Link's day begins as it always does: with a short gasp and mild head trauma.
He bolts from his pillow in a panic, flying from the top of his bed and into the bottom of his sister's. The nuts and bolts of their old bunk rattle him awake, and, as usual, he immediately forgets the contents of his dream. He rubs the perpetual swollen lump at his hairline as Aryll, who in lieu of a proper alarm clock counts on his nightmares to wake both of them at precisely the same hour every day, groans above him.
"I don't want this," she mutters. "I don't want this for my life."
Link has never understood his little sister's matinal mantra. It seems a little too existential to him to be a rough translation of "let me sleep a little longer," but he never allows her musings—existential or not—to force him into acting as her snooze button. If he has to have nightmares, he figures he ought to put them to good use, and that use is waking Aryll up each day just in time to be hopelessly late for school.
"I'm afraid this is your life," he says, realizing he's talking to himself as much as his sister.
"School isn't for another two hours," she yawns.
"And it takes you three to get ready, so get up."
Link drags himself down the hall to the bathroom, where after shooing a prodigious family of cockroaches, he begins to put on his liar's uniform. He slips on his collared shirt (12 rupees, discount bin at Malo Mart), his pants and jacket (35 rupees each, same discount bin at Malo Mart), his shoes (18 rupees, secondhand but polished to near-perfection), and his tie (free, found in a cardboard box of his father's old possessions), and tops the look with an empty briefcase, which he pulled from a dumpster behind Red Lion Technologies, Inc. He brushes his teeth, shaves more out of respect for the ritual than any sort of necessity, attempts to tame his hair and fails, then follows the scent of his grandmother's cooking to the dingy kitchen.
His breakfast and lunch sit in boxes on the table. Grandma turns from the stove, smiling in the lamplight (in an hour or so dawn will pour through the kitchen window—or at least it would, had Bolson Construction not built the bigger—and infinitely better—apartment tower between their window and the sun). She shuffles over to see him off.
"Are you staying late tonight again?" she asks, straightening his tie.
"Not tonight."
"You ask me, Bo works you far too hard for that pittance he sends home with you."
"I can't complain," Link sighs. It isn't as if he has nothing to complain about—he just knows as a replaceable peon he has no right to. At best, he can prostrate himself and beg for a fraction of a rupee more, but he's not stupid. Asking for money means getting sacked.
"Well, I'll have something waiting for you when you get home. You can watch the night races with us—it's Epona's last before retirement." Grandma stares at the poorly-made knot in his tie for a moment, wrinkled frown widening. "Though I know what they mean by retirement. It's quite sad what's done to those poor beasts… Ah well, I've got my weight in rupees on her winning, and I'll be damned if I'm not going to prove a point to all those old biddies at the bridge club." She shoves his food into his hands and pushes him toward the door.
"You can't keep gambling away our income," Link says.
"Oh, you'll see. It'll net me enough to pay off Aryll's slate."
"We can hope," Link mutters under his breath, but he knows better. He knows better than to hope that Grandma can pull a gold rupee from her gambling ass—especially betting on old horses. As he leaves the apartment, shuffling along the bug-eaten carpet to the stairs, he calculates the months it'll take to pay off what amounts to Aryll's school supplies. Seems like every student needs a goddamn slate now, and by the time next year rolls around she'll need a newer model to keep pace with her peers. Link isn't spectacular at mathematics, but he is a practiced pessimist, a master of down-rounding and error-accounting and worst-scenario-calculations, and once he adds up his disposable income, Grandma's spending, the comical interest rates on which Red Lion Technologies prides itself, rent, and the occasional Noble Pursuit to keep him alive to earn anything at all, he concludes the most reasonable payment plan falls somewhere in the hundreds of years.
Link loves Aryll, arguably more than anything, but he'll be damned if that girl isn't milking him dry. Last week Grandma took her out to buy new shoes, and they had to be groosenators, lest the cruelty of her teenage peers be released in full force upon her. Luckily, Grandma had the foresight to buy them two sizes too big so Aryll would still have room to grow into them. She'll just have to wear several pairs of socks for the next year or so, and Link has faith she'll be able to hide that from her classmates easily enough.
He has, like everyone in Castletown, considered buying a slate for himself, but he can't fathom why he would need it. He could fathom why he wanted it, and it certainly had something to do with Red Lion's aggressive advertising campaigns that left half the streets (even the ones in Link's district) plastered with images of slate-related glory, leisure, and status. He supposes he would only wear it as a status symbol, but he would probably rarely use it, and he can't have Bo making laughing comments about how "Boy, I don't pay you enough to buy something like that!"
Halfway to work the sun decides to rise, grey and only half-warm, over the eastern high-rises of the city. It tries its damnedest to illuminate the street, but it can't compete with the flashing, colored lights that line the sidewalks and billboards. Most of them point up to Castletown's latest obsessions—an up-and-coming Zora band, the newest model of Sheikah slate, the smiling face of the male-model-turned-corporate-icon Groose (Link is unsure if he has a surname), whose line of clothing is immensely popular among teenagers. Link blames Groose for his sister's insistence on getting the most inexcusably overpriced shoes in the city, but he supposes the man needs to net a veritable fortune to buy enough hairspray to make a pompadour of that magnitude defy gravity.
Link tries to get himself to think of something besides Groose's tantalizingly punchable smile, but when he arrives at the offices of Bo & Bo & Bo & Co, the sparkling redhead appears to be the topic of conversation.
"I hear he's doing a… what's it… mash-around with the Indigo-Go's," says the receptionist.
"You mean like a single or something?" asks a man in a poorly-ironed shirt. "Or like… a concert? Because I'd give my left testicle to see him survive being on stage at one of those."
The Indigo-Go's (apostrophe included) is, of course, Aryll's favorite band. Grandma and Link both refuse to let her attend a concert, not so much because of the exorbitant prices, but because the band has something of a traditionalist streak, and they insist on playing Zora instruments as they were meant to—underwater. Their venues are so wet that at least one non-Zora concertgoer drowns per performance (on bad days, at least one per song), but the more casualties accrued at an Indigo-Go's concert, the higher the magazines rate the musical quality.
Link spends a moment trying to imagine Groose onstage with the Indigo-Go's, but that necessitates imagining Groose's hair wet, which is, according to University of North Castletown's leading psychologists, mentally and emotionally impossible. So Link gives up, forgoes joining the conversation, and makes for what he refers to as his office. He walks past the wall of three generations of identical Bos immortalized in oil paint, turns the first corner and arrives at a metal door. With a jingle of keys, he's inside.
The lightless closet has barely enough room for him to change out of his suit and into his work clothes. He carefully folds his pants and jacket, collared shirt and tie, places his shoes aside, and pulls on his boots and brown coveralls, dappled like a pinto with stains and streaks of bleach. He grabs his bucket, mop and other cleaning supplies, reassures himself with the promise that he gets to go home before the sun sets, and bumps into his boss on the way out.
"Oh, thank the gods," Bo says with a wide, almost magnanimous smile. "You're just in time. Someone left you a present in the second-floor bathroom and the stench is starting to spread."
Whenever Grandma asks what exactly Link does at Bo & Bo & Bo & Co, he replies he cleans up after his coworkers, mostly. He knows she takes this to mean he goes through their paperwork and corrects mistakes, double-checks mathematics and prices, and occasionally dispels financial disputes. Which is why nearly every month or so she concludes that without his ridiculously hard work the office would collapse entirely, and encourages him to ask "Mr. Bo, who is, after all, like a family friend" for a promotion.
Link doesn't like to try his luck—it was only due to the earnest supplication of Bo's daughter Ilia, a schoolmate and sort-of girlfriend, that he landed this gig in the first place. Unfortunately, Ilia is now bettering herself at veterinary school and can't act as a shield against the more miserly aspects of her father, so Link has long since given up trying to coax some liberality from the man. The first and only time he gave into Grandma's insistences and asked Bo for work that was a little cleaner, the man cheerfully promoted him from janitor to "sanitation engineer" (no pay raise), and babbled on about his generosity so much Link was thoroughly deterred from asking again.
So Link takes what little treasures he can. He finds dropped green rupees in the stairwell, lost office supplies, watches, sunglasses, and occasionally a little plastic bag of Sheikah firegrass floating in a toilet cistern. He leaves these bags alone, not necessarily because he knows it would be obvious the thief is the company sanitation engineer, but because he's the first to admit that anyone might need a puff or two to get through a workday dealing with Bo's overwhelming energy.
By the end of his shift, he collects eighteen rupees (all green) and a discarded but still pristine pair of silk socks. When he returns to his broom closet office to change back into his suit, he stores his generous haul in his briefcase. He's done well today—much better than he usually does, and he's in a good mood by the time he makes his way down the stairs to the building's entrance. He falls into the tide of other workers, hiding himself among two dozen suits and identical brown briefcases that belong to the lucky men and women who go home at a decent time. Fortunately, this camouflage works; he makes it safely to the street without Bo pouncing on him with an extra mess to clean (for free, of course—no true member of the Bo & Bo & Bo & Co family would ever ask for overtime pay).
He breathes a sigh of relief, congratulating himself on the day. He's got eighteen extra rupees in his bag, a new pair of (likely fungus-free) socks, and still an hour or so of daylight. And now he can head straight home, throw off his shoes, eat dinner, and watch Grandma lose her weight in rupees to her frenemies at the bridge club by betting on an old racehorse.
On the corner opposite Bo's humble office building, a bluish Rito stands with an accordion, warbling away. Its case sits open on the sidewalk, and as Link approaches, he can make out the tune of an old folk song. He stops to enjoy the musical narratives of heroes and beasts and kings and magic (magic is a particular favorite topic of songs no one sings anymore), and after a few minutes he decides it's worth it to leave a rupee in the accordion case. Feeling something like a king himself, he opens his briefcase and drops in one of his newfound rupees. At the clink of money, the Rito glances at the case, and promptly changes his tune.
"Oh, behold the miser-man," warbles the bird. "Who thinks that in this poor land, to leave but a single rupee, passes for generosity."
Link learns at that moment how a beak can frown. He wonders if it's not to late to reach down and take his hard-earned pittance back, but he had enjoyed the music, until it took a turn for the insulting. Instead he drops in a second rupee, and after getting a somewhat forgiving look from the Rito, moves on, reminding himself to wait until he's got a fiver before he leaves a tip again. Link begins to hum, picking up where the bird left off, outlining the tune about a princess putting down some sort of vague existential threat to her kingdom. He remembers the song as one his mother once sang, but he cannot recall the words.
The sounds of the accordion follow him to the end of the street. He turns a few corners and passes through a block of thumping noise, adjusting his humming to the beat. Deep in the earth below him, he knows there's some Goron project or another underway. The higher-ups in town have been talking about building some sort of underground thoroughfare—a fever dream conceived by the public services unit of Red Lion—but everyone aboveground is fairly sure the Gorons only use their tunnels for their races. For the most part, no one minds—it's hard enough as a Goron in the city to roll from here to there in a hurry without breaking windows or bending streetlamps, barreling through tenements or disrupting traffic. Though there are certainly complaints when Goronic construction grounds pop up unexpectedly, thumping and shaking and throwing citizens from their bicycles, spilling wine from glasses and vibrating furniture off balconies. It is best to watch you head in such zones.
Perhaps it is due to the thumping of construction that Link does not hear the hurried footsteps approaching him, or perhaps because they belong to the shiny black groosenators on a pair of silent Sheikah feet. In either case, he doesn't notice he's being overtaken until the runner bumps him on the shoulder and sends him stumbling.
The Sheikah slows only to glance at him over his shoulder. "Sorry—I mean watch it!" he growls, and prances on, hauling a briefcase (like everyone else's, clearly from the Red Lion Technologies). Bumping into a Sheikah—especially one in a hurry and clearly underdressed for his office job—is an unusual occurrence, given their rarity, but it is one Link can recover from without counting this day as unusual. What does strike him as unusual, however, is the veritable army of pursuers that turn the corner after the runner.
Like anyone with half a brain, Link knows the sudden appearance of armed security forces is the last time to start trouble. So when a dozen men in black slacks and blacker jackets screech to a halt at the end of the street, he freezes. His heart jumps to his throat but he stays put, eyeing the line of helmets, goggles and Red Lion Private Security logos. He raises his arms above his head, one hand still clutching his briefcase. He expects to be asked where the presumable culprit ran, and he fully prepares himself to point down a perpendicular alley to direct these gentlemen after their quarry and out of his hair (which is standing quite at attention on the back of his neck), but they do not seem interested in talking. When one man at the forefront raises a hand and the unmistakable beep of a charging guardian gun meets Link's ears, his frozen mind thaws just enough to tell him to run. Heart in his throat, hand shaking, he turns and takes off after the Sheikah.
It is common knowledge that the nicer one's clothing, the poorer one runs in it. Link's brogans slip on the concrete and his dangling tie flips over itself and straight into his face (had his shoes been genuine Hateno leather or his tie real Gerudo silk they might've been much more disobedient, but as it is, it's still a second-hand outfit, and perhaps it is this cheapness that saves him). Still clutching his briefcase, he stumbles to the alleyway, swiping his untamable tie away from his eyes. He sprints almost to the beat of the massive drums far below him, and he manages to turn the corner just as the sharp heat of a weaponized beam screams past his ear. He stumbles into the alley after the Sheikah, scrambling away from the sounds of footsteps and shouting. Ahead of him, in the tower of light at the far end of the alley, the Sheikah again disappears.
How the hell is he so fast? Link thinks, lungs burning, feet aching. He doesn't dare look behind him as he reaches the alley's end, but he can feel the shadows of the men scramble after him, he can hear the high-pitched ring of their charging weaponry. He bursts into the adjacent street, turns, and throws himself toward another alley, hoping that if he racks up enough rights and lefts he might be able to lose this mistaken group of pursuers and resume his almost-good day.
As he flies past a pair of dumpsters, wheezing heavily, a sharp voice catches up to him.
"You! Behind here!"
A hand flies from the shadows and grips his shoulder. He's tugged from his feet to the space behind the dumpsters, into the safety of foul-smelling shadows. He stumbles, clutching his briefcase of treasures to his chest, and finds himself staring into the half-covered face of his Sheikah assailant. The stranger lifts a finger to his face to silence him, and then glances over the top of the dumpsters to see the shadows of their pursers march across the asphalt. The Sheikah crouches, takes a deep breath, and his fingers begin tangling and disentangling themselves like they're attempting to play the world's smallest harp.
Link is in the midst of wondering why this stranger is wiggling his fingers like an idiot when a dark puff of smoke curls from between them, spreading and enshrouding the dumpsters.
It's certainly a good thing the spell is one of silence, since at the appearance of magic, Link lets loose a little cry of surprise. The Sheikah's red eyes roll, and he reaches out a hand to pinch Link's lips.
"It's not perfect," the stranger whispers, "so be quiet."
Link and the Sheikah listen to the sound of boots run past. His heart sits in his throat, beating so hard he wouldn't be surprised if it pops outright. They stay crouched for far too long, but when the noise quiets down, and the shadows of their pursuers disappear, the Sheikah lets out a sigh.
"What the hell was that?" Link hisses.
"Private security force," the stranger says. His voice is soft, light—he sounds young. Link wonders why a kid like him is embroiled in this kind of cat-and-mouse business, but he has some idea it has something to do with whatever's inside that briefcase. All he knows for sure is that he can't get dragged into it.
"Look, I don't know who you are or why you're running," he whispers, "but whatever the reason, I want nothing to do with it."
The upper half of the Sheikah's face gives him an exasperated look. "Then why did you follow me? What were you thinking?"
"I didn't mean to!" Link growls. "They shot at me! What did you expect me to do?"
"Run the other way?" The stranger slumps against the dumpster, dropping his briefcase at his side.
"At least we're safe now." He is not sure if he's lying—he just wants to remove himself from whatever this is and go home. He can almost taste Grandma's soup on his tongue. "So, you go your way, and I'll go mine. And next time you're gonna run around doing criminal shit, make sure you do it with a unique briefcase."
The Sheikah sighs. "That's the point of it, isn't it? It's nondescript." He brushes off his knees, wiggles his toes in his groosenators and takes a deep breath. "You might want to keep your head down for a while. They'll be out looking for us for the next couple days at least. I'm sorry, I really am."
When he sees the guilty look in the Sheikah's eyes, he softens his tone. "I don't live far from here; I can make it home. You sure you're going to be all right?"
"Yeah."
"Take care of yourself." He stands, but the Sheikah's hand grips his wrist, pulling him back into the shadows. His heart, which has just finally slowed to a reasonable pace, soars again to his throat.
"Shit, shit shit shit," the stranger breathes. "She's here."
A blurry glow appears at the edges of Link's vision. Something intangible, something almost electric, forces his hair to stand on end. His skin tingles, and a cold feeling creeps from his feet upward. He looks around for any clue to the source of the discomfiting sensation. When the feeling intensifies and the metal dumpsters start to rattle, he lifts his wide, bewildered eyes at the stranger. When he speaks, there's a heavy, electric tinge to his voice.
"What's happening?"
The Sheikah's hair is standing on end, and he's desperately weaving another spell. Link can barely hear his answer over the high-pitched ring of the metal around them.
"Impa is what's happening—"
With a screeching of metal and the banging of a thousand pounds of garbage tossed against itself, the dumpsters take off, careening up the alley and crashing into the fence at its end. Link's stomach drops as metal bends and trash rains down the walls—he can do nothing but stare at the mess, ears ringing, heart thumping. He barely notices the Sheikah grabbing his trembling hand and pulling him down the alleyway. As he's dragged away, he catches a brief glimpse of a slim figure in a suit, a bluish glow in its hand, coming toward them—
Suddenly, Link is enveloped in a storm of cloudy grey. He coughs, skin burning, as the smoke pours into his nose and mouth, searing his tongue. He feels himself lighten, dissipating into the horrifying mist—erased, unmade. His joints pop apart, his veins and capillaries unthread, his breath dissipates. He throws his head back and tries to yell, tries to spit out the burning taste, but he finds he has no mouth. A cursory glance at the rest of him reveals he's got nothing else, either. For a brief moment, when he finally becomes nothing, he is quite sure he knows this is what it feels like to die.
Shit, he thinks. And I didn't even get to die at home.
He's not quite prepared to meet the goddess whose church services he's been avoiding for more than a decade, so he struggles against the mist, swimming with arms and legs he does not have. He makes his way toward a bright swirl that liberally might be considered the proverbial light. It's a pity he can't remember if he's supposed to swim toward or away from it, since no one told him if the end of the tunnel led toward the light of life or the light of heaven.
He's swimming aimlessly (and limblessly) through the smoke-choked ether, thinking up excuses to tell Hylia for his acute and chronic impiety when he suddenly reappears.
Quickly, and all too painfully, he is remade. He feels his skeleton reassemble, his muscles reattach to his bones, his breath pour into his lungs, and his skin tighten around him. It is unpleasant, but the sensation, being a sensation at all, comes with a wave of relief. A sudden onset of gravity pulls him to the ground. His feet sink into dark mud, the taste of smoke still lingers on his tongue, but he is somehow, miraculously, alive.
The stranger pops into existence beside him in a puff of grey, and celebrates with a fist in the air. "I didn't think that would work!" he says, before gripping Link and looking him over. "You have all your parts still, haven't you? Haven't lost anything important on the way?" Link just stares, voiceless, and the Sheikah prods him. "Shit, did you leave your tongue back there? Your lungs? Oh gods, I should've known better than to do it without a slate—"
"I'm… fine," Link wheezes, finally. He takes a moment to look around. They seem to have landed on the banks of a filthy canal, and the buildings at its edge are unrecognizable to him. A few discarded cans and an abandoned shoe float on the grimy surface of the water. He holds his aching head and reaches down for his briefcase. "Where are we?"
"Somewhere near the Zora housing districts, by the smell of it." The Sheikah drags Link away from the filthy water and up the slope to the street. "But we're not too far from where we were. I'd be careful going back. Do you have money for a ride?"
"Yeah…" he says, still stunned. He's still got a fare's worth of green rupees in his bag.
"Good, then we should probably get out of here." He knows the Sheikah is beaming, though a black scarf covers his mouth. "I can't believe that worked! I've been torturing myself forever over that one."
"That… smoke thing?"
"Yeah. It's an old Sheikah technique." The stranger drags his groosenators proudly across the asphalt, wiping the putrid mud from them. "That'll show Impa who she's dealing with."
"Look," Links starts, holding his head. "I don't really care who Impa is, or what you've shown her. I just want to know that I'll be able to get home without getting shot at."
"Well get going, then. If you hurry you can probably get out of the neighborhood before they catch up, or figure out where we went. I'll lead them away—give them a tasty breadcrumb trail to chew on." There is a note of pride in his voice—though the way it rises and falls, Link is no longer quite certain it belongs to a male. He decides he doesn't care—he just wants to get home, he just wants the mud off his shoes and Grandma's soup in his mouth. He turns to go.
"Hey," the Sheikah says, and he slows, still in a daze. "Stay safe." With that, the stranger gives him an eyes-only smile, grabs his—or possibly her—briefcase and flies off into the inky dusk.
Link stares for a moment, baffled, before beginning the long journey home. He wanders in a daze until he finds a dinky brown cab on three wheels, metal plates warped into the shape of an extinct species of sand seal once known for its speed and liveliness.
"Fifteen rupees for the street seal to Outset," his driver says, a Goron who's apparently had to punch out one eye of the giant seal to look out over the street, since the windshield hovers somewhere around his obscenely muscled midriff.
Link sighs, eager to rest his feet for a while and have a good long think about what exactly transpired this inauspicious evening. Unfortunately, when he lifts his briefcase to search for his rupees, he finds it's locked.
The street seal rumbles away, leaving Link in the darkening alley, bewildered, tired, and some reason, clinging as if for dear life to a stranger's briefcase.
So I'm gonna go out and say it: I don't really like modern AUs. And since I don't really like myself either, I decided to try it. No idea if this sort of lazy writing is going to work out, or if I'll continue this, but I thought out of all the Zeldas, BotW was the one closest to being compatible with this sort of concept (it's the slate). Since my stories are based on TP and OoT mostly, I decided to give WW and BotW a little attention.
The title will probably change. Hopefully it will change. If I think up something that's not utter shite. I'm iffy on the tense, too-I like the immediacy of present tense but it's almost as if this wants to be written in the past... ah well. I'm open to suggestions, as usual.