Babble - Beyond Dimensions

Chapter 33: The one where they deal with coffee

Sky awoke with a cough. This wasn’t too strange, it was something that sometimes happened but this one just wouldn’t go away and so he coughed and coughed and hoped he wouldn’t wake Twilight. His roommate twitched in his sleep but luckily didn’t wake and so Sky quickly clutched the comfortable and probably - if judging the rest of the room – very expensive pillow to his face to stifle the loud coughs as he struggled for air and prayed to the goddesses for this episode to be over.

Black spots were already in his line of vision when finally the attack subsided, and though still stifled Sky could breathe again. His head was spinning and he felt as if he had just fought for hours on end but no matter how tight his chest still felt, there was air in his lungs again and that was enough.

Quietly he rolled out of bed and walked out the room and even as he had to hold his weight on the wall as his head still spun slightly from the missing oxygen it had just suffered, he still slung the sleeping Fi over his shoulder in her sheath. As soon as he had left the room, Sky then quickly followed the long halls down the stairs until he smelled the strong smell of…something.

Confused he followed the smell into a room that might be the kitchen that Wild and Hyrule had been guided to the day before as there was still a slight stain on the ceiling from smoke. But otherwise the room looked completely new.

As if catching his gaze, the woman the heroes had been introduced to yesterday, Impi (and didn’t that seem uncomfortably saddening familiar? Sky’s Zelda would have loved to meet this woman), stated coldly from where she was seated at the large table with another person: “The painters refused to come and do their job at the late time we already had yesterday. At least the others already delivered punctually.”

Sky looked at her and shuddered, the ice cold look in her eyes promised no mercy for the unbribable painters that had refused the last minute job offer. But then she put a professional smile on and pulled one of the many free chairs out: “Come and sit, I’ve got coffee. You look like you need it.”

Coffee? What was that?

Then she quickly swung her head around and snatched probably said coffee out of the reaching hands of the other person seated on the table: “No you don’t! That would be your fifth cup this morning! Man up!”

And only then the shade of a person also sitting on the table became recognizable.

It was Time.

Sky stared and then quietly seated himself between the woman and his leader. The man looked…horrible. Like he hadn’t gotten a minute of sleep that night while also being tortured. His eye was bloodshot, you could build entire cities under the bags of his eyes and his hands still clinging to the probably coffee can were shaking.

Now seriously worried, Sky asked: “Are you okay?” Which also translated to “Do you want to talk about it?” seeing as each hero had their own bag of personal trauma they carried with themselves.

“The moon here is not about to come and crash down, so yes” Time stated tonelessly, as if he was only talking about the weather and not about an apocalyptic occurrence that apparently he only just now learned was impossible here but apparently entirely possible where he was from.

Sky felt the blood drain out of his face at the implications and while his mind flashed back to when Time had stated the biggest thing he had ever fought was the moon, he couldn’t help the uninvited tightness settling on his lungs as the worry for Hyrule – and especially his love – overcame him.