Chapter Text
“Wind,” Warriors said, with the patience of a person that has stood in place for multiple hours on guard duty in direct summer sunlight more than once and only slightly entertained malicious thoughts towards his fellow man.
Wind, draped halfway across Warrior’s torso, snoring into his own arms, did not reply.
“Wind.”
Snoooore.
Twilight, across the inn, halfway through pulling on his boots, snickered unhelpfully. A flurry of echoing mirth gave away the peanut gallery; out of sight, but certainly not out of hearing.
Useless, the lot of them.
Wind snuffled in his sleep, burying his nose deeper into the crook of his arms and curling up a bit on himself for a moment, before arching out into what could only be described as a kitten stretch, yawning wide enough to show off a chipped tooth before going limp again.
This also had the effect of not removing his wing from Warrior’s face, but, rather, cramming it up right underneath his nose.
Warriors, manfully, did not give in to the urge to sneeze.
(It was not an easy urge to resist. Wind’s wings were fluffy, full of baby down and oh Golden Three he can feel it tickling the inside of his nose-)
“Just dump him off,” Twilight said, continuing to offer absolutely no help whatsoever beyond keeping his voice down low, and also continuing not to hide his grin at Warrior’s dire circumstances at all, in the very slightest, even as he started lacing up the back of his tunic around the wing-slits, which is just obnoxious considering how much of a bitch those things are to do up blind like that and also-
“I can absolutely not do that,” Warriors hissed at him, and wished Twilight was about, oh, five feet closer so that he could give him a good whack with his free wing.
Of course, wishes don’t come true when you’ve been abandoned by the Goddesses, which Warriors clearly has been.
Wind shifted again. So did his wing. The down tickled on the inside of his nose dangerously; Warriors held his breath, and accidentally got some in his mouth as a result.
Ack.
“He weighs maybe seventy pounds soaking wet,” piped up part of the peanut gallery, and the way Four popped into view- half-dressed and still sporting a mess of bedhead, one of his own feathers caught up in the tangles of his hair and not even pretending he hasn’t been lurking and laughing at Warrior’s misfortune this entire time is a personal attack on him, personally. “A bokoblin weighs more than him. You can absolutely dump him off of you.”
Scandal. Outrage. Betrayal.
“I cannot,” Warriors said, slowly and patiently, and also through a mouthful of down so actually pretty muffled, “because that would damn my soul to the dark world forever, and Hyrule needs that not to happen so it doesn’t get eaten by darkness again.”
“Huh?” Hyrule’s head lifted up from where he, alone among the heartless curs he calls brothers, was not, actually, laughing at Warrior’s suffering, but rather digging through his bag with the single-minded focus that either meant there was going to be a room search later today, or there was a bag clean-out due soon.
“Kingdom,” Warriors, Four, Twilight, and the still-unseen peanut gallery- hi there, Wild and Legend, Warriors can hear you you realize- all chorused at once in an act of well-practiced unison.
“Ah,” Hyrule went back to his attempts to dig a hole through the middle of his bag, uncovered wings flickering absently, and, as a consequence, showering the floorboards beneath him with a gentle glittering of fairy dust.
… Wild’s going to have to go after that with his broom before they leave.
“He’s not a cat, your soul’s fine.” Twilight went right back to the attack, leaning right up against the doorframe. Warriors could tell the exact moment he noticed the feather caught in Four’s hair; Twilight's hands twitched, and he immediately folded them against his chest.
“Plus, he bounces,” Four added, utterly unaware- or possibly fully aware, it was hard to tell with Four sometimes- that Twilight was actively fighting off the urge to pluck the feather out of his hair behind him. “... You could at least shove his wing out your mouth.”
Warriors let his head fall down with an unsatisfying poff onto the bed. “There. Wing removed,” he said, and squinted up at Legend and Wild, now visible from this new viewpoint.
Wild, smiling angelically, waved at him. With both hands, clearly displaying that his slate was not in them.
Warriors was not fooled.
“I can see that thing propped up against your knee,” Warriors said flatly.
“What thing?” Wild asked sweetly, blatantly picking up his slate and moving it so that it stood up against a pillow, still pointing at the tangle limbs and misfortune that was Wind and Warriors.
Legend, arched into a stretch that had him up on the tips of his toes and his feathers spread far enough to brush the walls, snickered, and brought his wings back in with a crisp, neat snap that Warriors will admit over his own dead body that he envied the control of.
Neither of them so much as twitched a helpfully-inclined muscle in his direction.
Oh, Goddesses above. Oh benevolent overseers of Hyrule. Where are you now, in your defender’s time of need? Did his service to the realm mean naught to those lofty, divine beings? Why, divine Goddesses, are you allowing his sworn brothers to do this to him? Truely, there must be no hope left in the land-
“Okay, okay,” Twilight finally snorted and moved in. “By Ordona’s Grace. You could give street players a run for their money, I swear.”
“Ha ha,” Warriors groused, and absolutely didn’t wheeze a little in relief when Twilight carefully scooped Wind up, freeing Warrior’s chest and breathing passages from the sleepy weight of a teenager and a very fluffy sneezing hazard respectively.
Twilight hummed contemplatively for a moment, side-eying Warriors as he levered himself upright and to his feet, shaking himself out in a full-body ruffle that managed to kick up what was, perhaps, a mildly concerning amount of down, and at least four feathers that… weren’t his, actually, among about three others that were.
… Augh. If the wildly jumping seasons between portals like this actually managed to set off early molting in their group, Warriors is going to be pissed. And he probably wouldn’t be the only one in a mood, either- molting off-schedule was uncomfortable.
Shaking that thought off, Warriors reached out for Wind, starting to say, “Here, let’s just put him-”
Twilight, unceremoniously, dumped Wind on the bed.
Wind bolted awake with a screech and a wild flailing of limbs, and as Warriors, left with a half-spoken sentence and the indignant thought of well all that effort of trying to wake him up gently just enough to move his wing out the way was CLEARLY wasted Twilight WHY- was left standing there, betrayed by his sworn brother again, Wind managed to lurch upright on the bed.
“Good-”
Wind took about two seconds to blink the sleep from his eyes, and locked on to his target.
Twilight hit the other bed with an oof and a laugh as a very small sailor tackled him around the middle, and Wild leapt to snatch up his slate and vacate the mattress in favor of perching with Hyrule at the table as they start to roll around, Twilight doing his level best to catch Wind in a headlock. Wind, unsurprisingly, continually managed to squirm out of every single one like the slippery little eel he is.
Warriors looked up at the ceiling. Contemplated praying to the gods.
Something broke on the bedside table. Neither Twilight or Wind stopped in their roughhousing.
“Why,” he settled for instead, cast out into the room at large.
“This wouldn’t have happened if you were just willing to dump Wind on the floor yourself,” Four said from, like, his hip, the slow, mock-pitying shake of his head audible in his voice.
“I was trying to let him keep sleeping.”
Four blinked, slow, placid, and a taunt.
“Should’ve just dumped him on the floor,” he repeated.
Warriors considered.
Then he reached out, snapped up the feather out of Four’s hair, and went on the attack.
“You- HEY-”
“HEY TWI. CATCH.”
A scoop. A squawk. A soaring flight across the room.
Without missing a beat, Twilight turned mid-heckling of Wind, and caught Four out of the air, narrowly avoiding being smacked in the nose with a flailing wing.
Four blew out a mouthful of hair, and pinned Twilight with a forbidding glare that would be so much more intimidating if Twilight wasn’t, essentially, cradling him like a baby. “Twilig-”
Twilight dumped him on top of Wind.
Twin squawks of dismay and outrage gave word enough to what the two of them thought of that.
At his shoulder, a hum- Warriors glanced over, and the bright colors of Legend settled beside him.
“Well, that’s Four settled,” Legend shook out his wrists with the absent-minded thoughtlessness of old habit before crossing his arms and angling an inquisitive eyebrow at Warriors. “You gonna let Twilight just get away with that?”
“Just wait,” Warriors said pleasantly.
At that moment, Four surfaced from the tangle, managing through some unholy magic to completely evade Twilight’s grabbing arm to end up perching on the base of the bed board, feathers ruffled out and puffing up in straggly disarray.
“Get his knees,” he snapped at Wind, and didn’t wait for a reply before diving at Twilight’s shoulders.
Wind obeyed with what some would, perhaps, call somewhat excessive glee.
And down went the behemoth, flapping his giant wings.
Something makes another breaking sound. Warriors, intentionally, doesn’t look to see what it is.
“We’re going to have to pay for those, you know,” Hyrule observed, sliding up beside with his bag over his shoulder, cloak back over his wings, watching the tussle with avid interest.
Warriors hummed. Twilight was now tangled up hopelessly in blankets and the two smallest members of their group, and- in an act of great cosmic righteousness-
Wind’s fluffy, downy wing was right in Twilight’s face, unavoidably close enough to his nose for inhaling. Warriors held his breath, and watched, and waited with more anticipation he’d felt on some war campaigns-
Twilight sneezed. Right into the wing that was in his face.
Wind recoiled immediately and frantically from the tussle, hopping around instead and flapping the offended wing wildly, chanting, “ Ew ew ew that’s GROSS Twilight ew-”
Four, even more a mess now, clawed his way up from being thrown off the bed with narrow, plotting eyes. Part Twilight’s way, and part Warrior’s way, but…
“Worth it,” Warriors decided, and didn’t even have to fake a smile when he handed over what turned out to be triple the room cost to the innkeeper in payment for the damages they managed to cause.
(Two weeks later, it felt a little less worth it when Four’s revenge plot hit.
It involved multiple pairs of strength bracelets, Warriors himself, and the pond outside of Wild’s house, where they had so happened to be staying for a few days.
It took hours of preening to get all the duckweed out. Hours, Four!
“You deserved it,” Four said flatly, the strength bracelets gleaming malevolently upon his arms. The oilslick gleam of his feathers somehow felt particularly ominous at this angle- the angle in question being Four, standing on the second floor, while Warriors was stuck looking up at him from the ground floor.
“But duckweed, though,” Warriors said plaintively. He resisted the urge to shake out his wings again. There were no dried bits of itchy plant matter left in his wings. Wind and Sky had helped him look.
“Deserved,” Four declared, and stalked away.)