Chapter Text
“When I find the motherfucker who sold me that damn map, I’m going to skin him.” Shrike was trying very hard not to think about the fact that she was unlikely to live long enough to find the motherfucker who’d sold her that damn map. “Prime hunting area my ass. No monsters for miles around, damn his fucking eyes. All dangerous areas clearly marked, that shit-eating bastard.”
The map had been accurate enough when it came to topography, but it had failed to include a few key features of the landscape. One being the treacherous hills and ridges, mostly made up of loose shale deposits, that looked stable right up until you put your weight on them and the whole thing went sliding down the slope. The other was the fact that there was a monster camp smack in the middle of the ruins. She’d run into the former while attempting to avoid the latter, and was now stuck at the bottom of a treacherously steep slope, that had looked gentle and grassy right up until she put a foot wrong and it turned out to be hiding a drop-off in the shrubbery.
She wasn’t getting back up it anytime soon, she knew that much. Her ankle was either broken or sprained. She couldn’t tell which, but it was very swollen and it hurt like hell. There was a little creek running through here, and she’d dragged herself over to it and immersed her ankle in it, thinking that was probably one of the things you were supposed to do. How did you tell the difference between a sprain and a break anyway? Did one hurt more? Was she supposed to wrap it, or would that make it worse?
Anyway, she’d soaked her ankle until it hurt less, and then crawled back to her pack, trying to keep her weight off it. If all the trees weren’t up at the top of the hill maybe she could have made herself a crutch, but for now she was stuck waiting for help. She’d met a pair of sisters who foraged for truffles on the road a few days back, maybe they’d pass through here and she could flag them down.
She looked up hopefully at the sound of someone making their way through the foliage, down a gentler section of the slope than she’d taken to get here. It was hard to tell who was more surprised, her, or the moblin who emerged from the trees.
It raised its club. She raised her bow and loosed an arrow, dimly thankful for the instincts that made her hands take over and move without needing input from her brain, which was stuck in a loop of “fuck fuck fuck.” But in her hurry, the arrow went speeding past its head instead of burying itself between the moblin’s eyes where she’d wanted it. She nocked another arrow without looking and raised her voice to pretend that had been a warning shot instead of a miss.
“Back off, or the next one goes through your eye,” she threatened. Everyone knew monsters understood a few words of Hylian, even if all they usually spoke in was unintelligible grunts and snarls. “I’m already a good shot, and I can’t miss at this range.” It seemed to understand her, since it didn’t come closer, but it didn’t back off either.
“Hylian small. Weak.” It’s words trailed off into a series of guttural snarls that might have been words or just animal growls, long lips rising away from its snout to bare fangs as long as her fingers.
“An arrow is small too, but we can both kill you anyway,” she retorted. “Hylian is strong enough to hold a bow with a fifty pound draw weight, which makes the arrow a lot more likely to kill you.” It snorted explosively, hefting its club at her.
“Club kill more.”
“Not if you can’t get close enough to use it.”
“Hylian sleep.”
“With one eye open,” she retorted. “And my bow next to me. I see or hear anything, I’ll shoot first and shoot again second.”
The moblin considered it anyway. She could see its snout twitch and its beady little eyes narrow as whatever passed for its thoughts whirred away in its head, before it slammed its club into a nearby sapling with a roar. The little tree shattered. She had to work to keep her expression blank. Her brain was still scrabbling in circles of “fuck fuck fuck” and not providing much help with that.
“I’m not impressed. Get.” It let out one last snarl that she swore sounded sulky before turning and leaving. She held the arrow nocked for another minute before relaxing it. The whole exchange couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes, but her arms were shaking at having held the bow at full draw for so long. (At least she told herself that was why.)
She might be useless with a sword, but stealth and her skill with a bow and arrow had always been enough to keep her safe when she was out roaming the wild. She’d had to learn the skills, growing up the oldest of four children, since her father had needed help with his hunting to feed them all. She’d honed them in her travels, and they’d stood her in good stead. The same skill she used to sneak up on a deer could be used to sneak around a monster camp. But now she felt unpleasantly like the prey rather than the predator. More specifically, like a sitting duck. If the moblin went back for the rest of its camp and they all rushed her, her skill with a bow and arrow wasn’t going to help her much, and she couldn’t run. She was just going to have to hope their attention spans were as short as she’d heard, and that it would have forgotten about her by the time it got back to camp.
She had always been able to sleep lightly when she was out on the road. That night she woke not to noise but to silence, the silence of crickets and night-calling birds falling quiet as something bigger than them passed by. And the silence of someone trying to sneak into her camp. Her eyes flew open as she sat up and grabbed her bow in a single smooth motion. Her father would have been impressed. Too bad she hadn’t had the foresight to leave her arrows just as close to hand.
“Who’s there?” she demanded squinting into the dark, her banked fire just enough light to make everything look like a threatening shadow. She had to grope around for her quiver, and the first arrow she fired at the lumpy silhouette that raised its head at her call was too hasty, poorly aimed in bad light, just trying to keep the intruder startled enough not to come closer. The bokoblin (she could see it more clearly now, the big ragged ears and hunched posture) squealed in alarm and bolted with an uneven, bumpy gait. She kept the bow raised, arrow nocked, for another couple of minutes, ears and eyes straining for the slightest hint of returning monsters.
She nearly wasted an arrow jumping when the wind blew something down the hill at her from the direction the bokoblin had come from. But it was just a rattle of apples bumping down the hill, followed by something that spun and skipped off the ground. She reached out to catch it before the wind could blow it away entirely. It was a crudely woven basket, made from the thick blades of the tall grass that grew so abundantly around here. For one absurd moment, she thought it was one of the little baskets children wove for the spring celebration, to fill with flowers and berries, then sneak onto people’s windowsills. It was just big enough to hold a few apples, and apparently had, as the apples that had finally settled on the ground nearby were clearly freshly picked.
She snorted and tossed the basket away. So it’d been out gathering food and decided it might as well help itself to her supplies while she slept, had it? Nice try.
She spent the rest of the night dozing upright against her pack, making sure that her quiver was more easily to hand this time, but nothing came back.
By the next morning, she was starting to worry about firewood. She should probably have been worrying about food, but there was water here and you died of thirst a lot faster than hunger, and you died even faster from the things a fire kept away. There’d been enough deadwood collected down here for her to crawl around and collect, but probably not enough to last her the recovery period for a sprained ankle, and definitely not enough to recover from a broken ankle. (Actually, the amount of driftwood she’d found down here argued that the creek got a lot bigger than this, so there was a third possibility that there’d be a heavy rain and she’d drown in a flash flood before anything else got her.) Besides, most of her food was preserved, not fresh, and it needed cooking to make it palatable. She guessed she could eat the dried oats she’d brought for porridge as they were, but she wasn’t looking forward to it. She’d eaten the three apples, core and all, for breakfast because with the bruising they’d gotten rolling down the hill they wouldn’t last long anyway. She wasn’t going to turn her nose up at free food, even if it was kind of stolen.
She jumped at the sound of something moving towards her, which she realized was another apple rolling down the hill at her, and that at that angle someone had to have set it rolling. Her first thought was distraction, ambush, and she raised the bow up, looking wildly around for the charge she was expecting. She’d take that moblin bastard out with her like she’d promised if nothing else. But no enemies appeared, and the apple came to a slow rolling stop by her feet. Another one came rolling down the hill and still made her jump a little, but nothing.
“Who’s there?” she called suspiciously.
“There,” a harsh voice echoed her, and that really did make her jump again. A shape rose from behind a jumble of rocks, ragged ears and a short snout. She swung her bow up to aim and it ducked down again. “Whoz there,” it called again. “Broc there.” She kept her bow aimed steadily at the spot in the rocks where it had vanished, glancing wildly over her shoulders to the left and right. If this was a distraction, it was a hell of a good one. The bokoblin didn’t come out from behind the rocks again, but a clawed red hand emerged and rolled another apple down the slope at her. She looked with sudden suspicion at the first one. Did bokoblins have poison?
“If you’re trying to poison me, I’m not going to eat this,” she called up the hill for good measure.
“No hurt. Shh, shh, no hurt.” She’d never heard a bokoblin offer anything like parley before, but in the end it was the absurdity of being shushed at like a nervous horse that finally made her lower her bow. The bokoblin must have been watching through a gap in the rocks, because a moment later it slowly raised its head to look down at her again. She almost swung the bow up again when it bared its teeth at her, until she realized it was grinning. “No hurt?”
“No hurt,” she echoed suspiciously. She didn’t put the bow down, but that seemed to be enough for it, as it began makings its way slowly down the hill. At first she thought it was trying to put her at ease by going slow, until she realized that one of its legs was twisted, the foot held stiffly and at an odd angle. It couldn’t move fast. That did make her feel a little better, but it was strange too. She’d never seen an injured bokoblin before; or rather she’d never seen one with evidence of a healed injury. They came back even if they died with every rise of the blood moon. Did it not heal them when that happened?
It came to a stop a few yards away from her. Far away enough that it couldn’t lunge at her, especially not with that foot, but still easily within bow range. It seemed a surprisingly sophisticated gesture to put her at ease from a monster.
“No hurt,” it repeated, crouching down to put itself on her level. “Broc there.”
“What… about the rocks?” she asked now truly baffled.
“Broc,” it repeated, tapping its chest. “Boko, Broc. Hylian….?” It paused, gesturing at her. It was was telling her its name, she finally realized. And asking for hers.
“Shrike,” she answered finally, after what was probably too long a pause.
“Shrike hurt there?” it asked, tapping its head pointedly, and she bristled when she realized the teeth were showing again in an amused smile.
“My head is fine,” she snapped, which only seemed to amuse it more.
“Shrike heyid hurt if Shrike not know Shrike.”
She was trying very hard to be outraged at the fact that a bokoblin of all things was insulting her intelligence, but… the stupid joke just reminded her so much of the equally stupid jokes her little brother had used to make whenever he could possibly manage. He’d used to get her every damn time she came down for breakfast with “My name’s not ‘morning’ it’s Kent! Did you forget me in just one night?” Even the smile, red and be-fanged as it was, had something of the same impish quality, and that was what finally let an amused snort escape from her, that quickly turned onto a full on laugh, not even at the joke so much as the absurdity of the situation, building into a nearly hysterical relief of tension until she was gasping for breath and wiping tears from her eyes. She ignored the look of concern the bokoblin was giving her as she caught her breath. (Until that moment, she hadn’t known they could look concerned about anything but their prey escaping.)
“Shrike leg hurt?”
“I… yeah. I fell.” She gestured up towards the steeper slope she’d slipped down. “Hurt my leg. Hey!” She yanked her leg back as the bokoblin leaned forward and reached for it.
“Shh. No hurt,” it repeated. “Broc see. Broc… not hurt?” It looked frustrated, rattling off a string of sharp, barking words she couldn’t recognize. When she clearly didn’t understand, it leaned down and picked up a stick and a piece of grass. “Hurt.” It snapped the stick in two. “Not hurt.” It fit the two pieces back together and wound the grass around the break. “Broc not hurt.”
“Fix?” she asked incredulously. “You can fix it?”
“Ficks?”
“You… your leg.” She pointed. “It was hurt. You fixed it?”
“Yes! Fix!” Its ears flapped excitedly. “Broc leg...” It pulled the sticks apart again, holding them at an angle. “Hurt like this. Broc fix. Not all fix. Broc fix boko, mob… fix hylian?” He tilted his head quizzically. “Broc fix good,” he assured her. “Broc leg, long time. One fix. Now, Broc fix, fix, fix, fix. Shrike leg not like Broc leg.”
She hesitated. One the one hand, it clearly hadn’t been able to heal its leg all the way. On the other other hand, the demonstration with the twigs had looked pretty bad, and if she’d been in that situation, trying to straighten a compound fracture on herself with no anesthetic, she probably wouldn’t do so well either. And it sounded like it had been a long time ago too.
“You fix a lot of broken bones?” she asked. “Lots of other bokoblins and moblins?”
“Yes, fix lots,” he said proudly. “Broc fix in band, not fight. Fix things, make things… Long time, fix bokos not Broc band. Not now,” he said, ears drooping a little sadly. “Bands less. Bands stay, see less, move less.” He glanced over her and visibly twitched his ears up into a more neutral position again, crinkling his eyes at her in what she was starting to get the idea was the equivalent of a fake smile. “Broc fix. Good fix for Shrike.” And for reasons that she couldn’t adequately explain, she wanted to trust him when he said it.
“Okay. If you think you can fix it….” This time when Broc leaned in, she didn’t pull away, even from the uncomfortable feeling of alien hands poking and prodding at her ankle with surprising gentleness, although she had to keep herself from jumping every time the blunt claws pressed in. Broc pressed down a little too hard, making her yelp, and drew in the sharp hissing breath that seemed to be a universal sign of dismay in all Hyrule’s species.
“Bad,” was the pronunciation. She’d expected that, already knew it, but somehow it was worse to hear it from someone else. “Broken. Boko live.” Broc tapped the twisted leg in demonstration. “Other things not live. If deer leg bad, this bad, Broc is...” Apparently the sharp drawing of a finger across a throat was also a universal gesture. “Hylian live? Or…?”
“A hylian won’t die from a broken ankle,” she said. “I’m not a deer.”
She remembered, a long time ago when she was a child, her father complaining about taking down a deer some other hunter had already shot. ‘Poor thing was staggering through the woods, couldn’t even see where it was going, just looking for a place to lay down and die. Didn’t know it was already dead.’ He’d turned that into a lesson on why she should always make sure that anything she shot she took down clean, even if she had to track it ten miles to put another arrow in it. He’d emphasized it was about mercy, but it had probably been more because they couldn’t afford to throw away arrows without the meat to show for it. It had stuck regardless. She’d had nightmares about staggering through the woods at night, pierced and bleeding and dead without knowing it, but it had stuck. And here she was now, wounded and downed and wondering whether the one in front of her had tracked her down to help her, or give her the hunter’s mercy.
“It won’t kill me,” she repeated, wondering who she was trying to convince.
“Good.” He patted her leg gently, like someone might do with a nervous horse. “Shrike tough, like boko! Shrike stay, Broc go, bring fix.”
The more she watched him, as he scrambled back up the hill, the more she wondered whether his old injury was actually as much of a disability as she’d thought, or if it had been a show to put her at ease. He wasn’t as fast as the other bokoblins she’d seen, but he still seemed to get up the slope quicker than she would have expected, grabbing rock handholds and protruding roots to help him with the ease of long practice.
He was back about twenty minutes later, with another one of those grass baskets. This one seemed to be lined with leaves, and he was holding it like there was something heavy inside. He sat down in front of her ankle again.
“Good fix for hurt leg,” he told her proudly, gesturing for her to roll up her leggings away from her injured ankle, and remove her boot. She did so a little dubiously.
“Some hurt,” he warmed her, putting his hands on her ankle. “Fix.” She folded over the sleeve of her jacket and bit down on it, pretty sure she knew what was about to happen.
“Do it,” she said through gritted teeth. The jacket sleeve didn’t do much to muffle the pained howl she made when he set the bone properly, but at least it kept her from biting through her own tongue.
“Shh, shh,” she distantly heard him saying. He was patting something onto her ankle now, something cool and soothing that seemed to leach the pain away… As the red haze of pain slowly faded, she realized it was the contents of the basket, a mass of white clay with crushed herbs mixed into it that he was packing on like a poultice. It probably was, she realized, although the white clay bore a resemblance to the white clay markings she’d seen the moblins wearing. She supposed it would probably make a decent cast once it dried, as long as she didn’t move too much.
“Hey, Broc?” she asked. He hummed an assent, looking up as he finished packing the clay around her ankle. “How did you hurt your leg?”
“Broc fall from...” he paused, at a word that he didn’t know in Hylian. “Bwreehee.” He blew the word out with his breath in a horselike whinny, and then drummed his hands on the ground to imitate the thunder of hooves.
“A horse,” she said, taking half of the stick he’d previously broken and drawing a quick sketch of one in the dirt.
“Yes. Horawrse.” He nodded, taking the stick to draw a blaze on the nose and a single sock on a hind foot. She wasn’t sure why he thought it was important for her to know the horse’s pattern; maybe he wanted to make sure she knew he’d been thrown by one of the wild mustangs, and not by one of the tamer spotted feral horses?
No, she realized a moment later, as he added on a semblance of mane and tail flowing as though mid-gallop, the tip of his tongue lolling out from behind a fang in concentration. He was doing it for the simple enjoyment of it.
“You like horses? Bwreehee?” she asked.
“Bwreehee,” he repeated absently, putting his emphasis on the “ree” where she’d been stressing the “hee” instead. “Yes. Broc… friend horses. Horses scared, hurt, horses kick. Broc go slow, no hurt. Friend.” He was giving her a particularly intent look, poised, waiting.
“Friend,” she repeated, hoping he’d take the meaning she was trying to give it. “I want to know your word. Can you… tell me how to call you friend?” He beamed, and she was pretty sure that despite the language gap, he understood her perfectly.