His tablet. That's what he had forgotten in class. On his way home, he had tried to pull it from his pocket. But, alas, it was gone. He had known he left something behind, being his ridiculous, preoccupied self, but he just couldn't recall specifically what it was. Now, grimacing, he approached Boom's room, hoping that by some slim chance the teacher was still there. He turned the doorknob, and, to his relief, the door swung open to reveal a very surprised Boom. He had some intricate contraption sprawled across his desk, various Bunsen burners placed under a number boiling flasks, all interconnected by a mass of tubes. Watching the experiment was a girl of about thirteen, sitting atop a desk, legs swinging back and forth underneath. "Hi, um, Link?" Boom guessed.

"Yes, Link is correct."

"Craving to see the intricate inner workings of pressure equilibrium, or do you have another purpose in coming here?"

"Well, I was just wondering if you found a tablet laying around. I believe I left mine in here."

"I can't say I have...wait! I have! I put it back in the storage room, but I don't know where, exactly, I put it. Hold on. I'll check for you." He bustled through a door, poking his head out one last time to say, "And this is my daughter Fi, by the way. Somehow, she hasn't gotten tired of my antics."

"Oh, I have. I just put up with them," she said.

Boom laughed. "I stand corrected."

His head retracted into the doorway like a turtle retracts its head into its shell, but before the door closed it shot right back out again. "Oh, and don't get any ideas about my daughter."

"She's thirteen," Link said reassuringly, as if being thirteen closed off any possibility whatsoever of a love interest. Still, he felt slightly less comfortable after Boom left than he would have if such a possibility had not been mentioned.

They sat it silence. Fi, whose eyes were fixed darkly on Link, broke it.

"It's easy to forget that there were others on the ship."

"What?"

"The cruise ship. When the Marauders attacked. I mean, it's easy to remember that there were others physically on the ship, but it's impossible to fully grasp the vast amount of pain that occurred on those fateful days, before we were rescued by the Hyrule militia."

Link's eyes went wide. After he moved, he never suspected he would see another person who had gone through what he had. But she was right. It was easy to forget that eighty-seven other souls had suffered at the hands of the gerudo, that eighty-seven other people had loved ones die or had died themselves. It was easy to forget that he was not solitary in his horror.

"I didn't live on Hyrule, like you," she went on, "but I was visiting a friend there. One whom I had met through an interplanetary internet service, and desperately wanted to meet. My dad opposed, but I insisted. And eventually, he gave in, and let me go off-planet. Accompanied by Derek's parents, of course." Her eyes started to water. She tried to blink the tears off, but salty beads were streaming down her cheeks before she could stop them.

"Terrible mistake, was it not?" Link immediately berated himself for such an insensitive reply.

"Yes. Terrible mistake on my part. I never should have wanted to go there, because if I hadn't, Derek's family wouldn't have wanted to treat me to a cruise like that, and then they wouldn't have gone, and they...they wouldn't have died. Every one of them, dead from exhaustion, or malnourishment, or..." She was bawling now, beyond consolation.

"I know," Link said softly, teary-eyed as well. "I know what it's like. Not a day goes by where I don't wonder if there was anything I could have done to discourage my parents from such a vacation. But how could I have known? Now they're dead and I'm alive, and the guilt burdens me." A thought occurred to him. "How did you know I was there as well? Did...did you see me on the ship?"

She turned her gaze aside, reluctant to answer his question.

"Did you?" Link asked again. She shifted her gaze to the other side, dodging his face.

"I did," she finally replied, her breathing unsteady. "You were...used for a demonstration. Of torture devices. Do you remember?"

Link did. He remembered full well being a test subject. That had been his family's job on the ship. While most were laborers, toiling in sweaty rooms all day to do the gerudo's grunt work, he and his parents had been strapped to tables and fed. They were fed all day, not food, but pain. They had pain shoved down their throats to flail about in their stomachs and tear them apart from the inside out. While most had fed the gerudo, the gerudo had fed them, and fed them well. And Link would never be hungry again. "I remember."

"You were dragged out, like a tribute into the Colosseum. And they treated you with everything, from whips to weird...devices, and by the end, you were writhing on the ground, nude and helpless, unable to utter a word other than barbaric screams, and the monster presiding over this whole thing, she told us that if we didn't work the same would happen to us. And I couldn't bear to look at you, but at the same time I couldn't pull my eyes away from you, and you were dragged back into the...oh..." She was trembling violently, now curled into the fetal position upon the desk.

"You...remember me?"

She nodded.

He didn't know what to say. So he found himself recounting experiences, things that he knew she didn't want to hear. Now that she had broken the barrier, opened the Pandora's box, Link could not hold it back. Everything came out in a torrent. "My parents and I...we were all tortured like this. Lab rats for torture. They always tried their...toys, as they called them, on my parents first, then fine-tuned them on me. I didn't know why they did it this way, perhaps because I was young and they had some kind of deranged mercy in their hearts that told them that the old should go before the young, but later, I knew why they were doing what they were doing. They..." He choked on his words.

"They what?" She was listening now, intently.

"They had other uses for me. Of course." His voice was bitter; his eyes were furious. "They, a species of females with only one male every generation, would want young bodies upon which to feast, and it fell to me to satisfy their twisted desires."

Fi put a hand over her mouth in shock. "You were molested?"

Link's anger melted into an indistinct puddle of regret. Not that there was anything to regret, as there was nothing he could have done. "Raped. Over and over. I couldn't bear the looks on my parents' faces as they watched hordes of gerudo leeches line up in front of me, my body turned into a brothel for all of them. Yes, I was untied, I could have fought back, but there was always a guard standing nearby with an electric whip in case I made a false move. And I wouldn't just be whipped for resisting, either; I would be whipped if I failed in any way to satiate their desires. And so it was." He was on the verge of screaming. "My parents, forced to watch as I not only succumbed to the rapists, but participated. Even now I can feel the fierce hands gripping me, not only enjoying me against my will but forcing me to enjoy them, and punishing me if I didn't. This was my life. Pain and prostitution. Days on end, I couldn't even-"

"Link, Link, be quiet!" Fi was pleading with him. "My dad will hear you."

Link slumped into a chair and tried to calm down, taking shaky breaths. "I'm sorry. I...needed to talk about this. With someone. Not some psychologist, reading responses out of a book about PTSD, but with a real person." His breaths became more stable. "Thank you. Thanks for listening. I haven't...I haven't even discussed this with my older brother at this deep of a level. It was always too painful. He knew about everything, but not from me."

"Do you have dreams about what happened?"

He looked her in the eyes. "Almost every night."

"Me too."

Link got out of his chair and started pacing. His expression began to shift from angry to sad to annoyed, as if it was at a crossroads and couldn't decide which way to go. Eventually, he said, "Where the hell is Boom? Hasn't he found my tablet by now?"

He turned around again, hair whipping about his face, but before he could pace any further he was met by loving arms. Arms that had not loved him before, but rather found love through empathy. He was caught in Fi's embrace, and, finding comfort in the touch, however foreign, he embraced her back. "Thank you, Fi," he said again. "Thank you for listening."

"I'll always be here for you if you want to talk."

He nodded slowly. "And I'll be here for you as well. If you ever want to share your story with me."

"Maybe someday. But today, I think your story is enough for the both of us." She paused, tensing in his arms. "Physical contact doesn't...bother you, does it?"

"A loving embrace doesn't bother me. It isn't the contact itself that matters, but how it is delivered."

"Ah."

They stood content in each other's arms until the door flung open and Boom reappeared. The sound amongst the silence was like a bomb on a peaceful town, causing Fi to yelp and jump away. Boom was standing with Link's tablet in his hand and a solemn expression on his face. Slowly, he approached Link, looking as if he had seen something his daughter had described from a nightmare, only in real life.

When he reached Link, he patted his arm paternally and said, "I found your tablet."