#Sky: maybe he’s having trouble sleeping because everyone decided to discuss the largest/scariest things they fought *right before bedtime*

[undertheopensky]

We Are But Children 1

Whumptober Day 12: Insomnia

Characters: Four, Sky, lil bit of Hyrule and Legend

Trigger warnings: Past Violence to a Child

Read on Ao3!

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Tiny!Four sniffles.

Sky looks up sharply. Tiny!Four is curled in his older counterpart’s bedroll, and until now he’d thought he was sound asleep. Another shuddery breath shakes his small frame. Nightmare or homesick, Sky guesses, and sets aside the half-finished spoon to head over.

Laying a hand on the boy’s shoulder gets a flinch – definitely not asleep, then. “Hey, buddy,” Sky murmurs, “what’s wrong?”

The boy rolls over. Under the tear tracks, he’s tense and wary. Tiny!Four hadn’t taken to their explanations as well as Tiny!Legend, probably because he’s only eight and remembers being halfway into his first (and as far as Tiny!Four is concerned, only) adventure. He’d spent the first couple of hours calling for his grandfather and someone named ‘Ezlo’, and crying over the bird-shaped charm on the hood of his overtunic. He doesn’t know where he is or what’s happening. He doesn’t trust them.

But he’s still just eight years old and alone and scared in the dark. And Sky is warm enough and safe enough that when he draws close Tiny!Four reaches out, and lets himself be bundled up into Sky’s side.

“I’ve got you,” Sky says softly. “You’re alright. You wanna tell me what’s wrong?”

“I c-can’t sleep,” Tiny!Four wails, blessedly muffled in Sky’s shoulder. “Is cold and too dark and I heard a wolfos an’ I’m scared –”

“Shhhh,” Sky murmurs, rocking him gently. “I know. I heard the wolfos too, but I’m not scared. Any wolfos that’s out tonight will steer clear of us. Do you know why?”

Tiny!Four’s tear stained face peers up at him.

“We have a fire, and lots of people, and we don’t have any food out for them to smell. We’re scary, to them, and we don’t have anything they want. So if they find us, they’ll smell the smoke, and see all of us with our weapons, and not find anything to eat, and go off and hunt deer instead. We’ll be okay.”

“But what if they don’t? What if they think we’re food?”

“That’s why I’m awake,” Sky explains. It’s a bit awkward – Tiny!Four is tiny, but he’s still eight – but he manages to pick the boy up with minimal fumbling and balance him on his hip so that he can walk the perimeter. It’s not a real patrol, though Tiny!Four won’t know that. Sky walks slow and swaying, and talks in a low voice. “I’m watching for monsters, and listening for anything close by that might attack us. If I notice anything, I can wake everyone up so we can fight back.”

Tiny!Four clings to his collar for balance. “But won’t you get tired, staying awake all night? I’m never ‘llowed to do that, ‘cos Grandpa says I’ll be too sleepy t’ work in the forge.”

“Well, I won’t be staying up all night.” Tiny!Four stiffens. “We take turns, see? I have the early part of the night, Legend will take the middle, and Hyrule takes the last part, until dawn comes and everything is light again. That way, someone’s always on guard.”

Relaxing, Tiny!Four nods thoughtfully. “That’s smart. But how do you know when your turn is over?”

Sky can’t resist booping him lightly on the nose. “How do you know what time it is in the daytime?”

Tiny!Four stops staring cross-eyed at his own nose to say, “The sun! When it’s in the east, it’s morning time, an’ when it gets high overhead, it’s noon, an’ then it goes down towards the west in the after-noon. But there’s no sun at night, so how do you tell?”

“We read the stars,” Sky says. He’s getting tired, so he sits on one of the logs near the fire and moves Tiny!Four to his lap, then points up at the glittering trails of silver through midnight blue overhead. “The stars make shapes, and those shapes move through the sky, just like the sun does. So because the Great Loftwing is right overhead -” Sky sketches out the two long trails of stars that make up its wings, the fan of its tail and the curve of its beak - “I know it’s not quite time to wake Legend yet. When the Remlit rises to chase it - he points to the horizon where the constellation has yet to appear - and I can see the ears, I know it’s Legend’s turn. Pretty cool, huh?”

Tiny!Four nods, then startles when Hyrule hums agreement.

“Oh, sh-shoot, sorry, Hyrule. Did we wake you?”

“No,” Hyrule lies, “I was just listening to your star stories. They’re different to the ones I know.” He sits up and wriggles free of his bedroll.

Because loftwings were extinct in every other time, Sky supposes, though the knowledge makes his heart try to wring itself dry.

Hyrule must see the pain in his face because he doesn’t pursue the topic. He sits on the next log over, far enough away that Tiny!Four doesn’t go tense, and says to Sky, “Most of ours are monster-related, though I think The Lovers is a holdover from Time’s era.”

“Did Time really fight the moon?” Tiny!Four asks. “I wouldn’t wanna fight the moon. ‘S too big.”

“Oh?” says Sky. “So if the moon is too big, what’s the biggest thing you’ve ever fought?”

Tiny!Four snuggles back against Sky. “A gleerok.”

Hyrule goes white. “A gleeok?” he squeaks, at a volume that makes Sky wince.

Tiny!Four blinks. “No, the Minish called it a gleerok. I remember because it had a rock on its back.”

“What did it look like?” Sky prompts, since Hyrule appears to be having some kind of silent breakdown.

“Like a lava dragon,” says Tiny!Four. “I dunno if it had legs, it just swam around in in the lava and spat fireballs at me, and sometimes it would dive down an’ do something to flood the whole room with lava! A couple times I had to climb the walls so it wouldn’t burn my feet. The rocks were really hot though.” He pouts at his hands, clearly remembering burns.

Sky runs a hand through his hair, soothing. “That sounds pretty scary.”

“…it was.” Tiny!Four thumps his head down on Sky’s shoulder and sighs. “My eyes hurt.”

“You can close them if you like.”

“No. Then the bad things will get me.”

“Bad things?”

“…monsters. I see them all the time. Sometimes when I’m tired they hide in the shadows to scare me. ‘N when I close my eyes I know they’re there. He trembles in Sky’s arms.”

Sky’s heart breaks. This is why he feels so uncomfortable when Legend or Time talks about their early adventures. About being a small child in a world that’s determined to kill them. For every laughingly told story, there are just as many nightmares waiting in the dark.

And Sky has nightmares too, but he’d been a fully trained knight before even starting. He’d been seventeen, not eight.

At least he’d known what he was getting into.

Tiny!Four clings to the front of Sky’s tunic, shoving his face uncomfortably hard into his collarbone.

“Why does it still hurt, Sky?” he says, muffled. “Why won’t it stop?”

“Why won’t what stop, Four?” Sky asks. Tiny!Four doesn’t answer, maybe doesn’t hear him; he just cries into Sky’s collar.

“He’s overtired,” Legend says from right behind him, scaring the absolute shit out of Sky. Legend steadies him when he nearly falls off the log. “Sorry, thought you knew I was there.”

“Why would I know you were there?” Sky hisses at him. Legend rolls his eyes and steps over the log to sit next to him.

“I dunno, because you’re a battlefield master and have great awareness of your surroundings?” he says sarcastically. Sky swats at him, blushing.

Propping his chin on Sky’s shoulder, Tiny!Four looks at Legend with wet blue eyes. “What does that mean?”

“Sky is our best fighter when he doesn’t have his head in the clouds,” Legend tells him.

Sky is stuck between two different flavours of embarrassment and doesn’t know what to do with it. “Legend, don’t exaggerate! I’m not that bad.”

Legend stares at him. “Last week you fell in a ditch because you were walking with your eyes closed.”

Sky flushes. “That was -”

“When me and Warriors were arguing about which way to go you fell asleep standing up and fell on Wild.”

“Hey, we’d just been switched from the middle of the night to mid-morning, we were all exhausted -”

“When we were last signing into an inn you forgot how to spell your own name.”

Finally, Tiny!Four giggles. “You grumble like Ezlo does.”

Fortunately all Legend does is raise an eyebrow. “Oh do I? Does Ezlo have a lot to grumble about, then?”

“I think he’s just grumpy. He complains when I don’t do what he says, and he complains when I do do what he says. An’ he doesn’t like waiting for me to do stuff, like when I can’t reach a switch and haveta find somethin’ to hit it with, or a box to stand on.”

“And he can’t just flip those switches himself?”

“No. Ezlo doesn’t have any hands.”

“Why’s that?”

“B’cause he’s a hat.” Tiny!Four yawns, wide and unselfconscious. He lays his head back down on Sky’s shoulder, while his blinks get slower and sleepier. “A really cranky hat.”

Tiny!Four’s clearly still young enough that falling asleep on a caregiver’s shoulder is a comfort. Sky’s glad he still has that, in the face of nightmares and monsters. It doesn’t take much more - a little rocking, more head strokes - before he’s finally out, loose in Sky’s arms and breathing softly.

Hyrule sits back with an exaggeratedly soft sigh. “Phew. Thank goodness.”

Sky nods, exhausted.

“He’s cute, but I hope he’s not this hard to put to bed every night,” says Legend, leaning forward the tuck a bit of loose hair behind Tiny!Four’s ear.

“What was he saying about Ezlo being a hat?” Hyrule says.

“I have no idea. We can try asking him in the morning, if he’s feeling more comfortable - or we can ask when he turns back.” Legend stretches his arms over his head. “Anyway, Sky, Hyrule, you two should go to bed - it’s my turn now. Take the kid with you, though, I am not babysitting.”

Sky rolls his eyes - like they were supposed to not notice how soft and gentle Legend had been with a miserable child? - but he’s careful as he stands with Tiny!Four still curled against him. There’s a moment where he’s afraid he’ll wake up again, as he set him down in Four’s bedroll, but the boy just snuffles and rolls himself up in the blankets.

Sky tucks the edges around him and spends a moment looking at his face, soft and lax in sleep. He looks so young.

The thing is. Despite the name, Tiny!Four is the exact same size as Normal!Four. He’s clearly younger, but it’s all in the lines of his face, the way he stands and talks and holds himself. Four’s frame hadn’t been changed by the wizzrobe. His mind, yes, and he’s missing some scars, but Four’s body is eerily unchanged.

It makes Sky uneasy, to be honest.

At the very least, Sky thinks, they know there’s a time limit. Legend took just three days to shift back – three strained, nerve-wracking days – and Hyrule is pretty sure Four will be the same.

Maybe after, they’ll get some answers.

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Read Part 2 here!