The room they were all meeting up in was crowded and nasty. There were so many disgustingly rich and sweaty teenagers all standing in a vague circle, trying to work out who was the richest and who had the most influence over the rest of them. Hence, who would be the best target to make friends with. Link just stood there hoping that no one bothered to talk to him. Rich people were awful and he hated being one. His dearest mother always said that he should be grateful for what he had because he might never have to work a day in his life, and he owed that to the 'hard work' of his parents. Except his parents hadn't done anything, because they'd been brought up being told that they'd never have to work a day in their lives. And they didn't. They paid other people to do all the work for them and then they got most of the reward.

Link liked to think that his awkward existence was a form of karma that was punishing his parents for being shitty rich people, because they found him endlessly irritating. They hated him in the awkward parenting way where you weren't allowed to outright hate your child, just try to undermine them every step of the way instead because they were 'ungrateful' and 'didn't understand the effort that their parents put in'. They were right, he didn't understand. But the bit that he didn't understand was how they thought that they'd put any effort in at all, because they really hadn't.

"Okay, everyone!" Someone pimply and tall with a loud voice called. "I know you all want to get to know each other, but we need you to get into your room groups!" Instantly, everyone began shouting out their room numbers. Link didn't even remember what his was, not that he could shout it out to find his future room mates anyway.

"Um, hello?" A girl came and stood in front of him. She was taller than him, no surprise, and she had bright blonde hair he would bet was dyed because she was rich and bright blue eyes that were looking at him in a strange way. Instantly, he disliked her. On principal, of course, because she was rich and he hated rich people. "I saw you coming out of my room earlier, but I don't know. Were you sent to the wrong place?"

He shook his head and resigned himself to a long and awkward explanation, shifting his notepad into his hands so he could write to her. 'I can't speak,' he started, and to his surprise she nodded without a single look of pity. He no longer hated her, even though it was probably just that she was good at acting. 'I asked to be put in the boys rooms, but they obviously ignored me. I am a boy, though.'

The girl nodded again. "Okay," she said. "What's your name? I'm Zelda. I have a surname too, but I don't want to bother with that kind of thing."

He definitely wasn't going to hate her. Good, because there was no way that he was going to share a room with someone shitty. Not when the school had explicitly gone against his wishes, at least.

'My name is Link,' he wrote, hoping that she didn't laugh at his name like a lot of people had a habit of doing. He really hated it when people dismissed his name choice because it wasn't the usual kind of name people had. When he'd first told his mother, her first response was that it was a terrible name and she would never pick a name like that for 'her little girl'.

"Hang on," Zelda said, "do you know sign language?"

Link nodded, suddenly getting his hopes up. Useless, of course, because barely anyone knew sign language, they just 'thought that it would be cool to learn'. 'I'd communicate in it, but no one ever knows it.'

'I do,' Zelda signed, smiling at him, and okay he actually loved her now, in the not gay (she wasn't even his gender, she didn't qualify), friendly way. They were best friends now, she couldn't stop that. Oh, that made him so happy. Suddenly, he wasn't alone. There was someone he could talk to in the language he had been using all his life and it was great.

'How much?' He asked, just to check. Maybe she only knew the basics. Maybe she only knew the tiniest amount. He couldn't expect her to know as much as he did, because she could talk and she could hear.

'A fair amount,' she signed back. 'My nanny from when I was little had a deaf son and she taught me how to sign to him, but I kept learning it after she stopped looking after me.' It was done with such ease, such confidence, that Link didn't doubt that he would be able to communicate with her without a pen and paper. She was obviously the best room mate he could have ended up with, despite the fact that she was a girl. There probably weren't any boys who understood sign language, and Zelda seemed to be cool with him being a boy, which was a huge relief.

"Excuse me," someone said, and Link turned to see someone who looked rather angry at everything. Their skin was a darker colour that showed they were probably of Sheikah descent (that was when his darling mother would get the curse wards out, he was sure) and their eyes were the classic blood red. "I think I spoke to you earlier when I was coming out of our room." They scowled in the direction of Link, but he got the impression that the person did that to everyone they met, not just him. He was fairly sure that he did the same thing to most people anyway.

"Yes," Zelda said. "You're Sheik, aren't you? It seems the people in charge of rooms in this place may have mixed something up, because Link's also in our room."

Sheik sighed and audibly complained about Hylian cishets ruining everything. Link wanted to laugh very loudly, but he was worried it would attract too much attention if he did.

'Can I introduce you, or would you prefer to write?' Zelda signed to him.

'You can introduce me if you like,' Link said. He could always correct her if she said something wrong, after all.

"Well, Sheik, this is Link," Zelda said. "And from what I can tell, I think we're all going to be fantastic friends."