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undertheopensky · 8 months

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Wildlife 1

Whumptober Day 3: Solitary Confinement

Characters: Blue Link

Read on Ao3!

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It’s the stillness that wakes him.

Blue’s gotten used to sleeping through a certain amount of background noise. He lives with his brothers. Noise is just a fact of life, from Red falling down the stairs when half-asleep, Green banging around rearranging the living room every week, and Vio tripping over the newly-arranged furniture when he goes to make tea at two in the morning. Never mind when someone’s working in the forge; that’s just about loud enough to wake the dead, and if one of them’s in there then all of them are in and out, handling coke, pulling wire, using the second anvil, or running water so no one passes out in the summer heat.

So when Blue draws close to consciousness and hears nothing - no gentle murmur of conversation, no rattling of plates and cups - it jolts him to full awareness.

He’s - outside. He was definitely not outside last night. He’s also no longer in his bed, instead picking himself up from grass and dirt and staring at the trees towering overhead in mute confusion.

The fuck happened? And why the fuck didn’t he wake up for it?

“Guys?” he calls, and is immediately weirded out by the way his voice is swallowed up by the empty greenery. “Red, Green? Vio? Are you there? Can you hear me?”

He doesn’t hear anything in response, which is fine. He doesn’t need the others for whatever the fuck this is. Even if he’d really prefer not to be in his pyjamas.

It’s whatever.

He’d also kind of like a weapon. Blue glances around the forest floor with a dawning frown - it’s strange there’s no fallen branches. No dead leaves, even, though it’s not fall back home and from the lack of a nip in the air it’s not here either, but like, trees are always losing a few leaves here and there. This place is almost unnaturally clean. There’s some shrubs and some saplings in that open area to the left; if he can’t find something he’ll make one.

Blue’s hand goes to the knife he’d be wearing at his belt if he wasn’t in his goddamn nightclothes.

Whatever. He’ll cope.

After using his whole body weight to break off a suitably-sized stick, and beating it against a nearby rock until most of the offshoots are broken off, Blue chooses a direction at random and sets off. The trees here are so thick there’s no way to determine landmarks. It’s like the Minish Woods, too dense to see the sky or more than ten feet away, but it can’t be like that forever. He’ll find a sparse patch, or maybe a tree he can climb, and find something. And in the meantime, he can try to forage. It feels like late spring, so probably not much fruit around, but Red ensured that everyone knew a few things they could gather in any season.

That kind of knowledge only works locally, though, and Blue is carefully not letting himself wonder just how far away he’s been transported. He is not used to seeing this many needle-y evergreens. Cone trees? He knows the seeds are in cones so they’re probably called cone trees, and most of the seeds are edible if he can find them. Some of them also have edible needles, too, and he squints at the nearest one trying to remember the difference between a spruce and a pine.

Blue’s pretty sure the difference isn’t fatal, at least.

He snaps off a tip from a low-hanging branch, sniffs it, then shrugs and pops it in his mouth.

He immediately spits it back out, spitting frantically in an attempt to get the taste out, too.

“This tastes like paint stripper!” he complains to the air, and belatedly remembers Red telling them that while technically edible, pine needles were the worst of the bunch and to go for spruce instead. “Ugh.”

Okay, so this is probably a pine tree. Good to know. He takes a close squint at the branch, wondering how the fuck it’s any different to every other nearby tree. “Red said the cones are always easy to tell apart,” Blue mutters to himself, and glances fruitlessly around for lumps of brown amongst the green. “Guess it really is the wrong season. But… needles. There was something about the actual needles.”

He picks another bunch and looks them over. They’re long, and spiky, like two flat pieces glued together at right angles, three of them all bundled together on a short wooden stem.

“Okay, I guess. Let’s find something to compare this to.”

He just hopes he’s right in that it’s a pine tree and the next attempt won’t taste even worse.

Blue investigates the nearest shrubs on his way past and finds only a single mouseberry bush, which is a long way from ideal. The fruit doesn’t taste of much, and they always upset his stomach if he eats more than a handful. It’s something, at least, even this early in the season. And hey, these trees look different to that first stand of them. The needles all grow straight off the branch, for one thing, and they’re more solid than spiky.

Blue bites down on a branch tip from this new tree and makes a face. Sharp, not altogether pleasant, but closer to an underripe lemon than wood stripper. He’ll take it over starving, but Golden Three, that’s awful. Blue seriously hopes there’s other shit to eat in this weird-ass forest.

He keeps going on his chosen heading, passing more spruce trees (reluctantly picking tips along the way) and another mouseberry bush, until he meets a white stone wall.

Blue squints at it in confusion. It’s too smooth to be a natural cliff face, too consistent to be hand-hewn - it’s also the first real barrier he’s found to his straight-line progress, the first true landmark he’s found. He just wishes it wasn’t so fucking weird. His fingers should catch on fine irregularities, or glide across truly polished stone. This is just… flat.

Squinting skywards - useless, because the trees grow thickly all the way up to the edge which is also hella weird - Blue turns deliberately to the left, so his sword hand is free, and starts following the cliff face, dodging trunks as he goes.

It’s not long after that that he comes to another landmark, this one a small creek flowing from a crack in the wall.

“The hell?” Blue squints at it. The crack is… not large enough for the kind of current he can see, which is bizarre. He sticks his hand in it to check the depth - fuck it’s freezing - no deeper than mid-forearm and a sandy bottom. The water’s crystal clear and it’s fucking with his perception a bit; where’s the algae that should be drifting in the shallows, the trailing braids of water plants? Tadpoles, minnows, fish? What’s wrong with the water, for there to be no life in it?

Where’s any of the animals? This whole time, the forest has been eerily silent except for Blue’s own footsteps. No small scurrying things, no birds flitting overhead. There’s not even any wind.

Shaking his arm to get some of the water off, Blue looks back at the strange, white wall that blocked his progress. Keep following the wall, or start following the creek?

The creek is - slightly - more likely to lead him to a village. People need water, after all.

It’s intuition alone that makes him hop the coursing water, put his hand back on the damn wall, and keep going.

Whenever he passes a probably-a-spruce-tree Blue snaps off the soft green branch tips he can reach, holding up the hem of his sleep shirt to gather them in. Stupidly, it makes him wish he’d worn his cap to bed. Then at least he’d have a handy carrying basket for this shit without the awkwardness of wearing it at the same time.

There’s still not much by way of berry shrubs, unfortunately. Blue’s been checking as he goes, moving away from the wall to hunt for potential forage where he can, always keeping the flash of white within eyeshot so he doesn’t lose his heading. He still wants to make progress.

The silence is getting to him, though.

If he were with the others, there’d be sound. Red chattering about the bird he’d seen, or the baker’s new baby, or how the town minish were expanding the dwelling in the post office. Green singing to himself, or constructing new and terrible jokes to inflict on unsuspecting people. Even Vio likes to talk, sometimes, picking good-natured fights with Blue, or teasing Red. All of it to the endless cadence of forge hammers and hissing bellows.

Instead, Blue’s alone, only his own footsteps and breathing and heartbeat to keep him company.

Blue’s not like Vio. He doesn’t get overwhelmed by lots of noise and need long hours spent in relative quiet to recover. He likes a bit of peace and quiet, because when you have three brothers you take what you can get. He just doesn’t need it.

And this much quiet is deeply, deeply unsettling.

It also makes it hard to ignore the ache in his gut. Blue has a routine, dammit. Wake up, start the day’s tea, get food on the table before any of the others make it down the stairs and attempt to cook. Today he woke up alone in a creepy forest, and instead of breakfast, he’s busy trying to work out where the fuck he is with only pieces of tree to snack on.

He chews another one, grumbling to himself. Stupid trees. Stupid plants. Stupid berries, not being around when he needs them -

Is that another wall?

It is indeed another wall, which joins the first at perfect right angles and no visible seam, like it’s all of one piece. Blue hates it so much.

He doesn’t like the feeling of being herded. He doesn’t like that he can’t see the sky. He hates that there’s been no trees with branches low enough to climb, no rock formations to get a higher viewpoint with, that all he can do is keep following the fucking wall.

“This is bullshit,” he hisses under his breath with a scowl.

It’s been hours. He’s tired and hungry and all he’s found is more fucking trees and more fucking walls —

The burn in his eyes startles him badly. He’s not Red. He doesn’t just cry at the drop of a hat, over stupid shit like not knowing where he is or where the others are, or the shaky pressure blanketing his lungs. What the fuck.

“Okay,” he tells himself, “okay. We need a break.” Red would for sure have been whining for one by now. He should - pace himself. Sit down and eat something. Hell, he doesn’t even known how long he’s been walking for. It’s not like he can mark the path of the sun without a view of the sky.

Blue makes himself sit down on the nearest tree root. Pretends his sniffling is just checking the smell of the stupid spruce tips. Eats a few, grimacing at the sharp-sour taste, and considers the mouseberries he’d collected.

He’s thirsty, is the problem. Spruce needles don’t have much water, and even if the creek isn’t poisoned to hell he’s got no way to carry it. As long as he doesn’t eat too many - they’re better than nothing, right?

The juice from each small fruit feels inadequate. He’d never been fond of the taste, even before discovering they don’t agree with him. Blue eats a carefully-counted ten of the small grey-purple berries, then resolutely folds the rest back in his shirt.

(He’s still thirsty. Still hungry. Still feels like something is weighing him down by his chest.)

“Time to go,” he says to no one, and when his heart gives an uncomfortable throb he ignores it. There’s another stand of stupid spruce trees he can scavenge off of.

He doesn’t know how long he spends like that - following the wall, foraging for food, squinting uselessly into the thick forest like that’ll make things make more sense. There’s more ground cover here, small leafy things and ground-hugging shrubs that make it even more difficult to see anything at a distance. With any luck, some of it will wind up being edible. Blue’s not in the mood to investigate, though. It’s been - hours, surely, by now. And yet the light overhead hasn’t shifted at all. If he’d woken up mid-morning then by now the sun should be dropping, turning the air golden and making shadows stretch out across the ground. Instead, it feels - like it hasn’t changed at all. Still the cool white light of a waking sun.

It’s almost like - dungeon lighting. Too consistent, and run on magic, instead of the movements of the heavens.

“Same thing,” Blue mutters to himself.

It’s a cold shock when Vio doesn’t snarl at him for it. Unconsciously, he’d been expecting resistance; a playful argument about where magic comes from. The lack of it feels like - missing not just the iron but the anvil entirely. At least there’s no hammer to drop on his own foot, here. He huffs, scrubs his hands up and down his arms to settle the prickling there, and keeps going.

Then, all at once, everything goes dark.

Blue yelps.

It’s not just the suddenness - it’s the completeness of the loss of light. Even on the darkest of new moons the stars should be enough to dust solid outlines silver. Here? Fuck all. He can’t see his hands, he can’t see his feet, he can’t see the ground, he can’t see the protrusion that catches his foot -

Hard-rough-scraping meets his face. Blue flails back, nearly losing his balance, before he gets a hand on the tree and the world steadies.

Well, he’s definitely not going anywhere else today.

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Morning dawns just as abruptly as night had fallen. Blue knows this because he’s awake when it happens.

He’d slept badly. Golden Three, he’s out of practice at sleeping on hard ground. Without even a bedroll to cushion him he’d been in and out of restless sleep more times than he could count, before sudden, blazing light speared through the canopy and he gave up. Might as well get something done, since further sleep was a wash.

Light restored, he’s able to look himself over.

A few scrapes and bruises from his unfortunate meeting with his new best friend tree in the dark, nothing serious. He’s also not sore from wandering around all day, which is interesting. He’s been barefoot the whole time, shouldn’t they be killing him?

When he checks, though, there’s not so much as a scratch, just dirt and grass stains. He supposes, when he thinks back, that the forest floor is just as empty of rocks and sticks to cut his feet on as it is leaf litter and handy fallen branches.

That’s still weird.

His stomach chooses now to complain loudly about yesterday’s meagre fare. The cramping makes Blue grimace. He’s got to find more food than just spruce needles and mouseberries, or it’s going to be a very lean time for him until he makes it home. Yesterday he’d been too tightly wound to stop and check every likely-looking plant, but he’d earmarked a few thick patches that aren’t too far back. He’ll check those, in hopes of a decent meal, before continuing his wall-expedition.

He eats some of his small store - after gathering it again, he’d dropped it from his shirt when dark had fallen - and heads out.

The first patch is all woody stuff, not as inviting as it had looked from a distance. The second is more promising.

Blue checks the fluffy leaves carefully. Yeah, this one’s okay - the tubers are a touch bitter, but they’re not toxic, and definitely safer than the mouseberries. Using his stick to break the hard crust of earth, he starts digging.

The dirt, like everything else in this awful place, is weird. Small, perfectly smooth particles, all the same size, with no pockets of sand or rotting root system or small burrowing insects. The closest comparison he has is clay, but there’s no way he’d be able to break through heat-dried clay without better tools. This stuff gives way beneath his bare hands.

A small, pale swelling emerges from the weird dirt, maybe the size of his thumb.

Blue wiggles his fingers deeper.

Finally, he thinks he’s got most of the roots free. Blue grabs the plant by the thick stem just below the ground-line, and pulls.

In a shower of dust, the root mass comes free, a fist-sized bundle of pale tubers dangling from his hand.

He grins to himself. It’s not much, but it’s something.

As he walks he scrubs the dirt off with hands and sleeves, and any clean tubers go straight in his mouth. They’re actually not bad raw. A little gritty, which Blue’s not thinking about too hard. Definitely more pleasant than the spruce tips. And he’s seeing more plants with the same leaves, some large, most much smaller, so there’s a supply of food for at least a little while.

It’s as his stomach is finally starting to settle that he spots the break in the trees and his heart goes cold.

Blue runs the last few yards, losing some of the damn spruce tips when he hurdles a root. There’s another fucking wall, the same perfect stone, the same seamless join. That makes three walls forming a horseshoe shape, blocking him in.

He drops any pretence of pacing himself. Blue can move much faster when he’s not scouting for food, watching for danger. And this is suddenly much more important than watching for animals that he knows by now just aren’t there. He finds the other end of the creek - again, vanishing into a crack too small for its volume - and not far beyond it, another corner. Another wall. But there’s still a chance, just a little further, lungs burning heart aching eyes gone blurry with the wind -

Water burbles cheerfully out of a crack in the clean white stone, and Blue knows for sure he’s back where he started.

He’s boxed in. There’s no way out.

-----

Another night of terrible sleep has Blue waking feeling like a horse sat on him.

It’s not just the body aches, though those are definitely a thing after days of sleeping on the ground. He just feels flat. Beyond tired and into the misty grey indifference of ‘I could lie here all day and wouldn’t even feel better after’.

(He’s trapped. There’s no way out of this silent, unnatural forest. There’s no way out.)

(He’s going to die here.)

“No, you’re not,” he tells himself. “Come on. Get up. Food time. Let’s do this.”

The days after his discovery are a bit blurry. Blue had spent a lot of time roaming the forest and looking for a tree he could climb or some other vantage point, pacing the walls looking for weak points, even braving the damn creek to see if the cracks the water poured through could be widened. So far, he’s found nothing.

Finally, Blue drags himself into a sit. He squints through the cold light - so bright, he just woke up damn it - and tries to muster the energy to make it the rest of the way up. “Come on,” he says, trying to emulate Green, “the sooner you get up, the sooner you can find food, and - I don’t fucking know. Try climbing the stupid pine trees again. C’mon, you’ve got shit to do, don’t just sit here all day. Move.” He ignores the pang - it’s not Green, he knows it’s not Green, but it’s the only thing that’s been keeping him moving, sometimes. Pretending his brothers are just out of view, laughing at his attempts to wake himself up.

He’d slept pretty close to the stream last night. Maybe some cold water to the face will get him going.

Blue’s not paying attention as he heads for the sound of water rushing over rocks. Most of the stream bed is sand, but there’s this one patch where many tumbled stones gather in a bend, and the sound is soothing, if nothing else. He blinks sleepily as it comes into view. Light reflecting off the rippling surface gives the illusion there’s things moving underneath. He ignores it, kneeling by the edge to splash his face -

Silver flashes, spraying water in an unexpected arc.

- and Blue tumbles backwards, screeching invectives at every goddess he knows as he falls on his ass.

For a few seconds he sits there, wide-eyed and honestly thinking the loneliness was making him hallucinate. Blue flinches when another fishtail visibly splashes out of the water.

“Din, Farore and Nayru,” he mutters, suppressing a shudder. He’d been convinced the river was dead, somehow. Poisoned, maybe. It took him two days to get desperate enough to even risk drinking it.

After he gets over the instinctive revulsion, Blue finds himself kneeling on the bank eyeing the fish darting past.

They look normal. Through the flash of light-on-water and silvery scales, he’s pretty sure he’s looking at trout. Right colour, right shape, no weird tentacles or slimy growths. Just… fish. Decent sized, too.

Goddesses, he’s so hungry.

But they’re still the only living things in the water. There’s no algae, no tadpoles in the shallows, no stringy water plants being tugged about in the current. What are the trout eating? And, considering the fact that he still hasn’t seen a single worm or insect, what the fuck is he meant to use for bait?

Apparently the trout are also hungry, because the shoddy hook he baits with a bit of tuber attracts a customer within ten minutes.

Blue yanks - the hook breaks - but the fish is already on the bank, flopping uselessly on the grass until Blue kills it.

Then he sits and stares.

Fish. After days on a diet of tubers, leafy greens, and spruce needles, he’s almost hungry enough to eat it raw. The thought of the slimy texture turns his stomach, though, and he can almost hear Vio reciting a list of diseases contracted only from eating raw meat.

Problem is, he has no fire.

The ‘weather’ here has been warm and rainless. There’s been no need for it, unless he wanted to fucking see at night, and he’s been too exhausted to consider the difficulties of gathering fuel in a place with no deadwood, and getting a spark with no flint and no metal. It’d be easier with one of the others. Red, especially, can get a fire going almost magically fast even when all he has is sticks. Blue can do it. But goddesses, he really misses his brothers.

“Red, really wish you were here right now.”

Blue sniffles, and scrubs away the not-tears, and goes hunting for kindling.

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Read Part 2 here!

#whumptober 2023 #blue link #lu blue #four swords #linked universe #the linked universe part comes in later i swear #blue does a lot of squinting in this #i wonder if he needs glasses #IF THERE'S ANYTHING STRANGE IN THIS PLEASE TELL ME #I WROTE THIS WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY WRITING AN EXAM #skies writes #lu fic #legend of zelda

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