Shades of Blue

Waking Up

Where are you?

Where...

Where did you go?

Have to...find you...

Supposed to find you, when...

Remember, remember—have to...

When he opened his eyes, he was alone.

Something about that phenomenon felt...wrong. Like he had fallen asleep expecting someone there...like he had...like someone was supposed to be here. Someone was...wait...something was wrong. He had been...he couldn't recall. He couldn't remember. Why couldn't he remember...anything? All he had was this vague recollection, a half baked thought that he had been...waiting for someone? Here?

But where was here? Who was that someone his mind was foolishly expecting?

Who was he?

Trying to cease the encroaching panic at that terrible thought, he blinked the daze out of his eyes, focusing his blurry gaze upward as he dragged his sluggish thoughts back into order. There was a horribly bright light coming from...somewhere. It was blue. A blinding, garish blue, staring down at him from the ceiling of whatever strange place he found himself in. He hated it. His vision blurred again, and he rubbed dazedly at his eyes as he sat up, looking around the dark...cave, that he found himself in. He was in a cave.

Why he thought his location odd, when he couldn't even recall his own name, he really couldn't say. All he had was a fuzzy sense that something was amiss, with where he was. He was not meant to be here. Not here, and not alone. Certainly not alone.

It felt as if he had been asleep for a terribly long time, drifting in something he couldn't see, lulled off until nothing was left of him but his scrambled consciousness and a sense of something missing.

And oh, that sense was massive. Less than a minute of conscious thought and he could already tell with sweeping clarity that there was a terrible amount of information he was missing. There was a swath of space in his hazy thoughts left devastatingly blank, thousands of questions reverberating off the emptiness and demanding answers he could not supply.

His breathing had picked up pace without his notice, and he shook his head at himself. He needed to focus, not drown in the sense of dread lurking in the back of his muddled thoughts. There was no sense in thinking of these things now, not when he had so little idea of where he was. A deep, unbreakable part of him was telling him to calm himself, to focus on what was in front of him, the task at hand, orient and understand. There was a time for panic, and moments after waking in a strange cave was decidedly not the time.

What had drawn him awake in the first place? There had been something, something beyond whatever strange draining sound he had faintly heard as he opened his eyes. Something had really caught his weary attention, and had carefully pulled him from the thickness of death like sleep. He'd followed it here, whatever it was...though he had very little idea of where he had been prior to this moment. And he still didn't quite know where here was.

No, no he was not going to think about that. Panic later, understand now.

As if in response to his meandering confusion, he heard a voice—a far off, echoing sort of voice that was familiar and yet...not.

Wake up, Link, it whispered, a hint of desperation in its musical tone.

That was it. That was his name. How could he have forgotten his own name? He'd never had another. It was only Link, he was only ever Link. Nothing else could have been his name, and yet he had utterly failed to remember it until this strange, oddly familiar girl's voice had told him it as she whispered for him to wake up. It was her voice he had followed out of that seeping darkness. Her voice that had pulled him from the slumber he had somehow ended up in.