Chapter Text
There’s a splatter of red. It oozes through her fingers as she pants for breath, desperately clutching her side as she runs up the never-ending stairwell. Hot polluted air fills her lungs. Burning like the pain radiating from her side.
No matter how fast she runs, she still hears his hollow, echoing footsteps behind her. His taunting, acidic words. The words the schoolgirls echo when they circle and corner her like sharks. Trapping her in like a pack of wolves with a rabbit.
She clutches the doorknob to the roof with a slick red hand, struggling for grip.
The drunken footsteps follow. Slow and sedate. He knows she’s trapped. He doesn’t need to run, despite her fast pace.
In spite of this, his words only get angrier.
The door opens with her weight, and she stumbles against it. The bang it makes is nails against her throbbing skin.
She doesn’t have time to breathe, but the pain has her legs shaking.
It hurts too much to get a proper breath, but she hisses one through her teeth anyway. Blinking away drifting sparkling dots from her vision like nonexistent fairies.
She doesn’t have time.
On wobbly legs, she drags herself forward. Drops of red splatter at her feet.
There’s nothing up here. An empty, flat roof with a railing taking up half the space. But the railing goes around behind the stairwell she just exited. Leaving a small ledge just on the other side, that’s unreachable unless you hold on from the outside and shuffle.
She’s hidden here before. Spent cold and rainy nights hidden in the space as her limbs go numb, too afraid to move.
She stumbles to the edge of the roof, her breaths fast and shallow, climbing over the barrier with shaking limbs.
She can hide. She can—
the door slams open.
Too late. No time.
A man with black hair, so unlike her own auburn— like her mothers, stands there for a moment, before equally dark eyes lock on her.
A knife stained the same red as her side is in one of his hands; there’s a bottle in his other hand. Even as he walks, he takes a long swig, stumbling forwards. “There you are.” He rasps.
In the span of one breath and the next, their eyes still locked, one with terror, the other with a dark promise… her foot slips.
Her hands are too wet with sweat and blood to catch herself on the metal she was clinging to— Slipping through her fingers like water.
She falls, but already her vision is starting to black out.
She screams.
She wishes…
She wishes the same thing she wished so long ago.
Her heavy eyes catch on a bird flying high overhead.
A seagull.
They aren’t anywhere near the sea.
She wishes she could be a bird after this.
To fly far, far away.
Maybe, just maybe, be with him again.
Like that long ago dream…
XxxX
Someplace vastly different, over Hyrule field, the sky parts with a beautiful golden glow, and something unseen by nearly all, falls.
A young man with golden hair that fades to a petal pink at the bottom of a single strand, scowls, nose crinkling in annoyance.
The beautiful scene has the goddesses' hands all over it.
He flicks his deep red and pink wings, absently smoothing out ruffled feathers and runs his hands over his layered tunic of red and green, assured by the magic humming against his skin from the many enchantments both on the clothes, the many rings on his fingers, and the bracelets on his wrists. His hand then trails absently to his sword and magic bag holding many of his numerous items.
It’s habit, even if he despises the idea of another ‘adventure’— at least he won’t be without his items this time.
He learned his lesson the last time he left home without his things.
The thought makes his face darken further.
Never again.
He’s still just staring at the golden rays of light. It almost looks like a natural phenomenon, if not for the waves of magic radiating strong enough that he can just barely feel it all the way from where he stands— no doubt miles away.
He should really go check it out.
Who knows what will happen if he doesn’t….
Weird things don’t just happen around him. Not without a cart load of trouble following.
Zelda will probably end up kidnapped again or something if he doesn’t.
She might end up kidnapped again even if he does go investigate…
“You gonna pay for all that, or just stare at the sky?”
Taking in a sharp breath through his nose, Link turns back to the shop stall and it’s not-so patiently waiting owner, quickly finishing up paying for his purchases for his and Ravio’s dinner.
They’re attempting stew tonight, though he might just bail and go to the pub or something. Let Ravio fend for himself.
Briefly, he glances at the sky again.
He’ll go investigate. But no one ever said he has to do it in a hurry.
XxxX
She, her name is Marin— wakes someplace very different from where she fell.
And she did fall.
She briefly remembers fluttering her eyes open to harsh winds and sprawling land far, far, too far, below her.
And then she closed her eyes again, unable to catch her breath.
…And then she was on the ground.
She isn’t dead— which she should be.
She isn’t in a hospital.
She isn’t in a city; laid out on the hot summer pavement, drowning on blood and the heat of that muggy summer's day— the hottest they’d seen in a long while, if the news reporter she’d watched from a store window on her way home was to be believed.
No, she’s in a green field, next to a stream and an apple tree. The air light and cool, filled with the combined symphony of birds, bugs, and the burble of water. A soft breeze has grass tickling her face, cooling the pleasant warmth of sunshine gently kissing her skin. Causing the greenery to rustle harmoniously around her in a soothing lullaby.
She feels at her side and it’s still painfully sore, still coated with drying blood, but it’s not actively bleeding, and the wound itself feels smaller.
Maybe she is dead after all.
Maybe this is a hallucination her brain is giving her, seconds before death. She read about that happening somewhere.
With that thought in mind, she crawls tiredly out of the direct sunlight of a late afternoon, and into the shade of the apple tree’s leaves. She sinks back down into the grass as she lets her eyes fall closed again.
It feels like only minutes later that her back begins to throb.
Waking her well into the night; it starts as just an itch deep under her skin, then a tingling, a barely-there ache, and slowly but surely grows.
Two spots right below her shoulder blades.
Soon though, she’s sobbing. The pain unbearable— she tries to scratch, or at least press, on the spots on her back, but when she contorts and reaches for them, she finds two uncomfortably large growths.
The skin feels too stretched. Far too sensitive— or more specifically whatever is underneath the skin is. The skin itself feels all but numb to touch. Just pulsing in pain.
And it hurts.
It hurts it hurts it hurts—
She isn’t sure how long she lays there, trembling and sweaty. Head starting to throb with the same resounding, all-consuming pain as she clenches her jaw tight. Skin far too hot, but also discordantly clammy and shivering.
Whatever happens, it comes several agonizing hours later. Just as the sun peaks from over the distant hills.
In that exhausted delirium, writhing in the dew-covered grass, the skin on her back rips, her shirt tears, and just like when she fell off the apartment roof, Marin screams.
No one comes.
No one hears.
There’s no one to help.
There never is.
Only in dreams.
Warm blood oozes into her clothes and down her back.
Something limp and warm and wet presses tightly against where there should be unmarred skin and fabric.
Tears slide from her eyes, wetting the dirt and grass she has her face pressed against. She heaves a wrenching sob that leaves her clenched muscles shivering with aching spasms.
She lets out a broken whimper. Utterly spent.
More tears slide down to pool in her ear as she curls in on herself between the roots of the apple tree. The comforting smell of apples and nature now only the sickening scent of overripe fruit and blood to her nose. Cloying in her lungs and leaving her stomach in sick knots.
If she is dead…
…Then surely this is hell.