of himself, learn firsthand what emotional darkness they’d put him through. His mother was still at the top of that list, even if he’d managed to turn most of his anger toward her into quiet resentment instead.

But was it worth it? The time spent hunched over tear-dotted ink, ripping his pen into the parchment as he added to his long list of small hatreds? He didn’t feel any better when he read through the instances of his parents ignoring his wishes, or Impa forcing him into another box that didn’t quite fit, or the compounded weight of all the other little reminders that the world considered him fundamentally wrong in some way. Was there merit in letting some of those things go? It felt like it would be admitting defeat, quietly letting the world roll over him like it always did when he didn’t plant his feet and threaten it with a knife. Faced with this utterly alien worldview, he found his own called into question. He didn’t know what to do about it.

Avoka opened his mouth to ask: “How do you do it? Let things go?” He only got a few words in before a sharp pop and ensuing hiss signaled the end of his freedom.

Smoke filled the alley and a hard, wiry arm snatched him up by the waist. Avoka was thrown over an adult’s shoulder like a sack of radishes and launched skyward by a Hookshot. He just sighed, resigned to his fate.

Impa hauled him across town in silence. Her simmering aura of “just wait until we get back home” was nearly palpable. Ooh, she was pissed.

He looked back the way they’d come, thinking of the too-nice blacksmith with the sunny smile that he’d run into. The one with interesting ideas that he’d like to hear about. His…potential first friend, in all his ten years and five months of life. If he hadn’t snuck out precisely on this day, at this time, he might never have run into that kid who was maybe a little like him.

Avoka felt like all the trouble he was about to be in was worth it.

Chapter Text

Link yawned and adjusted his pack of repaired weaponry. Ugh, morning deliveries were the worst . Morning just wasn’t his time of the day, and he doubted that would ever change no matter how often his sister assigned him this chore. How did anyone function at sunrise without having stayed up through the night to see it?

In his sleepy shuffling, he caught the toe of his back foot on the heel of his front and tripped over himself. He fell smack into a small, narrow back and then staggered off to the side.

“Augh!” A musical tinkle of shattering glass accompanied the surprised, frustrated scream.

He’d run into Maple, a girl who ran potion deliveries for her grandmother Syrup. She was always zipping across town when she wasn’t minding the potion shop, and thus Link stood a decent chance of running into her when he was doing deliveries for his own family’s business. Unfortunately, he had a bad habit of doing that literally when he was too tired to see straight.

“Link!” Maple roared. She took the Magic Rod off her belt and waved it to repair the broken bottles and return them to their carrying basket. Then she leveled it at Link, who went cross-eyed at the globe of quartz a few inches from his nose. “That’s the second time this month! I’ve had to start carrying replacement potions in my purse because of you,” she seethed. “How? Why?”

Link shrugged helplessly. He didn’t know why the worst of his sleepy morning stumbles seemed to target the poor witch. While there were other delivery kids for various industries scurrying around Castle Town in the early morning, he didn’t slam into them nearly as often.

“If you weren’t cursed enough as it is, I’d lay another one on you,” Maple groused, tucking her Magic Rod back into her belt. “Some guy was looking for you earlier. Why don’t you go run into him instead?”

Link frowned in thought. There were very few people in the world who would ever be out looking for him, and they all shared his last name. He gestured questioningly toward the family owl emblem stitched onto his tunic.

“Not unless you’ve got a twiggy Sheikah cousin,” Maple said. “He was about my size and trying to look bigger with some platform sandals and a Royal Guard trainee uniform. Loud, deep, scratchy voice and ultra-long hair ring a bell? He has his mask up, too, so either he thinks he’s way cooler than he is or he’s trying to hide a zit.”

The Sheikah clogs, long hair, and mask sounded right for that boy Link had met a little over a year ago. Avoka had been squeaky, though.

“He’s been puttering around the southern end of Main Street asking after you. I think Rupin’s about to lose it—the kid’s outfit is spooking some of his potential customers.”

Link grimaced. Rupin, who ran one of the adventuring gear shops on the southern end of the Castle Town Bazaar, had little patience for anything that cut even slightly into his profits. He had a particular dislike of Link, who was fascinated by the workmanship of his more expensive shields but had no intention of ever buying one.

“Thank you,” he told Maple before jogging down the road. Around him, latecomers to the market’s morning set-up were rolling out their mats and laying out price boards. Experienced street merchants with well-established shops were set up and smiling at the passers-by starting to trickle in. Beedle was already bickering with someone trying to sell him a Blue Potion that had gone a little green with age, and the Zora ladies who ran the Ring Shop were taking a water break as a heavily-armored adventurer walked away with a dainty, pearl-studded number that he carefully slid onto his pinky. Probably something to improve his swimming speed.

“Now, sir, I’m sure you understand the effect that one of your rank might have on the common working man,” Link heard as he approached Rupin’s Gear Shop. “A uniformed officer, even as young as yourself, is someone to be respected. I’m afraid that such a deferential atmosphere isn’t one I like to cultivate in my humble shop. Customers should be comfortable here!” The tone was at the most sickly-sweet the man could manage, which meant he’d been repeating himself for a while.

A Sheikah boy with lengthy silver hair tied up in twin double-loops that resembled butterfly wings glared up at the irritated shopkeeper. As Maple had said, he wore the dark blue hakama, haori, and collared uniform shirt of one of the Royal Guardsmen who protected Hyrule Castle. His broad leather belt and the lack of an eye sigil on his forehead marked him as a trainee, though his diminutive size was the most obvious sign. He stood with his arms crossed and his chin jutting out defiantly. “You run one of the most well-known landmarks in the Bazaar and Link is known to frequent your shop,” he declared. “If I can’t find him by walking around, I’m just going to stay here until he shows up.” His husky tenor voice was startling to hear. The boy looked like he was about nine, but he sounded a few years older than Link!

Rupin’s eyes bulged in frustrated fury behind his cheerful grimace. “But please, sir, I’m only a humble shopkeeper who lives on his profits, and you’re—” He caught sight of Link and a hint of relief slipped through his expression before the smile was back and somewhat less frightening. “Oh, look, he’s here! Does that mean your mission has been accomplished, young officer?”

The boy looked over. His brown eyes crinkled in a smile mostly hidden behind his dark blue mask. “It does! Oh, and here, for your lost business.” He pulled out a wallet, withdrew a silver Rupee, and picked up Rupin’s hand to lay the money on the stunned man’s palm. “Pretend I bought something,” he said before skipping toward Link.

For his part, Link was quite confused. This boy looked like Avoka, but his eyes were a much lighter and more yellowish shade of gray-brown. His voice wasn’t the mousy flute Link had heard last year, either. Could puberty change voices that much so fast? If Avoka was as old as he looked, he surely couldn’t have hit puberty, right?

As the young Sheikah neared, the sound of his magic hit Link’s ears. Avoka still sounded like both a choir and agitated bees, his power muted by the same sense of unfulfilled purpose and tight restraint as before.

A quieter melody chimed at the Sheikah’s ear, where he wore a cuff of metal, stone, and magical Bluestone crystal. Bluestone was a rock whose name could be deceptive; it was only blue when both charged with magic and actively running a spell with said magic. Most of the time it was an orange color that signaled it being magically charged, but not necessarily enchanted and definitely not active. The Bluestone chips in Avoka’s ear cuff were a telltale turquoise, singing sweetly of deception. It was an illusion spell spun from Sheikah shadow-magic—rare, expensive to commission, and very odd for someone around his age to be toting around. That would explain the slight shift in eye-color, though not why someone so young would need a spell like that.

Avoka slowed to a stop in front of Link, the confidence seeming to bleed out of him. He looked down at his feet, which were clad in taller geta than the last time Link had seen him, and no longer turning pink in protest. “Um, do you remember me?” he asked timidly. “I know I look and sound a little different. For…for reasons. But I’m still me.”

Link nodded. Even if he hadn’t had a good memory for people, how could he forget the boy who’d once threatened bullies with a knife for his sake? It had been the first time another kid had defended him. “You have an illusion on,” he remarked. “Still hiding?”

Avoka’s hand shot to his ear cuff. “H-How did you—?!”

“I can hear magic,” Link told him. “Are you okay? You got kidnapped.”

A pink flush showed above the edge of the boy’s mask. “Oh, that was um…That was my boss, sorry. I wasn’t supposed to be out, and she took me back to…work. She can be a little dramatic sometimes,” he said, fiddling with his sleeve. “What was that about hearing magic, though?”

“I’m a mage,” Link explained. Most people with magic wound up with a singular unique talent like Avoka’s, but Link’s fell somewhere between that and what Maple could do. Having one’s senses and strength boosted lacked the flashy versatility of being able to cast various spells from a Magic Rod, but it made him pretty good at wielding the heavier hammers at the forge and outrunning bullies.

“You’re a mage?” Avoka’s brown eyes misted over slightly in recollection. “But those boys last year…”

“Hurting doesn’t help,” Link declared. Just because he had magic, that didn’t give him an excuse to use it against people he didn’t like. “Do you still knife-threaten people? Because that’s not nice.”

The Sheikah shifted from foot to foot. “This is actually the first time I’ve been out of the cas—out of the house since you last saw me. I went through some stuff.” His eyes flicked away and he put a hand to his throat. “I got better, though. Actually, I was kind of wondering…” Avoka tucked his hands in his sleeves, nervously grinding the front peg of one of his geta against the cobblestones. “Is that offer to visit your house still open? I-I know it’s been a whole year, and you don’t know me at all, and I probably scared you last time we met—sorry about that—but I was just wondering—”

If Avoka started talking any faster, Link would lose track of all those words and any sense of understanding. “Yeah,” he cut in. As Maple had taught him since they’d first met months ago, interrupting people was sometimes okay and didn’t always lead to yelling. She did it all the time! “We can hang out. But I have deliveries first. You can come with.” He hiked up his backpack full of iron and steel.

While enchanted to be more durable than its materials, his backpack wasn’t an internally expanded Bag of Holding. Those were expensive, and besides, part of this chore was about building up his physical strength and the magical reserves that boosted it. Instead of a lightweight little satchel, he was toting about forty unconcealed pounds of repaired, paper-wrapped weaponry and tools to be returned to various soldiers and workers around Castle Town. There was also ten pounds’ worth of protective iron mesh and padding stitched to the inside of his pack just in case. It was a comfortable training weight for him to carry for a couple of hours—neither light enough for him to ignore, nor heavy enough to put him at risk of injury.

Avoka did a double-take at his pack, as if just now noticing it. “You can lift that?” he asked incredulously.

“Mage,” Link reminded him. He took his flipbook of customers out of his pocket and checked the names on the list. Next was Bashter, a Goron who lived on the west side of town and was a hot commodity among the local Hylian construction crews. His hammer probably made up half of the weight in Link’s backpack. “This way,” he told Avoka, pointing, before setting off at a swift walk.

Avoka jogged to keep up. “You mentioned last year that you were apprenticing as a blacksmith,” he said. “Do you do all the deliveries for your smithy?”

“I do,” Link said. “Not an apprentice yet, though. Just home-schooled.”

The Sheikah looked him up and down. “Wait, how old are you?”

“Ten. Eleven in two months.” Link’s somewhat Gerudo build and relatively deep voice tended to make people think he was a couple of years older.

Avoka gasped. “I’m older than you.”

Link gasped, too. “You are?”

“Yeah, by, uh…” The Sheikah paused to do some mental math. “Five months. I’ve been a Royal Guard trainee since my last birthday, but I started my training earlier.”

“Huh.” He wondered what Royal Guard training entailed. Sneaking, presumably. He didn’t really know what those guys did, other than look scary and stand outside important places.

Link yawned and absently sidestepped some dung left in the wake of a fancy black and white coach. He towed Avoka around it by the wrist when the boy seemed to miss the obstacle. “Watch the road,” he advised. “There’s stuff on it sometimes.”

“Oh,” Avoka said, seeming disturbed by the sight of horse poo on a horse-traveled street. “Does no one clean it?”

Link gave the boy a bemused look. He was making it sound like he’d never been on a street before. A mental image of a big Link duck tucking a smaller Avoka duckling under his wing crossed his mind. It was a terrible combination, someone who could barely explain matched with someone who needed many explanations, but Link seemed to be the only normal-ish kid Avoka knew. Until someone who was better at words came along, he was the only one on the job.

“Street-sweepers do,” he told the Sheikah. “But are lots of roads.”

“Ah, I see.”

They traveled down that street, turned a corner, and started heading north toward the town’s middle ring. Castle Town’s circles of social status were a little more literal than in some cities due to the place being built in a semicircle with concentric arcs. Most laborers lived closer to the wall that kept the monsters out during troubled times, but Bashter was sought-after enough to afford a house farther in.

Avoka buzzed around him, peering up at buildings and studying passing vehicles. He would clip-clop a few steps away to look at something, then scurry back, then trot off in another direction before returning to Link’s side. All the while, the boy didn’t speak but seemed to be vibrating with the urge to do so.

Link smiled amusedly. Some people assumed that because he was “stoic”, they ought to leave him to his silence. They considered it rude to speak first, for whatever reason. He was mainly quiet because he didn’t feel the need to speak unless he had something to say, and he often didn’t speak at all because he had a habit of unintentionally sparking tempers. If given the chance, Link would happily talk the ears off of anyone who asked him to explain something. It was just that conversations quickly turned unpleasant when other people expected him to keep up with their lightning-fast pace, spout long and thoughtless sentences like they did, and react loudly and often to whatever they said, then got mad when he couldn’t.

“It’s okay to talk,” he told Avoka. “Am bad at out-loud words, but I like talking and questions. If you want to talk at me with lots of fast words, that’s okay, too. I just won’t understand you.”

The Sheikah perked up. “Oh, is that why—? Wait, no.” Avoka looked away guiltily.

Link could guess at what he’d meant to ask, familiar with that reaction. “Mmhm, is why I talk funny,” he said. “I think better than I talk.” Thinking to oneself, spinning ideas into writing, and spouting those musings at other people were different processes, and he was only good at the first two. Explaining what went through his head in the form of conversation (spoken or signed) involved running it through a mental translator, getting a sentence lined up, and then pushing the result out into the world. The small amount of lag involved in the process was what caused his halting speech, and having to run the translation backwards when listening was why rapid conversations quickly turned into language soup that he couldn’t make heads or tails of. Whenever he needed to get a complex idea across to his sister or coworkers at the smithy, he’d just hand them a document he’d written out with all the information they would need. Writing was such a wonderfully efficient and archival mode of communication. You couldn’t flip the pages of a conversation to review what someone had said, after all.

Avoka didn’t seem to know what to say in response to that. He shuffled his feet awkwardly before resuming his sightseeing, though this time he asked questions.

“What’s this?” he asked, pointing to a bench with a yellow-painted sign posted next to it.

“Taxi stop. For convenience.”

“What’s a taxi?”

“Carriage that gets you places. You pay by the block.”

“People don’t have their own carriages?”

“Mostly rich people do. Horses are expensive.”

Avoka put a hand to his chin. “I guess you do have to pay people to muck the stables and feed them and such. Oh, and then the feed costs money, too…”

“Most people can’t pay people,” Link informed him. Hearing an approaching magical hum and the squeak of vehicle suspension, he took the Sheikah by the arm and tugged him out of the way of a chariot coming up from behind them. Those self-propelled vehicles had a bad habit of sneaking up on people who were used to the sound of horse hooves. They were equipped with bells and horns, but drivers rarely used them for the right reasons.

Avoka watched it pass with wide eyes. The three occupants paid him no mind, deep in conversation over something. “They could have killed me!” he exclaimed. “How could they drive so irresponsibly?”

“That’s how traffic works. Smaller one gets out of the way,” Link explained. “They thought you would move.”

“How entitled!”

Link shrugged. He was fine with dodging vehicles, but he supposed not everyone had the patience for it.

“Hmph.” Avoka glared at the distant chariot before finding something else to ask about. “What’s this?”

Link glanced to the side. “Sewer manhole.”

Avoka pranced away from it like a nervous horse. “Oh, right, sewers…Why does that store over there have so many clothes in it?”

“Because they made them already. You buy what fits.”

“What if the measurements aren’t quite right, though? Not everyone is standard in shape.”

“Then they fit funny.”

“And people don’t care?”

“Not really. Silly thing to care about.”

“…Huh.”

Link spied the familiar iron door of Bashter’s townhouse and walked up the front steps with Avoka at his shoulder. He took his backpack off, pulled out the iron hammer that had been making it a little lopsided, and rested the tool on his shoulder. Avoka looked up at the wrapped head with wide eyes.

“How much does that weigh?” he asked in a hushed voice.

Link hefted it a little. “Twenty pounds?”

“Twenty?”

“Isn’t a big Goron hammer.”

Link took up the claw-shaped doorknocker hanging at about eye-level and brought it down in three ringing clangs. Bashter’s door was the only one he didn’t hate using the knocker for; the sound still hurt his ears, but not in a Bad Noise way. Except for its painful loudness, the ring of metal on metal was rather pleasant.

The door opened promptly and Bashter grinned down at him. “Heya, Link! Glad you got my hammer back to me so quick! I’ve got a big job coming up,” he boomed. “Did the weight give you any problem?”

“No, sir.” Link held the tool out, bracing one foot in front of him so he didn’t tip over. Super-strength didn’t excuse him from the effects of holding almost a quarter of his weight at arm’s length.

“Thanks, Brother!” Bashter plucked the hammer from Link’s hands and exchanged it for a yellow Rupee to cover the delivery fee.

“You’re welcome.” Link gave him a short bow, then recollected his pack and set off for the next client.

Avoka kept glancing over his shoulder, his eyes wide. “I didn’t know Gorons were so big!” he said. “Are they all huge like that?”

Link nodded. Bashter was of average height at eight feet tall, and had a medium build for his race. Having been on a few construction sites before, Link had seen Gorons bigger than Bashter. “You’ve never met a Goron?”

“Only Hylians, Labrynnans, Sheikah, and the occasional Gerudo,” Avoka replied. “I’ve only seen a Zora once or twice. Gorons, Ritos, and Zoras don’t really interact with my social circle. Which is a problem, now that I think about it.” He frowned and rubbed his chin. “They belong to sovereign nations within Hylia’s realm, but it seems like they should get more of a voice in the central government…”

Link’s eyebrows went up. Did Avoka’s family share the same social circles as Hyrule’s monarchy? Because that was the only way what he’d just said made sense.

Hmm, a wealthy Sheikah boy with little understanding of the outside world whose parents had something to do with the King and Queen? And he had an apprenticeship as a future castle guard? It seemed like Avoka might have grown up in the castle or one of the fancy neighborhoods closest to it. His parents could have been high-ranking members of the Royal Guard, or super-rich people who rubbed elbows with other rich people at the castle. It probably was worrying that Avoka didn’t often see members of non-human races, then; it wouldn’t do for Hyrule’s royal family to discriminate against the peoples they shared Hylia’s blessed lands with.

Link’s delivery run went as smoothly as usual, his earlier run-in with Maple aside. Having Avoka around to commentate was interesting. The boy’s curiosity and willingness to ask any question that came to mind quickly endeared him to Link. Too many people assumed that Link’s simple speech indicated someone who knew and understood less than them. True, there were a lot of things others automatically seemed to know that took longer for him to study up on, but he was good at observation and a quick learner. He was worthy of being asked questions.

Avoka was patient with Link’s limitations, and yet didn’t seem condescending. It was accommodation without insult, a rare thing in Link’s experience. If Link needed Avoka to repeat something he’d said too quickly, the boy didn’t get angry about saying it again. He also noticed that the Sheikah tended to keep his speech very to-the-point, which he appreciated. Fancy wording with flowery dancing around the topic tended to confuse him, and silent implications or double-speak just sounded like strange phrasing instead of secret messages. Blunt, potentially insulting speech suited Link’s sensibilities far better than tactful politesse; it was how all his relatives spoke and what he’d grown up hearing at the forge.

“Now we can go to my house,” Link declared, leading the way to Castle Town’s main front gate. He stretched out his shoulders. Ah, they were nicely sore. He’d gotten a good workout today.

“Is there a reason you live outside the city?” Avoka asked. He peered into the small forest beyond the open gate with wonder. Link wondered whether he’d ever seen it before. “I thought it was too dangerous to be outside a town during times of trouble.”

“Monsters don’t break into houses much,” Link said. He didn’t have any memory of the last attack on Hyrule, but his sister had told him that keeping the lights off and the windows shuttered was usually enough to make Stalfoses ignore your house. Moblins and Bokoblins were a bigger danger, but it took a ridiculous amount of power to conjure up enough of those to raid the countryside. It had been almost fifty years since the last mass assault like that. Usually, kingdom takeover attempts were focused on cities and larger villages, since it was more feasible for most evil mages to conjure up a single battalion of monsters right where they needed it.

“But don’t they burn down buildings and cause massacres?” Avoka asked. He flung his hands toward the thick stone wall whose gate they were passing through. “What’s the point of this thing, then?”

“Armies of monsters are like that. Not one or two,” Link clarified. “You’re thinking of history books. They only talk about big things there. The little things are like…you see a Moblin outside and pretend you don’t exist until it leaves.” Or so his sister had told him. Link hadn’t even been a year old the last time Hyrule had been attacked, a coup focused mainly on Castle Town that had affected the area around it to a lesser degree. Fourteen-year-old Gabbi had gathered him up and hidden under a bed with him in her arms until their mother had declared the coast clear.

Avoka shuddered. “I’ve seen Moblins in those history books. They sound terrifying.”

Link nodded. Nine-foot-tall pig monsters who probably knew how to fight better than you were super scary. He didn’t know how people signed up to apprentice as knights at his age, knowing they might one day be expected to fight one of those beasts.

Avoka went quiet as they entered the forest. He took in the sight of the trees with wonder. Reaching out, he watched the dappled light streaming through the leaves slide across his sleeve. When he caught sight of an apple tree, he skipped toward it and stared up into its flowery white boughs. It was too early for fruit, but the trees in bloom were quite a sight.

“What kind of tree is this? Do you know?” Avoka asked, glancing over.

“An apple tree. Scrub Apple. Green and sour. They’re good for baking,” Link said. The trees were recognizable by their leaves, which were darker and more bluish than those of the more common Hylian Sugar Apple. “You haven’t seen an apple tree before?”

The boy shook his head. “Mother has terrible allergies, so we have to be careful about what we grow next to the…uh, next to our house.” He tucked his hands in his sleeves and deliberately turned his eyes away from Link. “All of these flowers would have her wheezing. I’d love to have a tree like this planted somewhere on the grounds, though. Maybe in a greenhouse so Mother doesn’t suffer in spring.”

Link let out a soft huff of laughter. It drew Avoka’s startled attention toward him. “Is ‘in the yard’, for most people. Maybe ‘in the field’,” he said with a smile. “Also, greenhouses are expensive.”

Avoka blushed. “It seems like a lot of things in my life are.”

“Can’t choose what you’re born into. It’s good you want to learn about other people,” Link said. He’d seen a lot of rich kids in his time running the front counter of the Bluesmith Forge, and very few were even half as agreeable as Avoka.

Once they had passed through the woods, it was only a short walk through the waving grass of Hyrule Field before they reached the cleared stretch of dirt around Link’s house. The non-grassy area was an ugly, but reasonable precaution in case the house’s Blue Flame forge went out of control. Link walked right up to the front gate while Avoka trailed behind him. The Sheikah seemed intimidated by the twelve-foot-high, outward-curving ironwood fence.

“I still don’t know much about commoners, but that looks expensive,” Avoka commented.

Link took a magic key out of his pocket. It consisted of a Bluestone crystal embedded in a small stone block, enchanted with a magical signature that matched the gate’s internal lock. “Never said I was poor. My family could be rich if we didn’t spend our money,” he said, tapping the key against the barrier of nigh-indestructible Sheikah stala. The lock clicked and the doors swung outward.

Avoka’s mouth fell open as he stared up at Link’s house. Link hummed amusedly at his reaction. He supposed it was an intimidating sight to people unfamiliar with his family background, but it was still funny.

Link’s home was a small fortress, designed by his parents to withstand attacks from anyone who might want to break down the doors and steal the technological secrets within. Spikes lined the roof and stala armor reinforced the thick granite walls. The front door was innocuous wood with a steel core and enchanted to be nigh indestructible, hinges and all.

“Heard of the Bluesmith family before?” Link asked slyly. He loved surprising people like this. No one expected anything extraordinary from someone as plain as him.

“Blue…Bluesmith?” Avoka stammered. “The ones who invented everything?”

Link laughed. “Not everything. Just some.” His ancestor, the original Link Bluesmith and the Hero who had earned his family their last name, had been the one to discover how Bluestone could be used for modern utilities like lights and power lines for large magical devices. Before that, the Sheikah had been using the crystals as batteries for their Sheikah Slates and other small enchanted things. Since the Hero of Lights had used her discovery to push Hyrule into an era of great technological advancement, her descendants had been working diligently to follow in her great footsteps.

“Who are you?” Avoka asked, wide-eyed.

Link paused to compose an introduction in his head. He wanted some longer sentences for this. “I’m Link Bluesmith. My ancestor came up with the Light Cannon. My sister invented Light Weapons. Light Weapons are big dangerous, but Hyrule Castle orders them,” he said with a note of pride. “My sister and I are working on a long-term project. We want to make walking all-terrain vehicles. Are just trying to make legs for now, though. The actuator spells are hard. Gabbi’s working on a new kind of joint for them to move.”

“You’re an inventor?” Avoka almost shrieked. “What are you delivering swords for?! Why does your family do blacksmithing work if you’re the world’s most famous bluesmiths?”

“Haven’t invented yet. Am working on actuators, remember?” Link corrected. He took another minute to come up with more sentences and was both surprised and grateful that Avoka didn’t interrupt. “We’re blacksmiths because science is expensive. Bluestone only grows around hard rock. Costs a lot to mine. And breaks or explodes if it doesn’t like your spell. You have to go through a lot of Bluestone before you find a spell that works. My family are experimental engineers. We don’t use industry enchantments; we invent them.”

The Sheikah stared at him, appearing to be at a loss for words. “You’re smarter than I gave you credit for,” he admitted quietly after a long pause. “I shouldn’t have judged you by the way you speak. Sorry for making a bad assumption.”

Link smiled. “Thanks for telling me.” It took a lot for someone to admit their mistakes, even engineers in his family’s dangerous line of work.

They stepped into the courtyard, the gate closing and locking itself behind them. Link switched out his magical key for a standard metal one as he walked up to the front door.

“So the Mad Owl lives in a place like this…” Avoka studied the riveted stala doorframe. “You’re related to her, right?”

Link sighed. It was a good thing Gabbi thought that nickname was cute rather than mean, because it was what everyone in Hyrule knew her by. Their family crest was a Great Horned Owl, the Bluesmith style of goggles involved a distinctive nose protector, and descendants of the Hero of Lights tended to have chaotic hair that made them look like ruffled birds, so it had been inevitable that one of them would wind up being called that. “Her name is Gaebora. I call her ‘Gabbi’,” he said. “Big sister, kind-of mom too.” He unlocked the door and pulled it open.

Gabbi was by the threshold, pulling on a set of boots. Half a sausage poked out of her mouth—breakfast on the go for someone in a hurry—and her hair stuck out haphazardly around the Bluesmith cap-and-goggles she always wore. He didn’t have to check the time to know that she must have forgotten to set her alarm again.

She perked up when she saw Link, then brightened further when she noticed his companion. “Link!” she gasped, taking the sausage out of her mouth. “Is that a friend?”

Link puffed his chest out proudly. “Uh-huh.” His very first friend. He was going to buy some candy later today to celebrate, and maybe brag to Maple about it. She thought he was a clumsy doofus, but now he was a clumsy doofus with a friend, so there.

Gabbi finished shoving her foot into her left boot and stood up. Avoka shrank into Link’s side as the woman unfolded to her full height. “You’re so big!” he squeaked.

“Yeah, I’ve been told,” Gabbi said with a good-humored grin. She was six-foot-five and two-hundred fifty pounds of magically-reinforced muscle on a sturdy, broad-shouldered frame. It was a common build for members of the Bluesmith family, a trait that reached three hundred years back to the Hero of Lights. “My Gerudo cousins still call me little, though! HA!” Her booming laugh made Avoka jump. “Well, I’d love to stick around and supervise your playdate, but I’ve got to open up shop and I’m running late. Do you remember where the snacks and first-aid kit are, Link?”

He nodded.

“ALRIGHTY THEN!” she said with a thumbs-up of approval. Avoka jumped again. “Just make sure your friend follows the safety rules if you guys go in the workroom, and don’t make anything explode until I get home, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Have fun, kids!” Gabbi started sprinting across Hyrule Field toward the dark building that stood a mile away.

“She’s very loud—um, nice. Loud and nice, I guess,” Avoka said. His eyebrows went up as he watched Gabbi fly through the long grass. “You Bluesmiths move like the wind! How do you do it?”

“Family magic. The Hero of Lights had it first,” Link said. He walked into the house and went about unstrapping his sandals. “Makes us strong and fast. Boosts our senses. Can’t always turn that off. Gabbi wears goggles because light gives her headaches.”

“Ohhh. Wait.” Avoka frowned. “Does that mean her nickname is rather cruel, if she has to wear those? I think most people assume the mad scientist look is a fashion statement.”

“It’s okay. Gabbi likes goggles. Thinks the nickname is fun.” He reached out and tugged the Sheikah over the threshold when it seemed like he might dither on the porch. “Shouldn’t leave the door open. The house has temperature control,” he explained as he shut the door.

Avoka looked around, spooked, when the cooler air inside the house enfolded him. “You can control temperatures, too? What can’t your magic do?”

Link laughed. “No, technology.” He pointed up at the stala pipes snaking under the rafters. “House has a Blue Flame forge. Blue Flame can run lots of powered things. Those pipes blow controlled-temperature air. Dial for it is in the kitchen.”

The Sheikah shucked off his geta and walked under a pipe to stare at it in wonder. “The air is cooler!” he exclaimed. “My house is too big and old for us to have power lines running through the whole thing. Blue Flame is too dangerous, and we can’t draw on the ground-tap generators for the city grid because of the huge power drain. We’ve only installed a few small ground-taps and modernized some sections here and there.”

“Really?” He wouldn’t have expected the rich kid to live a more old-fashioned life than him. Of course, being part of a family who set the cutting edge of technology made his lifestyle more appliance-assisted than most, but rich people could usually keep up. “Have you seen a self-cooling icebox before?”

Avoka tilted his head to one side. “You mean, like an icebox that doesn’t need ice?”

“Icebox makes ice if we push a button.”

“Ooh, I wanna see!”

Impa’s maroon eyes moved up and down Avoka’s form when he stepped into their meeting spot in an old war room. “You’re in one piece,” she commented. “I assume your meeting with that commoner went well?”

Avoka pulled down his mask and beamed. “He’s really nice! Link let me follow him around town and ask him about things while he did his morning deliveries.” He started taking his hair down from its butterfly loops so he could pull his clothes past his head and get redressed. “I made some kind of mean assumptions about him the first time we met. He’s actually an inventor, and really smart! It’s just that he has some difficulty with speaking and understanding. He reads as much as I do and knows a lot of stuff, though, especially about his family’s work.”

“And what family work would that be? Did you ask questions about his background?”

Avoka took the illusion-casting cuff off his ear and went from red-eyed, gray-haired Trainee Avoka to the magenta-eyed, ashen-blond Zelda who crept around back rooms in forbidden clothes. Once he put on a piece of his enchanted royal jewelry, he’d switch to the blue-eyed, golden-blonde Princess Zelda that the public knew. The magic disguises made him feel like a cool secret agent sometimes. “Auntie, the point of this was for me to establish a connection with someone willing and able to help me learn about the people I’m meant to lead one day, not to interrogate a suspect,” Zelda said with exasperation. “But yes, I asked him some things. Link doesn’t have any proper sense of suspicion or deception, I don’t think. He answers questions honestly and readily—too readily, for a member of the Bluesmith family.” He frowned. “I’m going to have to work with him on that. It isn’t safe for him or the kingdom.”

Impa nodded. “I should say so. Those engineers are responsible for inventing some of the most dangerous weapons in Hyrule. Should the Yiga, or any other force of evil discover how they managed it, the kingdom would be put at great risk,” she said. “Did he tell you of his connection to the Mad Owl?”

“She’s his big sister—thirteen years older—and the person who raised him. I didn’t ask what happened to his parents, but it doesn’t seem like he ever knew them,” Zelda reported. “There aren’t many pictures of them around his home, and only one with an infant Link.”

“They perished in a scuffle at their main Bluestone lab. A team of Yiga attempted to kidnap your friend’s father using a bomb as leverage against the others in the room. The explosive spontaneously ignited in the high heat by one of the Blue Flame forges and allowed the power source to escape containment. That area of Hateno Hill is still scorched to glass.”

Zelda shivered. Blue Flame was a wondrous, infinite source of energy when harnessed correctly, but one of the scariest things in the world when let off its leash. He could hardly believe that Link had something like that in his house.

Actually, on second thought, it kind of made sense that he would. The apparent propensity of Bluestone to explode under the strain of imperfect experimental enchantments—easily one of the scariest things Zelda had ever heard, given how depended-upon that crystal was in the modern era—didn’t seem to faze Link at all. He’d even shown Avoka the music he was tweaking for some kind of light-display alarm clock project, casually mentioning that his first two attempts to reverse-engineer a Sheikah Slate screen had exploded so badly that he’d been pelted by Bluestone fragments and shards of the glass he’d affixed the spell node to. It was a “high-safety” project now, as he put it, requiring him to add a protective leather tunic and metal face shield to the protections he already wore for his experiments. For the Mad Owl to be fine with her baby brother regularly putting himself in such danger, she must have been equally as comfortable with the thought that a single bomb in the wrong place could turn their house’s tamed blue sun into a massive, nearly unstoppable inferno.

“If the Yiga have targeted his family before, they might attack again,” Zelda fretted. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to take advantage of Link, as accommodating and friendly as he was. He’d been willing to let one random Sheikah into his house; a covert Yiga agent could easily convince him to do it again.

“Oh, they have. It isn’t a publicized thing, but the Bluesmiths have become accustomed to being targeted for their technological secrets,” Impa said. “Five years ago, your friend lost a distant cousin in one such attack. A Yiga threw a smoke bomb too close to an experiment of his in the middle of an enchantment and the power source exploded. Four deaths, no survivors. Since then, the Yiga Clan has been getting more careful and crafty, and the Bluesmiths correspondingly more paranoid. I’m sure you must have seen what one of their homes looks like.”

Zelda had thought the unclimbable fence, granite fortress blocks, and spiked roof had been a precaution against monsters, not mad Ganondorf-resurrection fanatics. He pitied Link. Just like Zelda hadn’t asked to be born into his position in life, neither had his friend. At least Zelda had his difficult-to-reach tower to live in. Link’s house needed to be located outside of a city due to its volatile and easily-sabotaged power source, so he and his sister didn’t have the protection of patrolled stone walls or other buildings.

“I’ll have to teach him to be careful,” he said determinedly. “He’s too vulnerable.” Link was strong enough to defend himself, but he had to know when and how to do so. As it was, the boy presented an easy mark for anyone who put on a friendly tone of voice and asked questions that seemed innocuous at first glance. Zelda, or rather Avoka, would show his sweet, guileless new friend the value of growing a few thorns.

A teasing smile touched his aunt’s lips. “You speak with such fire,” she commented. “Has that boy already captured your heart?”

Zelda gave her a baffled look. “Why does wanting to keep a nice person safe mean I want to marry them?”

Impa blinked. “…It doesn’t have to mean that, I suppose,” she said with an air of awkwardness. “You just spoke so fervently about meeting that boy again since your recovery that, well, I assumed you might have taken after your parents. They fell in love when they weren’t much older than you.”

Zelda made a face. He had never understood the appeal of romance. The way he’d seen it written in books and acted out in front of him, it seemed like an unnerving form of territorial obsession that he never, ever wanted aimed in his direction. Nevertheless, he was doing his best to become resigned to the idea of having his mind consumed by it upon marrying. The concept of love at first sight, looking across a room and suddenly having a significant chunk of his free will vanish because he’d locked eyes with a fated stranger, was even more terrifying.

He would get married and have an heir because it was his duty, but he didn’t think he’d ever be able to stop dreading it. Well, having a baby was fine with him—he’d heard that they were tiny and cute and impressive knowledge-sponges—but not the making of one, which he’d made the mistake of asking his aunt about a month ago. He hoped he’d be able to come up with a workaround for that particular (repulsive, unsanitary, no thank you) process when he was older and smarter.

“I like Link because he likes pretty things, he answers all of my questions without being mean about the dumb ones, he has good ideas, and he smiles only when he means it,” he declared. “I’d never want to marry someone I like, because then it would be a lot sadder to hate them. I’d much rather marry someone I already hate than grow to despise a person I wanted to be friends with. Except Duke Ralph.” He made a face, thinking of the miserable betrothal ceremony he’d been forced to go through last year with the Labryn royal. His mother had made him wear a horribly tight bodice with a stomacher (ugh), and a ruffled skirt so big that he’d been afraid of catching its stupid bell-shaped crinoline in the fireplace. “Ralph is much too annoying for me to marry, even if I already dislike him.”

His aunt closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, like she suddenly had a headache. “Hatred is not meant to be an inevitable part of—” She cut herself off with a long, heavy sigh before saying, “I believe a long conversation may be in order.”

Zelda frowned quizzically. How could you not hate the person whose appearance took over your mind and made it hard to think about anything else? He’d read about it in books! Those people were under some kind of curse, he was sure. There was no way people could enjoy that feeling for real. The curse of lustful obsession would claim him, too, once he got married, but he wouldn’t give into it without a fight.

“We’ll unpack your ideas of love and marriage later. In the meantime, I’ll arrange to have someone monitor Link’s safety in town. Should anyone threaten him, I will know within the hour.”

Zelda brightened. “Thank you, Auntie!”

“You’re welcome, Nephew.” She walked forward and motioned for him to face the table. “Now sit still so I can braid all that hair of yours before it tangles.”

Zelda obediently kept his spine straight while Impa drew his hair into a simple plait with businesslike tugs. To pass the time, he considered the idea of having his first ever friend. He’d only been around relatives or boring people a lot older than him until he’d been allowed to join the Royal Guard trainees. Then he’d been surrounded for several hours a day by Sheikah boys who thought he was loud and clumsy and shrimpy. When their instructor wasn’t looking, they teased him for being so bad at training games that called for shadow magic and knocked him around extra hard in sparring matches because his undersized frame made it easy to do. He hadn’t complained to Impa about it because that was exactly what a whiny royal brat would do, but it had hurt to be rejected by the people he’d been hoping to join and make friends with.

Link was simply pleasant to be around. He had a warm, calming presence about him. Like Impa, and unlike most people in Zelda’s life, he felt comfortable to talk to. Zelda actually wanted to see Link again, which he couldn’t say for most of his peers. The Sheikah boys at training were mean and the only royals he’d met around his age were either evil bitches (the Gerudo princesses, Koume and Kotake), incredibly annoying (his distant Hytopian cousin, Styla) or sexist, conversation-hogging buttheads (Duke Ralph).

“Will I be able to visit Link again?” he asked his aunt.

The hands weaving the ends of his hair together paused. “I believe that can be arranged. I’m glad you’ve finally found a friend, Zelda.”

Zelda beamed. “I am, too!” It had certainly taken long enough!