Archive of Our Own

pitchpole

[ˈpɪtʃˌpəʊl]

verb (intransitive)

1. informal : to go head over heels 

2. nautical : to capsize stern over bow on hitting a steep wave

3. nautical informal : to pitch very violently on the sea

"It's not going to work, you know.”

Gale shakes his head in blatant dismissal—of the criticism, of any input at all, Lore isn't sure, exactly—and lashes the cord around the joint one more time.

Lore very carefully unclenches his jaw. Anger will not help him here. Gale, like his alternate timeline self, does not respond well to being told what to do. He has to be reasoned with. If his path is to be altered, it must be by his own hand. 

He tries to redirect anyway. "Are you listening to me, I told you—"

"I don't care what you think you know," at last the other boy looks up from his project, shooting Lore an unimpressed look. "This is an island, isn't it?"

"Well, yeah, but—"

Gale's face splits into a smug grin. "Then I'm getting off it the same way that I got on it. Over the fucking sea."

Lore sighs. He isn't listening. "It isn't going to work."

The smile drops, a more patronizing expression taking its place. "Because you from the future told you so?"

"Yes!" Finally, he's starting to get it.

"Did you from the future mention me?"

Well, shit. He's got Lore there. "…No."

"Well then there you have it," the smile comes back. "The situation is different, so the answer is different."

He's so fucking frustrating. "I don't think it works like that."

"So what, you're too scared to find out?"

Anger, hot and sharp, jumps up into Lore's chest. That's been happening a lot more, now, ever since Labrynna, ever since the Black Tower and the—He takes a deep breath, trying to stay calm. Gale doesn't deserve his misplaced rage.

"I'm not scared of the ocean."

Gale raises an eyebrow. "No?"

"No," he insists, ignoring the impressions of a storm front that flickers over his vision briefly, like a mirage. He's getting backed into a corner, and he doesn't like it. "I'm afraid of wasting our time!"

Gale rolls his eyes. "So what? As much as I want to get off this fucking middle of no-where place, it's not like I'm in a rush. It's not like you're in a rush. We can take our time."

Lore blinks. Phantom waves crash over his head. Brine and bitter cold licking at his limbs despite the ever-present sunshine.

"Besides, I don't see how 'fighting to release a god from a curse' is in any way faster than just fucking sailing away."

Lore takes another deep breath. He could tell him. He could tell him about the entire thing. The dream, the Windfish, the fact that none of these people except for the two of them are even real, he could, he maybe should, but—Lore has always been a runner.

"It's just not going to work."

"You won't even try!" Gale is starting to seem truly frustrated.

"There isn't any fucking reason to try!"

"Why not?"

"Because it isn't going to work!" What the fuck has gotten into this guy today? "And sitting here spending your time trying to look helpful when you could actually do something other than pretending to help—"

"Hey!"

"—just to feel like you matter isn't fucking helping! So just fucking stop, and let me do my job!"

Gale is looking at him now, just looking at him with a slack jaw and wide eyes and Lore takes a second to let the words that just came flying out of his mouth actually filter through his brain.

Oh, shit.

"Wait, Gale, I didn't mean—"

"No, Folklore." Gale cuts him off, finds his voice. And it sounds pained, it sounds upset, and it makes the hunted animal in Lore's chest flinch. "I think you said exactly what you mean."

He doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know the way out of the trap that he has placed his head into. All he knows is that he would very much like this conversation to be over now.

So, Lore does the most obvious thing, and stomps off of the beach.

Ridiculous. Fucking ridiculous. If Gale wants to waste his time building a raft, then he can do so. It's not like he's cutting down real trees. It's not like he's wasting real rope. It's not like—

Enough of that. Lore has had enough of the thinking and the worrying, and the getting all up in his head about whether or not this way or that way is the right way to go about handling the climb out of this magic pit.

He's just going to go run the Dungeon.

Quick trip back to Marin's house, he gets changed, swapping out his casual clothes for his proper adventuring gear. He tells his fictional host that he's heading to Tail Cave, the weight of his shield upon his back and the key in his pocket more of a comfort than anything else.

One Dungeon run—quite possibly the easiest Dungeon run of Lore's entire life—later, and the Molodrom explodes into magic. It's… strange, seeing the exact same enemy, no different than it was when he faced it before, though the terrain can make things different, sure. He knows that this place is a dream, but still. He wonders how much of it is something he is inside, as opposed to how much is something he brought with him.

He knows that he might go crazy, trying to figure that out.

He is bruised a bit from the fight, muscles strained and overworked, but not injured. Not even a scratch, Lore is pretty proud of himself for this one.

He's in good spirits as he works his way out of the little wild corner, back from the cave all the way to the little island home that he has been staying at, a certifiable skip in his step despite the exhaustion.

It doesn't last long.

"You messed up," Marin tells him with a smile devoid of kindness as Lore limps his way up the path to her—their—the—house.

He stops dead in his tracks. "What?"

Marin sighs, and looks at him, just looks at him like he's a horseshoe crab struggling to turn back over off of its backside after a particularly mean wave.

"No, don't look at me like that, what did I do?"

"You went into that place, and you didn't tell Gale."

Lore blinks, trying to find out where he could have possibly gone wrong here. "I told you."

Marin just stares at him Just stares and stares, and the longer it goes on, the more worried Lore is that he might in fact be a fucking idiot, but he isn't going to admit guilt without evidence. So he crosses his arms and stares back.

The stalemate passes all of five seconds before Lore breaks. "So what, he wants to be personally notified before I do anything? He's not my fucking keeper."

Marin places her hands on her hips to match his energy, glaring back just as hard. "You told us that it was dangerous. That we couldn't follow you in there because we could die."

"Yes!"

"That even people who had raised a sword before would have trouble with the trials in there."

"Yes, but—"

"And you went in, and you didn't even tell him. You didn't even say goodbye."

Lore rolls his eyes. "Is that what this is about?" Un-fucking believable. "I wasn't going to die."

"Why, because you're just that much better than everyone else?"

Lore flushes, and sputters. "No, no that's not—I just know what I'm doing—"

"So you're smarter than everyone else, then?"

"No!"

"Then what is it?"

"I've done those kinds of things before, okay? That wasn't my first Dungeon and it won't be my last and I can handle it just fine on my own. No one else needs to come in with me!"

Marin sighs and then rolls her eyes at him. "You really don't get it, do you?"

No, he doesn't. He would love to but he doesn't even know what it is that he needs to get. "Get what?"

"It's like talking to a coconut with you, Lore."

And with that she turns around and walks away, slamming the door behind her. Lore sighs and rubs a hand down his face. It's never easy, with those two. Always so opinionated and trying to get in the way, to help him when he's got the situation under control on his own. He doesn't understand why they won't just let him handle the situation.

He doesn't understand where Marin is getting the idea that she can argue with him from, she isn't even fucking real. (The thought makes him wince even as he says it. It's true, but it doesn't feel true, it doesn't feel right.)

He tries not to think about it too hard. Like a lot of things that pull on his shaky emotional stability lately, Lore has found that it is easier to just push it aside and move on. Much like he's been doing to Gale, as like… a person. Much like he's been doing to almost everyone on this island as a person, discounting their existences out of hand.

He might… need to get better about that.

There are times, where Lore wishes that Legend hadn't told him about this island. Days (if they really can be called days, he often finds himself wondering how much time has passed on the outside.) where he truly thinks that it would be better, to not have known. Where he thinks that he is harsher to Marin than she deserves. Where he is colder to all of the people of Koholint than he ought to be.

Days where he wonders if Gale, too, is nothing more than a dream.

He dismisses that thought out of hand, of course. Other than Gale, the entire experience on this island is exactly as the Hero of Legend said. The same people, the same layout, the same problems and Dungeons. He does wish that there has been a touch more information sharing on the Dungeon part, but after the incident with the forgetting an entire fucking phase of a boss-fight, Lore is kind of happy that he wasn't given any faulty intel. He's… he's getting off topic. The point here is the only real people on this island are Lore himself and Gale.

Lore is real because he is. He's not even going to question that kind of thing, because he's mad enough as it is, he doesn't want to go actually insane, not on this trip.

Gale is real because he isn't a character in the story. He's not a part of the legend. And he's so very clearly, painfully, obviously Wind. He's got the same face and the same mannerisms, the same jump to his voice when he gets excited. The same eyes and he pulls the same faces. And while in normal circumstances 'this is literally a copy of the same person I already know' would be a glaring give away that something is wrong, Lore is not in normal circumstances. He has not been in normal circumstances for a very long time.

He's used to doppelgangers.

He is curious about the two Links in the same time without the use of the whole time travel thing. He's also curious about the name thing (why is he Link, and Gale isn't). But he hasn't asked, hasn't wanted to give too much of his hand away.

He doesn't want to fuck time up more than it already had been just by dint of his own fucking existence.

…where was he going with this? Right, Gale is real and Lore is real and everyone and everything else on this island is fake. These are the facts.

The other facts, as far as Legend was willing to share, was that the only way out of this dream is to wake up, and the only way he could manage to do that was by running headfirst into the very obvious Link-tailored quest at the center of the charade.

He said that it was difficult, and it was at times cruel, but that it could be done. He said it needed to be done quickly.

But Gale… Gale might have a point.

If they are in a dream, then that implies that the 'dream' is a thing with physical boundaries, which can be used to further infer that maybe the boundaries of the dream can be crossed, maybe there is a point, if they sailed out to it far enough, that the entire thing would break apart, would shatter, and they would both wake up in the storm, gasping on the waves.

(Or, Gale at least will be gasping, hopefully not drowning. Lore can't drown, not anymore.)

But maybe it could work. Maybe it will work.

…and he does want to get back into his friend's good graces after crawling into a dungeon 'behind his back.' Whatever that is supposed to mean.

Yeah, they can give it a go. What's the worst thing that can happen?

(Yes, Lore knows that that is a terrible sentence to even think, yes he thought it anyway, no there isn't anything that he can do about it, he can't travel in time anymore he doesn't have the fucking harp.)

"Okay, fine," he says, storming into the house uninvited. Gale looks up with a glare but Lore doesn't give him the chance to argue back, doesn't let this turn into a fight.

"Lore, what—" Marin tries.

"Lore holds up a hand, cutting her off. He feels bad about it, it isn't polite, but he doesn't have time for this. "We can try your way," he says to the other boy instead, and then nearly runs out of the house.

Nearly. Nearly runs. He walks out of the house at a very calm and controlled pace, the brightness of that smile burning the back of his head as he goes.

This better fucking work.

Supplies weigh down the little divot that Gale worked into the floor of the raft, food and gourds full of water, a few changes of clothes. He is still under the impression that he washed up on this shore naturally, and Lore still doesn't know how to tell him otherwise.

So he lets the boy pack, lets him fuss over what he thinks they will need if they are to have a chance of escaping the strange tide around the island long enough to do any kind of practical navigation, if they are to find his home, or even the mainland.

Lore says nothing as he excitedly doubles the rations for the trip to take two of them. He only puts his foot down when Gale starts trying to convince him that Marin should come along.

That was too far.

The two of them can get out of the dream. But Legend was crystal fucking clear about Marin and the whole not being real thing. If she leaves this island—the dream—she will cease to exist. And that is the same thing as death, as far as Lore is concerned.

He is uncomfortable, intimately familiar, with the idea of unbecoming. He has faced it, the phantom hand of nonexistence, that hung briefly over his entire reality with no one but him and the other bearers of his spirit being any wiser. Of the gamble, the oath he has sworn, to spare his world and a little boy who failed through no fault of his own. If there is a chance to escape this dream without breaking it, then there is a chance to save themselves without ending the others, 'real' or not.

So Marin has to stay.

They're ready in only another two days, after Lore finally agrees to try. He doesn't say anything about what he's doing behind their backs, about the work he's doing to get ready for the second Dungeon.

Rescuing the stupid bowow was pretty public, but innocent looking.

He hesitates, on the concept of goodbye. Saying goodbye to the island is easy, a simple mental wave to his general surroundings as he goes. It is beautiful here, but he doesn't think that it will be missed. He has seen beautiful places before, and he doesn't miss them. They stay with him, fill him up, comfort him in the dark nights and the empty cold that is starting, inch by insidious inch, to grow inside his heart.

Places, unlike people, don't leave you. You get to keep them, even after you go.

So no, Lore does not say goodbye to Koholint. He doesn't say goodbye to any of the people on it either. None of them are real except for him and Gale, and there isn't any reason to say goodbye to Gale. Because he is coming with him.

He is.

Marin is… harder, to swallow. No more real than the rest of the islanders, there is still something about her that grabs him, that holds his attention and makes him want to treat her differently. He tries, anyway, to skip it.

He dresses quickly that morning, Gale absent from his place on the floor beside him. In a rush, Lore gathers up all of his belongings that are not already down by the boat, and goes to just leave the little house without a word.

"You really aren't going to say anything?" A voice—her voice—calls, with his hand on the door.

He doesn't want to look back. Looking back is how you stop moving.

"Not a word?"

"It's not going to work," he manages, eyes fixed on the door, voice strained with its own lack of will.

"Then why bother trying?"

His tongue is heavy, it won't move.

"I…"

It's easier to avoid the fight.

He pushes the door open.

It's a longer walk than usual, to the shore.

There is a trepidation that climbs in Lore's mind as Gale says that they are ready to go. A fear that laps up his ankles along with the waves over his boots. An anxiety that feels sticky, that seems to try to hold him down.

He doesn't let it.

"Get on," Gale tells him, the raft barely in the waves.

Lore frowns. "Don't you need help pushing it out, or—"

"Lore," there is a kindness in Gale's voice that he does not want to examine too closely, that he is afraid to find perception of his self within. "Get on the boat."

He gets on the boat. He sits curled into a corner of it as Gale shoves the raft over the last bit of wet sand. As the rising waterline goes higher and then stays, as the craft begins to float, thereby proving that Gale does at least know how to make a functional raft.

So that's something.

His friend jumps in, splashing some water in with him, and Lore flinches back from it, not wanting to get wet. He knows that it is inevitable, on this quest, but he would like to avoid it as much as possible. He doesn't particularly want to explain to the other the whole mermaid thing. Not a fun time.

So he stays firmly away from the edges of the craft, from the sporadic jumping of the shore-line waves, and lets his friend mess with the homemade rigging.

The rocking of their raft only unsettles Lore slightly, the memory of the storm jumping up into his mind. But he inhales and exhales slowly through the anxiety, knowing better than most that fears not faced tend to consume. That they get inside of you and rend and tear until there is nothing left but an empty hollowing aching void where a guy's sense of safety and security and the knowledge that his uncle would surely be—

Anyway. Lore is so calm, all things considered, about being on the fucking boat.

Gale squeezes his hand, the boy's other on the rope attached to the tiny cloth sail. "You scared?"

There is no point in lying. He has been thoroughly found out. "Terrified."

The island boy laughs, a light and careless thing, tossing his sand-streaked hair back into the wind. He's beautiful, in a way that Lore can't be, with his sharp edges and slowly developing permanent scowl.

He squeezes the hero's hand one one time. "I've got you," Gale tells him, and then lets go.

The sail snaps open, and it grabs the breeze, their sudden movement forward the only reason for the jolt in Lore's stomach, alright?

The ride in a straight line out away from the island, straight out to sea. Lore does suppose that at this moment, basically any direction is straight out to sea, what with only the minuscule island of Koholint behind them there is hardly anything else that they could be facing but the open ocean of it all.

The ship rocks gently on the waves, an easy up and down that is almost like riding a horse. Not that Lore had ridden a lot of horses, but he has at least spent more time on horses than on a ship. Boat. Raft. Thing. What the fuck was he thinking, taking a single person sailing ship across the sea to Hyrule from Labrynna. He’s insane, this whole situation is the result of his crazy, and he can't even blame Legend for it because he was going to be doing this anyway and talking to the old guy just solidified the idea in his head, what the fuck—

"Folklore," Gale calls to him from where he is fussing over the sail. "I need you to breathe, and to grab the rudder,"

Right, right, he has a job to do, he isn't just along for the ride. Lore reaches out with his trembling left hand and grabs the tiller, the tiny little stick that is their most controlled method of aiming. Having a task, having something to do, calms him, steadies him, makes him less like a thing that is shaking apart at the seams, something a little less likely to break apart like a wave upon the rocks.

…speaking of.

"Gale, quick question?"

"Yeah?"

"How many times have you tried this again?"

There is no noise but the gentle shushing of the water as it licks up along the sides of the raft.

"Gale!"

"Uh… this makes the twelfth try, I think."

Oh, he’s going to kill this boy.

"What happened the other fucking eleven times?"

"Well…If I tell you, you’ll panic."

"That's not fucking reassuring!"

Gale just laughs, just has the audacity to fucking laugh at him and then shout, "Hard to port!"

Lore curses under his breath and pushes the lever hard, and the ship rears, bucks, jumps up and down and goes up and over a wave that otherwise would have hit them in the side.

"Do you know what pitchpoling is, Lore?"

…That does not sound good. "I'm not a sailor."

"Yeah, that's fucking obvious, but answer the question."

"No, Gale, I do not know your boat terms."

He laughs again, and it's making Lore less mad each time that he does it. Every time that he is laughed at, there is something for his mind to focus on other than the steadily darkening water all around him.

"Then don't worry about it. I just need to be real steady on that tiller when we get to the drop off."

Steady. Yeah, Lore can do steady. He is so fucking steady. His hands don't shake at all anymore when he holds his sword. No matter the size of the thing that he must face, the ferocity of the beast.

The ocean is another class of opponent entirely. A whole new category of foe. He did not appreciate this when he set sail, from the gentle shore of Labrynna. He appreciates it now.

Fear is cold, like the spray of the waves. But it does not paralyze Lore, not anymore. He is calm control in the face of chaos and he can be as calm as Gale needs him to be, if it means getting off of this island.

(If it means getting out of this dream while there is still time left to save him. The idea that he could already be too late tightens like a vice in his chest.)

Surely that would mean that he would vanish. Surely then he would be gone. If he is really shipwrecked here—which he is, Lore knows that he is—then if he drowned then he would have to vanish. Yes. Of course. They still have time. They have to still have time.

Lore will not entertain the other possibilities, not while he still has some fucking hope.

The raft jumps again, this time a little harsher, The waves are getting bigger, not smaller like he thought they would as the two of them got farther out from the coast line,

"We're nearly to the sandbar.”

BOOM. 

A noise like a slamming door raises Lore’s anxiety to new heights. He catches himself looking around for the Dungeon Boss that usually charges at him after a noise like that.

"Gale, what was that?"

"That is the thing that's going to try to keep up in here."

BOOM!

The waves jump again, and cloud cover forms overhead, faster than Lore has ever seen a storm grow, faster than is natural.

"…Gale, we need to go back."

"Steady on the tiller."

BOOM!

The waves are walls now, things that they are rising up and then falling down as they crash up and past the raft. The ropes holding their vessel together groan under the forces trying to pull the lashings apart.

BOOM!

The wood shakes, trembles like a bird before a storm, and Lore does not want to be here.

It's getting dark fast, darker and darker, and they need to turn around. They need to go back now before it is too late, before they end up at the bottom of the dreamed sea.

"GALE!"

"We can make it!"

The rain falls down like a bucket over their heads, the water drenching the inside of their tiny ship, weighing them down.

It's just like the last time, with the storm and the lightning. It feels like the outside world—the real world—did, right before the lightning strike, before everything when hot and white and full of blinding pain.

…It's just like the outside.

Holy fucking shit they might make it.

Resolve more than fear steadies Lore's grip on the handle of their fragile rudder. He watches Gale, the way that he tweaks and adjusts the angle of the sail. They way that he does not so much as blink when the rain comes pelting down. The way that he looks only straight ahead, at the goal in front of him.

Lore's stomach flips over. And then so does the boat.

Water slams into him like a wall, heavy and solid, stone and mortar. He goes through the obstacle, darkness and cold taking away the little bit of light that the lightning from the storm above had given him. Not fear, but something worse, resignation, grips his heart.

He braces for the pain. For the breaking of bone and the rending of flesh. For the way that the curse he so foolishly welcomed into his core will break him and remake him into a creature of the water, so that he can swoop Gale up from wherever he is inside these turbulent waves and carry him to safety.

He wonders if they did make it out.

…He wonders why he isn't in agony yet.

He wonders why he can’t fucking breathe.

His lungs burn, heaving for air in a place where there is none, no gills coming to take over. Pure discipline stops him from chugging water in a futile attempt to grab oxygen but Lore has a new problem. If he isn't going to transform, then he needs to swim his way out of here.

He… does not know how to swim with hylian legs. He never. Fucking. Learned.

He kicks out hard in a panic, trying to make his limbs cooperate, no grace, no skill to the motions. He does move, but it doesn't feel like he is moving very far. He cannot tell which way is up, he cannot tell which way to move in, he's going to drown, he's going to die, he's—

Something grabs him from around the waist. Lore sucks in a startled breath and is instantly filled with regret just as much as sea water.

He cannot help the struggle, now. He squirms and kicks, frantically trying to get away from the thing that is choking him, that is stealing his breath, that is filling his lungs up with water that is salty and all encompassing and runs through his throat like glass, that cuts his chest apart from the inside, stabbing like the spikes along the floor of a Dungeon trap.

He can't take it anymore he can't take it he can't—

Cold hits his face, air, and he suddenly feels wet in a way that under the water is not.

He heaves on pure instinct, retching salt and water and more waves until it is bile into the sea, all the while Gale (of course it's Gale, he's fishing him out of the ocean again) mutters something that Lore is not capable of comprehending into his neck.

He clings to the other boy, to the solid realness, to the warmth of him, the solidness, in a world made of nothing but cold and empty. He squeezes his eyes shut, and burrows his nose in his friend's neck, and tries not to break apart.

Gale murmurs soothing noises the entire way back to the shoreline, where the presence of solid ground under Lore's shaking legs snaps him out of his clingyness.

He lets go of Gale, and stumbles, crawls at parts, until the waves are no longer licking at his legs, the cold slowly dissipating under the heat of the sun. The sand scratchy and real, deceptively so beneath his hands.

Well, that was bullshit. Lore wheezes, still trying to cough up the entire ocean, still having trouble seeing past all the salt that is in his eyes.

"Lore, are you okay?"

He hacks again, fingers curling into a fist in the sand that Gale drops him in, feeling the coarseness of it, the realness of it steadying him somewhat.

He's alive, he's alive, he's okay.

"Lore, are you okay?"

He manages a nod, and forces his eyes open.

Gale is staring at him where he is also lying, another piece of shipwreck on the disturbed sand of the otherwise picturesque beach. There is no storm anymore, no wind and waves to call them to heel. They are in paradise again, a perfectly calm shore.

Gale reaches out, cradles his face, holding onto him with such a deeply concerned expression, beating into him in a way that is warmer that the sun that steadily dries them

Lore manages a shaky nod.

"Why didn't you tell me you couldn't swim?" Gale asks and there is fear in that voice, a real tangible fear that Lore has not truly confronted from himself in years.

"I—"

What to say? That he can swim, but only when he's been enchanted by a magical pair of leggings? That he hasn't swam in so long that he forgot how? That he hit his head on the fucking boat or something, to try to spare his fucking dignity or whatever scraps of it that he has left when it comes to this guy after today.

"Forget it," Gale breathes and the release of the obligation is more of a relief than the air was a few moments ago. "Just forget it. You're okay, and that's all that matters."

Oh, how he wishes it were that simple.

"The storm," Lore manages to croak out, and Gale twists his mouth into a frown. "Does that happen every time?"

The silence is all the answer that Lore needs.

"Oh, fuck this." The soft intimacy of their movement shatters apart like their raft just has. "Fuck it all, I'm done."

"Done what?" There is a trepidation in Gales' voice that he normally would be really sympathetic to. Now is not normally. "Lore?"

He shoves himself to his feet, pushing the grasping hands of his friend off of him. "We tried it your way, and wasted a lot of fucking wood in the process."

"Lore, please, we nearly—"

"NO!" The young hero whirls around, nearly tripping in the sand as his feet scuff against it at an awkward angle. "No, Gale, we tried, okay? We tried. But I am not doing that again, not when I know that there is a force on this island that will not let us leave and that the only way to do something about it is by following the fucking leads that I already have."

There is a moment of tense silence, where Gale doesn't say anything and neither does Lore, both of them just looking at each other, just sizing one another—and their conviction to their contrary opinions—up.

Lore groans and throws his hands up in exasperation. "Fucking forget it! I'll figure it out myself."

And with that he storms off of the beach, away from the sea, and farther into his own dream.

It's a few days later, when Lore is thoroughly finished coughing all of the salt water out of his lungs, and his hands have quit shaking, that he decides that enough is enough. No more dawdling, it's time to head to the next Dungeon. And if it turns out to be as easy as the last one, he can get the entire thing done before supper.

But, he has learned. He knows better now than to slink off without a word. He thinks about the fact that Marin has a very good point after all, about how if he had stumbled upon Gale hacking up the sea on the beach with no warning he would have… not taken it well is a bit of an understatement, come to think of it. So he decides to go for the direct approach this time.

"I'm going back in," he says, cutting Gale off the mid swing of his little hand-axe, cutting down another little tree. (Lore has noticed that there does not seem to be evidence of all this logging. No stumps left all over the shore line. No dwindling tropical canopy. It is, truly, picture perfect every single day. He's even pretty sure that was the same tree that his friend had cut down before. Not that he can say that.)

"Back in where?" Gale raises an eyebrow, "The sea?"

Lore stifles the wince. "Well, I'll have to, eventually."

Gale snorts a small laugh, and goes to turn back to his task, thinking the conversation is done.

"I mean back to my puzzle. Back to the path I can see, through the heart of the island."

Gale freezes, but doesn't turn around. "You mean the one you keep telling me would get me killed."

Careful there, little hero, Lore tells himself. Steady. "Sailing is easy for you," he starts, forcing a light tone to his voice. "It doesn't feel dangerous at all, does it?"

Gale shakes his head, staring out at the horizon line. "No, it feels dangerous every time. In every moment. But I…" A pause, and Lore is just considering jumping back in, adding something else, when Gale continues. "I'm good at it. I know that I can handle it, no matter what the ocean might throw at me."

"That's what those places, those labyrinths, those monsters, that's what they are to me. They’re dangerous, Gale."

"But you can handle it."

"I can handle it."

At last, they seem to understand each other. Gale looks back at him, and there is a feeling there, being aimed at him that Lore does not know how to define.

"Let me come with you," Gale asks, and there it is. The impossible question.

Lore tries to fight down his grimace, tries to remain calm, not to let the anger that tastes like fear fill his mouth. "You can't."

"Oh come the fuck on, Folklore, I can—"

"It's just not a good idea, okay?"

"Well why not?"

"You saw how bad taking me sailing went."

Gale laughs at that. He always laughs at Lore's bad excuse for humor, and it makes something hot inside of the boy's chest flare in a way that he does not know how to identify. "In my defense, you got to this island in the first place. I assumed that you could manage a boat."

"I got shipwrecked on this island."

"Yeah, but you're bound to have bad luck eventually, no matter how much skill you have at something."

Lore doesn't say a fucking word.

Gale hears it anyway, in the silence. "No, don't tell me."

Not a word.

"It was. That was your first voyage and you were shipwrecked?"

"Leave me be."

He doesn't, leave him be, that is. Instead the teasing continues, builds, turns into something that feels less like an insult and more like a sparring match. It feels… nice, Lore thinks. To be treated like an equal. To not be looked down on or up to, and to just be. To be teased, mocked even.

It feels nice, like a sip of something warm settling into his chest.

Getting ready to go down into the dark is easy, when he thinks of that feeling, of the way that the sunlight hits Gale's eyes, of the easy friendship that will be waiting for him when he emerges, victorious.

The need to go is all the more pressing with every single drop that he caves to caring about the boy. Time is running out, in the storm, for Gale. Lore cannot allow it to reach its end. Not for someone like him. Not for someone so kind. Not for someone so brave, even if it is in a way different than Lore is used to recognizing bravery.

That’s the thing about Links, whatever they might be called. They have a way of being brave in unexpected places.

Lore gathers his own courage, and heads down into the Dungeon.

It’s exactly what he’s expecting, through the mouth of the cave. Dim light, damn stillness rotting through the air. A chest in the first room is a bit of a surprise, but it is surrounded by deceptively heavy pots. Because of course it is. Lore sighs, frustrated by an obvious yet unachievable objective. Embarrassing as it is, he can’t lift those things. Not on his own. 

…Maybe if there was more than one of him, he can’t help but think. Maybe if the Chain was here.

(Maybe if Gale was here.)

No, no, he’s not doing that, he’s not going to go and get sad about getting what it is that he wants. That would just be ridiculous.

Now he just needs to focus.

Forward, into a familiar picture, into darkness and a spark, barely-visible torches begging for flames. Lore smiles to himself, and ignites them. The path forward opens from there, and it is easy to proceed.

The thing is, Lore actually does like this part of the Hero gig. The rush of a fight, the straight forward objective of a locked room. There is always a way through, always an answer. He just has to stay calm enough to find it, whatever that it might be in this specific situation.

The stalfos fall quickly, and he circles back with the key to the other room, happy that it was easy this time, satisfied with a puzzle solved. He takes a single step through the doorway and freezes, some kind of awareness screaming in his mind. Lore knows better than to ignore that, the sense of danger, in places like this.

When he notices the spike traps, he nearly laughs.

Really, that’s all?

Easy.

He still feels something… here. He’s being watched.

The light chitter of the keese above him makes the tension in his chest unfurl even further. He almost laughs. He was stressed about this? Gale could handle this. Fuck, Marin could probably handle this if he took care of the stalfos for her.

Maybe he should bring the islanders some time, just to laugh at them freaking out over keese.

The thought immediately sours in his mind. This is a Dungeon, not a playground, and it is certainly not something to subject civilians to, much less children.

He hasn’t been either of those things in a long time.

He’s just going to get this over with. Yeah. That will be best.

The keese dive as he runs into the room, and he dodges the spikes with careful precision. A door opens the moment the last creature dies, the instant whatever spell tying their life force to the lock is broken.

A small gap, easy to leap, on the on other side, the fucking beetles. And a treasure chest. It might be worth it.

He takes another step forward and the door slams shut behind him. For fucks sake.

He hates it when that happens.

Everything after that is a bit of a monotonous blur. He kills a monster. He solves a puzzle. He dodges traps and navigates a maze and there just isn’t much… there isn’t a lot of joy in it, not like he’s used to. He is too used to having people with him now. Legend in the Veran fight. Wind taking a hit for him.

Gale, dragging him back to shore.

It’s not that he’s helpless. Lore is a fucking Hero of Legend, he is more than capable of doing things on his own. But he… he misses the company. The banter, the way that Wild’s absurdist humor just kind of fixed the mood no matter what else was going on.

It’s surprisingly hard, now, to be here all alone, with no one but the keese to talk to.

And the freaky mask monster that copies his motions. That’s not fun.

The point is—because there really isn’t much else to talk about or think about down here—that amid all the easy fights and the backtracking and the angrily kicking magically looked doors, Lore…kind of wishes that he wasn't by himself.

Especially when he gets to that stupid fucking room that the solution and the subsequent prize require entering from different doors, like, come on, he misses having two of him so bad right now.

He knows that Gale isn’t the same as having two of him. Gale is nothing like Lore or Legend. Gale is nice. Gale doesn't insult other people for breathing. Gale laughs at the waves and has a golden kiss to his skin that implies he doesn’t spend most of his days at the bottom of a cave.

Gale lights up a room when he laughs, he doesn’t suck all the warmth out of it.

Lore shakes his head out of the thoughts and nearly misses a jump, toes slipping on the edge of a platform. He stumbles forward, making his inertia rescue rather than ruin him, and nearly lands on a spiked beetle.

Fucks sake, he needs to focus.

He makes himself focus, or at least try to, for the rest of the run.

It’s only when another door slams shut magically behind him and the floor shakes with the stomping entrance of his foe, that Lore realizes he has entered a boss chamber. So much for focusing, fuck.

And…that is a fucking hinox, for Farore’s sake.

Lore is trying to get his head on straight when the monsters rears back, clearly preparing to act, and then charges at him. He manages to jump away at the last second, and draws his sword in the same motion, slashing at the beast's side.

The beast roars, and turns, and Lore dashes out of the range of attack.

It charges again, and this time he isn’t quite fast enough.

The hinox grabs him around the middle, squeezing in a way that knocks all the breath from Lore’s lungs, in a way that makes him want to gasp. Something fragile in his chest cracks, creaks, groans like wood under stress. And then suddenly, release, freedom, open air around his body.

It is not a relief. It rushes over his face in a way that triggers his awakened diving instinct. He can’t breathe still, cannot make himself draw breath against the sensation of something over his mouth and then suddenly, impact.

Lore meets the wall shoulder first, tossed to the side he supposes, it had happened rather fast. He crumples on impact and slides down, his left arm tingling uncomfortable from the nerves pinched. 

But he can still hold his sword.

He picks it up with his right hand, forgoes the shield or the chance to use items entirely.

He is going to need to be quick, he is going to need to move with purpose and light feet, and his is going to need to fucking focus, past the pain in his chest, past the screaming in his shoulder, past the worries of anything in the entirety of the world that exist beyond this fight, right here and now.

He is so glad he did not let Gale come. The boy would have been killed.

(Lore might be killed if he doesn’t stop letting himself be distracted.)

He manages to time the dodge right again, and does not give himself the second to feel the relief. Instead he starts hacking away as soon as his feet are back on the ground, fighting fast the pain in his bones, against the awkwardness of holding his sword in his right hamd.

He can do this.

Again.

He jumps back, the hinox charges, and he leaps out of the way. He stumbles, but does not fall, and strikes out hard.

With a roar, the hinox freezes, and explodes into a pile of ash and dark magic.

Lore collapses to the ground, wheezing out heavier and heavier breaths, the room starting to spin.

A light chime, and he looks up, around fading spots in his vision.

A fairy. But she isn't bottled, she isn’t caught. They don’t know each other, and he’s in no position to use the fae rules of manners against her. She flies up and away, out of his sight.

Alone in the boss arena, Lore is suddenly, painfully aware, that he is thoroughly fucked.

The creature and the fairy might now both be gone, but he does not think he himself is much farther behind.

Darkness climbs in sporadic spots into his vision, his breath comes in shuddering gasps. He’s in so much pain, and he is really, really concerned about walking out of this one.

He’s alone. No one is coming to save him.

As much as it hurts, that is the thought that makes Lore hold on, to cling to his awareness with shaking hands. He forces his eyes wider, and takes in the thing that may just save his life.

A warp tile, manifested in the center of the room.

He uses his sword as a crutch, and heaves himself upright on shaking legs.

He coughs, and feels the wetness on his lips. Wipes it away to see read smeared across his fingers. Either this warp tile leads him to somewhere with medical supplies or he’s about to test that whole ‘what happens if he dies in the dream’ thing.

He really does not want to test it.

He makes contact with the swirl of magic on the floor and the next thing Lore knows he’s standing in the Dungeon entrance, collapsing back to his knees as the nausea of the transport hits his weakened body. He hurls, and then stares morosely at the door to the Dungeon.

No one is coming to save him. 

He screams in pain and frustration as he stumbles back to his feet, and starts walking.

He manages to limp his way almost all the way back to the house in a fugue state, spotty, blurred. Back to a proper path, at the very least, gives him a fighting chance. A chance to be found, to be rescued, to be patched up, something.

"Lore!" a voice calls out to him, a familiar voice, for all that that means. Every voice is familiar, on this island. There aren't many people that could be speaking. There isn't anyone—real or otherwise—that he doesn't know.

"Here," he croaks out, legs buckling beneath him, the world starting to spin, to blur, to break apart into fractal pieces.

"Shit!" the voice—oh, that's Gale, hello Gale—calls, and Lore's legs finally quit on him. He goes down, and everything else goes dark.

"We have to stop meeting like this," Gale's high, sweet voice tells him, and Lore wakes with a laugh that hurts.

He chokes on it, and coughs, and that hurts all the more.

"Fuck, I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Gale does have the decency to really look apologetic, from here he sits at Lore's bedside. "Don't laugh, you're hurting yourself."

"I'm okay," Lore wheezes out. "Just a bit sore."

Gale just gives him a look.

"What?"

"Marin's washed your tunic four times now."

"…okay?"

"She still hasn't gotten the blood out."

Well, shit. He doesn't say it, but it must show on his face.

"You told me that you had it under control."

"I did."

"It doesn't look like it from here, Lore."

He winces, partly from the confrontation, and partly from the spike of pain brought on by that anti-confrontational wince.

"Well, that’s settled."

"…What?"

"Is there a version of the story where I talk you out of continuing on this crazy treasure hunt of yours?"

Finally, an easy question. "No. No there isn't."

Gale nods, his hand clenched into a fist where it is hovering, inches away from Lore's leg on the bed.

"I can't explain it, but I have to keep going. I have to."

"Okay."

"I can explain later, after—" He blinks. "What?"

"Okay."

He can't fucking believe it. "Just okay? Just like that?"

"You have to do this. I can accept that." Lore holds his breath, nearly, waiting for the catch. "There is nothing that I can do or say to stop you."

All correct, but what—

"So I'm coming with you."

And there it is.

"No, Gale, I told you—"

"You told me that you had it under control. That you didn't need any help."

"Because I didn't, I made it back, and—"

"And you also told me you could handle sailing out of here."

Lore's mouth snaps shut with an audible click.

"I'm coming with you."

A million different ways to end this conversation flash through his head. There's the screaming match, There is the calm logic proof. There is the stubborn refusal to elaborate. There are so many ways that Lore can make this go amazingly, spectacularly wrong. So many ways to utterly ruin a friendship.

For once in his Farore-forsaken life, he does the thing that seems wisest.

"Fine."

Gale's eyes blow wide, shock rounding out the island boy's mouth.

"But there are going to be conditions."

"Fine."

"And stop smiling like that."

He doesn't, not until the mix of exhaustion and bloodloss blurs Lore's vision, dragging him back under once more. Then, and only then, does the smug satisfaction on his friend's face blur into something else, something that Lore does not get the chance to try to categorize before the dark swallows him whole.

“Are you kidding me?” Gale asks, staring down at the hastily assembled obstacle course.

Lore shakes his head, trying to be as serious in his countenance as possible. “If you can’t manage this you can’t come with me.

‘This’ being a hastily drawn obstacle course of squares outlined in the sand, with sticks sticking up sporadically in them.

“Manage what?” Gale laughs, “A kid’s game?”

He’s going to fucking kill him.

“If you can’t take this seriously, then you definitely aren’t coming.” Lore says, with a huff, and then turns around, starting to march off of the beach and away from the moron.

“Hey, Lore, hang on!” And hand wraps round his wrist, warm and shocking. “Please, don’t start with that.”

He takes a very slow breath, wills the heat out of his cheeks, and turns around.

“It might help if you could explain why this is helpful?”

Yeah, he can… he can do that.

He looks straight down at the ground, and makes himself talk. For the first time in his life, Lore actually describes what the inside of a Dungeon is like. The empty pits that drop farther than a torch lasts. The spikes that jump up from the floor. The monsters positioned exactly in the perfect way to make it all too easy to fall should he dodge too far.

At last, he looks up, into his friend’s wide, warm eyes. “So if you can’t even make a jump far enough to not die to the architecture, I’m not even going to bother teaching you how to fight.”

Gale argues less, after that,

They walk into the dark, the pair of them, and a fear that Lore has not felt since he was nine years old and only rabbit-height grips his heart. This is a mistake. This is a terrible, horrible mistake, and he should not be doing it. What the fuck is he thinking, bringing Gale in here, bringing anyone in here, the last time that he was inside this place, he nearly died.

“Hey,” Gale calls from right behind him, soft, gentle. “We can do this.”

Lore can. He knows that he can, “I’m not sure that we should.”

“Well…” an unexpectedly teasing note enters Gale’s voice, “we can always try the raft again.”

Lore turns around to glare at him with the full force that that remark deserves, getting back nothing more than a shameless smile.

Gale’s expression softens, smooths out around the edges. “I can do this.”

Lore wants to believe him. He doesn’t know that he can. In front of them the warp tile spins, beckoning a return to the halfway point of the dungeon. If Lore was alone, he would take it. If he was gauging only his own capacity to proceed, he would know that he is more than ready.

But he isn’t alone, for better or worse.

“Don’t touch that,” Lore says, and hedges around it, beginning to follow the path he took to run the first half of the Dungeon on his own. 

“What is it?”

“It’s called a warp tile, it will take us deeper in.”

Gale freezes mid step. “Do we… not want to go deeper in?”

Lore rolls his eyes, “Yeah, we do, but I’m not letting you come farther than the first room if you can’t handle an easy fight.”

Gale snorts, amused for some unknown but infuriating reason. “Okay, Dungeon Master, take me to the keese.”

“Not keese,” Lore says, gesturing at the spark working its way along the wall ahead of them. 

“What the fuck is that?!”

The sudden alarm in his friend’s voice nearly makes Lore laugh. Nearly. 

Things go… surprisingly smooth, after that. Gale is a good listener and light on his feet—of course he is, he’s Wind, alternate name, alternate timeline not withstanding, and he’s as much Wind and Lore is Legend, loathe as he is to admit it—and the spark is bypassed with barely a sweat.

The stalfos go down just as quickly. Lore finishes off one as Gale takes the other, and what could have been a moderately stressful fight because of the numbers alone is suddenly… easy.

Suddenly the idea of doing this the long and slow way seems… it seems fucking stupid, there’s no other way to put it. It will do nothing but tire them both out and there is no telling whether or not the enemies that they see here in the first half of the Dungeon are going to be the same as in the second half.

“This is a waste of time,” Lore announces, at seemingly random. Gale, bless him, just makes a ‘go on’ gesture, more than used to Lore’s non sequiturs at this point. “We’re using the warp tile.”

A self-satisfied smile blooms on Gale’s lips, and Lore feels his own cheeks heat slightly in response. He gulps, and tries to will it down.

“So you trust me not to die like an idiot, then?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Lore snaps, harsher than he needs to, if he’s being honest.

Back the way they came, and Lore pauses in front of the warp tile, chewing on his lip, weighing his options. "You're following right behind me.”

It isn’t a question. Gale nods in agreement all the same.

“Okay,” he shakes out the lingering fear. “Okay.” He steps forward, and the room blurs, spins, and then disappears.

He has exactly one second the process the empty boss fight room, the smears of his own blood on the floor, on the fucking wall, before Gale stumbles out of the warp tile himself, heaving and clearly trying not to retch.

Moving on impulse rather than thought, Lore crouches down, rubs small circles into his friend’s back. A few seconds later, Gale gets his shit together and looks up. Lore smiles what he hopes reads as reassurance back at him.

“Are they always like that?” he asks.

Lore grimaces. “You get used to them.”

Gales shudders, and at the sensation in his palm Lore realizes that he’s still touching the guy. He pulls his hand away as though he has been burned, feeling rather hot all of a sudden.

Gale smirks at him. Wait, what, why would he be smirking at him? Lore must have read that smile wrong, it was a normal smile, come on.

All humor leaves his friend’s body when he takes in the dried blood smeared around the room. “What happened here?”

“I made a mistake,” Lore says as nonchalantly as he can, and rises back to standing. “Come on.”

“A mistake?” Gale squeaks as he follows behind, clearly not wanting to leave it be.

Lore tries to hold his anger—and it is definitely anger, not simmering fear, not the lingering memory of blood in his mouth—in. “I don’t make a habit of quitting halfway. And you saw me.”

He isn’t going to debate the issue any further. Without leaving room for conversation, he marches straight through the other door.

“Are you fucking kidding me.”

“What?” Gale asks, still right behind him, a note of anxiety in his voice that Lore is definitely responsible for, that makes him flinch himself.

Lore sighs, and points up at the glowing construct of healing magic, the heart-shaped manifested spell floating in the room, “I didn’t have to turn around after all. I could have made it one more room!”

All anxiety leaves Gale’s voice, his posture. This is a good thing. What is less good is how it seems to be replaced with anger. “Lore, I swear to—”

“Oh look, keese!” Totally not changing the subject, Lore dives out of the way of the first flying creature, and spins to hit it.

Gale is grumbling something under his breath, but lines himself up to take on the other fluttery nuisance. On habit more than by need, Lore grabs the heart, feels the magic flow over him, and makes himself not intervene. Gale finishes off the keese. 

(The other keese. The second of the two keeses? Keesi? Keese? Fuck if he knows.)

‘What?” he says instead, at the continually baffled expression on his friend's face, trying not to get caught up in how the confused expression itself is endearing, like a small puppy.

“You know what?” Gale sighs. “Never mind, I know that I’m not going to get anywhere with you about this.”

Lore doesn’t know why, but he sticks his tongue out. Like a mature person. Which he totally is.

Yep.

The silence from Gale says enough. Lore flushes slightly, and the words that he wants to say all leave him. The witty comeback, the compliments about how well Gale has been handling himself in the Dungeon so far, any kind of hit about vulnerability and really not wanting to talk about how used to nearly dying he has become, it all just flies out the window at the moment that his tongue goes dead in his mouth.

Fuck, fuck, fuckity.

He’s just going to walk into the next room and Gale can figure it out. He’s actually pretty decent at following Lore’s silent cues. It’s actually kind of nice.

Ahem. Doorway, Room. Monsters.

He stomps ahead, and hears Gale mumble some kind of curse under his breath, chooses actively not to turn around, not to try to figure out what it is. Instead he just marches straight on into the next room, which is… pretty straightforward?

It’s a big square space, with a diagonal line made of holes in the floor running through it. Simple, clean.

The heat of a body radiates against Lore’s back, and Lore gulps in the doorway. The presence of another person is spurring him forwards, his instinctive tendency towards away nearly overriding his learned behavior to not leap without looking. To not jump in without properly understanding what it is that he is running headfirst into.

Nearly.

“Something's wrong,” he says, careful, low.

“What do you see?” Gale’s breath tickles the back of his neck. “Monsters?”

Lore shakes his head. “A trap.”

“In the holes in the floor?”

It could be. It wouldn’t be the first time that the ground has literally fallen out from under him, or that a simple jump has concealed something much more sharp. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like something new. Something that he doesn’t understand.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“Folklore,” Gale whispers into his ear, and it shivers down his back. “You can do this. You told me you can.”

The confidence Gale has in him is doing more for Lore’s ego that he would like to admit. Personally. He sighs, “Just… stay back.” This can go wrong. This can go so wrong, but he isn’t sure how, which unsettles him more than it would have if he could see what it is that is waiting for him.

He takes one single step into the room proper.

Something in the corner suddenly moves, grows, swells, turning from an unobtrusive spot into a great blue bowl of a thing, as it sucks air in.

It’s kind of… silly looking, that’s the only way that Lore has to describe it. It’s just silly looking, like an absurd concept of a thing rather than an actual threat.

But then the suction force hits Lore himself and, well. He kind of feels like an idiot. Because that sucker is strong. Very, very strong.

His torso jolts forwards, and it is only his muscle memory that makes him counterbalance, tensing his abdominals and pushing away. He manages to right himself, but it isn’t enough to actually stop the pull, the way that the rush of air is dragging on his body. His feet start sliding, slipping on the stone. He feels himself wobble, about to fall.

His feet start moving, backpedaling on animal instinct, trying to fight against the pull.

“Lore!” Gale yells, and he reaches back, towards the person calling out to him, without thought.

A hand on his, something solid, something to hold on to. He squeezes back, holding tight to Gale’s hand, and looks back.

His friend has one hand on the outer edge of the doorway, the other in Lore’s grip. His own legs are rising slightly, elevating with the force of the suction that is racing all the way to the room’s entryway now. But he’s not letting go.

Fuck.

“Gale, you have to let me go,” Lore yells over the roar of the wind. “I can make the jump!”

“It’s going to eat you!”

“It’s going to try!” Something in Lore’s shoulder strains, threatens to pop. Fuck. He shouldn't have grabbed him back.

Should have, would have, could have, Lore, just move the fuck on.

He jolts forwards suddenly, and he looks back again. Gale is slipping. They’re both going to go down. The holes in the floor, previously harmless and passive, now loom large and ominous. They are going to try to swallow the both whole, and if they manage to get over them, that thing in the corner will—

His life is a joke, actually. Lore is pretty sure that his entire life is a fucking joke.

With another abrupt jolt, Gale loses his grip on the door, and Lore stops thinking.

He rips his hand out of his friend's grip, and lets the open air take him.

Suction and gravity war, and his feet hit the ground again, but keep sliding forwards. Gale and him both are being dragged, farther and farther forward, towards the yawning holes in the floor and the creature—or mechanism, he actually isn’t entirely sure that it is a creature—that is literally sucking all of the air out of the room.

Gale is steady, on a rocking ship. He is sure feet, in soft sand.

He has never had to deal with anything like this.

The negative air pressure is pulling on him faster than it is on Lore, he is sliding closer and closer to the gaps in the floor, and a thousand horrible possible futures flash before Lore’s eyes. All of them with one universal constant, and that is his friend’s broken and bleeding corpse.

Like a switch being pressed, problem solving comes back online in a flash.

“Gale, run against it!” he commands.

“Way ahead of you,” the islander answers, and turns around to fight harder against the air current.

He’s not gaining ground, but he’s losing it at a slightly slower speed. That is going to have to be good enough, there’s nothing else that Lore can do, other than end this, and end it quickly.

Plan laid out in his mind—stupid, reckless, and liable to go badly wrong, but a plan nonetheless—Lore finally stops resisting and goes on the offensive.

He leans forward into the pull, starting to work with the current rather than against it, feet moving forwards, going, with the aid of the air, from a sliding stillness to a full forward sprint in a single heartbeat.

Right hand goes into his pouch at the same monet that his left draws his sword.

The Roc’s feather is caught between his index and middle finger at the same instant that his front foot hits the edge of the bottomless pit dividing the room.

Raising his sword arm to strike, he leaps.

The lightness of the feather and the pull of the air meet, grab a hold of one another, and have their effects pushed to even higher degrees by the force of his jump. For a moment, Lore feels as though he has grown wings, like he’s being carried by that strange bird from all those years ago, like he’s caught in the pull of a gale seed.

The thing in front of him does not seem to grow closer so much as it appears to get larger, so fast is his approach. He can only pray to anyone who might care enough to listen that he has timed this right, and swing down hard.

The air flow cuts off. His arm shakes with the force of the hit. And Lore is, somehow, miraculously, not swallowed.

The thing in the room explodes into magic, and a chest drops down from the ceiling.

The temptation of the chest is… strong is not even the right word. It feels compulsory, automatic, an instinct like breathing to walk himself over to that big shiny red box and yank it open. If he was alone, that is exactly what Lore would do, before the weird suction thing could like, reactivate or something.

The thing is, he isn’t alone.

And there is something far more important in this room than loot.

“Gale!” he yelps, running back the short distance to his friend. 

Gale has done a… pretty okay job at fighting off the pull of the thing. Unfortunately, ‘pretty okay’ isn’t exactly good enough, and the current state of him has the bottom of Lore’s stomach dropping out from under him.

Gale teeters on the edge of a small chasm, heels off the edge and arms pinwheeling forwards in a desperate attempt to do something, anything, to spare him the inevitable.

Unlike with defeating the enemy in the room, Lore doesn’t think. He just moves.

Against the protest of recently pushed muscles, he breaks into a dead sprint, running as quick as he can towards the problem, the horror, the fear, the thing that cannot be allowed to happen. From the other side of the hole in the floor he leaps, not in a proper jump meant to land him on balanced feet, but in a crude tackle.

The impact of Lore’s shoulder to the small of Gales’ back both saves and nearly dooms them both. The force sends them both forward, away from danger, away from the edge, away from certain death. The contact of the other nearly makes Lore flinch backwards, that same strange impulse not to be caused by touching jolting him backwards.

Survival instinct alone makes Lore hold on, and inertia wins out.

The roll, when they hit the stone floor, the force of the fall flipping them over a few times and tangling the two boys up into a knot.

There is a beat, when the motion stops, that Lore just blinks up at the dim ceiling and pants. That was… intense? Yes. That was intense.

Shit. Fuck.

“I’m okay,” Gale breathes, as though he himself is surprised by the fact.

Fury catches, reigniting, and blazing through Lore’s chest. He doesn’t make the decision, doesn’t actually consciously decide to do it. He just feels himself yelling. "But you could have not been!"

Gale turns his head sideways to face him, utterly unimpressed. “Are you really yelling at me over a hypothetical right now?”

“I—Well—” Lore sputters, feeling his tongue trying to quit on him. Gale is so close, alive, and okay. “No, I'm yelling at you over a very much real thing that could have fucking happened.”

Gale blinks at him like he’s trying to blink the rising sun out of his eyes. His big, wide eyes, and—He speaks slow, like he’s talking to an idiot child. “Yeah, Lore, could have happened, which means it didn't happen, so it's a fucking hypothetical, you—”

Lore groans, and knocks the back of his head against the floor. “Why are we yelling about the meaning of words?”

“You literally—”

Lore nearly screams. His chest is tight. “I can't do this.”

“Can't do what, you jackass?”

Ignore the pounding in his chest. 

“Rationalize your actions out loud?

No, he can’t ignore the warmth of him, the heat pressing through their tangled legs. “No, I can't—”

“Deal with being told you're an idiot?”

Come on, Lore, say something.

“Seeing that you’re panicking over nothing?”

Anything at all, please, please, please. “Lose you!”

Gale’s diatribe cuts off, and he just stares at him, wide eyed. But Lore’s traitorous tongue, now freed of its constraints, decides to run wild.

“I can't watch you die, I can't watch anyone else die!" There is a driving panic now, starting to build like a buzzing hive of bees behind Lore's eyes. The sensation of the sea in his mouth. The feeling of blood, not his own, sticky and cloying through the fabric on his knees.

He can't breathe.

“I'm sorry,” Gale starts,  “I didn't…”

Something uncomfortably close to a sob shakes out of him, but Lore can’t stop talking, he’s started something he shouldn’t have, and now he cannot stop.

“I've watched so many people die—" The hilt of the sword is still warm, still carrying a heat that is likewise spilled all over the floor, that is dissipating from his uncle's body by the second. There's nothing he can do. "—or leave—" The portal snaps shut, and they are gone, all of them are gone, every Link but him, little Hero of Folklore, not quite a Legend. The weight of everything he can and must do heavy on his shoulders and no one left to stand beside him, to bear it. "—and I can't take it anymore, especially not if it's you.”

Gale blinks again, the concern on his face morphing into something like surprise. “Wait, what—”

He’s babbling, he can tell that he’s babbling but he can’t fucking stop. “If it was you I don't know what it is that I would do, I can't lose you, not you I—”

He is summarily shut up by the press of a hot mouth over his own.

It takes a second or three longer than Lore would like to admit, for him to realize what it is, exactly, that is happening to him.

His body catches up faster than his mind, like with most things. And when Lore’s thoroughly short-circuited mind does scrape itself back from the corners of the room it was blown into, he finds that he was kissing back before he even realized that he is, in fact, being kissed.

He considers freaking the fuck out about it for about… two seconds, maybe three. And then Gale’s rolling them, putting himself above Lore and pressing his weight down with an insistence that makes Lore gasp, and melt into the floor.

Much like his tongue a moment ago, his hands develop a mind of their own. One jumps up, finding the small of Gale’s back and pulling, insistent, down. Gale goes with it, grinding forwards and down, and a line like white fire shoots up through Lore’s stomach.

Startled, he pulls his hand away, letting it hover awkwardly in the air, its brethren too thoroughly wound into Gale’s hair to move.

He has no idea what he’s doing. Like, no idea at all what the fuck he is meant to be doing. All he knows is yes, and more, and there’s a tongue in his mouth and then teeth on his throat, and he is spreading his legs wider in response as though that is going to help him.

Gale is a weight above him, trapping him, but not constricting, pinning without panic. Lore screws his eyes shut, and feels another full body shudder run through him at the feather-soft kiss of fingers skating up his thigh, along the inside of his legs, pushing his skirt aside.

A noise leaves him. He doesn’t want to describe it, embarrassing as it is, and the next thing he knows his awkwardly floating hand is bunching the fabric of Gale’s tunic into a tight fist on his back. And there is dry friction, and white hot feeling taking away his sight, and he’s panting, gasping into the mouth that is back over his.

It all moves fast, after that.

The floor, hard and stone, slowly leeches the warmth from Lore’s body, and with it the warm contentment from his mind. He bolts upright, untangling his limbs from Gale’s in an uncoordinated flurry of motion.

His friend—he is his friend, not something else, not something more—hastens to move with him, grabbing Lore’s sword from the detritus of their belongings and thrusting it pommel first in Lore’s direction. 

Lore freezes, going utterly still.

Gale blinks at him, owlish eyes wide in confusion and alarm, his hair a mess, redness still spattered across his throat. “What?”

Lore forces a slow, deep breath. “We shouldn’t stay here, not for too long.”

He lets Gale make the assumptions, lets him imagine some kind of threat with an hour glass above them. Let’s the other boy create an explanation for Lore’s behaviour that makes sense. That isn’t the truth.

That isn’t the picture of the fear slowly sliding under Lore’s skin. That isn’t the awareness that whatever just happened? It shouldn’t have. That it was an unacceptable lapse, that it was a waste of time. That every single second that Lore spends in a good dream, the boy that he lo—the boy that he cares about—is probably dying by inches, under the waves.

If Gale wants to help him with the Dungeons? All the better. It will go faster that way. It will be quicker.

Trying to keep him safe is a waste of time. And time is the one thing this island can’t magically buy them.

Whatever it takes, he’s waking them both up.

It's a moment of such clear conviction, that for a moment, the enchantment seems to be broken. In Lore's mouth he tastes salt and feels the flow of water through gills he does not, to his current awareness, have.

With a slow exhale, Lore fixes his sword back onto his back, letting the smell of the sea fade from his mind. There is no way out of this but through. He’s going to wake the Windfish, just like Legend told him. And he’s not going to end up like that guy, alone on the water. When he breaks this dream, he’s going to take Gale out of it with him.

And he is going to bring this boy safely to the shores. The real ones.

He has to.

He isn't losing him.