The sun had gone down hours ago, which had turned the usually kind, late summer air in the village bitingly cold.
Link had made sure to sit close to the fireplace in his house, although not so close and comfortable enough that he fell asleep in front of it. He had been watching the flames all night until they'd burned out, stubborn as they were to die, and now all that was left was a pile of ash in the fireplace and a few blackened chunks of wood, still glowing crimson.
He made himself stand up, the fuzz that had gathered in his head (that he hadn't even noticed was there,) clearing up quickly. He turned around to see Ghirahim lying on his bed, a book opened above his head. The spirit didn't tear his attention away from it as Link paced across the room.
"I need to go out," he said, stopping by the door as he rooted through his pouch that had been hung up there. He'd cleared it of the bomb bag and had replaced it with a pair of special gauntlets, equipped at the knuckles with sharp metal claws that extended past the length of Link's fingers, perfect for digging. He took one out of his pouch and slipped it onto his hand to flex it, testing its flexibility, before turning back the open plan bedroom on the other side of the cabin.
He considered his familiar. Although the little disappearance earlier that day had worried him momentarily, everything had been okay. Ghirahim had stayed in the house (as far as he knew), and nothing had been destroyed. Still...
Ghirahim looked down past his feet at Link when the blond continued to regard him, before turning back to his book.
"You should come," Link pressed awkwardly, not sure how to phrase his request. He didn't really want to ask Ghirahim for anything, so using 'could you' or 'please' was out of the question. Clearly this way of asking didn't work, though, because the spirit didn't move an inch.
"Why?" A challenge. Ghirahim knew that this was a request to follow and he was deliberately sounding uninvested. Link clenched his jaw; Ghirahim had, for the most part, given up on tormenting him verbally when he realised just how good the Hylian's straight face was - but now that Link needed him for something, he was back at it. Link heard the bed's covers rustle as Ghirahim presumably shuffled into a more comfortable position, and he sighed.
"I have a job that needs doing." He said, and then, with a flash of guilt shadowed by impatience, he added, "Can you hurry up and follow me."
Ghirahim immediately stood, his boots echoing on the wooden floor as he approached, and Link couldn't help but avoid his eyes, feeling uncomfortable. He was beginning to discover some of the "perks" of gaining a familiar through this particular spell, though he wasn't sure if he, personally, could call them perks.
Ghirahim had to obey him - if the wording was vague enough then he'd probably try to turn it around on Link somehow, but for the most part he was at the Hylian's command.
He did not like the idea of these interactions becoming a habit. Link, despite hating Ghirahim for all that he had done in the past, wasn't fond of this rule. He had felt similarly about his loftwing back on Skyloft - they had always been a team, he'd never seen the bird as his servant or something to follow his every order. If something ever seemed like too much for his mount to handle, then they'd work through it together until they were both comfortable. As much as he didn't want to work with Ghirahim, and didn't trust him, the idea of telling someone what to do and not even giving them the choice to object made his stomach twist unpleasantly.
Another rule - that he hated even more, because despite the first one going against his morals, at least it was (and he'd never admit this out loud) convenient - was that they couldn't go very far from each other. Link had discovered this when trying to leave Ghirahim at a shrine in the Faron woods a few days ago while he went to seek advice from Faron, the Great Water Dragon, only to be pulled back by an invisible force. It had felt like a combination of walking against a very strong gust of wind, and every inch of his body being pulled on by fishhooks. Both sensations were unpleasant, unnerving, and had lead him straight back to Ghirahim, who was waiting for him at the shrine with a knowing, sadistic grin on his face.
Needless to say, he hadn't managed to talk to Faron recently.
Ghirahim had told him that the bond would be able to stretch further with practice, but Link wasn't keen on leaving the spirit alone near Zelda for a prolonged period of time, so both of these rules were causing Link to fall into his own downward spiral of turmoil.
"Why do you need to tend to this job this late into the night?" Ghirahim said, not exactly groaning but the complaint was still clear.
"Why are you bothered? You don't need sleep." Link bit back, still facing the door, although he tried not to sound too aggressive, to make up for forcing him to follow without a choice.
"You clearly do," Ghirahim said, and Link could hear the distaste in his voice as the door opened and they stepped outside. He imagined Ghirahim was wrinkling his nose up as he said it. "You look awful."
Link rolled his eyes and didn't say anything as they walked through the village in the middle of the night, and Ghirahim (thankfully) didn't pipe up either, until they reached the garden allotments on the edge of town. They were filled with the season's growing harvest - beans, corn, and a variety of squash, among other vegetables and fruits - except for a section in the north of the field, that had been completely demolished.
"Are you going to explain?" Ghirahim said as Link picked his way through the lots. He stopped at a patch of pumpkins that seemed to have exploded, and crouched to examine the ground. There were holes everywhere that were too small to be caused by mogma, who had already arranged a land agreement with the humans that gave them no reason to terrorise them anyway. Link hummed to himself as he confirmed the culprit in his head, and he heard Ghirahim sigh, which reminded him to speak.
"There was talk going around that something's been getting into Pumm's pumpkins. It sounded like a moldorm, but I couldn't be sure."
Ghirahim had paused to listen, then moved to sit on the fence a short distance away. He perched there gracefully, one leg crossed over the other and looking completely ridiculous and out of place for this late at night, especially in his fancy clothes. Link decided not to comment on it. Instead, he straightened up, fishing out the mogma mitts. He held them in one hand for now and grabbed the fence with his free hand to steady himself, and started stamping on the ground.
He didn't look at Ghirahim, but he could tell he was getting a funny look from him.
"What in the Goddesses' names are you doing?" He said, subtly gripping the fence as it shook a bit from the stamping.
"The vibrations will get the attention of whatever's down there," Link explained, trying to will the heat away from his face as he grew more self conscious. "Makes my job easier."
He still refused to look at Ghirahim, who was still regarding him, and he found himself wondering what the spirit was thinking. He stopped his feet after a minute, satisfied that that would probably do the trick, and took his hand off the rickety wooden fence. He started to pick a splinter from his hand before he put the mogma mitts on, getting ready to dig the culprit out of the ground, when he heard a rustling behind him. He turned just in time to see a giant, centipede-like creature leap out of the soil and straight for his face.
Link dropped the gauntlets and grabbed the arthropod as it jumped forwards just in time, catching a mandible in each hand and trying desperately to keep them apart. They were razor sharp and cut into his palms immediately, and human blood flicked onto the ground as Link shifted his grip. He grunted from the pain, and the struggle of trying to keep it away from his face.
He heard footsteps amble slowly up beside him, and he dared to tear his eyes away for one moment to see Ghirahim standing there next to his head. He wasn't looking at Link, his gaze passing calmly over their surroundings.
"Odd location for a wrestling match, isn't it?" Ghirahim commented, and Link yelled as his grip slipped momentarily and the mandibles snapped down on his hands.
"Just get this thing off of me!"
Ghirahim seemed to consider, and Link yelped again as he managed to throw the creature off of him and kick it a bit away. It rolled and curled in on itself, before quickly darting back to finish its work. Link crawled away backwards, passing by Ghirahim, who quickly raised his hand and snapped, and the moldorm screamed, its tail suddenly disappearing in a puff of smoke, the rest of its body following suit. No more than two seconds had passed when there was no longer anything where the threat had once stood.
Link sat there panting heavily for a moment, the adrenaline pumping through him already starting to fade, before he shifted position and hissed as dirt rubbed into the cuts in his palms. He pulled them up to his face and examined them, groaning as he noted that a mixture of moist earth and blood was spread all over his hands. With a wince, he pushed himself up off the ground to stand.
"Was that it?" Ghirahim said, a slight hint of amusement in his voice like this was all a game. Link restrained his glare, knowing there was no point in giving the spirit a reaction when he seemed to feed off of attention.
Moldorms were aggressive creatures that usually kept to themselves, so Link felt it was safe to say that his job was done after getting rid of a single one. He almost thanked Ghirahim for saving him, when he was reminded that he would have had to anyway if he also wanted to live, and even then he'd taken his sweet time getting round to it, so Link said nothing, and turned to go home, dreading having to clean his wounds.
.
"I've been wondering," Ghirahim started, as Link attempted to wind a bandage around his hand half an hour later, "if you're really the same human I encountered a year ago."
Link looked up from his work and slipped up again, the bandage unraveling off his hand for the third time that night. He narrowed his eyes at the spirit.
"What?" He hissed. He was too exhausted for riddles, and too exhausted to restrain his annoyance any longer. He prayed Ghirahim would give him an answer quickly or he was tempted to throw a chair in his direction, even if it only meant they'd both get hurt.
"You handle things so sloppily," Ghirahim mused, like he was analysing a character in a book rather than talking to a real person. Link's eye twitched. "No matter how weak you've always been, you still managed to keep up with me as I travelled across the Surface. It was almost impressive."
And what was he supposed to say to that? Link was about to snap back a retort when Ghirahim interjected-
"Why don't you always have a weapon with you?"
Link closed his mouth and opened it again, before finally closing it when he realised he looked like a gaping fish. He considered Ghirahim's question, and had barely hesitated before he found his answer. The gauntlets he owned were his favoured weapon for tackling moldorms with, but he thought he'd make a jab at the spirit instead.
"It's easy to forget about weapons and fighting when life is usually so peaceful," he said pointedly, not looking at the spirit and opting to stare at the wall across from himself.
"That's a very foolish attitude that will get you killed."
Drat, he thought, and huffed, turning back to his bandage and tending to it with too much vigour, trying to look preoccupied. He heard Ghirahim sigh from his seat on the windowsill and get up to move across the room. Link startled as the spirit yanked the bandage away from him and crouched in front of him, taking his hand and holding it palm-up to dress it himself. He wanted to snatch his hand back and pull away, but at least his wounds were finally being covered. Ghirahim pulled the fabric tight across his hands, making the Hylian almost wince as the bandage was tied.
"You should always have some way of defending yourself, physical weapons just aren't practical sometimes." He said irritably as he moved onto Link's other hand. "Do you not know any magic at all?"
Link's face flushed with embarrassment as if he was supposed to. "No!" He said, trying to tell how uncommon magic-wielders were with the single word. He wasn't even sure that he knew any humans with Ghirahim's style of magic, the closest being Batreaux, who could hide or summon certain objects, but even those powers were derived from his initially demonic form.
Ghirahim gave Link a withering look that made his face flush with more embarrassment - the invasion of personal space made everything more uncomfortable - and then looked back down to the almost-bandaged hands.
"You're going to need to learn the basics, at the very least," he tied the bandage on the emphasised word, probably to stress how fundamental this skill was in his book and how pathetic Link was for not knowing it. Link frowned.
"Great. And how exactly would I do that?" He said, snarky and mocking and sarcastic. It almost took him aback to hear himself speak that way - the spirit's bad vibes were already rubbing off on him.
Ghirahim let his hands go, and then regarded Link with a look of incredulity.
"I'm going to teach you, of course." He said, and then his lips turned up in a disbelieving grin. He shook his head, "Where did you think you were going to learn? Your schoolteachers?" He laughed as he stood back up to turn and walk away, and Link's eyes widened. His stomach lurched.
Had a demonic spirit really just offered to teach him magic?
.
Finally back with more stuff!
I don't know if I'll be able to keep updating stuff every weekend because honestly, at the moment I'm very busy, and not very well on top of that. I still really love these stories though, so I can promise you I'll be continuing all of them.
(Also I'm bringing a new fic out soon about canon/Downward Sword Ghirahim's backstory:3 I'm thinking of calling it His Reflection in Metal, so keep an eye out if you're interested!)
So, who's got BotW? I'd say I'm close to finishing it and oh, my god. I'm so in love with everything.
