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His first memory was of being small, cold, and utterly alone, lying in a dark alleyway and waiting for fate to catch up with him.
He had long since passed the point of feeling anything other than apathy as he waited for something to finish him off–the illness, lack of food and water, or maybe the sheer loneliness of being forgotten in such a manner- when he heard what sounded like two separate pairs of footsteps slow and then stop in front of him. Weird. Usually people just passed him by. He tried to raise his head, matted blonde hair covering most of his face and obscuring his vision, but found that to be too much of an impossible task. He settled for simply turning his head to look up at the shadowy figures looming over him.
They had a brief conversation in a language that was both familiar and completely unintelligible, and then one of them–the shorter one, yet whoever it was seemed to exude more of an air of authority compared to their companion–stretched out a single gloved hand to him. They addressed him then, speaking a language he could actually understand with a rough, raspy voice that echoed around in his head even after they’d finished talking.
“C’mon, kid. Do you want to live or not?”
Somehow he managed to muster up enough strength to raise his arm and take the stranger’s hand, utterly unaware of the path he’d unknowingly set himself down.
-/-/-/-/-
Many years had passed since Master had picked him off the street and given him a purpose. He rarely thought about Before now. Why should he need to? Who he used to be was no longer relevant. Five years of his life had been spent waiting for the day he woke up and took Master’s hand. And slowly, that girl had faded until he no longer remembered that he had ever been anybody but himself. Master had never made a big deal out of the fact that he had ever been Her in the first place.
“You’re my shadow, kid,” Master used to tell him. “Who you were matters less than who you will be.”
Master had even given him a new name, though as he got older and he grew into his role as Master’s shadow–even going as far as to take Master’s place for unimportant events and therefore answering to Master’s name–he heard it spoken by others less and less.
But that didn’t mean he wasn’t Sheik.
Most of the clan knew him and Master to be one and the same, but Sheik knew the truth. No matter how long he spent pretending to be Master, he remained Sheik at his core. Just as he had been Sheik before she knew who he was, he would be Sheik even as he stood up in front of the clan and led them in Master’s place.
As Sheik had gotten older, he’d changed in ways that made it harder to be Master’s shadow. At first he’d been upset by that and that alone, for if he could not fulfill his purpose he was as good as worthless, but he’d slowly begun to realize that he disliked it because it wasn’t who he really was, even when he disregarded what Master had told him he should be. That was much harder to do, of course. Even the thought of attempting it felt… treasonous.
So, Sheik rarely entertained the idea of himself outside of an extension of Master’s will, and he was quite happy that way. After all, if he didn’t think about the ways his body felt wrong, then it couldn’t bother him. Weapons had no such worries about the length of their blade or the keenness of their edge, and as a living weapon himself he had no place for being unbalanced by unnecessary weight on his chest or disgusted by curves where there should be none.
Unfortunately, there were days when such a thing was unavoidable. Major appearances in front of the clan, when Sheik would take Master’s place as usual (such occurrences seemed to be happening more and more these days, as Master had begun to fear assassination with increasingly more intensity as time went on), were always the worst. Normally he was confined to Master’s rooms in the hideout as a safety precaution–it would not do for the clan to discover who he was, for fear of them connecting the dots and making Master look even weaker than he already was, thanks to the terror at the heart of why Sheik existed in the first place–so he didn’t have to worry about how others would perceive him. This only made days when he had to be aware of how he appeared to others hurt worse, though Sheik would never admit that to anybody.
He usually made it through days like that by vanishing far into himself and fully sinking into the facade he’d spent years carefully building that allowed him to fully become Master, if only for a little while. Spending all his time in close proximity to him had allowed Sheik to absorb all of Master’s body language and speech patterns until they became almost second-nature to him. It had hurt, at first–discarding your own sense of self (however flimsy it had been before) was never a simple task. But, like all things, it got easier with time. Now Sheik hardly felt the ache at all. Sure, he had a stronger concept of Himself now, but he had also learned that it was nice to be someone else for a while.
It was a valuable skill to have. Master was constantly praising him for his ability to perform so well, because he was always watching. Sheik sometimes entertained the idea of being allowed to go out and put it to use in undercover missions–all to better serve Master, of course–but the idea was a foolish one. He would never be allowed out of the clan’s hideout. He was simply too valuable to risk damaging with a mission like that. But thinking about that for too long always made Sheik profoundly sad for reasons even he could not fully articulate, so he tried not to allow himself to travel down such impossible roads of thought.
In any case, today was one such day when Sheik had to become Master. And so he did. It started, as always, in the mirror. Sheik faced himself, hands held loosely at his sides but shoulders tense with the anticipation of what he was about to do. Slowly, slowly, he reached up and undid the tie keeping the white footsoldier’s mask in place over his face. As he removed it, red eyes reflected in the mirror caught his attention and stopped him in his tracks.
He so rarely saw his own face. Much of the time, he liked it that way. Not that there was anything wrong with his face, other than how soft and too-pretty for a man it looked. That was a virtue in itself, but Sheik couldn’t help but wish it was just a little more masculine. In the end, what made it easier to bear was the knowledge that nobody (except for Master and maybe Sooga) would ever see his face. Neither of them cared if he was too pretty to be a boy at first glance.
Ah, but that wasn’t the point. He needed to refocus. So, reluctantly, Sheik set aside his mask, hanging it on a hook next to the mirror, and picked up a replica of Master’s much more ornate mask. He held it in his hands for a moment, studying the way the polished white surface dimly reflected a smudged shadow version of himself, marred only by the blood red lines of the clan’s symbol painted on the mask. Sheik stared into the inverted eye until he felt himself starting to slip away, receding deep within the darkest recesses of his mind. An odd feeling not unlike the sensation of floating–or what he thought floating felt like, as he’d never been swimming before–overtook him. His limbs were so light and too heavy all at the same time.
He allowed a cruel smile of the kind that Master was so fond of to spread across his face and subtly felt his posture shifting to match Master’s. It was slow at first, but then it was as if a switch had been clicked in his head as the final pieces of the facade fell into place. By the time he looked back into the mirror, the red eyes staring back at him belonged to an unfamiliar blonde boy–barely more than a kid, really, especially to someone as great and eminent as Master Kohga of the Yiga Clan.
And so Kohga placed his mask over his face before the dissonance of the wrong face (the great Master Kohga certainly did not look like his prized pupil, that much was for sure) took him out of the performance.
It was time to speak to his clan.
Kohga swaggered out of his rooms with all of his usual self-confidence, winding his way through the dimly lit and roughly-hewn tunnels that made up his clan’s home with ease. He could do this entirely blind and still know exactly where he was. This was his domain. The halls were mostly empty now, as most of his siblings were already obediently awaiting him in the main room, but he did encounter a few stragglers. They saluted him as he walked past and then promptly picked up the pace, not wanting to bear the shame of being late. Kohga acknowledged each of them with a single nod. Perhaps on another occasion he would have stopped to check in with them–all in the name of increasing morale, of course–but today he had a job to do. Information to deliver. Kohga could not afford distractions today.
Finally, after what felt like both an eternity and no time at all (it could be hard to judge the passage of time in these cramped corridors) Kohga emerged into the main hall. This was a circular cavern of the same dull gray stone that characterized the rest of his clan’s dwelling, draped with tattered blood red banners displaying the Inverted Eye everywhere you looked to ensure that anybody who passed through this space knew what was coming to them. Guardian statues who had been blinded with cloth also emblazoned with the Inverted Eye loomed in the corners. The uncertain torchlight of the room only added to the oppressive atmosphere.
Well, it would have been oppressive to somebody who wasn’t Yiga.
To Kohga, this was where he belonged. A symbol of his power. The circular stage in the center of the room, individually lit with more torches around the edge, was his and his alone. As he made his way through the assembled crowd–something that he had done intentionally, as he wanted his clan to feel a human connection with him before he got up on stage and addressed them as their Master, Kohga felt his blood begin to sing with the thrill of the performance.
(Somewhere, far off in his head, he recognized that these weren’t Master’s feelings, they were Sheik’s. But Master was a coward, and the clan could not know that. So they would see Sheik’s feelings bleed through Master’s form, and they would love Master more for it. Just as they were meant to.)
Kohga ascended to the stage and did a slow circuit, looking out over his clan. A hushed, rapturous silence descended over them as they waited for him to speak. He slowly came to a stop in the very center of the stage and waited just a little longer before drawing a breath and beginning to speak.
“The Hero of Hyrule lives.”
This statement was met with a chorus of jeers, mixing and blending into a single voiced chorus of displeasure. Kohga waited for his clan to quiet down once more with a cruel smile adorning his masked face. Only once they settled down did he resume speaking.
“I assure you, I am as displeased about this as you are, and Lord Ganon doubly so. I trust all of you know what comes next?” Kohga paused again, spreading his arms wide and circling around himself as if to invite a response from the crowd.
“Kill the Hero! Kill the Hero!” came the reply, all of the individual voices of his clan mixing into a single chorus once more.
As he listened to his siblings call for the death of their mortal enemy, Kohga flicked his gaze up to the hidden alcove where he knew he would be waiting, watching, judging. Only the faintest suggestion of a shadow betrayed his presence there. Had Kohga not expected it, he easily would have missed it. A sudden sense of anxiety undercut the sheer satisfaction he felt from being on stage like this, coming from deep within himself. Not from Kohga. Not from the mask. From Sheik. The mask did not outwardly slip, as he was far too good at his job for that, but the mental slip was disturbing nonetheless. That was twice now he’d felt it. Had he not taken enough time to prepare beforehand? All he wanted was to do well, to make sure that Master was satisfied with him–
No matter. He was Kohga, and Kohga did not bother with petty concerns such as this. He answered to no one. He was in control of his own fate and sought no approval from outsiders. The mask fell back into place. Sheik’s feelings retreated far away again.
Kohga held up a single hand for silence. The clan obeyed, though it took a little bit for them to fully settle down. “I’m told that he has begun traveling the land once more in his quest to destroy Lord Ganon. So it is once again time for us to scatter to the winds and hound his every step! The Hero shall know no rest and neither shall we until he is eliminated!”
A single wordless cheer of assent rose from the crowd. Kohga was alive, alive, alive. This was where he was meant to be.
“You know what to do. Dismissed!” Kohga called out, and the crowd that had previously stood mostly still came alive with movement as his siblings moved to go about the rest of their days. Or nights. Time was an illusion to one caged in rock such as he.
He waited until most of the crowd dispersed to return to his quarters. It was just easier that way. The halls were much more alive now, and Kohga did stop to speak to individuals when he came across them, though it was never for very long. Even so, it took him much longer than he would have liked to actually get back to his rooms. Someone–no, two someones–started trailing him at the halfway mark. He knew who it was without having to turn around to look. Anxiety spiked up within him again, only to be quickly reburied. Kohga could not afford to begin deconstructing the mask until he was in private once more.
Finally, finally, he made it back to his rooms. Kohga held the door open for his pursuers: the true Master Kohga and his ever present companion Sooga. He closed the door with a soft click and removed the physical mask as he began the process of removing the mental mask. It was much easier than usual today, further solidifying Sheik’s concern that he hadn’t taken enough time to let it “set” before he rushed out to give the address.
Ah well. No matter. He’d still performed well. At least, he thought so. Maybe Master was here to tell him otherwise. The awful anxiety he’d been battling for the whole walk back mixed with the lingering energy from the actual performance, creating a very volatile mix of emotions that Sheik wasn’t quite sure how to handle. He was so used to just not feeling the majority of the time that on occasions like this, when he felt everything, were hard to bear.
Master reached out and rested a hand on top of Sheik’s head, as he usually did when he had done something well. “Good work as usual, kid.”
Sheik let out an almost imperceptible sigh of relief. This was, of course, extremely disproportionate to how he actually felt–his knees did feel distinctly weak from relief–but he was careful to control his reactions, for being outwardly expressive would only dull his edge. And then he’d be useless, and Master would abandon him, and he would have lost all purpose. “Thank you, Master.”
“I have another mission for you,” Master said. He dropped his hand from Sheik’s head and fixed him in place with his stare, even through his plain footsolder’s mask.
“Already?” Sheik asked tonelessly, not allowing the glimmer of curiosity he felt to get the better of him.
“Yes. It’s… different from the usual.” Master’s gaze flickered over to Sooga’s tall and imposing form for a second. “I want to ensure the Hero doesn’t get away this time. And so… there’s no one I would trust more to handle the task personally.”
Sheik stared blankly at Master, not quite comprehending what he had just said. Go… out? Leave the hideout? Of course, he would do whatever Master asked, but what if he needed him here? He was his shadow, not just an assassin. Sure, he could kill (and had, on several occasions, but only to disloyal members who hadn’t left the hideout yet) but this was much, much different.
“You mean… track him down on the outside?”
“No, no,” Master responded quickly. It thoroughly crushed the casual hope that had begun to bloom in Sheik’s chest. “Should he come here–and I have every reason to suspect he would–I want you to fight in my place.”
Oh. Well. Of course he should have expected something like this. It seemed silly to think that anything else would have happened. The reality of such a request settled heavily into Sheik’s bones. Words Master left unsaid echoed in his ears.
That way, I can escape and restart the Yiga Clan if I have to.
But, ultimately, Sheik did not have an opinion on that. He was a tool to be used as Master saw best, and if this was his best use, then so be it.
“As you wish, Master.”
“Attaboy! Now get some rest. You’ve earned it.”
With that, Master departed, off to wherever he wasted his time all day with Sooga in tow. Sheik didn’t know where he went nor did he care. He had been put back on the rack for now, waiting for his next use in the near future. Such a far off goal as the one he had been handed wasn’t very relevant to him at the moment.
So, he would rest. And he would dream. Dreams were not befitting of a weapon, but they were of a young man named Sheik.