Living With Myself

Chapter 25

Link found Oni sitting on a log near the house, so he went to sit down next to him.
"It would have been nice if you hadn't shown yourself so... Forcefully, " he said with a sigh.
Oni grunted as his only response, and Link sighed again.
"How am I going to explain this to Zelda? Well, I guess that keeps our secrets even?" said Link with a slight smile. "But I'm still wondering, why would Nayru want to lure Dark by making him think he could be me? Like he said, it makes no sense."
The deity grunted and passed a hand through his white hair. Link realized it was a gesture that the three of them seemed to share.
"Because I found the shadow amusing, and Nayru wanted to take my toys away, the same as she has done since time immemorial."
Link scoffed. "Toys? Is that how you see us?"
Oni grabbed Link's left hand and pulled off his glove for them to see the glowing mark of the Triforce.
"Do you think you are anything more than a toy for your goddesses?" he asked.
"I like to think I am."
"You are not," said Oni, letting go of his hand. "Because we cannot see mortals like equals. Do you see a cat as an equal? You can't. You just play with it and let it do what it wants as long as it doesn't bother you"

Link held his chin in his palm, thinking about the deity's words. "I like to think I'm more like a dog. One of those big, furry ones," he said with a smile.

Oni narrowed his eyes at him. "I see how similar the original is to the shadow," he said.

"That's mean," said Link. "The way I've come to see it, he is his own original. If I was a dog, I think he would be a cat. We're similar in theory, but not really."

"Hmmm, that comparison seems...adequate."

The wind picked up, shaking the leaves of the trees around them. The rain had stopped, but heavy storm clouds still covered the sky. Dark came back with an armful of wood for the fire.

"Having secret chats between you?" he asked, with less humor and more bitterness than usual.

"It's not a secret if you can hear everything," said Link, getting up and taking the logs from him. Then he turned back to the deity. "I don't know why I do it. The drinking thing. One day I was in some random in between Termina and Sakeer, and I realized that that was the day I had fought Ganondorf. I was seventeen then, but I still felt ten years old when I thought about the battle. It was a strange feeling, to realize that I was seventeen for a second time, and I still hadn't learned how to grow up. So I bought a bottle of wine to celebrate my nonexistent battle, by myself. It was the first time I had tried wine."

"And you got shitfaced," said Dark with a motherly sigh.

Link laughed. "I did. I also jumped on a table and threw a mug at a bard. Or so I was told the next day. I don't remember much," he said, and shrugged. "It was better than spending the night thinking about the battle, and dreaming about it, and..." he trailed off, his mind going to the nightmares and the screams. Reimagining a thousand different scenarios in which he could see every single way he could have lost. He smiled instead and kept talking. "I just kept doing it every year after that. There's nothing more there."

"That is terrible," said a voice nearby, making Link and Dark jump. They turned to see that Sheik had come out of the house without them even noticing him.

"S-Sheik! How long-?" asked Link.

"Long enough," he said. He reached out to help Link with the longs, but Link refused, and instead accompanied him back inside the house, leaving Dark and Oni alone outside.

"I swear, Sheik appears and he loses his head," said Dark, sitting down next to Oni. "Not that I can blame him. I do too, but it's so annoying when only he can get close to Sheik. So unfair..."