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Alright, so technically, Twilight’s not on watch right now. That would be Legend, who’s sitting trained and still over on a nearby rock, hand on his sword that gleams blood-orange in the dying firelight. Twilight’s watch ended hours ago. This matters very little to Wolfie, though, because Wolfie—despite being known to all of the gathered heroes as Twilight—does what he wants.
There’s an urgency in his bones that he cannot quite shake, so he’s going to watch, and hunt whatever needs hunting. Whether or not he imagines his shadow yelling instructions at him is his own business.
Wolfie’s job is not only to watch the trees, but to watch the heroes, too. In many ways like this, he is Wild’s, but not tonight. Wars seems to have Wild at the moment, half-awake and murmuring some nonsense story to him. He nods absently to Wolfie as he walks by, making hardly a sound on the dying grass—they’ve made camp under a cluster of huge rocks, up on a series of cliffsides in the break of autumn. The whole place is dying grass, whistling wind, and rock, cliffs cresting over each other and slicing off a stretch of the infinite horizon beyond, stars darkened and muddled by the overcast night sky.
Wind is still, although Twilight worries because still doesn’t always mean alright, and one can never tell with the sailor. Time opens his eye and raises a skeptical eyebrow at Wolfie as he goes past him, which Wolfie dutifully ignores. Four has claimed Hyrule, which seems to be working fine for both of them. Sky is quiet, but he’s always quiet, and he’s curled in, as if he’s protecting himself from something. Sky’s prone to these sorts of things, night terrors that end in silent little gasps and a sketchbook in his hand, too-long glances at certain faces.
Wolfie does what Wolfie does best. He shoves his nose onto Sky’s forehead.
Sky’s eyes fly open. “Augh, Wolfie, what…?”
Wolfie sinks down, flopping his head onto Sky’s chest and looking at him with what he knows are his big, sad Twilight eyes. He knows this because Wild has told him about them, in no uncertain terms, at least fifty different times.
Sky shoves at Wolfie’s head. “M’fine, m’fine. Y’don’t need to get involved.”
Twilight begs to differ, and Wolfie says so with a glare on his face.
“...Alright, maybe you can get a little involved.” He shoves himself up to sitting, which is not really what Twilight was aiming for him to do, but alright. Wolfie eases up on the weight, letting Sky stand. Sky walks right over to Legend on light feet. “Taking the dog for a walk.”
Twilight does not want to take offense at this. Unfortunately, he does anyway.
“Alright.” Legend nods, not taking his eyes off the flickering shadows of the distant cliffs.
“Be back by morning,” Sky says, and then he takes off down the dead-grassy slope. Wolfie trots over to follow him, feeling the air become colder and quieter against his fur the further they get from camp.
Wolfie looks up at Sky, a silent question, and Sky understands. They’ve made a habit of things like this, after too many whispered secrets in the wake of a shared bug-collecting habit, a joint need to wrap blankets around people, and a twin trepidation for the older faces looking down and the younger faces looking up.
“Nothing substantial,” Sky sighs. “Shadows with red eyes, songs I don’t know. Certainly nothing we can use.” He narrows his eyes at the dull horizon, and his hair matches the cliff-grass in both color and the way that it waves in the wind. This is the closest that Sky will let himself get to a true scowl. Sky is not the oldest of them, but he is the first—and the duty of the eldest child, it seems, is to be steady. Twilight has no such compunctions, other than a deeply-held older brother instinct finely honed over a decade and a half, so he glares balefully at the middle distance on Sky’s behalf.
Sky catches Wolfie’s glare. “Thank you,” he says with a low laugh. “Your support means everything to me.”
Wolfie huffs. It better.
Sky eventually deems that they’ve walked far enough from camp, the wind rushing past them and howling a little as it goes. Wolfie resists the urge to return the call. Sky does not resist it quite as well, if the lyre that he takes out is any indication. He tunes it to the wind, but falls into that same, failsafe song that he always plays, that repetitive ballad, major key made melancholy by the style of play. Sky should stop making happy songs sound depressing.
Wolfie nudges him until Sky sits down on the grassy edge of the steep hillside. The rocks are towers and ants in the distance, soldiers in a siege, still and dark. Wolfie rests his head on top of Sky’s leg until he’s pretty sure it goes numb, watching him.
Twilight gets tired of ballads after a while. He’s heard these notes over and over, from Sky and Time, rightside-up and upside-down. He will hear them again. He does not need to hear them now, curse it, so Wolfie gets up. He paces through the shadow of a stone. Twilight walks out the other side.
“You need new material,” he sighs.
“I like my material.”
“You like your girlfriend.”
“I love my girlfriend.”
“Which we know, so you can stop playing her song over and over.”
“What would you have me play then, hm?” Sky raises a brow.
“Anything else, by the spirits.”
Sky stares him in the eyes and starts playing the ballad again.
Twilight wants to explode. “Alright, that’s it.”
Sky twangs a note on the lyre. “You’re rude. What happened to your good old-fashioned country boy manners?”
“You didn’t know what those were until I explained them to you.”
“And now I am suffering the consequences every day.” He rolls his eyes, smiling slightly. He’s not fooling Twi, though. Whatever he saw earlier still has him all spooked. It’s there in the lines of his shoulders, the stiffness of his fingers, the way he’s sitting cross-legged on the grass instead of with his legs stretched out in front of him. Twilight ain’t blind.
“Here. Sit down and shut up.” Twilight sits down in front of him.
“I’m already sitting.”
“Great, now do the second part.” He pulls up a blade of grass, but it’s too dead to make into a whistle. Boo. He’s gonna have to sing this, isn’t he?
“No.”
“I mean it. Lemme do something.” He hums a pitch. Nope. He hums another one. Spirits, no. He hums a third one. Eh, close enough.
Sky is watching and pressing his mouth closed like he’s trying not to laugh. Shut up, Sky. You couldn’t sing if your life depended on it. Twilight is doing his absolute best here.
“Go on,” Sky says, totally not with restrained mirth.
“You’re awful.” But Twilight does. He never actually learned proper sheet music, so he doesn’t know the note names like Sky does, but he—very successfully, he might add—hums through Epona’s favorite song, one of the only things he can remember from the blood family he never knew. Just a song. A simple little phrase and then a simple little phrase afterward.
He almost expects to see Epona come clattering up the slope, but she isn’t here. The wind’s the only sound that sings back.
“Pretty,” Sky says, like he hasn’t heard Twilight hum it under his breath a thousand times. He mimics the first two notes perfectly on the lyre, but fumbles the third. He tries the phrase again, and fumbles the same note.
“Higher,” Twilight says.
Sky glares at him like he wants him dead. When he tries the three-note phrase again, he does it perfectly.
“Play it for Epona, and she’ll come right to you.”
“I don’t need your horse, I have a bird.”
“You love my horse.”
“You love my bird.”
They both nod at each other in solidarity.
“Once more for me, please?” Sky asks.
Twilight complies, the edges of his voice getting lost to the wind. He hasn’t sung in ages. Ilia stopped cajoling him into it when he came back from saving the kingdom with a half-empty shadow and long-lost words, all locked up for efficiency’s sake. Sky, it seems, is just as out of practice with playing songs that aren’t ballads. For every note that Twilight’s voice falters on, Sky’s fingers slip on a string, betrayed by his own muscle memory.
It’s funny, but neither of them laugh.
“That’s it,” Sky says softly, once he makes a full run of the song without a stumble. “It really is a lovely song.”
“Don’t rightly know where it came from,” Twilight offers. “It came from wherever I’m from. But I’ve never quite known that. The old man knows the song too, for whatever that’s worth.”
“You know,” Sky says, “when I go back to my home, I’m not going to forget this song. I’m going to play it. It’s going to stay.”
“So it came from you,” Twilight laughs.
“No, no,” Sky smiles. “It came from you.”
“You’re gonna give me a headache, Sky.”
“You’re gonna have to suffer with it, Wolfie.”
The stiff lines of Sky’s fingers have finally calmed, and his shoulders are no longer tensely held up. He looks calm, and happy, and tired. Wolfie has done his job, and Twilight has succeeded in his duty.
The wind swirls through the stones and skips through the grass, as though horse hooves are on their way. Somewhere back at camp, the Hero of Time is incredibly disgruntled about the cyclical nature of the passage of his namesake. Too bad, so sad.