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His reflection was staring at him again.
Four gritted his teeth as he walked behind Legend. The veteran’s mirror shield was awfully distracting half the time, if only because of the sheer force of the sunlight that bounced back directly into Four’s face. But on such a dreary day, in such a mountainous expanse of rock and dirt, there was barely any sun to speak of. Hiking up a mountain with his brothers–in–arms could often prove to be fun, so long as they found a way to pass the time.
But Four was relatively certain his reflection should not be staring at him like that.
Yes, that was his own face. Yes, he was frowning just like that, with the same crinkle of the forehead and the same squint of the eyes. Yes, he knew how mirrors worked. He wasn’t that dull.
But there was something so distinctly wrong about his reflection, something that made him absolutely sure that he wasn’t looking at himself. Maybe it was the turn at the corner of the lip. Maybe it was the hunch of the shoulders, something uncomfortable–looking and vaguely confused. Maybe it was the tilt of the ears: just slightly too low to be his own, with a line of pain running through them.
Maybe it was in the eyes themselves: maybe his reflection’s dark pupils held some hidden light that Four wasn’t supposed to discern, like a light trying to find its way out of some abyssal chasm.
Four stared at his reflection, entirely certain that he wasn’t the one staring back.
It made him wonder.
But Legend suddenly twisted, hopping around a cobble that had made its way into their path, and smirked playfully at him, and Four could see his face no more.
∆∆∆
His shadow was wrong again.
Four screeched to a halt on the side of the road and frowned. At nine–fifteen at night, with the sun almost entirely past the horizon, people were finishing lighting their lanterns for the midsummer’s celebration. Lights of all colors were strung between houses, around fences, between lampposts. The heroes had only arrived in the morning, but they’d tried to help with the final preparations nevertheless, and now with the party in full swing, they were all taking a much–needed break. Four had been walking back to the inn alone, having forgotten a favorite ring of his that managed his headaches.
But his shadow was wrong.
He looked up, trying to find the brightest source of light, which happened to come from the streetlamp just above him. It cast a luminous golden haze all around him, and his shadow would be right under him.
If it wasn’t wrong.
He stepped backwards, and the shadow stayed where it was. A perfect mirror, as always, of his own movements. Except it was just a little bit too long. It should be directly under him — behind him, even, now that he’d stepped behind the center of the light — but it stayed firmly in front of his feet, squat and almost below him and just a little bit too long. Not that noticeable, not really. Not if you weren’t looking closely at it.
Four had been studying it for years.
“What in Hyrule…” he muttered, toeing the ground with his foot. His shadow did the same. He stuck one leg out. His shadow did the same.
He waved.
His shadow’s hand stuttered as it copied him.
No way. Great green Farore, no way in hell.
A pounding interrupted his musing, and the streetlight flickered at the quake of the earth. Four looked up to see Twilight riding on Epona towards him, a grin on his face.
“Y’alright there, Smith?” he asked. “Thinking of joining everyone else soon?” He nodded back the way he had come, where a bright warm glow leached down the darkened cobbled street from the central square.
Four looked back at his shadow. It was below his feet. It was no longer wrong. “In a minute,” he replied, his voice as smooth as ice. “Gotta grab something.”
Twilight nodded, but then seemed to think. “You sure you’re okay?” he asked, softer. “Need anything?”
“I’m fine,” Four told him. “Just needed a walk.”
He jogged away sedately, and his shadow followed, just as shadows do.
∆∆∆
His reflection was the wrong color again.
Four craned his neck to look at the window of the shop they had just passed. He and Sky were out on shopping duty in Warriors’ bustling Castle Town, and just walking down the main street was a task, never mind staying together. Sky loved every minute of it, looking around with bright eyes and open curiosity. Four just tried to stick as close to him as possible.
But the flash of purple and grey stopped him. Barely noticing Sky slip away, he wove through the throng, searching for that hint of vibrancy. He found himself standing at the huge picture window of an antique store full of shining, well–kept odds and ends. He couldn’t focus on any of them.
In the window, his reflection stared back.
He tipped his head, and it tipped its own — a perfect mirror, just as reflections were. There were no hidden expressions, no strange angles. But was he imagining that dark violet hue to his hair when the light hit it just right? Was he imagining the washed–out neutrality of his tunic? The glint of mischief in deep red eyes — not amber, not ruby, red — or the shine of a hidden fang in the tilt of his lips?
“FOUR!” someone yelled, and Four whipped his head around. Sky met his eyes, and his shoulders slumped in relief as he fought to get through the crowd. “There you are! I thought I’d lost you! You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” Four looked back at the window, but the sun glanced off it with a bright flash. He blinked away the afterimages, but when he looked back, his reflection was gone. He could only see the bits and bobs just past the glass, legally unreachable.
“See something you like?” the Chosen Hero asked. He rifled through his wallet, oblivious. “I’m sure we can spare some rupees. You deserve it.”
“No.” Four turned away. “Nah, I didn’t see anything. Where to next?”
His reflection had all the right colors, the next time he checked.
∆∆∆
His shadow was in the floor again.
Four curled up in his bedroll, trying to quiet his thoughts amidst the snores of his brothers and the pounding of rain on the roof. He traced the grooves his shadow made on the wooden floors of the inn, fitting his fingers in the slight indents that rippled as he moved. In the pitch dark, he couldn’t summon up anything but a bone–deep longing for a boy he’d never see again.
He was still there. He was still with him.
He’d never be with him again.
In that endless black, Four found himself curling his hand into a fist and extending his pointer finger, pinky, and thumb. He pressed the sign into the wood, willing for it to be understood. Knowing it never would.
I love you, he mouthed.
The door to the room creaked open. Four withdrew his hand in a snap as a thin beam of light fell from the hall onto his bedroll and beyond. The door was eased shut, and the floorboards creaked as someone got into bed.
Four looked over. Halfway under the covers beside Time, with one hand holding the thin flame of a candle, Warriors caught the movement. He grimaced and signed sorry, his ring glinting in the candlelight. Just one ring. He’d never taken it off in Four’s presence.
Suddenly glad he’d withdrawn his hand, Four waved him off and settled back to bed. Warriors blew the candle out.
The wooden floor was as smooth as it had been that morning.
∆∆∆
His reflection was inverted again.
Four stared into the depths of the oasis, trying to make sense of his own face. His tunic, along with everyone else’s, lay on the hot boulders near the pool to dry in the Gerudo sun. Wild, Hyrule, and Wind were taking turns diving into the water, filling the hazy air with shrieks of laughter while the others rested in the shade of the palm trees.
Four ignored them, kneeling on the hot sand and studying the face that hovered over the bed of the pool.
He squinted at the image. Raised one eyebrow. Tilted one ear. His reflection did everything perfectly backwards.
I miss you, he mouthed. His reflection mouthed it backwards.
He raised one hand. His reflection raised the other. His fingertips hovered over the water, afraid to disturb the image. They rested just in front of his reflection’s solar plexus, and it did the same.
And he wished with all his might, but nothing happened. His reflection looked at him with an inverted soulfulness that mirrored his own.
A wave suddenly crashed over Four’s head, leaving him spitting and sputtering.
“Sorry!” Wind yelled, pointing at where Wild had just resurfaced from a huge cannonball in the middle of the oasis. The Champion waved apologetically.
Four glanced back down at his reflection, but within the ripples, his face lined up with itself. It was nothing. Because there was no one there.
And it was just himself staring back.
∆∆∆
None of it made any sense.
Four scanned the columns and archways, so pristine and pale against the puffy clouds and the vibrant backdrop of sky. White marble floors. Cracks in foundations. An indent in a pillar just the right size for a little boy who got thrown too hard. Spiraling staircases that led down to the realm of mortals and up further into the realm of gods.
A gust of wind played with his hair, so different from the last time he’d been there.
“Is this Skyloft?” Wind asked, eternally curious.
“No,” Sky told him. “No, it isn’t.”
“Ain’t from my world,” Twilight chipped in. “Can’t be.”
“I think I’d know if there was a tower like this in my world,” Wild piped up. There was the small snap! of his Sheikah Slate as he took a picture. Four couldn’t blame him.
“I know where we are,” he said, cutting them all off. “I know this place.”
A hush fell over all the heroes. They were always so patient with him, letting him take his time to formulate his thoughts into some semblance of coherency. He’d never offered a reason for his difficulty, and they had never demanded one. They just took him as he was.
His gratitude was something no words could describe.
But instead of offering a name for the place, he looked at Legend. “Turn around.”
Maybe it was his expression, or maybe it was his strange demeanor, but the veteran obeyed with nothing but a raised eyebrow. Four’s face stared back, but it wasn’t Four’s face. He was sure of it now, every fiber in agreement with every other. His reflection’s eyes lit up, and Four was not imagining the thread of pain in the line of his shoulders. He wasn’t imagining the little quirk of the lips.
He looked down at the shadow that stretched in front of his boots towards the stairwell before him. The sun was ahead of him, still in the east.
“Alright, then,” he whispered. “You’re welcome to lead me. I’ll follow.”
The shadow began to run up the stairs of the Tower of Winds, and like anyone would, Four went with it.
Ignoring the shouts of his brothers, he activated his Pegasus Boots and took the stairs two at a time, tearing past levels upon levels of open–air marble as he tried to keep up. Some walls were crumbling. Some stood proud and polished. Four ignored them all, his eyes fixed on the shadow that wound up and up the staircase.
The shadow turned a sharp corner into a sunlit room, and Four skidded to a halt. His boots slipped on the polished marble and he slammed into the doorway, but he paid the ache no heed, only clutching the frame as he caught his breath. He watched as his shadow elongated on the ground, stretching out towards the golden, upside–down frame of an enormous mirror.
The mirror.
Four’s breath caught. Alone and abandoned, gathering dust, the Dark Mirror lay precisely where it had been shattered just a few years before. Nothing in the room had been touched: the chair sat on its side, scratched and covered in glass, along with the unlit sconces on the walls and the drag marks on the ground that led to the base of the mirror. Obsidian glass was scattered in shards and particles all throughout, but Four barely noticed. His eyes were fixed on the shadow on the ground as it reached a hand towards the frame of the mirror.
The tips of illusory fingers barely brushed it.
Between one moment and the next, the shadow was untethered from his feet and sucked across the floor into the mirror. Four staggered, clutching the door frame as a feeling of loss settled so heavily over him that for a moment, he could barely breathe. He gasped and stumbled towards the golden frame, every part of himself in complete agreement.
We must see that mirror.
He skidded to his knees, not even feeling the shards that sliced into his knees, and tried to slip his fingers under the mirror. Glass bit into his hands, staining themselves red and grinning up at him with bloody teeth. He ignored them and, grunting with exertion, pulled harder at the mirror. Bit by bit, he pulled the mirror up to standing, and with a great cry that he barely heard over the blood roaring in his ears, he pushed it the rest of the way until it lay on the marble floor with its broken face available for all the worlds to see.
But it wasn’t broken.
Four stared at the frame. He had expected a near–empty frame with only a few pieces of glass clinging to the edges — hell, he could have even expected a fully intact mirror, complete with dark magic output that would serve as yet another siphon for Vaati and Ganon. Nothing could have prepared him for the dark portal that settled neatly into the frame, so similar to the ones he and the other heroes had been travelling through.
A gateway made by a Dark version of Link.
He wasn’t thinking. He really wasn’t. If he had been, he would’ve considered questions such as, where did it come from? Who made it? Does it really go where it might? Is it safe? Is this a trap?
He didn’t.
Instead, he plunged one hand into the portal as deep as it would go, steadying himself against the frame with the other. He groped around in the endless dark, searching, pleading, hoping against all hope—
A hand grasped his own.
Four pulled. It was like pulling taffy: something on the other side was stuck, and just couldn’t let go. He braced his heels against the mirror and reached with both hands, tugging on the hand as hard as he could. His muscles burned and sweat dripped into his eyes, but whatever had a hold on the hand — and the body behind it — gave way. With one last mighty tug, he yanked the creature out of the mirror, and they sprawled across the ground together in a tangled heap.
The body on top of him coughed, then hacked, then wheezed as it inhaled, trying to breathe after having forgotten how. Pressed against a dark tunic, Four could hear the rattling of its lungs as it gasped, and when he turned his head, he could see a mop of brilliant purple hair, and it wasn’t just a body, it was a boy. A boy made of shadows that had learned to walk in the light. A boy of darkness that turned away from the monsters in the closet. A boy of ghost stories and fairy tales, a boy that followed and one that led.
Four sat up, cradling the boy in his lap that was the most precious thing in the world. His shadow, brought back to life. His Shadow, alive.
His Shadow took a shaky breath — shaky, but controlled — and looked up at him. Those beautiful red eyes widened. “Rainbow?”
And oh, how he had missed him.
Four felt his face break into a grin, even as his vision grew blurry. “Hi,” he whispered. His hand ghosted over Shadow’s forehead, and the shade caught it, tired eyes blinking at it.
“You’re hurt,” he murmured, twisting the hand to look at the glass shards stuck in Four’s hand.
Four just shrugged. He pulled his hand away and cupped it around Shadow’s cheek instead. “Doesn’t matter,” he huffed. “You’re alive.”
When he kissed him, it felt like coming home.