[EDIT 7/3/2023 because I forgot the recap, whoops] Last-chapter recap: Ron and Hermione teamed up with Prince Tiamus to cleanse Lake Hylia of whatever evil was causing Skullfish to spawn in it. The evil turned out to be the possessed tongue of Lake Hylia's guardian spirit, Jabora. After overcoming a challenge built by the Hero of Lights three centuries before, the trio faced off against Jabora and freed him from the Skullfish parasite's control.

In answer to a question asked by ZaneTribal Tyne Alexandros last chapter:
The Harrys' eventual title at the end of this will be the Champions of Magic. "Champion", because in New Hyrule's naming rules, a Hero is someone chosen by the gods/goddesses and a Champion is someone who stepped up to the task of saving the kingdom for reasons unrelated to divine Fate. Their friends would be known as the Warriors of Magic for their bravery in assisting the Champions and Hyrule. Shadow Harry and Vaati will continue calling the Harrys "Hero" because they're old farts who don't know/don't care that the meaning of the word has changed a tad since the Old Kingdom days.

In other news, I'll be participating in this year's Artfight under the username Garden_Eel, if any of you know what that is. Send an attack on there if you want some free art of your OC in return!

This installment is bonkers long and definitely not something that will become a new normal. Why is it over 14,000 words instead of the 5-7.5K I keep trying to aim for? Because a character voice exercise got out of hand and now there are two fully written-out versions of the same scene from two different perspectives. Also, because Link is very thinky and his narration takes up a lot of words. You might need to take a snack-break during this behemoth chapter lol. An illustration of Harry's new weapon has been posted under the "dungeon 6" tag on the garden-eel-draws tumblr, as well as an illustration of the general vibes of the scene between Link and Harry under my "characters" tag. Both images are displayed on the Ao3 version of this chapter for future ease-of-finding.

Content warning for mentions of Harry's abusive upbringing and Link's experiences with ableism and transphobia. A significant part of this chapter is about Harry's abuse-victim mentality, Link's neurodivergency, and how the two can clash. I'm writing both perspectives with a certain degree of personal experience; however, neither is meant to be in any way representative of everyone who has faced verbal abuse, or who has low-empathy autism.


Harry drew his bowstring back and sighted the target. His tongue stuck out as he focused.

"Put your tongue back in your mouth, or you might lose it," Avoka said as he walked up. "And check that saggy posture." He poked and patted at Harry to bring up his elbow and straighten his spine. "Watch your arm, too. You're aiming to slice some of it off."

Harry realized his forearm was in the path of the string again and adjusted accordingly. Even with the leather bracer he had on, smacking himself with the string bloody hurt. Avoka had ordered Red to find a different activity after Harry's brother had fouled several of their shots by accidentally attacking himself with his bow.

Harry could have sworn the transmitted pain of Red's fresh bruises hadn't felt quite as bad as it should have. Maybe it was the bracer on his arm, or maybe it was something new about the Four Sword. Harry would rather not test their possibly-dimmed pain connection until he had to.

He let his nocked arrow fly. It hit the target. Not anywhere near the center, where he'd intended, but at least it didn't miss this time.

Avoka whistled. "Day three, and you've hit that target about fifty percent of the time at thirty meters. Maybe you should ditch the sword and try archery instead."

"You think I'm good at this?" Harry asked in honest confusion. A fifty-percent hit rate sounded pretty terrible to him, even if the target was that far away. He hadn't managed to get anywhere near the center of it, either.

"I said you're good for Day Three, not a master," Avoka said, clapping him on the back. "Still, you've got decent posture for someone who's never held a bow before and you hit what you're aiming at better than I did in the same number of hours spent practicing. That takes a certain instinct for knowing the right angle and power to apply to it. Given your established skills as a long-distance spellcaster, I imagine archery would come more naturally to you than swordsmanship."

"Back home, I play a sport that has me following a tiny, flying ball around and trying to catch it. It taught me to pick small targets out of the distance pretty quickly. My eyesight's terrible, though, so I'm used to a certain amount of fuzziness," Harry said, tweaking his glasses. He'd gotten a new (and painfully expensive) set of self-adjusting glasses in town, so his vision was currently both a lot better than what he was used to and a tad strained. The Lenses of Truth gave him perfect sight through magic, but these were enchanted glass with a personalized prescription. Since he'd only gotten them yesterday—after much cajoling from Blue—they made his eyes and nose feel weird with their unfamiliarity.

"You really need those glasses, huh? Interesting," Avoka said. "Link, meanwhile, has stunning vision because of his magic, but can't see most colors right. He can hardly tell you and Red apart."

Harry laughed. "So I'm half-blind and he's color-blind! This dimensional stuff sure is weird." He set himself in the stance Avoka had shown him, pulled an arrow from the quiver hung over his backside, sighted and drew.

"Do those glasses actually help?" Avoka asked. "You keep squinting."

Harry released the arrow. It hit again, somewhat closer to center. "I usually wear ones with a prescription that doesn't quite suit me, so I'm not used to how these feel yet," he said, lifting them up to rub his tingling nose. What a novel idea—nose-pieces that fit! He hoped his face got used to it soon. "I wouldn't have bought these quite yet, since a hundred Rupees times three of me is, well…" he made a face, "but Blue bullied the rest of us into upgrading like him. Our other glasses were serving well enough, if you ask me."

"You're just fine with substandard equipment?" Avoka asked, his eyebrows going up. "What a bizarre thing to hear said in that voice."

"Link doesn't settle for less?" Harry nocked a third arrow.

The Sheikah lightly smacked Harry's limbs around to fix his slackening stance. "When it comes to things like tools and equipment, Link will make what he needs if he can't afford it," he said. "He wouldn't stand for a loose rivet in his safety goggles, let alone glasses that didn't allow him to see as well as he needed to. If his color-blindness affected his work, he'd have devoted years to crafting enchanted lenses that solved the problem."

"I'm guessing he's finicky like that because bad equipment can mean people losing fingers in blacksmithing machines and Bluestone projects exploding?"

"Uh-huh. He lets a lot of stuff slide, but never anything that affects his work. Blacksmiths and bluesmiths have to be perfectionists like that for their own safety."

Harry missed the target, but only just. He drew back another arrow and adjusted his aim, ignoring the burn in his arms and upper back. Blue would come outside to tell him off once he started pushing his pain tolerance too far. "It's wild to me that he works with exploding magic rocks on purpose. I mean it's brilliant, but mad."

"He'd probably agree with you. Every bluesmith knows their line of business is dangerous and more than a little mad, but those engineers further the field anyway. Personally, I'm thankful for the modern trains, Sheikah Slates, and lights they've produced, and also happy to never try to become one of them. Potion-brewing and writing the occasional seal is enough magic for me."

Harry scoped out the path of his string, then released it. Another arrow flew, this time thudding home in the grass in front of the target. It hadn't had enough power behind it to even nick the outermost ring. Harry clucked his tongue. He'd gotten impatient on the draw there.

"'Seal'?" he asked after checking his shot, brow furrowing. Like a letter seal, or one of the animals? Probably closer to the wax one, right? "Never heard of those. Are seals a branch of Hylian magic?"

Avoka shook his head "No, they're Sheikah magic. Purifying and warding seals are crafted by spiritually powerful Sheikah sages and priestesses. In my case, I've inherited a vaguely similar magical talent that my boss is desperately trying to teach me to harness in the only way she knows how. I can do a few of the same things as a Sheikah monk or priestess, but in a makeshift way."

"But what does a seal do? Purifying, for instance. What is that?" Harry asked. He knew that the Sunburst Spell was a purifying influence, burning away dark creatures in the same way that silver would burn a werewolf. He had difficulty mentally translating that to less spooky monsters like Bokoblins and Moblins, however. All that came to mind was attempting to ward off a troll with a cross.

Avoka stared at him like he'd said something fantastically dumb. "It's purifying. Like, anti-monster magic? The thing where you slap a piece of enchanted paper on something so it hurts any monster that touches it, or stick one onto a monster to discorporate it?" he said, his head tilting farther to the side as he spoke. "Haven't you seen the seals—the fancy little pieces of paper covered in Sheikah cursive—on the outside of some of the houses in town?"

'If all monsters can be purified, could there be a version of the Sunburst Spell out there that works on everything?' Harry wondered. It was something worth looking into. As for the written spells Avoka had described,Harry had seen those pieces of paper, with their squiggly unreadable Sheikah runes, and assumed people had been putting up flyers on their own houses for whatever reason. "Ohhh," he said. "Huh."

Avoka rubbed his temples. "That sword gives you such an authentic accent that I keep forgetting just how foreign you are. Even people from the known kingdoms outside of Hyrule know most of these things," he sighed. "Seal magic is commonly used, but uncommonly practiced. Being able to write functional seals is either something you study your entire life for or have been blessed with the ability to do. It requires a deep connection with the spirits or divine powers of Hyrule."

"There's no way I could do that, then," Harry said with a shrug. He wasn't dismayed by the fact that he was only connected to Hyrule by his magical sword. With as much trouble as he kept finding himself in back home, constantly facing that level of danger from two dimensions would have been the worst kind of tug-o-war.

"Keep an eye out for paper covered in squiggly calligraphy next time you visit an adventurer shop," Avoka advised. "If you find yourself in a pinch in the next dungeon you explore, you can lay a couple of warding seals across an opening to buy yourself some time. Those are pretty popular among adventurers. They'll let you pass through and block monsters that try to do the same, with the time limit depending on how much you're willing to spend at the shop."

Harry realized he had seen that written-on, eye-decorated paper before at one of those stores. He'd mistaken the rock-weighted stacks by the register for particularly obnoxious stationery, since it had been right next to the actual stationery. "I'll do that. Since our armor isn't great, we need to stop and heal ourselves pretty often. Being able to put up a temporary wall would help."

"Just keep in mind that they block monsters, not arrows or spells," Avoka advised. "Now move back about five meters and—"

The boy shivered and suddenly stood ramrod straight. His lengthy silver hair seemed to bristle as his scarlet eyes went wide with alarm. He spun around to glare fiercely into the distance.

"What in Ganon's godforsaken name is that?" One of his hands went for the short sword at the small of his back.

"Did you see something?" Harry asked. He scanned the skies for any unnatural storm clouds. There were only the white, puffy remains of that morning's early drizzle. "What was it?"

Avoka continued staring tensely across Hyrule Field. Harry conjured his Navi Slate, looked up at the sun, and checked the direction. Southwest, toward Gerudo Desert.

"I think…the world just broke?" Avoka said haltingly, shifting from his stiff, alert battle-stance. He dug the heels of his palms into his eyes. "Ow. My magic really doesn't like it."

Alarm shot through Harry. "Did you sense any evil magic beforehand, or anything disappearing?" he asked. If something big had happened, it had to be Vaati's work, but what exactly was he up to?

Avoka shook his head. "It feels like…" He folded his arms and frowned heavily in thought. "…a hole," he decided. "Something gave way, and now there's a hole punched through the world. I mean that literally—it's like someone took an awl to the fabric of the sky." He pressed his knuckles hard against his brow. "It's harder to sense now, and I'm not great at detecting these things in the first place, but there's a big shadow on the other side. It's something ambient wafting through the gap. The same darkness as your magic, I think."

Harry frowned, a little hurt. "You think I'm a dark wizard?" He would have thought he'd given off a better early impression than that!

Avoka smacked Harry on the arm. Now that he knew Harry was reedier than he looked under his bulky robes, the Sheikah did it with less force than he used to. "There's a difference between power source and intent, and intent is what matters most. I know you're even more of a bleeding heart than Link, you dork; my friend does a lot of too-helpful stuff that makes him super easy to kidnap, but even he has the sense not to throw himself into a volcano," he said. "Because your world is the shadow of mine, everything from there feels dark to me. Or maybe just dim? It's hard to describe, but it feels like a strong-yet-faded light." He screwed up his face as he tried to find a better phrase. "Yeah, that's the best description I can come up with. Not malicious, but not pure. Gray, more like. It's a shadow without intent."

Oh, that made sense. Wizard magic was something whose use could go from benevolent to malicious with ease. A spell did what it did, and it was up to the caster to decide what it was used for. There were also spells for practically everything, good and bad, and it was up to every mage to decide what kinds of magic they wanted to use. It was a lot harder to be evil with Hylian magic, where you really had to go out of your way to make up spells that matched your cruel intent. The default Hylian spell was a blessing. "Gray" was a good way to describe wizard magic, by contrast. The Dark World wasn't black compared to the Light World, but gray.

Back to the current situation, though. If Avoka could feel Dark World magic here, that must have meant there was a rip in space that had popped open. Why? How? Vaati was powerful enough that Avoka should have been able to sense him, too. The last time a weak point had been created, it had been because the mage had pulled a massive forest temple, then a sea of clouds from multiple storms, then an underwater cave complex through it. And even after that, Harry had needed to use a Moon Pearl to make it a full doorway. How did something spontaneously jab through the wall between worlds without warning?

Harry thumped his hand into his palm as realization struck him. Vaati hadn't done anything from this side; he must have been causing dimensional trouble back home!

Avoka rubbed his temples. "Ugh, something weird is going on now."

A glow arose far off in the same direction the Sheikah had been staring earlier. It wasn't a pleasant sight. The sky seemed to turn greasy and slick, shimmering a soft purple-gray. He couldn't make out much more than that from behind the Bluesmith compound's high fence.

He reached into his bag for his broom. "I should go and—"

Avoka's hand latched onto his arm. His spidery fingers dug deep into Harry's bicep. "If you go to whatever that is right now, you might just get written out of existence," he said harshly, still squinting in pain and holding his head. "Forget a hole—it's a sinkhole now. It feels like unraveling. You're going to let that magical malfunction settle into whatever counts as stability for it, and then you're going to fix the thing. If you try to fly off now, I'm going to knock you out of the sky for your own safety."

Harry blanched, remembering the boy's talent with projectiles. "Understood," he said weakly.

"I'm going to report this in to Commander Impa. In the meantime, you get yourselves ready for a trip. If it's a while before I come back, keep up your archery practice and sword forms like I showed you. I expect each one of you to be able to hold his own solo against a blue Lizalfos by the time you head out."

Harry nodded. "Yessir."

Avoka blinked in surprise at the address, then brightened. "Huh, I should have told you to call me 'sir' earlier!" he proclaimed. "I'm your combat teacher, so it's 'Sensei' or 'sir' now when I'm teaching you how not to trip over your feet. Got it?"

It was a bit of an odd request, but Harry supposed it was no skin off his nose. The boy was teaching him for free, and he didn't seem like someone to let the power to go to his head despite his resemblance to Malfoy. "Er, sure…sir?"

The Sheikah beamed. "Good!" He skipped off toward the forest between Link's house and Castle Town.

Harry put away his archery target board and went into the house to find Link and Hagrid playing Wizard's Chess with a miraculously undamaged game set, with Blue leaning over Link's shoulder to remind him what each piece did. Yellow and Red stood by the stove, experimenting with the ingredients they'd picked up in town that day. Red was cooking up a fragrant rice dish full of diced meat and carrots, while Yellow was frying banana pancakes.

"Isn't it funny that you can make yourself stronger just by eating some breakfast?" Yellow remarked to Red.

Red laughed. "Imagine fighting some bloke and being on the winning end, then he backs up to cram a pancake in his mouth and comes at you twice as strong! This place sure is fun."

Link looked up from the chessboard, where one of his pawns was beating down Hagrid's last knight. He spent a few seconds studying Harry's expression. "Big problem?" he asked.

Harry nodded. "Vaati's at it again. Avoka sensed some of what he was up to. Vaati made something like a portal, and not a stable one. I don't think the people here would have a concept of it, but Avoka was basically describing a black hole in reality."

Blue frowned. "How are we going to solve that from here? We've always needed to break Vaati's magic eyes to do it, and doing that takes Force Gems. There aren't any Force Gems in the Light World."

"There might not even be any anchors to break. I'm not sure he caused that black hole on purpose," Harry said. "Whatever he did is probably coming from the Dark World side, so we'd have to go there anyway. The hard part is finding a way back there. Worst case, we'll have to hop on the Southern Express to reach the portal by Outset Isle."

After hearing Yellow's English translation, Red said, "Well, at least then we'd be able to drop off those dragon scales with Ruka's scary grandma. Maybe she could even tell us where to find a Moon Pearl to open a portal that's easier to get to, since Ruka said she has a good memory for treasure."

Blue looked thoughtful. "While we're back home, I could sell off the amber I found for a better price. It's pretty common here, but I bet it's worth something in our world. I'll have to ask Malfoy about it."

Link perked up. "Lorule? Can I go?"

The Harrys and Hagrid looked at him with raised eyebrows all around.

"Did he ask what I think he did?" Hagrid wondered in English. "My Hylian isn't the strongest."

"You want to go the Dark World?" Harry said in confusion. Hyrule was such a friendly and vibrant kingdom—a charming balance between civilization and untamed nature that he'd never seen anywhere else. He couldn't imagine any of its inhabitants getting used to the comparatively dreary, over-cultivated atmosphere of jolly old England. Or Scotland, if that was the only region that mirrored this place. "Not all the legends about it are true, but some of them definitely are. It's not as nice as Hyrule."

For one thing, he doubted the average Londoner would have as much patience for the language barrier as Hyrule's citizens did. And that wasn't even getting into the fact that Link looked like an older, fitter, eccentric Harry with a weird dye-job, so people might mistake him for a foreign teenaged delinquent. His aunt and uncle had taught him that was one of the worst things he could be seen as, which was why they frequently lied about him being one.

Link nodded and clenched his hand near his chest. "I want to learn," he said with calm intensity.

Well, if he really wanted to go…"Sure, I guess?" Harry said. "Once we've solved whatever went wrong, it'd be a good idea to spend a couple of days in the Dark World and see what there is to stock up on." He figured those golden Gleeok scales they'd picked up could help them cover for a room, and maybe the people at Gringotts would have a conversion table for putting gems like Rupees into Galleons. He'd like to stop by Diagon Alley and a Muggle grocery store to check in on how his world was doing and buy some of the foods he'd been missing, too. Hyrule didn't have potatoes, berries other than Wildberries, or any form of citrus, and onions and garlic were considered a luxury because they didn't grow well in Hyrulean soil and were mostly imported from Holodrum. "We'll give you a call and let you know where the portal is once we've made the sinkhole close—or at least stop getting bigger. Just make sure you pack up everything you'll need, food and money included. We'll help you out with that stuff in the Dark World, of course, but it's a lot harder to survive there."

Link rested his chin on his hands. "How?" he asked mildly, tilting his head in his owlish fashion. There was a canny sharpness to his curious gaze that reminded Harry of Impa.

"Er…" It was a difference that Harry wasn't sure how to explain. Hyrule had free, wild-growing food everywhere, and no one who'd have you fined for trespassing or theft if you took some of it. Anybody who knew how to use a sword could slay some monsters and earn an income by selling their remains, or go into some forgotten hole in the side of a mountain and come out with treasure. Finding valuable gemstones was as easy as braving Death Mountain's heat long enough to break open the right rocks. You could go out into the forest right outside of town, pick a bunch of apples and mushrooms, lay out a blanket at the city market, and just sell them! Thanks to the Minish, anyone low on cash could go rooting through the grass and find enough Rupees for a warm meal or a night at an inn. If left to roam alone in the countryside here, Harry would have a better quality of life than he'd had staying with the Dursleys.

How did one put the lack of those things into words?

"Let's just say it's something you'll pick up on while you're there," Blue said with an unsavory smile. Harry got the sense that the envy he privately felt at Link's happy life might run a bit deeper in his brother. "Call it a learning experience."


[THE NEXT DAY]

Harry's POV

Harry sat cross-legged on the grass with his Transfiguration textbooks for this year and the ones previous laying open around him. He'd been combing through them for more transformation spells that weren't specific this-object-into-that-object. There weren't too many whatever-into-this-object spells to be found, possibly because giving the average thirteen-year-old that much power was kind of a bad idea. His brothers had gotten bored and wandered off ages ago. They were probably out in the forest by Link's house picking apples again. The trees regrew them so fast, and being able to pick fruit from a tree without getting chased off for theft or trespassing was still a new and thrilling experience. From the other side of the courtyard, he could hear the sound of Hagrid's wood-chopping echoing off of the high fence. The man was committed to regaining the health and strength he needed for his grounds-keeping work back at Hogwarts. Once everything was put right, he intended to go back to managing the castle's tamed lawns and wild forest without delay.

The suffering of Harry's afternoon efforts surrounded him. Bunny-rocks twitched their fuzzy ears fitfully. A stick-turned-bird was trying and failing to perch on something, its lack of eyes and long tail of solid wood causing it to crash belly-first into whatever it managed to find. On his knee sat a perfectly healthy conjured cobra, asking every now and then for him to make him something to eat. Harry had warned him that he wasn't very good at this yet, but now he turned a pebble mostly into a mouse and let it run off so the snake could stalk it. He'd remembered Serpensortia from when Malfoy had cast the spell at Dueling Club last year, but not the counter-spell Snape had banished the conjuration with, so he supposed he had a pet snake until the spell fizzled out in an hour or two. Animal conjurations like those weren't meant to stick around too long, he figured.

Harry picked up another rock and aimed his Magic Rod at it. "Scribblifors." It grew and flattened into a stone quill. Eh, close enough. Professor McGonagall would have given him a "P" for even the best of his transfigurations today, but his experimentation was less about getting the spell perfect and more about getting it to work at all. Objects in the Light World were really stubborn about being what they wanted to be, especially natural things like sticks and rocks, so overcoming that hurdle was a win in his book. The end goal was to make these spells useful for disarming and distracting monsters, since the beasties here were intelligent enough to notice and be surprised if their sword turned into a snake. Too bad he hadn't been able to find a spell like that in his textbooks—just ones for bunnies, birds, mice, and matchboxes.

"Your magic is…different."

"Gah!" Harry nearly hopped to his feet in fright. He dropped the stone feather, then twisted around.

Link leaned against the outside of his house's workroom, observing him. He was dressed in mostly shades of pink today, a short cape and floral, knee-length, petticoat-supported skirt swishing around him in the summer wind. A silver owl clip held his swooping bangs back from his face and his usual sleeveless green tunic bared the muscular brown arms crossed over his chest. It was a very color-blind, style-mixing outfit that shouldn't have worked, yet Harry couldn't have looked that cool if he'd tried.

"I'm quiet," Link said. He blinked, and the heavy force of his analytical stare lessened. "Sorry."

Harry laid a hand over his pounding heart. Link had to be some kind of secret Sheikah, because this wasn't the first time he'd given Harry such a fright. Few people could sneak up on Harry these days, thanks to the Four Sword doing something to tune up his situational awareness, but Link did so with ease. "S'okay. I'm quiet, too," Harry said a little breathlessly. "You were saying about my magic?"

"It's different. Stronger." Link pushed away from the house and went to inspect Harry's various twitching rocks and sticks. "Maple can't do this. She's very strong."

Oh, really? Harry had seen the witch using her magic here and there around town, mostly to move objects out of her way or shrink piles of horse dung to make them easier to step over. Little things, like what Mrs. Weasley used her magic for around the house. It had just seemed like normal mage behavior to him. "I didn't know that."

"You can cast anything?" Link asked.

Harry rubbed his chin. "If I practice, maybe. I'm not sure, to be honest. There isn't really a hard wall in front of most magic. I think, if someone works hard enough at it, they can cast whatever spell they like." He just found it difficult to learn extra spells at school because they were only supposed to use magic in class and he wasn't someone who learned well from textbooks alone.

"All spells? Elemental, moving things…" Link gestured to the rocks and the half-bird knocking its wooden head against a piece of metal it wanted to climb. "…This?"

"Conjuring and transforming are transfiguration-type spells," Harry told him, "But yeah, there isn't a magical limit keeping me from doing any of that. Actually, I know how to do all those things already." He stood up and aimed his staff over the fence. "Aguamenti." A powerful jet of water fired across the courtyard. Then he pointed his Magic Rod at a discarded metal casing. "Wingardium Leviosa." After having picked up boulders weighing dozens of tons up on Death Mountain, he barely noticed the magical strain of lifting the relatively light empty housing. He swung the object up and down, then set it back on the dirt. "I can't cast all the elements yet, but I know fire and water. It's just a shame that Dark World spells don't work all that well against monsters. I'd have to find the right Magic Rods for that."

Link nodded, his yellow-green eyebrows raised. "You're a battle mage. Impressive," he remarked. "My magic can't do that."

"Do you have a talent, like Avoka does?" Harry asked excitedly. How often did you get to see another version of yourself show you his magic?

Well, fairly often if you were a wizard with the Four Sword, but Link was different.

Link gave a small hum. "Yes. But less focused than Avoka's. Wider." He looked around, then went to a big sledgehammer propped up against the wall of his house. "Small Goron hammer. Ten kilograms," he declared, holding a hand out toward it. Harry didn't doubt that weight; the head of that thing was an enormous square block of solid iron. He didn't think they even made hammers that big and heavy in his world.

Link picked up the tool like it was nothing. He twirled it around with ease, then rested it against his shoulder. "Your magic works outside. Mine works inside," he said. He flexed one arm and turned his hand back to point at his thick bicep. "Bluesmith magic. Makes us big and strong. Boosts senses, too. Sometimes too much."

Harry vanished his Magic Rod and walked over to make sure that yes, Link was holding up all that iron without an ounce of strain. "How strong are you?" he asked in awe. His magic gave him a little extra defense compared to a Muggle, sometimes activating on its own to save him from broken bones and such, but this took that to an extreme. Harry hadn't even heard of spells that could boost someone's strength or senses, otherwise he'd have had his eyesight fixed straight away.

"Running, forty-five kilometers per hour. Overhead lift, one-hundred thirty kilos," Link recited. His unreadable expression broke out into a proud grin. "I can deadlift Gabbi!"

Link's sister was two meters tall and built like she could haul a tractor bare-handed, so that wasn't an idle boast.

"The Hero of Lights passed it down. She had it first," Link explained. "Stubborn magic, like she was. Whole family has it."

"So that's why you're so much bigger than me," Harry said, somewhat relieved. He'd been worried he was just that small. Yes, the top of his head only came up to the level of Link's nose (much to his embarrassment), but maybe his upbringing hadn't left as visible a mark as he'd thought.

Link shook his head. "It's not just that. I can tell," His perceptive stare rolled down Harry's body. Harry was grateful for his habit of wearing school robes over whatever Hylian clothes he had on. "I see a lot. Things other people 'just get', I have to learn. I don't 'get' people, so I study people," Link said. He leaned down to peer closely at Harry's face. "Am good at studying."

Harry's stomach twisted in a knot. Link had the gaze of someone who saw far more than Harry did. There was an analytical sharpness in those too-big, too-vivid Hylian eyes that made it feel like the kid could pierce the depths of his soul at a glance. Link might have been self-taught, but that look reminded Harry of Madam Pomfrey's level of professional observation.

"H-How do you study people?" Harry stammered. "Like a detective?"

Link pursed his lips, his head ticking from side to side like a slow metronome needle as he mulled over the question. A response came several seconds later. "Kind of? I'm an engineer. I identify problems so I can fix, mitigate, or avoid." The blacksmith paused again to think. "Sometimes people are problems. Sometimes people have problems." The words were followed by a pointed, knowing look. Then he straightened, backing up to a more comfortable distance.

Harry let out a small breath. Too close! Everything about that had been too close for comfort. He felt like he'd just passed through a scanner and come out the other end having been looked into far deeper than he'd ever wanted to be. Thank goodness Link couldn't cast any of Madam Pomfrey's check-up spells.

"I made lunch," Link announced. Cheerfully, maybe? Harry felt like an ass for not being able to tell. "Have some. You skipped breakfast."

Harry waved his hands in a flustered refusal. How the heck had Link known he'd skipped breakfast, anyway? "What? No, I can't keep taking your food! It's already enough that you're letting me hang around your house so much."

Link gave a slow blink and then made a demonstrative gesture toward him. "See? Problems."

A horrified blush lit up Harry's cheeks. Oh, Merlin, what did Link know about him just from looking? He hadn't expected his Light World double to be some kind of secret Sherlock Holmes!

Link's gaze softened. "It's not bad or stealing if you take what I give," he declared. "I want to feed you." He turned Harry around by the shoulders and ushered him into the house.

Harry sat down on one of the dining room benches and shrank in on himself as Link went to get dishes from the cabinets. "What do you see about me?" he asked timidly. Because the only other person who'd been that precisely perceptive about him had been the one other less direct alternate of himself: Shadow Harry. The spirit was cheating, too, with his memory-copying, so it wasn't the same as Link going through the effort of putting clues together.

"Will you get mad at me?" Link asked. "I'm not good with that."

"No, I promise." Harry hugged himself. "I'd just like to know, please." So he could put patches over those holes he had missed. Link wasn't the only one who'd started seeing the wrong things about him since the Boggart Incident had made Professor Lupin and his friends begin prying into his background. He had just been the quickest to home in on what Harry wanted to hide.

"If you say so." Link started ladling soup out of a pot on the stove into two wide bowls. After a while of anxiety-inducing silence, he said, "I saw a lack of medical treatment, self-cut hair, bad glasses, no adventuring sponsor, not enough food long-term. Neglect and resulting self-sufficiency. You were all watching Gabbi's hands because she talks loud. For you, volume means violence. All of you move like mice. Meek, small on purpose. You're used to hits and yelling. Not used to being helped." Link was silent for a while as he set the food on plates. Then he added, as an afterthought, "Gabbi won't hit. Never. Just friendly-yell without hearing aids in." He walked over and set a chunk of bread and a big helping of beef stew in front of Harry. The soup was fragrant, smelling richly of onions and truffle oil.

Harry held in the mortified urge to cry. Link had just read him like a book! What was this kid doing, training to be a magic blacksmith, when he was obviously meant to be this world's leading detective? Seriously, "self-cut hair" and "bad glasses"? How did one even spot those?!

And on top of that, he'd noticed Harry's unintentional implication that Gaebora was like the Dursleys. The woman was very big and boisterous in a way his uncle and cousin had taught him to be wary of, but that didn't make her a bad person. "Sorry," he mumbled at his soup.

"'Sorry' why?" Link's face was in its usual placid expression, his voice as measured and nonjudgmental as ever. Harry envied him for being able to stay so calm all the time. He hadn't seen much of Link in comparison to Avoka, since his Hylian counterpart spent a lot of time working at his family's business or holing up in his room to focus on projects, but it seemed like very few things were able to break the blacksmith's unflappable demeanor.

"I shouldn't have been acting afraid around her. It wasn't right," Harry mumbled. Guilt made it hard to match Link's patient stare. His eyes stung. "I know she's nice, it's just…I don't know how to not. It's hard to turn off, I guess."

A stretch of relative silence passed, Link swaying to a slow tempo and softly humming a tune to himself as he processed Harry's words. Harry twisted his hands under the table hard enough that he wondered whether Link could catch the creaking of the bones in his fingers with his super-hearing. He hated to admit it, because he was grateful for Link's kindness, but his difficulty reading this kid was playing havoc on his nerves. Harry wasn't the most perceptive bloke, but he did rely upon a certain amount of snap-judgment and further observation to know how to conduct himself around strangers. People in his hometown tended to assume the worst about him, so he had to be a bit of a chameleon to appeal to everyone's personal tastes and make the best impression he could. Impressions were important; they were the difference between a long punishment weekend of going hungry and getting a cookie at the sundries shop from a kind stranger. Was Link angry about what he'd said? Disturbed, like Ron or Hermione would have been? Harry couldn't tell, and the lack of an answer was driving him mad. How could he properly backpedal from what he'd admitted to if he didn't know what kind of reaction he was dealing with?

Harry's ears were ringing with stress-induced white noise when Link finally bridged the conversational chasm by declaring, "You don't have to say 'sorry' for that." Laying his elbows on the table, he leaned in toward Harry. "I'll tell you a secret," he said in a loud whisper. "Yelling is scary. Customers at the shop yell at me sometimes. I stare too much and talk too slow and say things wrong. Some people hate it." He laid a hand on his chest. "Lots of loud noises hurt, but I can manage. Always-headache, fine. My choice not to wear my aids. But angry yelling?" He shook his head hard. "Nope, nuh-uh, no thank you. So bad. Scary and hurts." A dark grimace crossed his face and a long moment stretched out before he spoke again.

"Yelling is extra bad because I can't make stop. It's other people's emotions, not mine. Often, don't know what I did wrong until someone explains. After, when it's too late." He sighed with a sense of exhaustion Harry could feel in his bones. "We both have problems with yelling. Even friendly yelling can be scary. I get that. Not mad at you." Link patted Harry on the shoulder. "You have reasons you're afraid. I hope someone can help with them someday. Now, have soup!" He flourished his fingers toward his bowl. "Avoka got from the castle yesterday, so it's expensive."

Harry hiccupped a laugh, wiping at his teary eyes. Link had cut to the root of him, but it felt oddly safe to have him in on the secret. It didn't seem like his alternate would betray him by blabbing around. Link wasn't like Professor Lupin, fretful and pushy and doing things not asked of him. There were no pitying looks or murmurs of "what happened to him?" for the kid who shrank back from raised voices and watched gesturing hands like a hawk. Link simply understood in the way that only an echo of Harry could. More importantly, he respected the fact that Harry didn't want to talk about why he'd learned those habits.

"Are you cheap, too?" Harry asked, picking up his spoon and swirling it in his stew. Beads of rich oil parted around it. "I've never had expensive soup before. Can't justify spending extra on things like that."

Well, he could now, with his wizard money, but basic staples in particular were difficult to convince himself to throw extra money at. He could afford the nicer bread and tinned soup now if he converted his Galleons to pounds, but buying those felt wrong in a way that buying an occasional special treat didn't. Like he didn't deserve to eat good normal food, but could have some ice cream sometimes. It was one of those things that made the most sense when he didn't think about it.

Link nodded. "I like budgets." He showed his crooked teeth in a cheeky grin. "And if I stare at something long enough, sometimes Avoka buys for me."

Harry laughed again, less tearfully this time. "If I asked Malfoy to do that, he'd have me pay him back with interest!"

"What is Malfoy?" Link asked. His lips twisted. "Wait. No. Words, erm…" He closed his eyes and furrowed his brow. "What is Malfoy…to you?" he rephrased. "Enemy? Friend?"

Harry took a bite of soup while he collected himself. Wow, it tasted expensive. There were notes of different flavors that his tongue was too uncultured to identify. Was that a touch of anise in there? "He's in the middle, I think," he said, waggling his hand. "I have two best friends back at my school, handling the stuff that the teachers won't. Malfoy isn't like them. He's hated my guts for two years, and then this year things changed. For now, I guess we're just trying to teach him to be less of an arsehole. If we're friends later, then that's a bonus."

Link ate a spoonful of soup and a mouthful of bread, giving Harry an avid stare all the while. Harry supposed that was his way of saying "well, go on".

Harry went on to explain Malfoy's "deal", as he understood it. Ron would have been able to fill in the "why" of it better, having a deeper grasp of how wizarding society worked. Still, Harry did his best. "We don't know how far back the Zora thing goes or where it came from, but it kind of broke him enough that he's starting to do more thinking for himself," Harry concluded. "It's been ages since I've heard him threaten to have his father ruin people and he doesn't call muggleborns a slur anymore, so…progress?" He shrugged and dipped his bread in his stew before taking a bite.

"Why does he hate 'Muggles' if Muggles are people?" Link asked. The poor kid looked like he'd been set adrift without a paddle. "Muggles are people. Mages are people with magic. 'Half-breeds' and some 'creatures' are people with magic. And muggleborns are mages like purebloods? Why hate so many? All are people! Makes no sense!"

"Exactly," Harry said, gesturing with his spoon. "It's bloody stupid, is what it is. That's what we're hoping he learns while we're here, with all of Hyrule's peoples being normal around each other. Malfoy's had that stuff shoved in his ears the entire time he was growing up, though, so he doesn't know any better. And then there's the whole 'old money' thing on top of it, which is its own kind of stupid. Like, my friend Ron's just as pureblood as he is, but he's not rich, so therefore he's 'worse'. Rich people are such gits."

"Avoka's decent," Link argued. "But yeah. Exception."

"How did your friend get to be so nice, anyway? Was he like that when you met him?" Harry asked. "Malfoy's better than he used to be a few months ago, but he's still…Malfoy."

"Avoka was never mean. Just new to things," Link said. "I could tell he grew up in a box. Everything outside surprised him. Lots of questions." He ate some soup-soaked bread. "Well. I guess he was angry," he said once he'd swallowed. "Not mean. Avoka likes to be heard. Hates getting ignored. Happened a lot to him, I think."

Harry nodded thoughtfully. Being talked over was what had pushed him and his brothers to go ahead with their quest and blow off the adults at the castle. If someone similar to Malfoy, of all people, wound up getting that treatment…Harry couldn't imagine the level of that tantrum. Malfoy liked to be the loudest voice in any room and the first person that people looked to for direction. He'd been mellowing out as his ego took one hit after another, but he still tended to elbow his way into dominance over most conversations.

"What are your friends like?" Link asked. "Maybe they have doubles?"

"That would be so weird," Harry said with a little laugh. It was kind of funny for Malfoy to be duplicated, but two Rons and Hermiones? Another Ron would be cool, but he didn't know if this world had enough books for two Hermiones.

"Well, Hermione's super smart. Reads a lot, remembers everything, and always gets the best grades," Harry began. "She was kind of hard to get along with at first because she's not very good with people. She can sound mean sometimes by accident."

"Huh. Like me," Link remarked. "Other friend?"

"Ron, I met first. When I found out I was a wizard, it was almost like winding up here." He gestured around him. "Magical people basically live in their own version of the same country, so I had to learn about all kinds of new things. He grew up with it, so he knows a lot about how stuff works over there. He's just fun to hang around with, too. I've learned a lot from him. Since I grew up non-magical, I was clueless about all that at first."

Link stared at him wonderingly. "But you're super magical."

"Yeah, by Light World standards, I guess." Harry ruffled his hair. He considered himself an average wizard at best. "Mages in the Dark World get our wands at eleven, and if we don't grow up around other magical people, there's no one there to tell us what we are until then. Before we get our wands, the only magic we can do is by accident, since it's hard to cast spells on purpose without one. My accidental magic had me do things like teleport onto a roof and regrow my hair after it all got cut off. Since I didn't know why and no one would tell me, I just thought I was some kind of freak."

Back then, he'd thought he suffered from an absurd strain of bad luck. It had felt like the universe had been out to get him in as much trouble as possible with his aunt and uncle by specifically targeting their hatred of strangeness.

Link winced at the word "freak". "You, too?" he said in a hushed voice.

"You get called that?" Harry said in surprise. Link was so much cooler than him, though! So tall, strong, pretty, and confident, with a job and everything. Not to mention he knew how to make swords and craft his own spells! Sure, his unusual nature wouldn't have gone over well in the Dark World, but it seemed like people in Hyrule were a lot less dangerously judgmental about how others dressed and talked. "Is it because of your magic?"

Link shook his head. "Is because I'm weird." He rested his chin on his raised palm. "Don't know why. Just am. Words are hard and people are hard to understand. Even for a Bluesmith, too many noises hurt me—make me 'overdramatic'. I don't know how to make my voice bouncy. Face is 'blank' because I can't make it always loud. I creep people out." He shrugged. "Sometimes they get mad at my clothes, too. Because I'm a vei, not voe or vai," He plucked at the lacy neckline of his cute, pink-striped magenta capelet and rolled his eyes. "People make problems out of me. I'm just here."

Oh, man, did Harry know that feeling. His relatives hated him simply because he existed. He could never be "normal" enough for them because he had magic, and part of their treatment of him had been an effort to stamp out his freakishness—as if it weren't an unchangeable part of him whether any of them liked it or not. Over in the magical world, all people had to do was take a look at his scar and they started falling over themselves to please him. It wasn't the same thing, but it was still others acting weird around him just because he happened to be Harry Potter. On top of that, every little thing he did at school got so much attention for no good reason. So what if he could talk to snakes? Why did that mean he had to be the Heir of Slytherin? People hadn't even known there was a snake going around Petrifying students when that rumor had started up!

"I get you," Harry commiserated. "Why can't people just be normal?"

Link sighed wistfully. "Wish I knew."


Link's POV

Link leaned against the side of his house, observing Green's magic practice. Such spellcasting was hardly ever seen in Hyrule, restricted to the extremely powerful and those in possession of rare, usually ancient Magic Rods. Not only that, but the kind of transformative magic Green was using was like nothing he'd seen before. It reminded him of the legends he'd grown up hearing as scary stories, ones that included such horrors as people being twisted into beasts by evil wizards and great spirits brought low by similar curses. Green's magic was not channeled with malice, however. Link could hear a certain ominousness within the power of all the Dark World residents, one made louder in Green's case by the wrong notes invading the boy's personal tune, but Link saw no evil intent here, only the kind of focus one would apply to any study session. Green even poked his tongue out when he was concentrating hard, like Link did.

The twitching rocks and sticks were a bit creepy, though. Could the rabbit-stones feel the pain of their misshapen form? Did the stick-bird feel panic at its lack of eyes? Was the snake that Green had conjured a real, living thing, and would it choke to death on that rock its creator had twisted into a stone-tailed mouse?

Green picked up another stone. Would it become a rock-rabbit or a rock-bird? Or perhaps another mouse for the snake formed from air to chase?

"Scribblifors," Green said. The rock in his hand assumed the shape of an archaic feather pen.

The fact that these powerful, world-twisting spells were so random and seemingly useless mystified Link, too. Why on earth would one want to transform a stick into a bird or a rock into an old-timey pen? Mainstream Light World magic, in the form of enchanting, seals, and potions, was all about improving upon or protecting things. Only the most evil of evil would fundamentally change an object's form and function, or so the common wisdom went.

"Your magic is…different," he remarked.

Green jumped like he'd no idea Link was there. Which he probably hadn't. Whoops. Link's usual focus on his hearing led to him walking with a smooth tread to keep from filling his ears with the sound of his own footsteps. He was also just Sheikah enough to have inherited a little of the illusion magic that made them so good at sneaking.

"I'm quiet," Link explained. "Sorry."

"S'okay. I'm quiet, too," Green said, clutching his chest. Link winced guiltily. He'd gotten that boy good, hadn't he? "You were saying about my magic?" Green asked.

Oh, right. What had he been saying? "It's different. Stronger." Link went to get a closer look at the rock-rabbits. Green's spells had gone half-wrong in different ways. Some stones were closer to rabbit-shaped but more rock-like in texture, while others had the fur right and everything else wrong. Link remembered hearing Malfoy and Blue complaining about something like that in English, which he'd had been steadily picking up since Hagrid had regained consciousness. He had only gotten one word in several, but managed to glean that their spells didn't work as well as they would have liked in the Light World. The power behind them was strong enough, but the spells' nature clashed with that of Hyrule. Link could absolutely understand why; though these foreign mages didn't seem ill-intentioned, the music behind their magic sang of dark potential. The blessed lands of Hyrule, which were naturally resistant to malicious powers, would be just as reluctant to follow these wizards' bidding as they would any self-styled Dark Lord attempting a takeover.

"Maple can't do this," Link said, recalling his friend's various abilities. She, too, could cast spells, though she did so without words and most of them were related to moving, repairing, or resizing objects. "She's very strong."

Green's eyes widened. "I didn't know that."

'Which gives me a good idea of the level of power you're used to working with,' Link thought. Malfoy's pompous attitude about Avoka's magic was making more sense. "You can cast anything?" he prodded.

Even mages as talented as Maple had their limits. Usually it was a matter of their magic's scope—what their power did and didn't want to do. A fire-mage, no matter how powerful, could not cast ice spells even with the help of an Ice Rod, for example. Their magic simply wouldn't allow it. Limits could also be established in terms of magical reserves, with some mages having larger internal pools of energy than others. Link and Avoka had very deep wells of magic to call upon despite the limited scope of their abilities, while Maple tired easily from using her Magic Rod. Since Green had been casting spells for a while now and didn't seem even slightly winded, Link assumed any caps on his power would be in the realm of purpose, not energy reserves.

Green rubbed his chin. "If I practice, maybe," he answered. "I'm not sure, to be honest. There isn't really a hard wall in front of most magic. I think, if someone works hard enough at it, they can cast whatever spell they like."

Link almost laughed at the absurdity of that notion. If Dark World mages had no limits on their abilities at all, then they were practically gods! What a wild world these people must come from!

He pushed for further clarification anyway. "All spells? Elemental, moving things…" He waved vaguely toward the tortured half-animate objects sitting around the courtyard. There wasn't a polite word for that kind of magic, so he just said, "…This?"

"Conjuring and transforming are transfiguration-type spells," Green explained. Oh, so that style of semi-destructive, object-warping magic really was commonplace in his world. Probably best not to tell the foreigner it was considered somewhat disturbing (if not outright evil) by the more superstitious among Hyrule's citizenry, then. Pointing out those kinds of things to other people tended to lead to angry yelling, in Link's experience. "But yeah, there isn't a magical limit keeping me from doing any of that," the wizard went on. "Actually, I know how to do all those things already."

Green proceeded to cast a spell that created a flood of water from nothing and lifted an iron housing from a retired forge that had to weigh at least half a ton. He performed those magical miracles with casual ease, showing no signs of strain whatsoever. Maple would have been on the ground wheezing after lifting such a weight, and she never would have been able to summon a river without a specialized Water Rod.

"I can't cast all the elements yet, but I know fire and water," Green said, seeming embarrassed at the admission. The boy clearly had no idea what fantastic magics he was able to wield. "It's just a shame that Dark World spells don't work all that well against monsters." Green pouted a little. "I'd have to find the right Magic Rods for that."

Link nodded, imagining the ludicrous power the little wizard would have at his beck and call if he had a specialized Magic Rod to boost his already ridiculous level of magic. It would certainly be a sight to see! "You're a battle mage. Impressive," he said, a dire understatement. It was difficult to hold in a wry smirk as he said it. "My magic can't do that."

Green's eyes lit up. "Do you have a talent, like Avoka does?"

Aww, it was sweet that this ultra-powerful mage still found Light World magic interesting. Power so often turned to egotism, as demonstrated by Malfoy, but it didn't seem like Green had let his go to his head. "Yes. But less focused than Avoka's. Wider," Link said, looking around for a way to show what he could do. His talent wasn't exactly flashy, so it would be a tad more difficult than throwing a knife.

His eyes caught on a hammer he'd forgotten to put away after smacking down some of the sharp edges of future project materials that had been recently dragged into the yard. He walked over and gestured toward it. "Small Goron hammer. Ten kilograms," he declared. After waiting to make sure Green's attention was on him, he picked the hammer up. He placed his feet with great care before spinning the tool around on its long handle like a staff. While its paltry ten kilos was easy to twirl, the hammer still weighed a fair fraction of what he did, and Link's somewhat iffy sense of balance loved finding any excuse to land him on his arse. Or his face.

Link rested the tool against his shoulder, putting its weight more comfortably over his center of gravity. "Your magic works outside. Mine works inside," he told Green. He flexed one arm and pointed to his thick bicep with the same hand. "Bluesmith magic. Makes us big and strong. Boosts senses, too. Sometimes too much."

Most Bluesmiths had one particular sense that was always a little (or a lot) too strong, no matter what. For Link it was his hearing, and for Gabbi it was her sight. Because he hated the deaf-feeling caused by his sensory aids, Link just dialed down his magic enough that he could endure all but the loudest of noises with only a constant migraine that he'd long learned to ignore. Gabbi, who had far less willingness to abide that pain, wore enchanted shades or goggles so she could handle sunshine and bright colors without an incessant throbbing at her temples. And, because she was Gabbi, she kept gnawing on Link's ear for him to wear his dampeners like she did.

At Link's explanation, Green had a look of shock on the features he and Link shared. Link wondered how the wizard managed to make his expressions so loud and frequent without thinking. He could tell from the natural speed and ease with which Green spoke and animated his face that the foreigner lacked the mental oddness that made it so difficult for Link to be understood and treated as someone of equal sapience to everyone else. What was it like to be Link, but normal?

Green walked over, flicking his hand and making the Magic Rod within it vanish. Link jumped. The wizard had just deleted something from the world without thinking about it!

"How strong are you?" Green asked with admiration in his voice, and Link had to hold in a snort. He wasn't strong enough to pluck things in and out of existence, that was for sure!

"Running, forty-five kilometers per hour. Overhead lift, one-hundred thirty kilos," Link obliged. He regularly tested such things so he knew what he had to work with in the lab and for his field experiments. He grinned, remembering the findings of a recent self-administered physical. "I can deadlift Gabbi!" His sister had been so delighted that she'd bought him cinnamon candy!

"The Hero of Lights passed it down. She had it first," Link went on. "Stubborn magic, like she was. Whole family has it." Inheritable talents, a rare breed, typically morphed into something else over time as they shifted to fit each bearer's nature. Somehow, the first Bluesmith's magic rang true after three hundred years, like her spirit was still guiding it.

That got an interesting reaction out of Green. His shoulders lowered just a bit, an expression of pleased surprise flickering across his face. He looked like someone who'd received unexpectedly good news. "So that's why you're so much bigger than me," he said.

Link's eyebrows went up. Had the wizard been plagued by thoughts of inadequacy caused by their difference in stature, or was this something else? Something related to the Harrys' possible lack of a Gabbi, perhaps?

Link shook his head. "It's not just that. I can tell," he said, giving the boy a once-over. Those ever-present black robes were like a visual smokescreen. Green and his brothers never cinched them in, preferring to wear their waist-wraps only over the clothes underneath, which made it difficult to judge their true size beyond basic height. What little they allowed to show didn't paint a reassuring picture.

"I see a lot," Link told him. "Things others 'just get', I have to learn. I don't 'get' people, so I study people." In the interest of avoiding an upset, he didn't want to come out and say "I've come to suspect, from a bunch of visual and behavioral clues you probably didn't notice you were dropping, that something is very wrong with your life", but he did feel like his dimensional alternate deserved to know Link was more perceptive than he'd probably assumed. Fair warning, and all that. The Harrys had earned it by not underestimating his ability to understand. Even Avoka had done that when they'd first met.

He caught sight of something barely visible under Green's bangs and leaned in for a closer look. It looked like the lower part of a poorly-healed scar. Another strike in favor of the boy not having received proper medical care growing up.

"Am good at studying," Link said a bit absently.

Up close, Green looked even younger. Why did it seem like he was physically lagging two or three years behind Link? Supposedly, this boy was six months older than him; Link was twelve, due to turn thirteen next month, while the Dark World's version of midsummer had long flown by. Though he hadn't voiced his skepticism even to Avoka, Link had a hard time believing his counterparts were really thirteen. Oh, and now Link noticed Green's breath didn't have the smell of food on it. No toothpaste scent, so it wasn't because he'd brushed his teeth. The boy had skipped a meal, hadn't he? That wasn't healthy for someone who was already quite slim and in the midst of training. Going by the thinness of the Harrys' wrists and forearms, as occasionally shown when the boys' voluminous robe sleeves fell back, Link was sure he had at least fifteen kilograms on any one of them. They were so little!

Green looked intensely nervous at Link's scrutiny. It was a different kind of unease than what Link usually inspired. Strangers tended to look at him like he was the problem when he creeped them out. Which, even if he didn't always understand why, he supposed he was. Green, meanwhile, seemed to be turning that sense of discomfited accusation toward himself. Why?

"H-How do you study people?" Green stammered. "Like a detective?"

Link was distantly aware of what those were. Detectives were part of a branch of the Royal Guard. He wasn't sure which one. Avoka had told him that they handled state-level investigations—big, strange, criminal happenings that made the papers and required special training to solve. It was quite a flattering comparison.

"Kind of?" Link said slowly. "I'm an engineer. I identify problems so I can fix, mitigate, or avoid."

Everything in the world could be broken down into compounding factors, problems, and solutions—social interactions included. Link approached every new person like a potential set of issues to be recognized and handled in different ways. By memorizing and constantly updating a standard list of all the possible social traps he might inadvertently set off in any given conversation, he avoided causing many a conflict. His skill for finding potential issues also gave him a knack for "reading" people, as Avoka would say. In his younger years, it hadn't been uncommon for Link to blurt details about a stranger that he wasn't technically supposed to know, simply because he'd seen a number of factors and come to a conclusion based on their combined meaning. As he'd gotten older, he'd become better at remembering what things he was allowed to say.

He condensed those thoughts into, "Sometimes people are problems. Sometimes people have problems." He gave Green a pointed look that hopefully communicated something along the lines of, "I can sense you're not in a good place and I'm not going to pry, but I just want you to be aware that I know."

Realizing he was maybe in Green's personal space, Link straightened and moved back a step. He was glad Green hadn't shoved him as a reminder, like some people did when he forgot their invisible bubbles. Despite Link's sturdy appearance, he was very easy to tip over when caught unawares.

"I made lunch. Have some. You skipped breakfast," Link offered brightly, hoping to quell the look of quiet terror in Green's wide, yellow-gray eyes. He hadn't meant to spook the poor boy.

To his dismay, the fear in Green's expression only intensified. The little wizard shook his head and waved his hands frantically. "What? No, I can't keep taking your food!" he cried. "It's already enough that you're letting me hang around your house so much."

Link gave him a slow blink. What on earth was this kid's background? It was basic hospitality to offer food if one had some to spare, and it was no trouble to have the multicolored boys and Malfoy around the house. The foreigners were well-mannered and not at all greedy, in contrast with the unpleasant legends about their shadowy homeland. They'd been sent across worlds and knew no one here but those that had been kidnapped alongside them. It was Link's pleasure to help such fantastically displaced strangers. And that wasn't even mentioning the fact that his dimensional alternates were currently doing their best to save the world! They'd helped a World Spirit regain her sanity, saved the Gorons from being flooded out of their homes and the rest of Hyrule from a slow poisoning by volcanic fallout, and returned to the Bluesmith family a memento of someone they had lost decades ago and never been allowed to find! Something had to be fundamentally wrong with this boy's thinking—a factor that went beyond mere humbleness.

He gestured toward Green. His thoughts came out of his mouth as, "See? Problems." Eh, close enough.

Poorly-hidden shame and horror took over Green's face.

Link sighed. He was not nearly good enough at people for this situation, but he felt obligated to fix the distress he'd caused. Hopefully he didn't just make his dimensional alternate feel even worse.

"It's not bad or stealing if you take what I give," he said patiently, because there was a very real chance that this unfortunate kid wasn't aware. "I want to feed you." Link steered Green into the house before he could issue another refusal. The wizard's stomach was growling and Link had no idea how many spells he'd thrown around that morning. Magic burned energy just like physical exercise; thus, it required one to eat more to compensate for the energy drain.

While Green went to sit down at the dining room table, Link started pulling out dishes from the cabinets. He generally wasn't someone to push things on people, but this boy needed to eat and Link had learned by observing Avoka and Maple that sometimes going ahead and doing what you wanted to do was the best course of action. If Green really didn't want to eat, Link wouldn't force him. He would fix the scrawny boy a meal regardless.

"What do you see about me?" he heard Green ask behind him. The wizard's voice, normally strong, brisk, and commanding compared to Link's cautious tones, was soft and meek.

Link internally groaned. He must have messed up bad somewhere when talking to Green, for the boy to be so scared of him. "Will you get mad at me?" he asked. If Green wanted to know, Link was willing to tell him, but it seemed like he was in an emotionally precarious state. "I'm not good with that."

"No, I promise," Green said quietly. "I'd just like to know, please." He looked so defeated, for some reason.

"If you say so." Link braced himself for incoming ire just in case. It wasn't uncommon for people to say one thing, actually mean something else, and then get mad at him when he missed their secret message.

He started ladling soup while he translated his many thoughts into a string of sentences, grateful that Green wasn't demanding he speed things up. Link wasn't taciturn by nature, despite common misconception, and in fact was quite happy to talk at length about a great many things; however, his preferred speed of conversation included a lot of what other people called "creepy staring", "weird fidgeting", and "awkward silence" as he composed sentences and took time to process what the other person had said. A customer at his family's shop had once compared him to a talking ReDead, which he now found funny even if it had hurt to hear back then.

"I saw a lack of medical treatment, self-cut hair, bad glasses, no adventuring sponsor, not enough food long-term. Neglect and resulting self-sufficiency. You were all watching Gabbi's hands because she talks loud. For you, volume means violence. All of you move like mice. Meek, small on purpose. You're used to hits and yelling. Not used to being helped," Link listed off.

Those were all signs that pointed specifically to an orphanage kid who had started off as a runaway from their parents or guardians before finding asylum at a shelter. Orphanage caretakers weren't required to do much more than feed their charges and make sure they had a warm bed and facilities to clean themselves, which made them cold and inattentive as guardians went, but such treatment didn't inspire the kind of fear that informed the Harrys' intentionally unobtrusive body language. The wizards had been punished harshly first, neglected second, he was sure.

Link made sure Green had a hearty portion of soup, broke a good-sized chunk of bread off of a loaf for him, and plated everything. Then, belatedly, it occurred to him that he should say something comforting to blunt the harshness of what he'd just said. No matter how neutral he intended his analyses to be, they always sounded like terrible insults—at least, that was how people had always reacted back when he'd been dumb enough to spout off his assumptions as soon as he made them.

"Gabbi won't hit. Never," he promised. "Just friendly-yell without hearing aids in." He walked to the table and set down the food.

Green's look of fear turned to horror, then terrible guilt. Link racked his memory for what he could have possibly said to inspire such a feeling. It had to be some mistake in wording, he was sure. People read all kinds of secret messages into plain sentences. To make them more dramatic, maybe? It had never made sense to him, and his sister was too plain-spoken herself to explain it well. Maybe Green had heard what he'd said in an accusing tone instead of a neutral one? Or had Link put his words in the wrong order and messed up his meaning?

Augh, he would have thought that talking to another version of himself would lead to fewer misunderstandings, but apparently not. He was so bad at this!

"Sorry," Green mumbled, his eyes down.

Link's heart panged. This boy was so pitiful that he wanted to hug him. Even if Link wasn't at all cuddly by nature, he understood that kind of thing brought those most people happiness and comfort. His relatives quite liked picking him up and hugging him and one another, after all, even grumpy old Mama Kappi! Link wasn't sure with Green, though. If being offered food scared the little wizard, then what might the offer of an embrace do?

"'Sorry' why?" he asked, doing his best to make his voice gentle.

"I shouldn't have been acting afraid around her. It wasn't right," Green said. Oh no, was he crying? "I know she's nice, I just…I don't know how to not. It's hard to turn off, I guess."

Ah, that explained it. Link must have accidentally accused him of accusing Gabbi of being like the people who had made him afraid. He had an idea of how to fix this, especially since Green was fearful instead of angry. It would take a lot of talking, but luckily Green seemed willing to give him the time he needed to load up some sentences.

"You don't have to say 'sorry' for that," Link reassured the boy. He leaned over the table like Maple did when she was dispensing particularly scandalous town gossip. "I'll tell you a secret," he said in a whisper, fully aware of and exploiting his inability to whisper. His friends found it funny. "Yelling is scary. Customers at the shop yell at me sometimes. I stare too much and talk too slow and say things wrong. Some people hate it." He laid a hand on his chest. "Lots of loud noises hurt, but I can manage. Always-headache, fine. My choice not to wear my aids. But angry yelling?" He shook his head. "Nope, nuh-uh, no thank you. So bad. Scary and hurts."

For example, last Tuesday there had been a customer whose yelling had driven him into the worst sort of fit—the kind that involved Link screaming and hitting himself because his head felt like it might explode, then regaining his ability to think and wishing it were possible to die of embarrassment. Link had unintentionally insulted the woman by pushing her to choose a lighter, simpler sword than the heavy flamberge she'd had her heart set on. The customer had been an indoorsy kind of slim, with soft hands and lax posture that had screamed "I've never touched a sword in my life", and Link had made the mistake of caring whether her choice of weapon got her killed. He'd gotten yelled at for being a presumptuous idiot. Then the customer had railed at his big sister for letting an "invalid" like him wander around loose, which had resulted in Gabbi picking her up and tossing her outside. Fun times.

"Yelling is extra bad because I can't make stop," Link said. "It's other people's emotions, not mine. Often, don't know what I did wrong until someone explains. After, when it's too late." He sighed, because even if he'd spent years telling himself it wasn't worth getting upset over, it did little to banish the frustration that arose at certain people's refusal to treat him like a fellow sapient being. He went out of his way to jump through their stupid, arbitrary conversational hoops, but Farore forbid those jerks expend the minutest dram of effort to—

No. Deep inhale. If his feelings got too strong, they'd overload his brain, and then his uncontrolled magic would crank up all his senses to blinding, and it would be a whole embarrassing scene. Link hated causing scenes. He breathed his frustration out before it could gain a solid foothold.

"We both have problems with yelling. Even friendly yelling can be scary. I get that. Not mad at you," he assured Green, patting the boy on the shoulder. It was a less potentially frightening version of the hug Green deserved. Baby steps. "You have reasons you're afraid. I hope someone can help with them someday. Now, have soup!" He flourished his fingers toward his bowl. "Avoka got from the castle yesterday, so it's expensive."

That got a laugh out of Green. Link inwardly cheered at his success. "Are you cheap, too?" the wizard asked, drying his teary eyes on his sleeve. Some of the fear seemed to have left him, replaced by a cautious sort of trust that showed in his moderately less tense body language. "I've never had expensive soup before. Can't justify spending extra on things like that."

Link nodded. There wasn't much money in his family's coffers that wasn't being spent on materials for their work, and their income fluctuated with their commissions, so he'd gotten accustomed to calculating the cost/benefit of everything he laid hands on when shopping. "I like budgets," he said. Then remembering something else he and his double shared in some sense, he flashed his teeth in a silly grin loud enough to be read from the top of Mount Lanayru. There was no way Green could miss it. "And if I stare at something long enough, sometimes Avoka buys for me," he said conspiratorially.

Green laughed again, a delightful sound. "If I asked Malfoy to do that, he'd have me pay him back with interest!"

"What is Malfoy?" Link asked. The rude boy's connection with Link's alternates was an enigma to him, and—oops, that sentence hadn't meant what he'd intended it to. "Wait. No. Words, erm…" He did a mental run-up and took another crack at it. "What is Malfoy…to you?" he reiterated. "Enemy? Friend?"

Green took a bite of soup as he thought. "He's in the middle, I think," he said with a waggle of his hand. "I have two best friends back at my school, handling the stuff that the teachers won't. Malfoy isn't like them. He's hated my guts for two years, and then this year things changed. For now, I guess we're just trying to teach him to be less of an arsehole. If we're friends later, then that's a bonus."

What a bizarre sort of relationship. It was like Avoka's and Maple's quarrelsome friendship; Link had no idea how or why someone would form such a connection. He waited for Green to say more, fascinated.

The wizard went on to explain the complex hierarchy that made up his people's society. Malfoy had been born at the very top of that confusing web and fallen almost to the bottom, which was the reason for his pompous attitude suddenly starting to clean up in the last few months. He'd been raised to think that people of non-human sapient races or of partly non-human descent were significantly lesser than him, and then he'd suddenly become one of those people via a strange reaction to Hylian magic revealing a hidden truth.

Link couldn't fathom it. Avoka had told him there were humans in Hyrule who harbored hatred toward Hyrule's non-human peoples, and Link had personally experienced anti-Gerudo and anti-Sheikah prejudice from other humans due to his mixed heritage. He found even that level of pointless malice difficult enough to wrap his head around. Now, Green was describing a world in which humans made such nit-picking differentiations not only within the same round-eared and Hylian-ish type, but among the magical ten percent within that group!

"We don't know how far back the Zora thing goes or where it came from, but it kind of broke him enough that he's starting to do more thinking for himself," Green said at the end of his explanation. "It's been ages since I've heard him threaten to have his father ruin people and he doesn't call muggleborns a slur anymore, so…progress?" He shrugged and took a bite of bread.

It was mind-boggling! How could Green be so calmly resigned to the existence of so many kinds of prejudice poisoning his society? It was something that would make anyone weep for the state of the world. Link couldn't imagine the level of ambient malice that must have choked the air there, if such thinking was the norm.

"Why does he hate 'Muggles' if Muggles are people?" Link asked. It felt like he was attempting to figure out the dimensions of an unfamiliar room with his eyes blindfolded and his hands tied behind his back. "Muggles are people. Mages are people with magic. 'Half-breeds' and some 'creatures' are people with magic. And muggleborns are mages like purebloods? Why hate so many? All are people! Makes no sense!"

"Exactly," Green said with great satisfaction. "It's bloody stupid, is what it is. That's what we're hoping he learns while we're here, with all of Hyrule's peoples being normal around each other. Malfoy's had that stuff shoved in his ears the entire time he was growing up, though, so he doesn't know any better. And then there's the whole 'old money' thing on top of it, which is its own kind of stupid. Like, my friend Ron's just as pureblood as he is, but he's not rich, so therefore he's 'worse'. Rich people are such gits."

Income-based societal inequality! Link desperately latched onto the familiar concept. "Avoka's decent," he said. In fact, Avoka was one of the few decent rich people he knew. Most of them trod over his personhood even worse than the average unpleasant customer did, which made them a special kind of irritating. "But yeah. Exception."

"How did your friend get to be so nice, anyway? Was he like that when you met him?" Green inquired. "Malfoy's better than he used to be a few months ago, but he's still…Malfoy."

Link was surprised that the boy thought Avoka was nice. Most people found his friend unpleasantly abrasive, and he'd have assumed the rather meek Harrys would have been intimidated by the Sheikah's forceful demeanor. "Avoka was never mean. Just new to things. I could tell he grew up in a box. Everything outside surprised him. Lots of questions," Link said. The first couple of times they'd met, Avoka hadn't known that rustless steel was expensive or that one had to dodge wheeled traffic in the street if one didn't want to be run over. He hadn't seen an apple tree before, only its fruit. Imagine that in Central Hyrule!

He ate some of his cooling lunch, ruminating longer on Green's question. "Well. I guess he was angry. Not mean," he amended. Avoka had seemed scared to be outside at first, always afraid of saying the wrong thing to Link and losing his only guide, but as he'd opened up and become more comfortable in Link's presence, he'd started venting about what troubled him. A lot troubled him, mainly in the form of people forcing him to do things. It was clear the boy frequently felt like he had no choice but to become small—to quietly agree to what he wished to rail against, but would be punished for arguing with.

"Avoka likes to be heard. Hates getting ignored. Happened a lot to him, I think," Link summarized.

Green nodded, a pondering look on his face.

"What are your friends like?" Link prompted. "Maybe they have doubles?"

"That would be so weird," Green said with a little laugh. He leaned over the table on his elbows. "Well, Hermione's super smart. Reads a lot, remembers everything, and always gets the best grades. She was kind of hard to get along with at first because she's not very good with people. She can sound mean sometimes by accident."

Whoa, that sounded familiar. Link wondered whether the girl suffered from a milder variation of his inborn strangeness. "Huh. Like me," he said. "Other friend?"

"Ron, I met first. When I found out I was a wizard, it was almost like winding up here." He gestured around him. "Magical people basically live in their own version of the same country, so I had to learn about all kinds of new things. He grew up with it, so he knows a lot about how stuff works over there. He's just fun to hang around with, too. I've learned a lot from him. Since I grew up non-magical, I was clueless about all that at first."

One could be magical in the Dark World and not know? How could one be unaware of such incredible power?! Admittedly, Link had grown up around people with the same familial magic as him, so he'd known what to expect, but he would have discovered it anyway the first time he picked up a sledgehammer that was bigger than him.

He flailed around for words that encapsulated his confusion. "But you're super magical," he managed to spout.

"Yeah, by Light World standards, I guess," Green said modestly. "Mages in the Dark World get our wands at eleven, and if we don't grow up around other magical people, there's no one there to tell us what we are until then. Before we get our wands, the only magic we can do is by accident, since it's hard to cast spells on purpose without one. My accidental magic had me do things like teleport onto a roof and regrow my hair after it all got cut off. Since I didn't know why and no one would tell me, I just thought I was some kind of freak."

Link winced at the last word. It had been hurled at him for a wide variety of reasons across his life. He tended to associate it with the trouble that often followed him hearing it. While Hylian adults tended to keep their disdain tucked behind fake smiles, their children weren't afraid to kick him into the dirt for having a big Gerudo nose or being a weird ugly boy-girl. "You, too?" he said, horrified that this alternate version of him hadn't been able to escape even that on top of whatever else had turned him into a too-humble, shrinking mouse. Hadn't the boy been through enough?

"You get called that?" Green said in surprise. Link didn't know why he'd be shocked; hadn't Link just made him cry by being horrible to him on accident? "Is it because of your magic?"

Because Link had figured out in recent years that it was best keep his mouth shut about what his boosted senses and special ears allowed him to notice, the Bluesmith family talent rarely caused him the problems that it used to. He shook his head. "Is because I'm weird," he said, resting his chin on his hand. "Don't know why. Just am." He'd spent years agonizing over an answer to "what's wrong with me?" and only caused himself pointless strife. It was the one thing in his life that would never have an answer, he'd been forced to conclude for his mental wellbeing. "Words are hard and people are hard to understand. Even for a Bluesmith, too many noises hurt me—make me 'overdramatic'. I don't know how to make my voice bouncy. Face is 'blank' because I can't make it always loud. I creep people out." He shrugged. Some years back, when he'd been in the deepest, most difficult depths of his self-imposed training to appear normal, he'd have had trouble admitting to all of that without crying.

"Sometimes they get mad at my clothes, too. Because I'm a vei, not voe or vai," he added, plucking at the lacy collar of his cape, an altered hand-me-down he'd gotten from Avoka's sister. He rolled his eyes at the memory of the last Hylian to call him a freak, a teenaged boy who'd gotten a bug up his butt the previous week over Link wearing a summer dress on a hot day. Farore forbid. Of all the pointless reasons strangers chose to get mad at him over, the cloth he draped around himself was the dumbest. Link dressed appropriately for his age and was fine with being called a boy or a girl if people didn't get the concept of someone who was neither, so what was there to kick up a fuss over?

"People make problems out of me," Link said with long-suffering exasperation. "I'm just here."

Green's eyes fell half-shut in tired understanding. Of all the similarities between them, Link suspected this one might have been the strongest. "I get you," Green said. "Why can't people just be normal?"

What a question for the ages! "Wish I knew," Link sighed. He wasn't sure even Hylia herself would have been able to answer that.


Item Get: Hunter's Bow. A small wooden longbow with a light 15-pound draw weight, great for smaller adults and larger children learning to shoot. Its low draw weight makes it unsuitable for taking down big game, but it can stun a monster just fine if its wielder has good aim.

Notes:

-Link's iffy sense of balance is part of a mild case of dyspraxia. It manifests most clearly in his hands, which have limited fine motor control.

-Gaebora is 6'5" and 260lbs. The record for a 12-year-old lifting weight is 308lbs, and I'm basing the Bluesmith family's mild super-strength off of the pinnacle of what normal humans at peak training can do. Why does Link have super-strength, you may ask? Well, I figure that once he gets whacked with the Destiny mallet in a few years, mild super-strength would explain him being able to lift the kinds of ridiculously heavy-looking weapons that BOTW/TOTK Link often uses. Basically, his talent makes him a video game protagonist with the downside of magical sensory processing issues on top of his autistic sensory processing issues.

-Link's sensory aids include a set of adjustable hearing dampeners (the opposite of his sister's hearing aids), enchanted emergency earmuffs that block all sound, magic glasses that dull his vision, goggles like his sister's that dull vision while also cutting out bright light and colors, and a handkerchief enchanted to turn bad smells into the scent of Hyrule Field. Link, being just as stubborn as Harry, only puts his blockers on when he's nagged by his sister or certain that a situation will send him into sensory overload.

-Hyrule has racism, but it's different than in the Dark World. The Light World races are more literally divided, for one thing, with some of them being different species of people, even within the same general race. Thus, things like skin color and magical talents are a non-issue, while other things are focused more on. Hylians, Sheikah, and the other smaller humans tend to side-eye Gerudo, for example, stereotyping them as brutish, dishonest, sexually loose, and greedy. Gerudo have a similar opinion of those smaller humans, the difference being that they consider them weak and too dependent on greenery and magic rather than brutish. Some Hylians look down on Sheikah, seeing them as either a born serving-class to Hylians or a race of unnerving, deceptive night-witches. Sheikah are murderously hostile toward anyone with Yiga features (orange eyes and black hair) regardless of whether the person in question is actually a member of the cult, look down on Hylians due to the smaller humans' relative clumsiness and unwary nature, and are even less trusting of Gerudo than Hylians. Zoras, meanwhile, will nitpick not only between species (Inland, Flying, Abyssal), but between kingdoms/territories within those species! Light World racism is overall rarer, milder, and less institutional than in the Dark World, though.

-"Rustless steel" is old-timey speak for "stainless steel". It's difficult and expensive to manufacture with Hyrule's somewhat medieval metallurgy, so most people will buy a rust-proofing enchantment laid on iron instead.

-"Vei" is a Gerudo term for anyone we'd put under the "nonbinary" umbrella. Link is agender, but since he doesn't have that word for it, he'd describe his "mental sex" as "both and neither, yes and no". Pronouns and other verbal gender-markers are just mouth-sounds to him, so he tends to go by the default grammatical case of any given language (masculine/neuter-form adjectives in Hylian, "she/her" in Gerudo, etc.) unless called something otherwise. People switching his pronouns without warning confuses him, so he prefers they pick a consistent mouth-sound.

-[RANT NOTE, due to general frustration with ableism, not you guys] I want to make it clear that empathy is not compassion. Empathy means being able to read the feelings of others and feel them yourself. It doesn't mean a willingness to help people, or be kind to others. Having more of it does not make someone a better person. In fact, as someone who is often emotionally read wrong because my body language is unusual, I know firsthand that empathy can make people feel justified in dehumanizing and mistreating those who emote differently from them. In my experience as a low-empathy person, the main difference is that I'll ask how someone is feeling so I can help them, rather than assuming how they're feeling and acting on that.