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It occurs to Hyrule by the fifth fight that these guys are trusting him, like… way too much.
It's not the usual, rather unpleasant these people are asking to get killed he experiences upon meeting friendly new travelers. There'd been a connection there, when they'd first met, that had left Hyrule no doubt but to trust the eight strange men and accept that they'd trust him as well. He'd always gone with his gut, and when his gut presented him with an overwhelming feeling of correctness, one usually acquainted with the scant company he did keep - Zelda and Aurora, that was - he'd trust it then as well. So that was all well and good.
The issue arose - well, by the fifth fight. It didn't come to mind sooner because the first injury had only occured by the third fight. It'd been a gash across Legend's forearm, a deep one, and before anyone had started to waste their potions Hyrule had scrambled over with open hands.
“I can heal,” he'd gasped out, nearly stumbling over his own feet in his haste. He'd pressed his palms to Legend's bicep firmly, against bloody, ragged fabric and warm skin - and boy didn't that feel weird - and he'd flooded it with magic without even asking for permission.
It'd worked, of course, like it always did. It was a wound Hyrule was intimately familiar with - there was nothing more common than a gash across a plane of skin, and it didn't require anything past imagining the layers of flesh and skin knitting together to fix. The others had gawked. Hyrule had tried not to blush, and failed.
“Thank you,” Legend had said, finally closing his jaw with a click.
“Well,” Time had said, unerringly calm voice still unreadable. “That'll be useful.”
And that was the root of the problem.
They were putting too much faith in him. Hyrule had become something of the unofficial team medic in the short time the group had met, and Hyrule - to put it frankly - he was not a fucking medic. He was the farthest thing from it. He'd met like two medics ever. Most of his external healing came from polite young women in villages who invited him inside and seemed weirdly disappointed when he hastened to leave. And, even then, that wasn't often - he was a traveler, a wanderer. He didn't know how to read.
And somehow. Somehow. He'd still become the team medic.
It was ridiculous. He had a life spell, sure, and he had troves of magic available to use at any time. But he didn't really… know anything about healing. His methods were mostly use magic and pray. And that… wouldn't do in regards to his new friends.
He'd talk to someone to get the misunderstanding cleared up. Soon. Soon. Once they had the time to breathe.
—
That time doesn’t come soon enough, apparently.
“You have to warn us about the bombs,” Warriors says.
Hovering over the campfire, Wild scowls. “I was going to deploy them first. If someone had listened to me…”
“That's not a verbal warning, chef!”
Below Hyrule, Twilight twitches. Hyrule wonders if it's from some kind of sensitivity or if he's just annoyed. Hyrule had sat next to Sky the other day and the older hero had pointed out little quirks and tells he'd noticed about the other heroes for fun, and patiently explained each one of them. It’s stuff Hyrule himself never would have noticed. He didn't stick around humans enough to.
…Or, he thinks as Twilight twitches again, maybe, it's because Hyrule’s mopping up blood from the little scattered holes in his thigh. He discards the soaked scrap into the fire automatically, inspecting the little marks. They seem pretty deep, and blood has started to once again run in rivulets down the expanse of skin underneath. He doesn’t know how he’d gotten into this position, but everyone else is also busy tending to wounds. So…
Mentally, he shrugs, inspecting the odd patterns the weapon had made. What weapon would cause this kind of damage? So precise and deep? Maybe it’d been some kind of magic…
Speaking of magic. Hyrule shakes some of the congealing blood off his hands and presses them to Twilight’s thigh, trying a gentle push of magic. The tips of his fingers glow blue, but otherwise… He’d used up most of his magic in the fight.
“You can’t just go off and do whatever you want without telling us! We’re a team now, Wild, and that means working together-”
“Sky,” Hyrule calls quietly. The man looks over, looking distinctly dazed. There’s a trail of blood down the side of his head. “Do you have a green potion?”
Sky nods. After a moment of fumbling, he tosses Hyrule a small green vial. Hyrule uncorks and chugs it, feeling his magic reserves swell up once again in a warm rush.
“Thank you,” he says, but Sky’s already laid back and… passed out. Wow.
“That was fast,” Twilight murmurs.
“Yeah.” Hyrule presses his hands against the skin again. A rush of energy, of warm magic tingling and whispering against the inside of the skin of his hands… the small, sharp wounds healing, he pictures it…
“Did you get all the shrapnel first?” Warriors’s voice is sharp and jolts Hyrule out of his momentary reverie. The man’s hovering over them, the scarf brushing against Hyrule’s ear. “It’s usually hard to reach.”
“What’s shrapnel,” Hyrule says.
“What,” Warriors says blankly.
“That’s what that was,” Twilight says, who - yeah, probably couldn’t have seen the injury on the back of his thigh. “Wait, what?”
Warriors’s hands come down to gingerly pull Hyrule’s hands off of Twilight’s leg. He presses them gently to Hyrule’s chest. “What is shrapnel,” he repeats, blankly.
“Is it a weapon?”
“I suppose so.” Warriors’s movements have gone smooth and vaguely robotic, and his breathing is deliberately even. Hyrule stares up at him, hands still where Warriors had moved them, and then his gaze shifts down as Warriors squats to their level and examines the thigh. “Usually, it’s cause by an explosion. Small bits of sharp material - usually rock or metal - get embedded into the skin.” He glances at Hyrule out the corner of his eye. “Has it not happened to you?”
“Once or twice,” Hyrule says, agreeably. “I just healed it.”
Twilight’s hand moves to his mouth. He looks vaguely faint. “Oh Lord,” he says politely, strange accent in full swing.
“Didn’t remove anything first?”
“Why would I?”
Warriors mouth is a thin line as he inspects the skin. “It can cause permanent muscle injury. Bits of them can also get caught in your bloodstream and kill you,” he says.
“Ah,” Hyrule says, suddenly understanding. “That’d do it.” To Twilight, he says: “Sorry, Twi.”
“No, it’s fine, you didn’ know,” Twilight says, although he’s still pale and getting paler by the second.
“Hyrule,” Warriors says. “Do you just have, like, fifty pieces of rock stuck under your skin?”
“Guess so,” Hyrule responds.
“Huh.” He’s started poking at the wounds with a small, silver instrument. “Well, Twilight, I’m happy to report that you won’t be having unmedicated surgery today.”
“Woo,” Twilight says, not particularly enthusiastic. He reaches over to pat Hyrule on the arm. “Thank you for tryin’, ‘rule.”
It sounds pretty genuine, even if Hyrule had put him inches away from unmedicated surgery - whatever that was. Still. A you’re welcome feels inappropriate, even to Hyrule, who speaks to people for ten minutes a month on average. “Uh,” he says instead.
Twilight flops back into the dirt. Warriors shifts to sit down properly, and Hyrule peers over his shoulder. He’s using the little metal things to carefully…
Oooh, gross. Hyrule had never particularly had the time to get used to blood and gore - it was something he avoided at all times for evil cult reasons, and while he wasn’t squeamish - no one who’d had to burn injuries shut on multiple occasions was squeamish - he still preferred not to look at it. Still, he watches in horrified fascination as the thin silver parts enter a small wound, held with hands that were just slightly shaky, and pulls out a small sliver of red. Each time a tremor rocks Wars’s hand - which isn’t that often, but enough to notice - Twilight would jerk fully in pain.
“Stay until I’m done, Hyrule, please,” Warriors says, voice low and focused. “You don’t have to watch, but it’ll be good to get these healed up as soon as possible. He’s lost a decent amount of blood.”
“Okay,” Hyrule murmurs. Absent-mindedly, he reaches up to his right arm, where the same had last happened to him. He squeezes the little meat there. Nothing really happens. “I’ve, um, been trying to tell you this for a few days. I don’t actually… know anything about healing.”
Warriors’s hand pauses, then shivers in place. “Really, now,” he says, but there’s a little humor in his voice. Then that humor dissipates, and in its wake is quiet seriousness. “I’m realizing that now. I’m sorry that we put you in a position that put pressure upon you. I think we made some assumptions.”
He plucks out another shard, discarding it into the grass. “I, especially, should know better.”
Hyrule rubs the back of his neck. “It’s fine, really,” he says, awkwardly. “I should’ve told you earlier.”
“Still.” Warriors steadies his left hand with his right. The burn running down it is uneven and unintentional. “How old are you, Hyrule?”
Odd question. Hyrule thinks for a minute. “Uh… sixteen, seventeen, maybe? I’m not quite sure.”
“Hm,” Warriors says. Another shard is thrown into the dirt. Wars has gone through almost all the little wounds. “Well. If you’d prefer to not be involved in healing at all, outside of emergencies, that’s just fine as well.”
“What? No!” Hyrule looks at him in disbelief. Warriors doesn’t turn, still concentrated on removing the last few shards. “Why waste a useful resource like - like healing magic?” Was the man feeling okay? It was a ludicrous thing to ask.
“We’re all more than the resources we provide, even if said resources are useful,” Warriors says, and then flicks a shard into the grass with a sense of finality. “Here. Done.”
“Let me.” Hyrule nudges past the Captain to lay his hands against Twilight’s thigh, this time with a little force and more confidence. It only takes a minute, and then the tingle starts once again, spreading warmly to his fingertips and into the bloodied skin. He pictures it knitting together, the skin smooth and unmarred. When he removes his hands, it’s a plain canvas of red - no marks, no gouges. “I - I want to help. I just don’t know… how.”
Warriors has leaned back on his arms. Twilight snores. A smile crosses his face, distant but… nice. “Well,” he says. “I can respect that.”
Hyrule smiles back. It’s odd, to have another person to smile at, but it’s nice.
–
“I was expecting a language barrier, either way,” Warriors says. He hooks his arms around the back of his neck. “So you being unable to read doesn't make much of a difference.”
Hyrule shrugs. “Do you even have a plan?”
“…For once, no,” Warriors admits. He kicks a stone as they walk. Sky, still slightly concussed, is hanging off of Time's arm ahead of them. Four paves the way, and the others trail behind. “My plans tend to focus more on strategy than they do a curriculum.”
“I don't know what a curriculum is,” Hyrule says.
“That's fair.” Warriors scrunches his nose. “How does one even heal?”
Now here's something Hyrule actually knows, even if he's not sure how to phrase it. He contemplates it a moment, looking around at their surroundings absently and reaching for the magic in the environment around them. Four's Hyrule, a small, thriving Kingdom, brims with it. Hyrule can taste it on his tongue.
“The Life spell I use is the one used by all fairies,” he says, and doesn't elaborate when Warriors cocks his head at him inquisitively. “Do you know much about fairy magic?”
Warriors tilts his head a bit farther. “I talk to fairies often, but it tends to lean more towards gossip.”
That explained the lingering familiarity on Warriors. No wonder Hyrule had felt comfortable with him. “Well. Um. First you've gotta understand that the Fae have always held a particular fondness for Hylians, ever since the beginning of time.” He can almost hear Zelda narrating the books he'd asked her to read out for him. “Not always in a particularly friendly manner. Fairy rings, changeling children, stealing identities. Mischief. You've heard stories.”
Everyone'd heard stories. He'd been called a changeling a few times. It was odd to see a child brimming with magic and on his own, not hiding away in a village, one of the few safe - relatively - areas in his era. Their isolation made them hostile to strange people. His own isolation made him strange. It wasn't a good combination.
Warriors is nodding. Hyrule takes a breath before continuing, hesitant. “There’s no records left of Sky or Four’s time, but the Fallen hero was rumored to have been raised by fae.” That was Time. It was a revelation that had shocked him, but it was simply easy to tell just from the strange clinging of fae magic to his form. He hadn’t mentioned that part to anyone else yet. Bringing up a dead, younger version of their leader wasn’t a pleasant conversation topic, even by Hyrule’s apparently low standards. “They were called Kokiri, children of the forest - and they had, um, changed to have Hylian bodies. And the Kokiri each had a fairy partner.”
“Uh huh,” Warriors says. Hyrule glances at him. He's squinting against the sunlight, expression neutral. Hyrule wonders if he's figuring something out. Legend had complained, a few times, that the man and Time clearly had history.
“Fairies have always been a partner race to Hylians. That’s never changed. That’s why they don’t mind being scooped up into bottles for use - they feel affection for us as long as they’re treated with respect.” This information was first-hand. “Hylians go to fairy fountains for healing and assistance. In turn, fairy fountains thrive off of visits and offerings.”
“It's a mutually beneficial relationship,” Warriors says thoughtfully. “That makes sense. I’ve had, uh… interesting experiences with great fairies, but they've always been very willing to help.”
Hyrule nods, thumbing at his gloves. “That all goes to say that, um, fairies know Hylians really well. In a way I can’t ever know Hylians. Healing is inherent to them, but it isn't for me. Which is why, despite using the same spell, mine is so much…” He rubs the back of his head. “Weaker.”
“Hm,” Warriors says, contemplatively. “What's your process for healing?”
“Process?”
“Yeah.”
“Um.” He thinks. It’s nothing he’s ever explained to someone else before - he’d tried, once, to a few fairies, but the concept of fairy healing not being inherent had been too outlandish. His cheeks redden. “It’s quite, uh, simple, but I imagine the skin fusing over. I can, um, push healing magic into someone, and it'll make them feel better, but injuries only fully heal when I concentrate on them.”
“Not quite what I expected.” There's no judgment in his voice, none that Hyrule can detect, but the small part of him that yearns for validation winces. Ugh. Everything had been easier when that side of him hadn’t existed. Ignoring it, he reaches for Warriors’s scarred hand, pulsing a small bit of magic into it. Next to him, the Captain relaxes minutely. “Ooh. Yeah, that helped a bit.”
He drops the hand, and it returns to the man’s side. “It could help more, I think.”
“Hmm,” Wars repeats, and then starts digging into his pack. “Okay. Y'know what. Let me try something.” Hyrule tries not to peer into his belongings curiously and mostly fails. Finally, a small book is procured, and Hyrule grimaces slightly. Surely the Captain hadn’t already forgotten his illiteracy. “I need… a recent injury. One you healed.”
“We can use Twilight's leg,” He suggests.
“Sure.” Wars’s voice raises into a bark. “Time! Can we take a break?”
The book is left in Hyrule’s hands as the Captain jogs ahead to talk to Time. Hyrule suspects the break isn’t solely to experiment with whatever thought the man had had, although it was probably a factor; ahead of them, Sky had begun to flag significantly as well. He’s not surprised when Time seems to acquiesce without much argument. Behind, he can hear Wind’s whines of relief.
Hyrule inspects the book. It’s small, worn, with ruddy stains that are… almost certainly blood. Inside… text he can’t read, and wouldn’t have been able even if he were literate, and diagrams that he begins to squint at.
“This, my friend,” Warriors says, boots crunching in the grass, “is my field medicine manual.” He slips a delicate finger in between the pages as he comes to a stop, flipping back to the beginning of the book. “And we just need… there!”
Hyrule squints. A incredibly red man stares back at him, eyeballs uncomfortably unprotected. “Is that… a flayed Hylian?”
Warriors’s expression does something complicated. “…I guess so. It’s how people in my time study the musculature of the hylian body. There’s one for the skeleton as well.” He flips to the last page over. Indeed, there’s a labelled skeleton. “We don’t use these diagrams much, Farore knows I’ve opened these pages like twice, but I think they might help with how you heal - even if they’re not very detailed.”
That was… awfully nice. Even now, skimming over the images he’s been presented with, Hyrule can feel his brain start to reconsider how he’d understood the bodies he’d worked with - it’d always been a matter of join everything until it looks normal, but here there were - muscles, he thinks - that went in particular directions that probably wouldn’t work as well if not healed properly. Twilight had mentioned feeling weak in the spot where his thigh had been shredded, when Warriors checked in on him the next day. Maybe if…
Twilight’s sat down abruptly in front of him. Warriors pushes down on his shoulders unnecessarily, seemingly just to be rough, and Hyrule coughs on a laugh. “I brought our lab rat,” he sings, and in return Twilight twists his shoulders so that Warriors topples straight into the grass. “Take off your pants, Rancher!’
“I can’t tell if he’s being serious,” Twilight informs Hyrule, who shrugs. “What are y’all up to?”
“I don’t really know,” Hyrule says, and then pokes Twilight’s thigh gingerly. The Rancher is easy to be comfortable around. “I need to see your thigh.”
“We’re testing something,” Warriors says from the dirt. Twilight presses a knuckle into the small of his back when the man attempts to get up. “Let me up, you overgrown oaf!”
“Ain’t stopping you,” Twilight says, placidly, and then pulls his trousers down to his knees. He pulls the hem of his shorts - still stained red - up to expose the expanse of skin. “Here ya go, ‘rule.”
“Okay,” Hyrule says, suddenly feeling nervous. Warriors has managed to sit up, and his hawk-like gaze is searing and a bit terrifying. “I don’t know if this is gonna work.”
“Nothing wrong with trying,” Warriors says, voice gentling from the cocky, annoying bastard he’d been channeling at Twilight earlier. “At worst, it doesn’t work, right?”
“Right.”
He settles his hands on Twilight’s thigh, over the small, barely-there puckers that had cut through the muscle underneath. The book is on his lap, and he peers at it - at the thigh, specifically, what he can see of it, the muscles spanning not horizontally across but vertically, and closes his eyes before focusing on the area.
He pushes.
“Oh,” Twilight says above him. “That feels better.”
Hyrule opens his eyes. The skin looks the same, but when he looks up at Twilight, the man is grinning at him. “I think whatever y’all were tryna do worked.”
“Hurts less?” Warriors queries. Hyrule pulls his hands off the skin, squinting at it to see any difference. He’d hoped the scarring would fade - fairies never left scars.
“I didn’ even realize how much it had been hurtin’,” Twilight says, and then reaches down to wave in Hyrule’s face. “Thanks, bud.”
“It worked?”
Twilight grins at him again, eyes light. “It worked!”
“Good job!” Warriors claps him on the back gently. “Master healer in progress, is what we’ve got here.”
“I need to try this on a broken bone,” Hyrule says, near breathlessly. “Whenever I heal my own bones they come out kinda wonky.”
“They what,” Warriors says, smile turning strained. Hyrule takes one of the man’s hands and presses it to his tunic, feeling the slightly misshapen ribs underneath that Hyrule hadn’t really known how to fix. He’d figured out the concept of setting bones pretty early on - through messy trial and error - but ribs were confusing in that regard. “Ooh, Nayru.”
“It’s a miracle that you’re alive,” Twilight informs him.
“Thank you,” Hyrule chirps, and then raises his voice slightly. “Wild!”
Wild raises his head from where he’s in the middle of starting a campfire. “Yeah?”
“I need you to break a leg,” Hyrule says, half serious.
“Okay!” Wild says, also half serious, getting to his feet. Twilight balks, getting to his feet in a swift motion and crossing what’s become their camp to lock Wild into a noogie.
“Don't you dare,” he warns the teenager squirming in his arms.
“What? No!” Warriors says. Hyrule shrugs, trying not to laugh. It escapes in an inconspicuous cough. “What?”
“I thought we were testing,” Hyrule says, trying to tamp down the teasing tone in his voice as Warriors pales a few shades. “I need broken bones, Captain.”
Warriors coughs into a hand. “How about. We wait until the next time one of us has a broken bone,” he suggests. “Then we can test it.”
“Okay,” Hyrule agrees, cheerfully. He fingers the book in his lap. Maybe, before then and now, he’d be able to get a few more diagrams like this - maybe they’d help as well.
–
“Try without setting it,” Warriors says, and Hyrule looks at him as though he’s gone insane. The man’s tipped his head back, wet hair dripping onto the stone floor of the cave. His face is grey - whether it’s from the pain of his arm being jostled as they ran for shelter, or just the dim lighting from the storm outside, Hyrule doesn’t know. “You’ve been practicing and studying a lot. I think you’ll be able to fix it without having to set it.”
“You’re really overestimating me here, Cap,” Hyrule says, almost laughing in his nervousness. Warriors’s arm is bent at an odd angle, and they don’t have any red potions or fairies on them. That leaves his magic, and while Hyrule’s confident enough in being able to fix the injury after setting it - again, it’s one he’s relatively familiar with, even if his method of healing had, in the past, usually left the bone slightly misshapen. But without setting it?! “If it heals wrong, we’ll have to rebreak it, you know.”
“I know,” Warriors says. Hyrule feels - or, maybe, the little Legend that’s formed in the corner of his brain - feels the urge to smack sense into him. “But it’s a good chance for you to assess your current skill, right?”
He raises his head to glance at Hyrule, who looks back with uncertainty. Then he tips his head back again. “If you really don’t want to, we can do it the regular way.”
“No, no, I…” He’s not one to back down from a challenge. None of them are. But at the sake of causing his friend pain… “Are you sure?”
“I wouldn’t have offered had I not been,” Warriors says gently.
“Okay.” Hyrule steels himself. He fishes the field medicine book out of his pouch, more for moral support than anything - he’d long since memorized it, and had gone on to study diagrams from books he’d borrowed from Legend and Four. “Okay.”
He presses a hand, gentle, to Warriors’s forearm, right next to the break. Then he closes his eyes, trying to draw on the bits of knowledge he’d gained by staring at angled images and Legend and Four’s explanations.
“Interrupt me if it starts to feel wrong,” he tells Warriors, who hums in response. Then -
He pushes.
This time, he opens his eyes halfway through, eyes locking onto the broken arm. Something underneath the skin is shifting - the bones, illuminated by the blue magic bleeding from Hyrule’s fingers, shift into place in a way he’s only seen with an actual fairy’s magic, the purple around the injury fading back into regular skin. A few more seconds, Hyrule’s head spinning with concentration and sudden exhaustion, and then…
“I think I did it,” he says, faintly, and lifts his hands. He reaches for where the break had been, gently pressing his thumb into the bone. It’s… not misshapen, not angled incorrectly. It looks normal. It feels normal.
“You did it,” Warriors says, and struggles a bit to sit up before wrapping his arms around Hyrule in a cold, wet embrace. “You did it!”
“I did it!” Hyrule cheers. He allows Warriors to pull him into his chest, both of them basically rolling back onto the damp cavern floor. “Wars!”
“Hyrule! This is huge, I’m so proud of you.” He’s squeezed slightly, and he manages to get his legs back underneath himself so that he’s sitting next to the Captain. “That looked exactly like how it does when a fairy heals a broken bone. You’re getting good at this.”
“I didn’t even have to set it!”
“You didn’t even have to set it!”
Warriors’s hand raises for a high-five, which Hyrule slaps enthusiastically. Then, ignoring the slight hesitance that’s always present in the back of his mind, he throws his arms around the Captain once more, grinning cheerfully. That was huge progress he’d made since joining the Chain - he’d gone from healing his own broken bones into misshapen amalgamations, to knowing to remove debris before healing an injury, to being able to set a bone properly before healing, to being able to set a bone with magic. It was insane. It was amazing. “Thank you for - for helping.”
“It was mostly you, kid.” Warriors’s hand settles in his hair and ruffles it, hitting them both with droplets of water. “Good job. I knew you could do it.”
It was a wonder what someone saying they believed in you could do for your self esteem. Hyrule flutters at the warm feeling in his chest, feeling his cheeks warm. Validation was a fun bonus to come of the stress that sentient company brought. He’d miss it, once this adventure was over - he’d gotten used to his eight loud companions. He’d come to care for them faster than he’d expected.
He ducks under Warriors’s arm, setting himself into the man’s side. He’s still too pale from the stab wounds Hyrule had healed earlier - it’d be best to wait out the storm before moving anywhere. Hyrule lets Warriors's body warmth leech into his skin, and settles in to wait.