Chapter Text
For my tater tot, who keeps me from drowning
She’d purchased already a necklace for her mother for Yule, and now she sits among the crowd waiting for the auction to end. The necklace is a pretty thing, made with sparkling, dark sapphires, and shining, well cut diamonds that glitter under the lights. It is breathtaking in its simplistic design, but she didn’t think much of it when it had been brought out beyond that it would complement her mother’s pale skin nicely.
She could just leave and pay for the item she’d won, but something holds her back. Something tells her that she ought to wait just a bit longer. As paddles jet up amongst the crowd, and the auctioneer babbles off the jumping price of whatever is on stage, she lets out a long yawn.
It’s not until Lot 4627 is wheeled out does Zelda Nohansen straighten in her seat. The item is a small mirror encased in an ornate black frame. The surface gleams under the lighting, etched with an intricate geometrical pattern. The pattern isn’t the only interesting thing about it though. The mirror itself is asymmetrical and oddly shaped – like a puzzle piece that has been separated from the rest of the picture.
Hey there, Princess.
Immediately, Zelda is enchanted by the piece, and she can’t even say why. It stirs something in her heart – a sort of familiar ache that she can’t quite explain. The lights flash across the mirror’s surface as it’s put in position for display for the auction, and to Zelda, it feels almost as if the mirror is winking at her, whispering to her: Why don’t you take a closer look? We’ll spruce you up, make you shine, make you sparkle. What’d ya say, Princess?
Zelda shakes her head, because mirrors don’t talk.
Her breath catches in her chest on an exhale. Hello, hello, the mirror says, winking at her once more, and she breathes it back. We'll run the town, Princess. You and me. So why don’t you have a look inside? I’ve got lots to show. We’ll make you irresistible.
We’ll make you complete.
Not even caring what the cost is, Zelda raises her paddle to bid on the item and doesn’t stop until it’s hers.
Let’s have some fun, Princess.
::
Growling, Midna Dahl slams the stack of files on the desk, and Link Coutts finally snaps out of his stupor. “Wake up, will ya?” she barks at him. Link only groans in response as he leans back in his chair. “You have a meeting in twenty minutes with that Baker woman. Her file’s on top.”
Link, pinching the bridge of his nose, gripes at her, “Do you have to yell in that annoyingly high pitch?” He drags himself out of his chair and stumbles over to the makeshift bar by the window. “It’s like you’re hammering nails into my skull,” he mutters as he pours himself another shot of whisky – this one’s to help curb the throbbing hangover.
Midna rolls her eyes. “Maybe if you – oh, I don’t know – cut the fuck back on your drinking, you could function as a half-decent human being.” With that, she storms out of his office. The door slams shut, rattling in the frame, and the quick flash of worry strikes Link that the window will shatter. The window, however, once again miraculously endures Midna’s abuse, and Link wonders if there will ever come a day when it will finally give and break.
With his drink in hand, Link sighs and sinks back into his chair. His right leg hurts, and he snorts into the glass as he raises it to his lips.
Ironically, the drinking is what keeps him functioning as “a half-decent human being”. Without it, Link doesn’t know what he’d be doing, where he’d be. He probably wouldn’t be doing this job, that’s for sure – which means Midna would be out of a job.
He sets the drink down and pulls the Baker file Midna so lovingly dropped for him. With one hand fisted, he leans over and raps the false shin of his right leg, trying to shake the phantom pain so he can better focus on the double type on the file. Sometimes it works, other times not so much. Today seems to be one of those not-so-much days, as the stinging pain of a ghost limb still persists.
The pain goes on, and he can’t get the damn words to pull together to something legible.
Link Coutts served in the Hyrulean Navy for three years aboard the King of Red Lions during the war until a piece of rogue shrapnel cost him half a leg. His right leg was amputated from just below the knee, and at twenty-one, Link was given a medical discharge from the Navy and sent home from the front lines. Good riddance, he kind of hated being on the open sea, truthfully. The discharge did nothing though to ease the nightmares that plagued him in both the waking and dream worlds. A year later, the war ended, and he was still sitting in a wheelchair at home like no time had passed. A broken, shell-shocked veteran.
At least it was just a leg, he muses. A prosthetic limb lets him get around these days, and so long as he wears trousers, people don’t pay mind to his slight limp. He’s not sure what he’d do if he’d lost an arm or a hand like some other sailors he knew. A prosthetic doesn’t give the ability to write or type or grab something.
Eventually, the Baker woman strides into Coutts Investigative Services, and Midna shows her into Link’s office where she’s less than pleased with his results.
It’s not that Link can’t do his job because he’s a drunk, no, he’s actually quite good at it. Link has found that he has a knack for seeing the ugly in people, and he has no problem documenting it. The problem is that people like Mrs. Baker don’t like to see the bad and the ugly. They don’t like being told something they don’t want to hear, and what Mrs. Baker doesn’t want to hear is that her husband has been seeing some floozy secretary two to three nights a week for at least the last ten weeks straight when her husband claimed that he was working late at the office on a project. She started to suspect something when she phoned in to his office one evening and was told he left at closing time. Her husband wasn’t even on the project team he claimed to be working on – which, by the way, had been completed two weeks ago, thank you very much.
The pictographs are laid out right in front of her in all their black and white glory, but Mrs. Baker turns the other cheek to it. “It must be some misunderstanding,” she insists, and Link rubs his forehead. Ugh, oh Farore, this woman is not helping his raging headache.
Link doesn’t care what she does with the information he’s gathered on her husband, so long as she pays, and when Midna comes into play, all bets are off. Which is great, because Link cannot deal with the woman much longer or his head might split open like a wee cucco egg.
“I don’t get it,” Midna grumbles after Mrs. Baker pays her fees and skitters out the door. “What’s the point of hiring us if you don’t actually want to know the truth?”
Link shrugs, reaching over for the whisky bottle. Midna quickly strides around his desk and snatches the bottle away from him.
“I mean,” she goes on, waving the bottle around. The amber liquid sloshes around, and Link stares at it like a man seeing water for the first time in days out in the middle of the Gerudo Desert. “Honestly, it’s such a waste of money.” Quickly, she adds, “Not that it’s a bad thing for us, obviously.”
Link reaches for the whisky, thinking her not paying attention, but again, she’s quick to pull it out of his reach. Damn her. Her heels click on the floor as she walks to the other side of the desk and sits down in the chair previously occupied by Mrs. Baker.
"Sometimes,” says Link, eyes still locked on that beautiful, wonderful, tantalizing, bottle of alcohol, “they think they’re ready to hear or see it, but when the time comes they’re not actually prepared.”
Midna scoffs.
“Could I please have the damn whisky back? It’s single malt.”
Midna looks from Link to the whisky in her hand. “Are you fucking serious?” she spits. “The last thing I want to deal with is you stumbling around like a drunk fool when you have meetings this afternoon.” She leans forward and her elbow slams down onto his desk. One finger pointed at him, she snaps, “You look like shit. Clean yourself up a little, will you? And I’d like to remind you, that you hired me as an assistant, not your partner.”
Taking the whisky with her, she gets up from the chair and turns to leave. Midna stops in the doorway, one hand on the doorknob, and says to him with dripping exasperation, “And for Nayru’s love: shave.”
Growling to himself, Link leaves his office, catching his redheaded secretary stashing the whisky bottle out of client eyes under her desk. He heads into the washroom and closes the door behind him. Midna was right – Din dammit, she always is – he looks like shit. Dark circles surround his eyes, the slight hint of bags coming in. He hasn’t had a decent sleep in about a week now, but he shrugs that off. It’s out of his control. What is in his control is the scruff lining his chin and jaw that Midna so delicately asked him to take care of.
He opens the medicine cabinet, saying goodbye to his reflection, and roots around in the spare shaving kit he keeps in the office. “Should just get a tub installed,” he says to himself. He brushes the shaving cream over his budding beard. “And a bed.”
He tries to get his hair in order. As usual though, it doesn’t behave. It never does. Link gives up on it and exits the washroom as he runs a hand over the wrinkles of his shirt. Yawning, he asks if there’s breakfast. Midna slaps the paperwork in her hands down on her desk. “Little late for that, and this isn’t your apartment,” she says, getting up. She undoes Link’s tie. “I can go get you a sandwich from Telma’s,” Midna tells him as she reties the tie and cinches it up to his collar, “but promise me you’ll lay off the sauce. You don’t need it today.”
But he does. Every day, in fact, thank you very much.
"You’re being awfully nice,” he comments instead.
She gives him a flat look and frowns when she receives a cheeky grin. She smooths out his shirt at the shoulders and adjusts his suspenders. Link jokes, “Are you finished yet, Mother?”
She whacks him lightly on the head and pulls her coat off the coat rack. “You’re the face of this business, jackass.” Midna draws her coat over her shoulder and shakes her long red hair out over the collar. “Act like it.”
"I thought that’s why I hired you,” he calls after her, but she just slams the door behind her.
Link sighs to himself, rubbing the back of his neck.
Goddesses. His leg hurts today.
He strides around Midna’s desk, stealing her chair, and brings the bottle of whisky to rest on his lap, considering it. As much as he’d like to go stone cold sober for Midna, Link knows he doesn’t have it in him, and so he twists the cap off and takes a swig straight from the bottle.
Sorry, Midna.
Link takes another long drink of the whisky before screwing the cap back on and putting it back where Midna placed it. He rolls up his shirt sleeves, and then from his shirt pocket, he snatches a cigarette. Link has to pad his pockets some to find a book of matches. He lights the cigarette, and the smoke curls up from the end.
Midna… If only he isn’t such a fuck up.
::
The cool January air bites at her face as Midna strides down Castleton’s 5th Ave towards Telma’s. “Bastard better pay me back,” she grumbles to herself when she reaches the intersection.
He’s not so bad, actually.
Sober.
Midna sighs.
She knows Link is never going to pull it together, she’s worked with him long enough. If it wasn’t for his work… Midna hates to think about it. Grumbling and hoping for a light change, she considers that Link is actually quite a gifted pictographer. Though it’s clear to her that he has absolutely no desire to chase the curtails of a dream of being a great pictographer. Even if he had an interest in pursuing a more artistic endeavor with his pictograph skills, that requires putting yourself out there, which Link has been downright incapable of doing since returning from war. It makes Midna wonder if he was that way before losing half a leg. She didn’t know him before the draft. The real shame, Midna thinks, is that he’s wasting a talent on something as stupid as a salary man shoving his tongue down his secretary’s throat.
At least the woman paid up.
As she crosses the intersection, Midna thinks not for the first time that she’s not much better than her employer. She doesn’t have much going for her other than work. It’s almost laughable. She went to university for a few semesters, and like many other young women, she ended up dropping out – just not for the same reason. Most girls quit when they get married.
That just isn’t Midna’s style.
It’s when she’s waiting on Link’s sandwich that she notices a man that looks eerily like her stupidly handsome employer staring at her. He’s not fair like Link; there’s no blond hair, no blue eyes. Instead, dark hair falls over ruby eyes. She shoots him a flirtatious smile but otherwise doesn’t engage him, because Link’s sandwich is up.
No. Marriage: that’s not Midna’s style at all.
::
There’s work to be done, but Link’s still idle at Midna’s desk, cigarette smoking and half laying in the chair while bemoaning to himself about the phantom limb, when the door to the office bangs open. Link’s startled from his daydreams of Midna and snaps to attention. A slightly portly man enters the office, and frantic eyes takes in the still slightly disheveled Link. “I’m looking for Coutts,” he says hastily. “Link Coutts.” He removes his hat from his head and begins to twist it in his hands in an anxious fidget.
“Well… um, that’s me.”
The door swigs shut, blinds rattling against it, and the man rushes over to Link behind the desk.
“My name is Daphnes Nohansen,” he babbles. “Please, please – it’s my daughter!” Link stiffens when Nohansen grabs him by the shoulders, shaky hands steadying themselves on Link. The veteran glances to the side as the door opens again. A tall, slender man slips in and shuts the door again, much more gently than Nohansen had.
Link pauses for a moment, eyes falling back on the man before him. “Sorry? You-your daughter?”
“Yes!” Nohansen gasps. “Her name is Zelda. She’s been missing since January 3rd!”