TALLYN
Tallyn woke up in Link's arms, warm and safe, listening to the heartbeat in the crook of his neck. He immediately began to smile—it had been far better than he ever could have imagined. He hoped Link didn't mind it too much. Tallyn ran his fingers along his jawline, his clavicle, his scabbed cut, down the twists and folds of his tight, contorted abdomen, along his hip…
"Darling," murmured Link, catching his arm and folding it against his chest. He urged Tallyn to roll onto his side and then fit him again into his arms like a puzzle piece. "Go back to sleep."
Tallyn tried, but was too thrilled—the temple, the embrace, Link's gorgeous body—it was almost too much for him to bear. He crawled out of Link's arms, dressed, and took the fishing pole and basket down to the small wooden dock. After an hour or so, he had caught a medium-sized trout and was baiting his line for another when he heard footsteps behind him.
"Anything biting?" asked Link.
"Some," said Tallyn, standing and presenting him with the basket.
Link took it and gazed shyly back at Tallyn. He looked away.
"How are you… feeling?" asked Tallyn.
Link shrugged. "Fine."
"I mean, about…"
"Fine," Link repeated, staring at a tree with great interest.
"I have to go back to Kakariko, Link."
Link's eyes snapped back to him. "So soon?"
"They said the floors would only take a few days, so…"
"I see," said Link. "It's probably time I returned too… perhaps to look for work now."
Tallyn waited for him to go on. "So you've finished the book?" he asked when Link offered nothing more.
He nodded. "Take it with you. I'll come back to the village in a day or so, after I've tied up my ends here. Tallyn…" he paused for a moment, "please don't think me mad or a liar when you read it. Think of it as… a story written from many clues buried in the old legends, for the purpose of entertaining the princess."
Tallyn smiled. "Don't worry, Link. I'll read it gently."
Link remained troubled. He stroked Tallyn's hair and kissed him on the corner of the lips before turning back to the cabin. Tallyn shivered, still thrilled by the newness of their affections, and followed him back to the camp.
They ate a small breakfast and Link cooked the freshly caught trout over the fire and packed it in waxy paper for Tallyn to take on the journey back to the village. Though the mood was somber Tallyn felt both excited and apprehensive about the chance to finally read the book.
Link walked with him to the stables and pulled him behind a tree before they reached the wood structure. He kissed him hard.
"Tal, I…" Link shook his head. "I'll see you soon."
Tallyn was suddenly aware of their proximity to other people. He looked over his shoulder nervously and kissed him back softly, hurriedly.
"See you soon," he agreed awkwardly, wondering if he ought to have said something more meaningful. He slipped out of his arms and walked a few paces ahead, and in a moment they were both greeted by the stable boy. He gave the boy a few rupees, led his horse out to the road, and looked back at Link.
"Goodbye, Link," he said, somewhat more solemnly than he intended. He glanced over his shoulder a few more times until Link grew too small to see.
It was night by the time he reached the village. He rode past the library, looking much as it always did save for the heap of charred wood and rubble at the foot of the great north window, and then, soon enough, he was home. He could hardly wait to open the pages of the book but he forced himself to be patient, and took a bath and ate a small supper of bread and cheese.
Tallyn sat down with the book at last. He examined the binding and found that it was a cheap, second-rate structure, of the sort sold in the market for ledgers. He wondered if he could persuade Link to copy it into a lovelier book, something that would befit the royal family's collection. Opening the book by its simple blue cloth cover revealed the block of off-white pages flecked with bits of wood and stem.
He read at first with a small smile, for the writing was simple and descriptive and reminded him so much of Link's actual voice, but he soon lost himself in the stories of spiders and dragons and princesses. The Kokiri forest tumbled forth from the pages as lush and mysterious as he had seen with his own eyes only a day ago, and he ventured through descriptions of the sulfurous dodongo cave, and found himself stricken with awe of the great faeries, the lake god Jabu-Jabu, and the dreams of Princess Zelda.
But then, the story took a turn. The castle fell, the princess escaped with her attendant Impa but was pursued by Ganondorf. Link retrieved her ocarina, opened the Door of Time, pulled the sword from the pedestal, and then…
…Tallyn saw his name. It was not 'Tallyn', the name his foster father had given him after his own father, but it was his old name, the one he silently possessed but had never been called: Sheik.
He stood up, feeling suddenly cramped, and stretched his arms above his head, and then began to pace. How long had he been reading? He poured himself some wine and looked at the clock. Two hours. Two hours of reading, and he had found himself woven into the story. Was this what Link had warned him about? He chuckled, wondering if he hadn't simply misread the name.
He returned to the book and saw that he hadn't. Link described Sheik carefully, from the length of his hair and color of his eyes to his lithe posture and the words that he spoke. Tallyn read them again and again, and found the words familiar in his mouth as he dared to mumble them out loud. His heart racing, he devoured the next passages, of Link's hunt for an artifact, and the humble inventory he took of his new body. He was just as he was in his dream, Tallyn thought, exhaling slowly; the green clothes, the shield of the kingsguard, the brocaded sheath and legendary sword. How strange to hold the thoughts and deeds of his dream-Link in his hands!
Tallyn shifted and ached, but read on, becoming increasingly anxious to reach the end, as painful emotions trembled beneath his skin, erupting every time he read a description of Link meeting Sheik. He read about Link's trials in the desert, his frustration at reaching a dead end, and then that terrible moment when they met for the last time, when they said goodbye. Tallyn had unwittingly experienced this memory once before, and it frightened and pained him to relive it again. Link's words struck him hard and confirmed what he had been feeling himself.
When Sheik stole away behind a pillar of sand, Link felt his heart break somewhere deep in his chest. It was then that he knew he was no longer a boy, but a man grown.
Not only did the passage steal Tallyn's breath away, it came dangerously close to being inappropriate. He read on, exhausted, and with a hard lump in his throat. The princess appeared in the Temple of Time disguised as Sheik, to Link's confusion, and was captured at last by the evil king. Link ran headlong into the bowels of the castle to rescue her, facing more challenges and growing even stronger. The battle was phenomenal, Tallyn remembered through Sheik's own eyes, watching from afar, dearly wishing he could have fought beside him. And then Link was gone, dispelled from that time, and he ended his memoirs with a few remarks about what he learned in this life about the legends and the Sacred Realm, and regrets for having been so young.
Tallyn closed his eyes and curled up in the plush chair where he had been sitting. Link's broken heart had echoed his own. It occurred to him that in that life, Link would never know that he had had a friend, another sworn ally besides Zelda, another soldier besides himself. Moments in time drifted across his closed eyelids like a play. The memories pooled like a well brimming with water; they saturated his vision and spilled over as sleep finally took him.
He awoke late the next day with an intense feeling of dread. As he washed his face and peered into the looking glass, Tallyn was surprised to see how healthy he looked, and surprised again that he should expect himself to appear more gaunt and weathered. He walked back over to the book on the table and touched the cover. It was just as he had suspected, and it indicated that Link had been having the same dreams all this time. But why? Tallyn felt no closer to an answer.
He shoved his hand through his disheveled hair. He knew he was lying to himself, and he did have one possible answer, but it was too painful to accept. Tallyn placed the kettle on the stove and felt himself slip into the familiar déjà vu of the day he waited for Link at Lake Hylia.
The ground shook as water came flooding from the ice-logged underwater passage to Zora's Domain, and he felt a powerful rumble as water poured from the temple beneath his feet. The water was clouded from the sudden stirring of the silty lakebed, now littered with chunks of ice and lake kelp. He heard Link behind him, and tried to suppress his smile beneath his cowl. He spoke to him without turning around to face him, but soon felt Link standing beside him. He finally looked up and saw his eyes, and they were starved and curious and sleep-deprived. Sheik stopped prattling for a moment, stunned at their closeness, and laid a hand on Link's shoulder.
"I'm glad you're safe," he confessed.
His mind raced on, past memories of watching over Link on the road, and his own path that took him back to Kakariko. He cringed and reached far back, remembering just one memory of his thirteenth birthday, but two sets of memories for his fourteenth. In one memory, he remembered receiving a leather paring knife and eating sweets with his parents, but in the other, he was crying as he carried the corpses of his neighbors to a great fire so that they would not be devoured by the wolves. Had those images always been with him? He saw more. Tallyn survived for a month in the ruins of the village before they came for him. Women and older children were taken to Ganondorf's camps in the sacked Castletown; many others were put to the sword or fled to the mountains.
Over and over, the two-sided memories flashed before his mind's stage. He tended the shop for his father for the first time; he was smacked with the flat of a jagged blade for spilling the wine he served to Ganon's minions. His first kiss with Melena, the baker's daughter; the first time he was savagely violated by the enemy soldiers. Teaching Ilsia how to sew signatures together to form a text block; being gashed on the arms, legs, and back by the soldiers' cruel swords.
Tallyn squeezed his eyes shut and begged the gods to spare him from seeing any more. His head was splitting with pain as he tried to suppress the words and imagery from two more years of agony and humiliation. Some memories passed by in a blur, some he modified in his subconscious with darkness or silence or false words in order to protect himself.
Tallyn fought his way back to the present. He looked around and saw that he had fallen into a chair. His eyes darted around to the clock, to the kettle; the long hand showed only a minute had passed, the kettle corroborated with its barely-moving tepid water. He knew he should eat something, but couldn't motivate himself to do so. The memories took a turn.
A small band of rebels attacked and burned the camps. Impa, a Sheikah woman in disguise, carried him away to a far-off place. Tallyn did not remember much from that time; he bathed often and did not speak. But Impa spoke to him, even if he never responded, and he silently heeded all of her kind words. She told him that she knew his birth mother, that they had been not-so-distant cousins. She told him his name was Sheik, and asked if he would like to be called that.
It was not just Impa, but there was also the beautiful princess-in-exile, disguised as a Sheikah, in hiding with them in the abandoned villages and cave systems in the M. province. She cared for him, taught him to play the lyre, and told him stories from Hylian legends as he slowly grew strong again. Before long, he began to train under Impa so that he might serve the princess as her royal messenger and guardian of the Hero.
Tallyn was inducted into the craft guild as a master; Sheik learned to grind medicines and to disappear behind a cloud of smoke.
His hands were shaking. He had felt the tremors of horrific flashback memories within his memories and struggled to separate them from his own present life. These things had happened to Sheik, not Tallyn. Or rather, it was Tallyn, but in a different Time, a Time that split away from this one and careened off into space. What was his future in that Time, he wondered nervously? What was Sheik doing right now? He waded through his new memories, but was unable to call upon his parallel self in the would-be present.
He closed the valve on the stove and paced around the house, frightened and electrified by the images in his head. He made himself a cup of tea and took Link's book and a red pencil upstairs to his desk. Tallyn mercilessly struck out misspellings, restructured unclear sentences, and wrote comments where he thought information should be added or omitted. The task took his mind off the shock and pain at remembering earlier years, and he hoped it would also serve as a small punishment for Link. He was angry that Link showed him the book despite having suspicions, and angrier yet at himself for his own persistence to see it.
He paused and blushed where Link had punctuated his account with moments of longing for Sheik, and Tallyn was beginning to acutely feel Sheik's very same struggle—the desire to talk to him, to be his friend, to touch him, and the oaths he swore that forbade it all. He remembered how carefully Sheik had suppressed of his affection for Link, and how it had swelled inside him until it collapsed under its own weight and came to resemble a feverish, secret love. By the last pages, Tallyn recalled how difficult it was to watch over him, how it made him want to die to speak only hollow, ancient words to him.
He swooned to imagine how Sheik would react if he could see himself and Link now.
Tallyn manically paced through the house and scavenged for food. He could not sleep and had lain awake for hours, winding and unwinding his spool of memories. Whenever his eyes began to close, he felt the dirty, lecherous hand of a soldier and the pleas of mercy on his lips. It was no good; for every sweet memory he recalled, there seemed to be ten nightmarish ones. Opening cupboards and pacing helped to ward off the more terrible images.
Though he sensed that it was very late, Tallyn impulsively changed his clothes and went for a run. The cool air ripped across his face as he looked out on the highly developed village and took stock of which buildings had burned and which had never been built in the Other Time. When he returned home, he heated water for his bath, washed, and somehow fell asleep, still wet and only partially dressed.
