Fandom: The Legend of Zelda (Ocarina of Time)
Character/s: Saria, Link in spirit.
Words: 323
Notes: For fifteen minute ficlets.
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He had always been a little strange, Saria could admit, sitting all alone but not really in her secret forest glade, surrounded by the distant, playful notes of a hidden piper. Her own song answered that taunting melody with zeal, its cheerfulness enlivening her own spirits, and those of the woodland sprites that drifted bright and aimless through the trees. But even that lively melody of her own devising, so attuned to her being, was not enough to tear her mind from its sharp and sometimes painful thoughts - not today.
He had always been a little different.
It wasn't just the fairy, she knew, although that was part if it, and all of it in a nutshell. The knowledge made her heart heavy, despite the easy kilter of her music. There was something about him... something that didn't sit right, something that rubbed their shrewd and tricky leader entirely the wrong way for no real reason at all.
There was something about him, and it showed in his eyes, those deep and drowning pools of blue, innocence and the mischief he had learned from everyone around him - perhaps that was part of it; he lacked their intrinsic, tricksy sense of humour. There was the fairy again, everything and nothing in a nutshell.
She wondered how she had never really noticed it before, the strange, awkward part of those deep blue eyes, airy and distant as time, heavy and close and ignorant except for what they told him.
Yes, he had always been different, and that was everything in a nutshell along with the fairy, crushed up tight and sticking in her throat just as nuts had a tendency to do in this high, hot summer, sticking as sweat to her skin in the storm season. It was time, it was time that was the difference - and time alone would tell whether that difference would be too much.
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