Part Three-Shopkeeper
This time, he was floundering through a sea of tall, slippery creatures, each one rushing by him as if stopping would hinder their ability to breathe.
He struggled around in the mass of slick commuters as he tried to get to dry land, but was too inexperienced of a swimmer to make any headway. He felt himself go under and began to panic as he started to drown. Suddenly, something grabbed his foot and began to pull him in the opposite direction. After a blur of bubbles, he felt his head break the surface and he exhaled water and gasped.
His savior let go of his foot and smiled down at him in a strange, fishy way as it handed him something.
Link began to wake up and couldn't make out the meaning of the words the lifeguard had said.
With that dream as motivation, Link had taken to improving his swimming skills in the little pond at the center of the Kokiri Forest meadow whenever his best friend was away. He was getting pretty good- at least, he could swim faster than Saria in a race (and outdoing her in anything was impressive, in his opinion.)
He pushed off a boulder in the water and tried to get to the other side and back in one breath.
When he succeeded, he made a great splash of returning to the surface.
"Hey!" yelled a voice. "You got all my stuff wet!"
Link whipped his sopping head around to see a soggy Ahzull furiously moving satchels of things out of the way of the water, his grey fairy bobbing up and down in perturbed agreement.
"What is all that stuff?" Link tentatively asked.
"Stuff for my busy-ness! And you got it all wet!"
Ahzull was incredibly short, incredibly gruff, and incredibly quiet- almost more so than Link in his silence. For him to yell so angrily was a cause for curiosity.
"I'm sorry," Link whispered.
Ahzull grunted in reply and began organizing the contents of his bag into piles, giving a wide berth to the pond Link was floating in.
Link took this as an acceptance to his apology; Ahzull had always acted little more than indifferent to the fairyless boy. "What's a busy-ness?" he ventured.
"When I trade this stuff for other stuff."
"Oh." Link paused. "What kind of stuff?"
"Those colored rocks that sparkle." Ahzull's eyes also began to sparkle like the gemstones he spoke of- they could be found all over the forest and in the center of the larger rocks (which Mido liked to break by throwing them at Link's house before giving the pretty fragments inside to Saria. She usually yelled at Mido for it instead of accepting his gifts, which didn't help much despite her intentions.)
"I like those colored rocks a lot," he finished.
"Will it work?" Link asked.
"Of course it will work! Everybody wants this stuff." With a sweeping gesture, Ahzull showed off his merchandise.
Link saw the appeal of the stock: Deku nuts to throw as pranks, long and sturdy sticks for pretend sword fights, and seeds for slingshots were among the things Ahzull had already stacked.
"Can I help?" Link was getting excited just looking at them.
"Okay." As soon as he said it, the petite boy stopped to reconsider, narrowing his hair-hidden eyes. "Wait- you aren't gonna try to take the stuff and the sparkly rocks, are you?" The rumors and slander spread about the boy without a fairy had reached even his ears.
The thought hadn't even crossed Link's mind. "No. You can keep all the sparkly stones."
That was all it took to convince Ahzull, and he nodded in consent.
Link leapt out of the water and shook himself dry (away from Ahzull's piles, of course) before going over to help him organize.
"What's this?" He pulled out a flat piece of wood with a familiar symbol smeared on it in red berry juice.
"A shield." Ahzull's habit of short answers didn't explain much, but Link was satisfied with it.
Pretty soon, the two boys had set up a nice little kiosk and were doing rather well- a few passers-by gave them business.
"Where are we gonna keep the stuff when it's bedtime?" Link asked suddenly.
"Can't we leave it here?"
"No. Mido might take it."
"Oh." Mido's bullying hadn't been reserved for just Link- he had been known to be mean to the others in the past. Because of his short stature, Ahzull was also a frequent target. At least, he had been until Link was old enough to divert Mido's attention.
"What about your house? It's your stuff."
"Hey, yeah, I can turn my house into a busy-ness! That's a good idea!" Ahzull grinned and began moving his wares into his house across the pond. Elated by his playmate's words, Link basked in the small praise.
The two worked quickly and excitedly, speaking more than either thought the other capable of doing.
They had just finished rearranging the furniture into suitable positions when Link noticed that Ahzull was too short to see over the makeshift counter.
"Let me be the counter-man. I'm tall enough."
"What's a counter?"
In reply, Link patted the table in front of their wares. "This."
"Oh." The petite Kokiri looked from his new counter to his new friend. "What can I do, then?"
"Um," Link thought for a moment. "You can go around and tell people to come to our shop."
"Our what?" Ahzull noticed that Link used lots of new words.
"Our shop. Our, um," Not realizing that the word 'shop' was not native to the Kokiri tongue, Link floundered for an explanation. "Our busy-ness." Link began to wonder where he learned 'counter', too.
"You use funny words."
Still unsure of where he had learned the words, Link took on some customers while Ahzull and his fairy went outside to advertise.
For a while, everything was fine- Link would trade some things from the many piles for what he and Ahzull had decided was a fair amount of stones, sometimes adjusting when someone would come in one or two colored rocks short (Link had been told not to do that, but it had been Shad who had been asking and Link paid for the difference out of his own pocket, figuring what Ahzull didn't know couldn't hurt him.) Shad smiled in chagrin and Linder swiftly interjected with a joke to keep the conversation going.
But, as usual, Link's lack of fairy and personal quirks would be his ruin.
With a fairy perched on his shoulder, Mido strolled into Ahzull's house. Silently, Shad shrunk to the sidelines, afraid of what was could happen next.
"Hey! Now I don't have to go get my own!" Mido walked behind the counter and stretched out a hand to take some Deku seeds. Link boldly stepped in front of him.
"What are you doin', fairyless? Move!" Mido tried to shove him away, but Link held his ground.
"You can't take them because, um," Flustered, Link wasn't sure what words he should use. He was thinking of lots of things to say, but they had all been nonsense to Ahzull and Shad and he didn't want Mido to be able to use them as fuel for his spiteful fire. Besides, he was just plain too scared of the taller boy to make words come out.
"Because um, um, um," mocked Mido, "They ain't yours, is they? This ain't even your house!"
Link knew he had to say something, fast, and threw away his mental filter. "This is a shop. A store. So that's why," he squeaked out.
"What kind of stupid thing are you saying?" Looking simply confused, Mido looked somewhat less threatening.
"Uh, well, uh, we… have, uh, things that you can, um, buy and we, uh, sell them for, er, colored rocks." From the shadows, Shad wished that Link wasn't spewing what seemed to be total nonsense, as the words 'buy' and 'sell' were completely alien to him. "See, this stuff is merchandise and you have to pay for it because, well, it's fair that way, um," Link shifted his weight nervously. "Do you, uh, get it?"
Truth be told, nobody, fairies included, had any idea what he was talking about. Mido got the impression that Link was trying to make a fool of him and got angrier than he had been before.
"Are you tryin' to make me look dumb? 'Cause I'll tell you who's dumb- you!" Red faced, he grabbed a nearby stick and struck Link across the chest with it. It broke, and he continued pelting Link with whatever was in his reach. With a yelp, the fairyless boy snatched up the wooden shield and tried to block the barrage as he took cover behind one of Ahzull's shelves. Mido was enraged that Link could defend himself- he ran out of ammo and began to push the bookshelf against the wall to pin his elusive prey down.
Link was sandwiched against the wall and began to wriggle himself out of the situation, using the shield to help him push the bookshelf off. With all of his focus on pressing against the shelf harder, Mido did not notice a panicked Shad take one of the Deku nuts from the sack he had just purchased and toss it at him.
The nut, nature's magic flash bomb, pegged Mido in the side of his face. He screamed as he was blinded and fell backwards, releasing the shelf as he went. Also completely dazed and stunned from the brightness of the flash, Link stumbled into the second set of shelves that contained the rest of the glowing goods. It all went down in a glorious eruption of light that filled the room and streamed out the doorway, catching the entire meadow by surprise. Ahzull bounded in, alarmed.
He saw Mido lying on the ground, totally blinded, and Link, eyes shielded, standing above a fallen bookshelf, broken 'stuff' strewn everywhere. The grey fairy immediately started yelling at Link as his charge kept his distance, seething.
"My eyes! You stupid fairyless idiot!" On the floor, Mido was going ballistic. "It's all your fault! It's always your fault!"
Ahzull scanned the disaster and noticed Shad crouched against the wall, presumably to protect his eyes.
"What happened?" Ahzull demanded.
Shad had been far enough away to regain his vision quickly and stammered out a messy reply.
"What happened?" Ahzull began to lose his temper.
Desperately, Shad glanced at the dazed Link.
"Mido was, um, um…" He wished he were as brave as his brothers.
"I didn't do anything!" moaned the bully. "It was all him!" Shad began to become outraged.
"No, it wasn't Link's-!" With a grunt, Link pulled himself together enough to send Shad a pleading message with his eyes. While not at all at a loss for words now that Mido was showing his manipulatively dishonest nature, Shad bit his tongue and obeyed his accused friend's command.
"Make him go! He doesn't know it all! He doesn't know what happened!" Mido was still complaining on the floor. At Mido's demand, Ahzull's grey fairy shooed the freckled boy outside the house, but not after he shared a silent confirmation from the hapless Link across the room.
Ahzull gave the wrongfully accused a glare that could have singed a scrub's leaves.
"I shoulda known you'd be trouble. Get out and don't ever help me with my busy-ness again." Slowly, like he had lead in his shoes, Link obeyed and headed towards the door. But when Ahzull decided that Link wasn't going fast enough, he lost his patience. He leapt in the air and stomped his feet, trampling the hat he had discarded from his head. "I said to get out! Out! OUT!"
Link picked up the pace and left the infuriated Ahzull with the blinded and whining Mido. As he passed him, Link had sworn that he had seen the bully grinning from his place on the floor. Perhaps the 'trouble' Ahzull had referred to Link causing had nothing to do with Link at all-hadn't Ahzull been the diminutive victim at one point? It could be- the littlest Kokiri wasn't one to explain himself.
Did it matter? Link reflected on the events of the day and what he had been doing at Ahzull's "busy-ness."
"Hey, you ought to be more careful. My buddy has a shop over there and he might be selling something that could help you. Of course, you may not be able to buy any of the merchandise at his store, being a kid and all, but it was worth a shot."
Was that what the creature in his dream had meant by all those weird words? He felt like he was on the verge of understanding so many things, but that something was holding him back, like the current he had been swept up in while he had slept.
He'd have to ask Saria about all of this later.
Thank you for reading this slightly improved chapter! I hope you enjoy it! Please read and review- I not only looooove to write fanfiction, but I loooove to improve myself and hear how I am doing in a reader's eyes! Thank you so much!
