I wanted to upload this as one long one-shot, but that's just not where my fanfic writing is at the moment. So I'm going to up load it in manageable chunks which might force me to actually finish it. Submitted for C/P's challenges by the dozen and winter self-care challenge.
Study in narrative style. Alternating POVs between Link and Zelda.
His mother calls him my river child, because he never stops running.
Carving pathways through Faron's thick grasses, high as his head and yellowed by summer sun. Scrambling over granite tors and the rotting logs that are the very bones of Lanayru's swamplands. Link never sees a horizon but to fling himself headlong into it, little muscles lithe and weedy, his skin a patchwork of blisters, scrapes, and scars. Songs of laughter tumble from his lips as darting butterflies, chasing him, chased by him, round and round in the endless race of youth, and when twilight dims the sky to cobalt-grey, he tramps home with all his cuts and bruises in tow, each injury a badge of honor.
"'Tis your doing," his mother accuses. She wags a wrathful finger at his father. "Dragging him all about the country, telling him wild stories about this, that, or the other." She throws her arms – bleached elbow-high with flour – into the air, and the room snows. "You've taught him nothing but foolish recklessness, and don't think I'll forgive you when he comes home one day with a cracked skull."
Link twirls within the flurries.
"Is that so?" His father, feet propped at the hearth, rumbles off his bear-laugh. "Next you'll tell me it wasn't the woman that chased off a pack of bokoblins with her bare hands who I courted all those years ago." His father, who married the village battle-ax and is as heedless as the son. "You're his mother, so I suppose 'tis right of you to worry. But don't trouble your conscience, m'dear, for I'd give better odds to his thick head than anything coming up against it." His father, who wears Royal Blue and a glinting sword on his belt, who sallies off with Link into every nook and hiding place of Hyrule because, "a child can't live if he can't breathe, if he can never taste the air of the wild."
His father, who spends three months at the castle for every one at home, yet brings back only enough coin to keep hunger out of his growing family's bones, the worst of winter's chill out of their little shack of a house.
But Link's world is not moored to the seas of poverty. He drowns himself in too many delights to feel the pinch. "Come Link, let me dry you off," and the satisfying starch of his mother's apron as it towels his wet hair. "Come Link, warm yourself," and he loses himself again to the purple, fairy-like embers pulsing within the driftwood fire. Scents of stewed mutton and mulled wine. Scents of steel and sweat and a new adventure.
Poor, simple, and happy. An idyllic childhood only for those living it.
"And tomorrow, if the weather holds, we'll have another romp in the wild places, aye son?" He tousles Link's barley-colored head, then throws him high enough to kiss the thatching.
The supper things have not yet been cleared away before Link squirms out of his father's grasp and bolts for the door.
"And where are you off to?" says his mother. She puts the bread and knife away and wraps the cheese in cloth, then rubs her rounded belly, the twins mewling at her feet.
His father hoists a babe under each arm. "Let him go, let him go. There's light enough yet, and he'd better get it out of him before bed."
"Hadn't he better listen to his poor mother?"
Link cries out at this injustice. "But I do listen!"
"Oh?"
He nods. "All the time."
"To me?"
Link give a squirrel-like cock to his head, little brain thinking. "Sometimes. But mostly to the voices."
"What's that, m'boy?" his father says. "What voices?"
"Take no heed of his ramblings," his mother chides. "That child talks to the wind as though it's his best friend. Take no heed."
They bid him wash the crockery and stable the cow before they release him, and then he runs – through the vegetable garden, down the dirt path that leads to the wheat fields, past the outskirts of the cultivated lands and into the unfarmed realms of Hyrule. Where wildflowers grow, the untamed creatures roam.
He runs – not to please his father or to terrorize his mother, but for the voice lodged deep within, the undefiable whisper of hurry, hurry, hurry.
Where is he going? It matters not. He runs because he can, because children do not run from what they are, they only run to it.