Second to last chapter to go, for at least this part.

I admit, ladies and gentlemen, that I have been writing a freakin' other part to this story, but I honestly don't know whether i'll be posting it, because well. The plot bunnies aren't jumping as much any more, and honestly, this needs to END. And I have enough stories that have been left hanging.

But yeah, if I ever finish writing the last part, I'll post it all up too, but at the moment, this EXTRA seems to be the last installment.

Hope you enjoy. :)

Hero's Mother - 4

\,(o),/

Almost a Year

\,(o),/

I didn't like being away from Navi. I didn't like the silence, and silence is not the right word.

Navi had to go, or else she wouldn't have gone. She was low on energy, and fairies were made of energy or magic or spirit-juice for all I knew, so she needed to replenish it or else she would fade and die. So when she went to the fairy fountain just outside the Castle for the day I didn't stop her. She knew, anyway. She could probably feel it, hear it, like I heard her.

I didn't like that I couldn't hear her, and hearing is not the right word.

Sitting still made me nervous, standing still made me itch. I searched for Zelda and asked for something to do.

Except I hadn't said it out loud, so Zelda and I just stared at each other for long seconds till she asked me what was wrong.

Words. "I, I need something to do. Distracted. I can't, I... "

I hated speaking when I didn't feel safe, I could never find the words, too busy trying to think of ways to fix the something that made me feel uneasy. But Navi's absence could not be fixed, unless I went to the fountain myself, but she'd been saying that I needed to meet more people and I had promised to try today, while she was gone. I'd forgotten that her absence would leave gnawing sprawling catacombs in my head and guts and spine, echoing caves of she's-not-here-ness, hollowness that I'd experienced once and once was more than enough. Was this why Navi was making me learn? In case I was in trouble if she was ever away? Was I too dependent on her? I wrung my hands.

Zelda noticed my hands too. "Do you want to keep your hands busy? Or do you want a book to read?"

"Hands busy. You said, something about the grounds. Is there anything…?"

"Well, there are some pears that need picking from the greenhouses..."

"I'll do it. Can I do it? I'll do it now."

"You'll need approval from Lady Kaalle."

People. But it was something to keep my mind off the not-here-ness, because it wasn't emptiness, just a wrongness, missing beats in my pulse.

Lady Kaalle turned out to be a girl younger than me, wearing a pretty dress that parasoled over her dainty feet in shades of insect teal and butterfly mauve. I took the hat off because I was Civil Liaisoning and apparently Agitha didn't like adults and the hat made me look like one.

Her laugh was surprisingly welcoming, eyeing me up and down. "Goodness me, for a moment I thought you were a grasshopper! Miss, do you like insects? Oh please say you do."

I liked to eat them, but judging from her accessories and her clothes that was not what she had in mind. I nodded.

"Excellent! My poor friends are always so misunderstood, especially Sir Spidermite and Reverend Mantis. If you'll come this way I'll introduce you to the guard bees and the ladybeetles, and please, don't mind the lacewingmen, they prefer to do their duties unnoticed. Oh, oh! You must see the soldier-wasps' new paper lanterns, they do such delicate work."

I stepped into the vast greenhouse, and the smell of lichen and moss and ferns and dirt slammed my senses with images of the Kokiri woods, and my nerves eased. This… this felt a little like childhood.

Agitha spun round, beckoning me, having already dashed a distance into the forested paradise. "Come on, miss! What is your name, I do apologise, I forget about formalities sometimes. Mine is Agitha Kaalle, Princess of all Bug Kingdom."

"Lin Knightly." I didn't know how to bow, or curtsy. "Um, errand girl?"

"Marvellous." she giggled and scampered on. "This way!"

\,(o),/

Navi felt Lin's presence at the entrance of the hidden alcove so she fluttered out, yawning, feeling refreshed. Lin was sitting by the crevice that acted as the doorway, too big now to fit into the cranny that she'd slipped through as a child. It was a little past dusk, the sky a vast plum canvas trimmed in pearl-laced clouds, and Lin was smiling in the half-light.

Before Navi could ask Lin told her about Agitha, though not in words. The Hylian thought of pigtails bouncing like butterfly wings, dirt-crusted fingernails that fluttered over wasp-hives, leaves and trees pungent with ripe fruit and old flowers, freckles and dimples, a rather sweet laugh, picking pale pears from a tree weeping with bounty, flicking jeweled ladybeetles to safety. Conversations, conversations about golden insects, skultullas and the baba family trees, Agitha adorably mistaking Lin's halts for the right vocabulary as awe-induced silences brought on by sheer love of carapaced and crawly things.

Navi fluttered against her temple. "I am so proud of you."

Lin grinned. She thought of a citrus tree in the greenhouse, sturdy, a tad bare, and imagined vines hanging onto it. Many came to the fore, tear grapes, singing hops, whistlejacks and others, draping themselves on the image like so many scarves as Lin considered their invasiveness, their usefulness, their scent, whether they had a parasitic nature, if they would grow well in the corner of the citrus tree.

If Agitha might like it.

"Let's start with a small potted fern."

Lin snorted, but a parade of ferns rustled through her mind anyway, occasionally swapping pots, carving designs on the rims, most of them involving insects.

"Does she know you eat them?"

"Shut up."

\,(o),/

Over a Year

\,(o),/

Link hadn't appreciated how Sheik changed when he met with different people.

He was more formal, more reverent when he dealt with people of supposedly higher birth, and more, rowdy? when he dealt with people in taverns. He shifted accordingly when he talked to children, women, old ladies chewing their gums, young men like him, and girls a little older than Link. Especially to girls older than Link, or around the same age.

Which made him wonder, which was the most genuine of Sheiks? Probably the one that interacted with Zelda, Navi thought back, but even then Link didn't see much of that, because Sheik kept himself closed to the Hylian. Polite, but indifferent. And kept calling him Hero.

Sighing, they wandered into the gorge-ish area around grounds of the Lord they were visiting, where Zelda had said she needed their help. The village had been sort of helpful as he'd asked around, the residents complaining about scarecrows being chewed out at night, that fruit was being taken from the highest branches. There was no mice problem in the inn, and that could only mean one thing.

Mother and child walked along the gorge, looking for a bend that faced the warm south. Navi scouted ahead when they found it, as Link bound some rope to a tree to scale the cliff, and sure enough, she reported a series of tunnels infested with keese.

Link imagined a small swarm, expected in an abandoned well. Navi agreed dryly that it might be something like that, if you multiplied the number of wells by at least fifty.

Oh. Hell. That was no longer an infestation, it was a reign.

Link recalled the conversations he'd overhead at the inn while he and Sheik had stayed there, of young men around a small round table with tankards in hand, boasting to look for the keese nests with roaring torches, without shields. Link might have corrected their methods (Keese plus fire equaled nightmare, and going without a shield was suicide) if he could explain the sheer idiocy of those actions in less than five sentences, but he'd dismissed it as unseasoned youngsters talking with false courage, and arguing with vaguely drunk boys would have been exhausting.

Navi snorted and thought of Link wading in swamps and collapsing against half dry banks, climbing out of abandoned turrets and nursing aching limbs, sleeping in volcanoes because it was the right temperature for a much needed doze no matter that the place could explode on his face. Those were good instances of Link being exhausted.

Link pouted at Navi before inching over the lip of the gorge, thinking of that one riddle in a tomb in Holodrum that had stumped him for hours, and still hadn't solved. It was that kind of exhausting and she knew it.

He jumped down, winding a length of rope around one leg and between his feet as he slid down, down, the rope hissing against his leather boots and gauntlets. The sun wasn't quite facing this way, and the wind was practically nonexistent. These probably saved him from a storm of keese eating him alive as he dangled there like bait, facing the wide wide hole that was bristling with the winged and fanged critters. It took some convincing before Navi ventured in at Link's request, to see just how deep the tunnel was.

Too deep and too tightly packed to go more than a yard, was the answer.

Link shuddered. If those boys had come here with torches, it would have set them all off. They would have exploded out and spread the fire on their wings and burned down the swathe of woods beyond, and the village, and maybe even started a interregional maelstrom of blazing hell on earth.

Which was probably why Zelda had asked them to be here, to prevent it before it happened.

Right, so…

Link crawled back up the rope like a caterpillar on a stem and rested on the lip of the gorge, thinking. It would be best to collapse the hole, and the inner tunnels, crush hopefully at least a third of the keese to avoid a full-blown exodus of leathery screechers. Bomb-flowers didn't grow in this part of Hyrule, so that was out. He did have a few bombs with him but it wasn't as if he could just throw them in, the aim would have to be just right. Not to mention timing; dying by own explosion was probably one of the stupidest ways to go.

Then he thought of his quiver of arrows. Could he…?

He thought of hanging off the rope by his ankles and shooting into the caverns with bombs strapped to arrows and Navi said HEY HEY HEY! In his mind, making him wince.

"That is insane and you KNOW IT!"

Alright, yes, he probably would have to concede that it was a little outlandish. But were they agreed that the entrance needed to be collapsed?

"What's stopping them from coming out another way?"

Nothing, really, Link internally sighed, scratching his hair. But he doubted there would be any other way out for the keese, at least, nothing big as the one they'd found, so if they trickled out of smaller entrances across the cliff-face like a mist rather than a blown dam, it was still a manageable problem. Probably. They didn't like sunlight, after all.

"So how exactly are you doing this?"

Link pictured some scenarios, Navi vetoing if she deemed them too risky. In the end they strapped some bombs to arrows, sticking the arrows just above the caverns full of nightvermin, and lit them with Din's Fire from afar.

They dashed away as the bombs sizzled, and to their mild horror saw Sheik and the local lord walking towards them. Navi zoomed ahead to warn them as Link hollered and waved his arms frantically and the bombs BOOMED.

The banks of the cliff, honeycombed by the tunnels, began collapsing. Including the ground Link was running on.

Navi screamed at him to run as the ground cracked and shattered below his soles, the screeches of dying and mulching keese reverberating up his legs with the rumbling of breaking earth, until finally a good bite of the ground fell away and Link leapt forward and grabbed onto a tree and kicked off it, letting the poor thing fall to its doom as he rolled onto more solid ground.

The earth shook beneath them still, shaking his teeth in his jaw, shifting boulders grumbling like giants smashing fists at each other as they rolled and thundered into the valley below where the Zora river wound its way to Lake Hylia.

Link's heart was hammering and his breath came in gasps, but he was grinning at a job well done, and fun well had.

If Navi had the appropriate anatomy she would have heeled her forehead and whimpered.

"Navi," he drawled happily, much like a child would drawl mom, "It wasn't that bad, was it?"

"What has this imbecile done to my land?!"

Sheik was scratching at the skin under his fringe as Link blinked at them, confused. He was clearly trying not to laugh.

It didn't help that a mist of shrieking keese billowed up into the air in the wake of the avalanche.

"Hero," Sheik pinched his lips, valiantly not smiling, "Just, what?"

"Uh, keese infestation." Link replied, thumbing over his shoulder as the black fog of squalling fangs dispersed into the shadowed gorge, away from sunlight, "I figured… you know."

"My land!" the lord blurted out again, shock curdling into anger, "Couldn't you have, burned them out or something? That was a decent slice of property you carved into that pit!"

Link snorted. Did nobody know how to not attack keese? "No."

"Why you little-"

"Sir, excuse the boy," Sheik sighed, bowing deeply, "He's a creature of few words. Too few, frankly. Hero," he added, peering up at a sky, "Do us a favour and demonstrate what happens when you set fire to a keese? There's a couple circling us now."

Link sighed, unsheathed his sword and waved it till the flashing weapon caught the keese' attention, and sent one a flicker of Din's Fire as it swooped. Of course, its wings caught fire without truly hurting it, the other keese flew over it and set fire to its own wings, and Link dodged, letting the two living streaks of fire slice past before dealing fatal blows.

Then Link hung back and let Sheik explain why and how the cave-in was probably what saved acres upon acres of land from fire, and the damages that the Lord himself would have incurred, and the fines he would have had to pay his neighbours as well as himself for said damages, and the Lord was satisfyingly quiet, after that.

"Could've warned us," Sheik admonished lightly when they saddled up to leave, "But good job."

Link grinned sheepishly. "Thanks."

"But seriously. Warn us next time." he continued, shuddering exaggeratedly. "I for one don't enjoy the prospect of solid ground crumbling under my feet. Or losing a Lord in that chaos and explaining it all to Zelda, or worse, actually dig that prat out. And dear Nayru I just realised I would have to record all this in a report. Thank you so very much."

The Hylian chuckled.

"Link," Navi admonished firmly, as Sheik groaned.

You may have noticed that Lin gets injured and overexerts herself A LOT during Touch.

Guess who acted as the hand break to the trainwreck that is her life?

Looking forward to seeing you all in the final chapter guys.

REGARDS,

S.S.