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Malon yawns.
She comes downstairs silently in her socks. Morning is her favourite time of day, and this morning in particular—she’s tired but happy, and still sleepy. She rounds the corner into the kitchen, humming as she goes, and—
Well. Seeing him is like feeling a beam of sunlight stretch out and curl over her shoulders. She’s warm inside. He’s got his head on the kitchen table and is snoring softly. One of her oversized sleep shirts dips over his shoulder and exposes his collarbone. His hair is mussed-up. She wants to run her fingers through it more than she’s ever wanted anything. She wants to walk over there and—
“Ma Isla Lon,” snaps her father under his breath from the corner of the room.
She shushes him quickly, feeling the curl of her gut as he names her entirely. Nobody brings her middle name into conversation. Not ever. He’s the only one who even knows what it is. “Link’s asleep, can’t you see?”
“What I can see,” Talon says grimly, “is a young man asleep in my house, wearing my sixteen-year-old daughter’s clothes.”
“He’s younger than me,” she hisses.
“By five months.”
Link stirs, makes a contented sigh. He turns his head but she’d promised him a good night’s sleep and—
Her blood runs quicker. It’s a thrill. “Don’t be like this! Pa—”
She hustles him out of the kitchen and into the garden. The chickens cluck at them excitedly. “I had to lend him clothes,” she says furiously, rubbing her upper arms. It’s a little after six—the air is still cold. “Didn’t you see his when he arrived? Completely ruined. I had to throw them out entirely. I thought I’d catch a disease.”
Talon glares at her, but she’s not exaggerating, not by much. Link’s tunic had so many stains on it that if she hadn’t made one just like it but much smaller for him before he left she wouldn’t’ve known what colour it was even supposed to be.
“Didn’t he have anything else?”
“No,” she lies. It’s for the greater good. His shirts were collared and cut close enough to his body so that monsters couldn’t tug on them and, well—hers were loose and worn and comfortable and she was just aching to give him something soft to keep. He looked like he hadn’t slept well in years.
Talon frowns. She can’t tell if he believes her. “Malon—” he starts, but he didn’t call her a liar, so that’s pretty good, right?
“Thanks, pa,” she grins, cutting him off, and goes back inside. She shuts the door as softly as she can, dodging the creaky floorboards as she crosses the kitchen, then dares to look up.
Link is awake.
He’s staring at her. Nobody else ever looks at her like this, like they’re peeling apart her skin to see what’s inside, but he’s always been the same. Ever since he was nine and he came down the lane in clothes made of leaves he’s been staring at her in this exact same way.
The emotion breaks over her like relief. If this is the same, then at least some of him came back to her—and maybe just enough—
“Good morning,” she tells him softly.
He blinks. “Good morning.”
“Sleep okay?”
He nods.
And it wasn’t like she hadn’t offered her bed—and she meant it, she would’ve given it to him, no matter how strange he was or how long it’d been since they saw each other or how angry her father would’ve been if he’d found out. It was a thrill. Nobody ever stayed over at the ranch apart from the stable boys, and they slept above the stable. She’d had a sleepover with a friend, once, but they’d both slept in front of the great hearth fire under blankets on the floor. It wasn’t really the same. And he’d refused her bed anyway. Said that outside would be fine, or the stable, and when she didn’t take that for an answer, that the kitchen would do.
He hums lightly, and puts his head back in his hands. She doesn’t think he’s going to say anything else, but she’s just stuck, staring at him. He’s in her shirt, sitting at her kitchen table, and she’s stuck in the thought of it like a hole in the road. She probably looks stupid, just standing there doing nothing but inhaling the sight of him.
“Breakfast?” she asks brightly.
He turns his face back to her. It’s like sunlight, it really is. “Yes,” he says, softly, after a while. “Please.”
Malon grins at him.
“Pa makes fresh bread every day,” she says, “and we’ve got milk, of course. And butter. That sound good to you?”
He hums—it’s a quiet noise. Lilts up and down, always the same each time. She didn’t like it at first, when she was expecting him to talk her ears off like he used to when they were both young, but he’s done it enough over the last couple of days that she’s starting to get used to it. It’s almost comforting.
It means he’s aware and listening—a lot better than the fugue state she’s found him in a few times. Just sitting there and staring at the walls like he didn’t think they were real.
Malon frowns.
She reaches up to the cabinet for plates and bangs her hand on the side of it coming down. He flinches in his chair—suppresses it, like he doesn’t want her to see.
She eyes him out of the corner of her eye, but he seems fine, if a little startled, so she keeps going like she didn’t see it, and they both pretend that nothing happened. He doesn’t want to talk about it, so she won’t push. He’ll tell her when he needs to.
He always does.
“Here,” she says eventually, sliding his plate across the table. Fresh bread and butter and milk to drink on the side, still steaming slightly. Talon came in from the cows only an hour ago.
He takes the food and stares at it like he’s never going to see a sight like this again. Malon sighs. She’s not fully grown yet, she knows, not old enough to be making big complicated life choices, and everyone always tells her to get a better grip on her impulse control, but she suddenly feels like she’d happily give him breakfast for the rest of her life.
After five years of her wondering if he was dead, he’s sitting at her kitchen table eating with her, and he’s grown —he’s grown up. He’s almost the same height as her, and his hair has lost the baby curl to it and he looks tired almost all of the time—
But it's still the golden colour of cornfields in autumn, and she’s still a little taller, and he looks less tired when he’s with her, and it warms her right to the bone to have him back.
“Nice shirt,” she says around a mouthful of bread.
His eyes flick up to meet hers. “Thanks,” he says, after a minute. He seems shy, suddenly, somehow. He picks up the piece of bread and tries to swallow it whole. “A friend lent it to me.”
“Mm,” Malon tells him. She kicks her feet idly under the table. One of them grazes his leg. “I’m pretty sure she’ll let you keep it.”
He stares. “Forever?”
She’s sixteen and she doesn’t know the meaning of the future or what it has in store for her, but right here and now in the kitchen with the sunlight shading over half of his face, she aches. She wants to give him all her shirts and the right half of her wardrobe to put them in. She wants to put her hands in his sleep-ruffled hair, she wants to tell him everything that’s happened to her in the last five years and she wants—
She wants .
So she swallows her toast and looks over to meet his eyes. “Yeah,” she says. “I think forever will do.”