#levis writes

Shadow was really trying to pay attention. He swore he was. Vio had lectured him time and time again about keeping his mind focused on what the teacher was saying so he didn't end up repeating the Great Tingle Debacle of last year. He is really really trying.

But it's not like Vio is making it easy. The light streaming through the window catches on his platinum blonde braid and makes it glow. Lose strands float around his head, creating a halo in the bright sunlight. Vio has his Concentration Look on his face as he stares at his computer, that adorable expression where his eyebrows furrow and lips pout and Shadow just wants to kiss him so damn bad.

"Shadow," Vio's stern voice snapped Shadow out of his mind and he whipped his head up to look at his boyfriend.

"Pay attention" Vio reprimanded. He went on to say something else but Shadow's eyes had fallen on Vio's computer screen, which displayed a half finished crossword instead of the assignment they were supposed to be working on.

"Why don't you follow your own advice?" Shadow blurted out, and Vio's eyebrows furrowed in confusion before glancing down at his computer, which he slammed shut a second later.

Shadow let his familiar self-satisfied smirk fall onto his face as the tips of Vio's ears went pink.

"Well," Vio said after regaining his composure. "You look very smug,"

"Mmmhmm," Shadow hummed, leaning forward a bit in his chair until he was mere inches from Vio's face. "And what are you going to do about it?"

Vio rolled his eyes and before Shadow knew it, was pressing his lips to Shadow's own. It was over in just a second, but the brazenness of the kiss stunned Shadow for more than a few moments afterwards.

Shadow squinted as he adjusted the lens of his camera, making sure Vio was in focus before hitting the capture button with a resounding click. Technically, he was supposed to be out here photographing the native flowers for an article in the school newspaper that Vio was running, but he had gotten distracted very quickly.

It wasn't really fair, asking Shadow not to look at Vio was like asking a bee not to land on a flower. Vio was intoxicating, always pulling him close with soft smiles and sharp eyes. So it was no wonder that Shadow had stopped taking pictures of flowers hours ago and now was just taking pictures of Vio.

He'd gotten some really good pictures, Vio standing on a hill with the sun at his back, his boyfriend's face in sharp profile next to a flower, and Vio caught doubled over mid laugh. That last one was Shadow's favorite, seeing Vio smile always made him happy.

"Shadow?" Vio asked. "How many pictures have you gotten so far?"

"Uhh...." Shadow trailed off, scrambling for a believable lie.

Vio's eyes narrowed as he stalked forward, reaching out for Shadow's camera. "Let me see your camera,"

"Uh," Shadow said. "Why?"

Before he could protest, Vio had reached over and hit the button to display the last picture. Shadow cringed as he watched Vio's eyes widen at the shot he had just taken Vio with his face half lit by the sunset.

"Shadow..." Vio breathed out. "Shadow this is amazing! The composition! The lighting! You need to show this to Mr. L! It's beautiful!"

"You're beautiful" Shadow said before he could stop himself.

Vio turned to him and it was in that moment that the real reason Shadow had been taking that picture hit Vio square in the face.

"Sorry for getting off track-mph!"

"And left and right and meet and-" Vio cut himself off with a grunt of pain as Shadow's toes collided with the top of his foot.

"Shit!" The shade exclaimed, glancing down at Vio's injured foot. "Sorry Vi, that was an accident," "I know, I know," Vio said, shaking his head. "And it was an accident the other ten times you did it as well,"

Noticing the hurt look on Shadow's face, Vio quickly moved to correct himself.

"I don't blame you, if my memory serves me right, Link stepped on Zelda's toes many a time when he was learning. But my foot does need a break from your repeated incursions into its non-painful state,"

"Well then," Shadow said, a smirk drawing itself across his face. "Allow me to take a burden off your poor, injured toes,"

Vio yelped in surprise as Shadow moved inhumanly fast to scoop his boyfriend up into his arms in a bridal carry. Muscle memory told Vio to wrap his arms around Shadow's neck and the two of them took a minute to just look at each other, a blush settling over both their cheeks.

"Now, let's see if there's any cakes in the kitchen to steal!" Shadow exclaimed, and Vio's rumbling stomach didn't have the willpower to protest.

-<3 -

"Vio, why is there water falling from the sky?"

Closing the pages of his weekly breathtakingly bad romance novel, Vio glanced up at his boyfriend and the view he was pointing at.

"Oh it's raining," Vio said noncommittally. "That's just when- holy shit it's raining,"

Shadow's head jerked to the side as he heard the rare swear word slip through his boyfriend's lips. Perhaps what was even more uncharacteristic was the ear to ear grin splitting Vio's face.

"Shadow holy shit! It's raining!"

After seeing his startled boyfriend blink at him for seven seconds very much gay with a dumbfounded expression, Vio composed himself and attempted to explain.

"It's rain. That's when water in the ground is absorbed into the sky and then falls from the sky when there is enough of it up there. There hasn't been a lot of rain recently so I'm very glad it has started raining again,"

Shadow's look of confusion lessened slightly. "Okay, huh,"

Vio glanced out the window at the night that had settled over the lost woods and the rain falling down outside it. It was clearly raining, but it didn't look like it was an excessively hard downpour.

That was when a idiotic, or genius, depending on your point of view, occurred to him.

"Shadow, come with me!" Vio exclaimed, grabbing his boyfriend by the hand and dragging him towards the door. Shadow's noise of surprise was completely ignored by Vio, who threw open the door to their cottage and dragged Shadow out into the rain.

"Hey!" Shadow protested. "It's wet out here!"

Vio gave Shadow his best 'no shit' look and re-positioned them so that they were facing each other with their right hand's clasped and Vio's left hand on Shadow's back.

"And left and right and-"

Effortlessly, Vio led Shadow into the dance and Shadow clumsily followed, trying his best to copy Vio's patterns. There, in the cool evening, with rain pouring down around them and making Vio's eyelashes twinkle with diamonds, Shadow forgot his worries and fears and focused only on the sound of his boyfriend's voice.

"-And meet and left and-"

The pair continued to spin through the woods. At some point, Vio's instructions ceased to be necessary and it was only the heartbeat of the two lovers that guided them through their dance. As their rhythm slowed, Vio and Shadow found themselves face to face, and before either of them could think, their lips were meeting in a tender kiss, as soft as the grass that the two of them stood on.

"That was perfect," Vio exhaled, an adoring smile gracing his face as he beamed down at his boyfriend. Shadow met his smile with a smile of his own, and while Vio was still off his guard, scooped him into a bridal carry.

It was almost comical sometimes, how a well trained and well organized group of insanely powerful heroes who had bested the toughest enemies and the most tedious of minigames in each of their respective lands, could be brought down by something as simple as a protruding root.

Said root was a visible-but-hard-to-spot-unless-you-were-really-looking-for-it bump in the middle of the dusty road that led from the Links' camp to the village just a short walk away. The unfortunate discoverer of this bump was the Hero of Winds, who was strolling back from the village with an armload of red and green potions he had acquired from a vendor in town.

"Well they didn't have as many green potions as you wanted, Time, but they had more than enough red ones, plus a really good deal on a wayward fairy so I hope you guys don't mind that I took it...."

As Wind continued to talk, his feet grew ever closer to that fateful root until his left foot caught it mid sentence and he was sent tumbling into the dirt in front of him.

"Oh flippers!" Wind swore as he got back onto his feet. "I didn't see that flipping root!"

"Flippers?" Legend snorted.

Wind quickly fixed Legend with A Look, raising an eyebrow and asking cooly, "Is there something wrong with that?"

"No no no" Legend said quickly. "I've just never heard that expression before,"

"Hey, it's not the weirdest one that I've heard," Twilight jumped in. "I grew up around a bunch of kids so I've got some creative swears too,"

Wind perked up at that. "You too! What's your favorite one?"

"Hmm, either 'son of a nannie' or 'billie bucker'" Twilight said.

"Billie bucker!" Wind snorted. "Oh that's genius!"

"'Son of a deku nut' was my favorite one to use when I was younger," Time added with a smile. "It still slips out some times,"

"Wow you guys are certainly creative," Legend said. "I've always just gone with the classic 'fuck'. Well, unless I'm at the castle and I need a more proper way to express my utter fucking annoyance with some of the nobles that Zelda is forced to keep around,"

"I can confirm, there are many ways to formally say 'fuck you'" Warriors added. "I've had to use a couple more than a few times to deal with the......finer sort of nobles that hang around the castle,"

"Ooooh, what's your favorite one?" Wild ask, falling backwards across a log to join the conversation.

Warriors cleared his throat, sat up ramrod straight, and put on his most formal voice to say, "Sir or madam, is it a recognizable part of your duties to emulate a gadfly to the best your abilities?"

Wild choked out a laugh, almost falling from his precarious position on his log in mirth.

"Perfect!" He crowed. "I'll be sure to use that when another snotty great grandkid of a fifth son of a noble killed in the Calamity wants to take up Zelda's time!"

"I trust that you boys will only use these insults when it is proper," Time said with a wry smile that revealed he was absolutely going to use them whenever he damn well pleased.

"Yes, of course, of course, old man," Legend said dismissively. "Now can I have a red potion?"

Wind looked back to the road, where a muddy brown splotch of broken glass and brown liquid sat.

Twilight was in quite the predicament. 

He’d been in predicaments before, every hero had, but this one was particularly challenging. This one was going to take all of Twilight’s strength, skill, and intelligence to get out of. He hadn’t faced a challenge quite like this one since that fateful day in Castletown, and the prospect of facing a challenge as daunting as that was terrifying. Twilight was walking a fine line between success and disaster, between life and death itself. 

“Hey, can you help? Hyrule fell asleep on me,”

Legend turned around from where he was packing up his bedroll to give Twilight an incredulous look.

“Do you think I’m crazy? Do you know how much shit the Old Man will give me if I wake him up?”

And there lay the crux of the issue. After discovering that Hyrule had a worse sleep schedule than Wild, which was impressive in a terrible sort of way, an unspoken rule had been imposed on the rest of the heroes: Let. Hyrule. Sleep. The penalty for waking him was hours of Time’s Disappointed Glare, and nobody wanted to be on the receiving end of that. The rule, for the most part, had been easy, they had simply opted to not disturb him while he was resting, but that was considerably harder when Hyrule’s resting place was Twilight’s hair. 

Last night, a sleepy Hyrule had asked Twilight, while in wolf form, if he could sleep on Wolfie’s head because he was having trouble getting to sleep on his own. Twilight hadn’t thought much of the request at the time, and had allowed the sleepy hero to curl up on his forehead as he himself had drifted off to sleep. Unfortunately for Morning Twilight, Evening Twilight had failed to realize that when Morning Twilight inevitably changed back into his Hylian form, Hyrule would be sleeping on his head. 

And that was the predicament Twilight was in. An adorable fairy was asleep on his head, rendering him imoble and with no support from his teammates. It reminded him of that day in Castletown a few years earlier, where he’d made the mistake of dozing off around the various stray cats of the city and woken up unable to move due to the furry felines resting on him.

It wasn’t a bad predicament to be in, but it was a predicament. 

Suddenly, Twilight’s hair began to part as if tiny arms and legs were moving through it and a voice slurring due to sleep said:

“Wha time isit?”

Twilight smiled. “It’s only eight. You still have an hour to sleep in,”

“M’kay” Hyrule murmured.

A yawn split the silence and Twilight felt movement on the top of his head. 

“It's really nice up here,” Hyrule said with a yawn. “Do you mind if I go back to sleep?”

“Not at all,” Twilight said, and he felt Hyrule curl up on his head once more. 

Legend shot him a grin. “Looks like someone’s not going to be getting up early?”