Chapter Text
Four years.
Four years, three months, and six days, he had waited.
Four years with an aching hole in his chest as he struggled to adjust to an emptier life. Everything had been knocked out of balance when Link was arrested and thrown into prison: no more bright smiles, no more blue-gray eyes to steal his breath when they caught the sun just right. No more late nights watching stars or fighting exhilarating battles side by side. The world became...muted. In those four years, the world was dulled without his sun to wash it in golden rays.
He had been sent to the frontlines—a blacksmith to the frontlines—and he saw the horrors Link had tried to prevent from ever becoming fate. He saw first-hand how the inky black smoke suffocated the sky and soldiers watched as families were forced from their homes, monsters creeping closer and closer to the main city. He saw it all in their faces: the hurt, the hollowness, the stress, the fear adding a heavy shadow to everyone’s eyes.
And four years, he had waited, the thought of Link shivering in a prison cell never leaving his mind. The memory of Link’s frantic, terrified face as the crowd jeered and guards dragged him away haunted his dreams.
Four years. He whispered it under his breath as he tightened his hands around the bundle in his arms. That’s how long it’d been. It felt like so, so much longer.
Now, Orville stood outside of the worn-down building Link was locked away in, shadows clinging to it like morning dew to leaves, located just outside the city. A story of neglect was painted in the building’s crumbling walls and rotting doors; he tried not to think about what kind of neglect that meant for Link.
He heard footsteps behind him and turned his head to see four men approaching. He’d been slightly irked when he realized he was the first to arrive. Orville always made sure to be punctual—living in a world on the verge of its end, he really had no time to spare—but he didn’t think the men who invited him would be late.
At the sight of them, anger blistered underneath his skin. He remembered, so clearly, their faces as they condemned Link to these years in prison. He remembered Link’s desperate words, his voice breaking as he screamed over the crowd’s uproar.
“Doom is falling upon this land, can’t you see? I speak the truth! I swear my honor, my life on it! Please, just LISTEN!”
Instead, these nobles, so untouched by the rest of the world’s suffering, waved their hands at the guards and ordered Link out of their sight.
As they came closer, the anger gave way to fear. These were the men that sent Link—one of the finest knights in the land, someone who had been dubbed a hero and was loved by countless—to prison. They had managed to sway the people’s hearts and turned them into a vicious mob against Link’s campaign. If Orville misstepped in any way, what could they do to him?
He bowed stiffly. “M’lords.”
They didn’t even bother to greet him. “You have the materials we asked for?” one of them asked. His voice was nasally and condescending.
He remembered that voice from when it insulted Link as he tried to win the people’s favor back. Orville nodded, biting his tongue lest his tone turn passive-aggressive.
“Good.”
The other nobles all but ignored Orville. They waited impatiently for the guards to open the door. It creaked open at their tugging, revealing a cracked stairwell that led to darkness. Orville swallowed. Link was right there, so close, so close, but he saw that darkness and another thought came to him. Just who lay down there? Was it Link? Or was it someone else, shaped by prison and shadows?
He shook the thoughts away, mouth dry and heart aching even as it raced, and trailed behind the men, who swept into the stairwell’s inky black with a swish of their long robes. Orville glanced back at the light one last time before the door was shut behind them with a groan from the hinges.
His feet slipped and slid on the frozen stairs, and he reached out and pressed his hand flat against the too-close walls. Cold bit mercilessly into his calloused skin. He blinked rapidly as he tried to get his eyes to adjust. He heard a horrible screech from ahead, metal grating on metal as it loudly protested being disturbed.
Then they were walking into the heart of the prison. Orville’s skin broke out in a chill, drawing a violent shiver out of him. The air was frozen and stale, a sharp stink wrinkling his nose. The men ahead of him whispered to themselves, but he didn’t bother to listen. He could barely see the figure in front of him, and they nearly crashed into each other when the group came to an abrupt halt. His breath caught in his throat, anticipation and hope and nervousness quickening his pulse.
They were outside Link’s cell. His friend, who he’d missed for four long years, was just beyond those rusted bars.
The cell door squealed open and chains rattled. Orville’s vision was slowly adjusting, gradually taking in the details one by one.
The first thing he noticed was the figure pressed up against the farthest wall of the cell. Their thin arms were pinned above their head by chains and their clothes were torn in so many places they barely passed for rags. If he squinted into the darkness hard enough, he could make out the scars and bruises that riddled the figure’s pale skin.
Link.
It hurt, it really hurt, to see him like this. Striking eyes veiled in darkness stared at them mistrustfully as Link shifted his bare feet on the stone ground.
“Link…” the man farthest from Orville started. “Link the hero.”
Orville narrowed his gaze at the man’s condescending, mocking tone. He struggled to hold his tongue and focused on adjusting his grip on the bundle in his arms. It was rather awkward to hold.
“Lord Dagianis, the man who framed you, has been killed by the Demon King,” the man continued. He went on about what Link had missed in these past four years, and Orville couldn’t help but feel anger at the man’s detached, uncaring tone. The lives lost were simply numbers to him. The crops and houses burned some distant, unimportant problem. They weren’t there to watch the sobbing children as they were ripped away from their homes in desperate attempts to flee the encroaching darkness, and they weren’t there to feel the fire’s deathly heat and suffocating smoke. They weren’t there. The only reason they were here now was because the war was finally, finally starting to affect them.
“The Demon King’s army will soon be upon us.”
The army is already upon us, Orville thought as he pursed his lips to keep the words from slipping past the cage of his teeth. You are just too deluded to see.
“Please, come into the light of the day,” another said, sounding at least a little more earnest with his words.
There was a long, heavy pause as Link stared at the men, his hands curled into loose fists above his head. Orville could see the barely-contained hurt and rage in his eyes.
“It was you—my own people—who said you have no need for a powerful hero,” Link spoke slowly, his words strained with bitterness. His chains rattled as he leaned forward, a crooked snarl on his face, the look in his eyes haunting Orville. “And now that it’s convenient for you, you want me to fight?”
Orville’s heart twisted and he had to look away. He swallowed, squeezing the weapon’s scabbard, curling his toes in his boots. Where was the mercy, the fairness for Link in this world? Did they really expect him to go from one horrible situation to the next?
Were they going to throw him into war, after years in prison?
The spike in Orville’s heart was driven in a little deeper when he heard Link whisper in a broken mutter, “I can’t even run anymore.”
“This land needs you,” one of the men, almost completely dismissing Link’s words. “We need your courage and strength. You at the helm of this war will boost morale and…”
Orville had to force himself to tune out whatever bullshit the nobles were spewing. Instead, he watched Link’s face, cloaked in pale shadows, flicker with rage. Chains rattled, their sound harsh in the void of darkness.
It took him a moment to realize that his name had been spoken.
Suddenly, the men parted like curtains to leave Orville standing alone, bare in Link’s direct line of sight. He stumbled forward on clumsy feet, hands slick with sweat and butterflies swirling in the pit of his stomach. For the first time in four long, long years, their gazes met.
Countless emotions filled him with vicious ferocity as Link’s eyes widened. For a moment he was lost in Link’s eyes, their striking gray-blue filled with shock and hurt and longing and so many more emotions that had no words to describe them. Orville knelt roughly, the cold of the ground seeping through his trousers and biting into his knees. Orville’s gaze blurred with water and his hands trembled as he laid out the bundle he’d been holding tightly for what felt like all day.
“Link, our hero,” he managed to get out, the words almost a whisper upon his tongue. He swallowed, forcing his voice to stay steady. He reached out and wrapped his hands around the weapon in front of him, the scabbard—a scabbard he had agonized over for days, each strap and paint stroke and decorating filament placed with infinite care by his hands—cool in his palms. “It is my honor to present this blade to you.”
He held his breath as Link’s gaze devoured the sword with a half-hearted reluctance. Orville unsheathed the weapon and let its perfectly-polished steel glimmer in the dim light. He had done his very best to make this sword the best he had ever crafted, as free of flaws as possible, as balanced as he could create to his ability. The sadness in Link’s eyes grew heavier the longer he stared at the sword. Orville could feel the men behind and to the side of him shift, impatient, inconsiderate.
“Do you accept?”
The three words stirred the moment, so gentle and tender between him and Link, away with a callous hand. Orville pursed his lips. Everyone in that cell knew there was only one answer to the question. He still saw hesitation in his friend’s face.
The “I accept” that Link forced out was so incredibly miserable that Orville had to look away as a guard came forward to relinquish the grip of unforgiving shackles. The chains clattered loudly, grating against Orville’s ears in the heavy silence that had filled the thin air of the cell. Orville’s breath rattled in his chest as he watched Link slowly lower his arms, the action seeming almost painful, and stared at his hands with the wide-eyed wonder of a toddler taking in the world for the first time. He flexed, then curled his fingers, one hand brushing over his bloodied wrists. Then his gaze dragged upwards to Orville, who swallowed and lifted the blade a little higher. It felt heavier than it should.
Something shadowed in his friend’s gaze, and carefully Link limped forward, one hand grabbing a frozen metal bar to steady himself as he reached out to take the weapon. Anticipation crackled through the air, fire raging across Orville’s skin when their hands brush ever so slightly as the sword is transferred from one grip to the other.
Link’s hand slipped from the bar to brace his grip on the weapon, the blade wobbling in the air, but for a moment, he lifted it victoriously, a remnant of the proud knight he used to be shining through the prison grime.
But then Link’s face twisted in pain and his arm buckled, the sword slipping from his fingers, and Orville stared with wide eyes at the blade on the ground. The clang of it hitting the ground echoed in his ears, bouncing in the empty chamber where his racing thoughts should be.
All he could do was stare, eyes glued to the ground, a pit in the bottom of his stomach.
“Your hero’s strength.”
The words were quiet and hoarse, but full of bitterness that stung with the sharpness of a viper’s bite. Orville swallowed, his mouth dryer than the air in Eldin.
“Do you see what you’ve done to it, now?”
Silence was his answer, ringing louder than the sound of the blade hitting the ground. It was cruel, the reality of the situation, and Orville had to remind himself to breathe as he glued his gaze to the sword he’d spent so long crafting.
One of the nobles heaved a sigh and waved a hand. “You are now a free man. Clean yourself up, and you can leave. There’s a crowd out there dying to see you,” he ordered. Orville flicked a nervous gaze at Link, a tension filling the cold air of the cell.
“No.”
The noble stopped mid-turn. “...What was that?” he asked, his voice sharp. Orville swallowed, trying to catch Link’s attention and convey that he was about to cross a line. Sweat slicked the blacksmith’s hands.
“No,” Link repeated, his voice hard as flint, but deadly soft. “I will go out there as I am now. Let them see what their ignorance has brought upon whom they crown ‘hero.’”
Silence fell over the group once again as Link and the noble glared at each other.
“You did say he is a free man,” Orville blurted before he could stop himself. His eyes widened and he snapped his mouth shut as the noble’s attention landed on him. “He...He has that choice, doesn’t he?”
What are you doing, Orville? he thought to himself as he watched the noble consider his words. You’re going to get yourself executed—
“Fine,” the noble sighed. He gave one last hard look at Link, before leaving with the rest of his comrades.
And then the cell was filled with just the two of them. Just Orville and Link. The first time they had been alone with each other in four years. Countless emotions choked him as his longtime friend slowly let the tension fall from his shoulders and turned to Orville.
Link...really did look awful. Eyebags that were like bruises on his pale, scarred face; his skeletal frame was visible through the torn rags that shouldn’t count for clothes. Dirt and filth were smeared over the scars littering his skin.
“Link,” Orville said, his voice barely reaching his own ears. The name fell like a forgotten prayer from his lips. His friend averted his gaze as he haltingly approached, reaching a shaking hand up to his cheek. “ Link.”
Slowly, icy blue-gray eyes met his pale brown ones.
Sobs tangled with his throat, but he swallowed them down. Link reached up and squeezed his hand where it cupped the hero’s cheek. Tears began to slide down his friend’s face, hot and thick and real, and this was really happening—after so long, it was truly happening—
“Orville,” Link whispered, and the blacksmith felt his thoughts slam to a stop.
Orville. His mind replayed the moment in his head. Orville, Orville, Orville.
Link had said his name so many times over the years, hundreds of thousands of times, and it brought floods of memories back, to hear him say it again.
Four years. That was how long Link had been gone, but Orville had started to lose him a long time before then. Link had slowly started to slip further and further away with each of the visions of death and destruction that plagued him. As he threw himself into his efforts to warn the people, mobilize the troops, prepare for war, Link stopped being the cocky, playful person Orville had known for seven years beforehand.
A small, traitorous part of Orville wondered if he would ever get that Link back. He tried to convince himself it would be okay if he never saw that side of Link again.
Orville lifted his other hand and wiped the tears from the hero’s face. “Let’s go,” he said, voice still strangled with emotion. “It is far overdue for you to leave this hellhole.”
<><><>
“Are you ready?”
The final door separating them from the outside world stood before them, the rust clinging to the hinges a deep red in the shadows. Sunlight seeped through the cracks in the walls, like spilled ichor of the gods being absorbed by the ground they created. Anticipation hummed in the air with a fearful shiver. Goosebumps prickled across Orville’s skin as he watched Link take a steadying breath, all his attention on the door in front of him. He wasn’t sure if it was just the frigid air that brought the chill.
Orville could still taste the question on his tongue as he waited for some sort of answer from Link. He watched as his old friend swallowed, neck far too pale from the lack of sunlight. Something like determination, or maybe something like desperation, settled over Link’s features, and he gave a jerky nod, chest hardly stirring for breath.
Orville pressed his tongue against the roof of his dry mouth and let go of Link’s arm gently. The door gave an unearthly screech as he eased it open, and in doing so, their final obstacle lay overcome. In came a rushing of sunlight, eager to meet the shadows of the stairwell.
Link swayed in the warm bath of blinding gold, one shaking hand protecting his eyes from the brillance. He looked like a pale ghost caught haunting the daylight, all skin and bones and scars. Orville hardly recognized him.
Link wasn’t moving, as if there were still shackles around his ankles forbidding him from taking the last step through the threshold of the prison. Orville carefully reached out and wrapped a hand around his friend’s bony wrist. He hardly had to pull forward to begin to coax Link into movement, his eyes wide and in some other place—or maybe he was just finally, after years of having one foot in the future, finally in the moment.
Tears began to drip down Link’s face as he shuffled forward on trembling knees, toes curling against the sun-bathed stones. The blacksmith helped him walk, his steps growing more desperate and uneven the farther they got from the prison watching them go.
The sun sat like a crown upon their heads, watching from the skies as something like a laugh wheezed past Link’s lips before he was crashing to the ground. The laugh twisted into gasping sobs and the tears turned thicker, Link’s hands reaching out to press against the warm stone. At such a display of emotion, so different from the closed-off thing he had become in the months leading up to his imprisonment, Orville found himself struggling to blink away his own tears, and he gave a watery smile to the world.
Link is free.
The thought came upon him in sudden catharsis. Link was—Link was free. Alive and breathing in front of him: out of that damp cell, free from the shadows and bars, free. The certainty of it washed over him with a wave of euphoria and joy, disbelief and trepidation.
He didn’t know at what point he had wrapped his arms around his friend’s skeletal shoulders, but suddenly Link was burying his hands in his scarf and breathing jagged against his neck, tears subsided. His grin was so wide it was visible from the corner of Orville’s vision. The stink of the prison clung to Link and his skin was freezing and his bones jutted into his stomach painfully, but Orville didn’t care one bit. All that mattered was that Link was back.
“This is really happening,” Link breathed into his neck, the sentence wavering between a question and a statement. “It’s not a dream?”
Orville pulled Link closer, felt the flutter in his stomach that he’d never been able to forget the sensation of, and felt a laugh bubble from his lips. It came out wrong, too quiet and lacking the joy he felt.
“Yes, Link,” he replied. “This— all of this, is real.” Real, not a dream spurred by the longing and pain in his chest. Real in the way the sunlight seeped into the both of them, and Link’s skin was warming beneath his touch, and they were holding each other in their arms: laughing, crying, euphoric after four years of being freed from their individual torture. In the sun, in each other’s arms, they could pretend this wasn’t so Link could fight a war. They could forget.
And perhaps that was the cruelest part of it all.
<><><>
They stood outside of a flat, thick silence wrapping around them like winter cloaks. He was acutely aware of his friend’s stillness, his hollow expression holding the barest bones of recognition. He hadn’t spoken a word since Orville had guided him through the whispering crowd that greeted them at the city center. Orville wanted to scream at the people who cautiously watched them, to tell them that this was their hero, to open his arms wide to the sky and make them see that it was their inaction and mistrust that led them to this dire situation.
Now, the crowd was behind them, and before them stood an empty building that had haunted the street as a hollowed shell for years. But despite this, the flat’s past had never really left, visible in the sign tucked into the corner of a window sill, written in his own sister’s handwriting— Link’s house. A stagnant and forgotten time capsule of an age that might never return.
Orville swallowed past the lump in his throat and opened his mouth, feeling the cool autumn dusk air hit his dry tongue. “Here we are,” he said with a wobbling tone, his voice too loud in his ears. It echoed in the empty spaces of his skull. Link was quiet beside him, and the blacksmith couldn’t help but turn his gaze to the man, the sight of his gaunt appearance still jarring.
Carefully, they entered the house, the door letting out a small creak and each of their footsteps letting up small clouds of dust. “I tried to maintain it,” Orville hesitantly admitted, something tight in his chest. He had tried , for the first year, before it all became too much when he realized that he might never see Link again and all he was doing was clinging to a dead man. Then he was called out to war, and there was no turning back. “But…” He shut his eyes briefly at the memory of the screams, fires, the twisted faces of horrible creatures led by a god of hate and war. “Things have gotten hectic. It’s absolute madness out there, Link. I don’t think even your visions could have predicted this.”
He bit his lip and immediately wished to take back that statement when Link’s shoulders caved forward. His friend looked so tired, deep shadows in the eyes that watched the stock-still house around them. “They did not listen,” Link murmured, his lips hardly moving. His words slid through the silence like they were old friends. He wouldn’t meet Orville’s eyes, lost somewhere else in the past. “Now they are paying the consequences. If…they had just…” Link’s face scrunched up for a moment before he sighed, refusing to continue.
Orville glanced around the darkening room. Hardly any sunlight could reach them through the irreversibly dirty windows. “I’ll go find some matches,” he said, fidgeting uncomfortably with the sword and clothes in his hands. “It's, um, getting dark.” He didn’t get much of a reply from Link—instead, his friend struggled over to the dust-adorned window where the sign sat. Orville could still remember the saccharine summer day his sister Elizabeth had come through the flat like a whirlwind, and left in her wake a sign to give Link something to smile at. Now, the memory sat bitter in his stomach. He didn’t know if any of them would smile or laugh like that again.
Allowing himself a small sigh, Orville set aside Link’s sword and clothes. He drifted down the short hallway to find a closet, digging through the expired supplies and clothes wrapped comfortably in a film of dust—how all this dust could have managed to get absolutely everywhere, Orville had no idea. It was in this dusty closet that he came upon a worn, half-empty box of matches.
He made his way back to the front room Link still stood in, clutching the matches in his hands. His friend was still as he stared at the sign cradled in his hands. Orville could make out the peeling painted flowers under Link’s scarred and pale fingers. Something flashed across Link’s face and he set it down as Orville stepped closer.
“She missed you, you know,” Orville blurted. Link flinched at the sound of his voice, making the blacksmith wince. He tried to cover it with an awkward laugh, but that just made him feel worse—why was he laughing?
“Sorry—I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, twisting the box of matches in his hand. Idiot. Idiot. “I found some matches?” he offered, holding up the box. Then something dawned on him, and he wanted to smack himself.
“Um…” He chuckled nervously. “I suppose I should have looked for a lantern to light first.” He wanted to shrivel up from the embarrassment that heated his neck and cheeks.
Link paid him no mind. “How…is she? Elizabeth?” his friend asked, voice strangled by a heavy rasp. “How is everyone, actually?”
Orville felt his gut clench, but he fought to keep the dread in his stomach showing on his face. “Liz is doing very well,” he half-lied. “She’s grown into a wonderful young woman—you’d be proud of her.”
He felt the dust on the matches grow caked by the sweat from his fingers, so he took a deep breath and discreetly wiped the dirt from his hands. They felt cold and clammy in the chill air of the flat. There was no sunlight here to warm it. Perhaps that could explain the frozen distance between him and Link.
“How old is she now?” Link whispered. He was leaning on the window sill for support. It struck Orville how disconnected Link really was from the world—Elizabeth had been eleven the last his friend had seen her. The reality of those long four years settled over his shoulders again, a familiar and unloved weight.
“Fifteen,” he eventually said. He could see the gears working in Link’s head as he slowly pieced together what that meant. Orville saw the exact moment the weight of those four years was placed upon his shoulders, too.
Silence stretched as Link’s careful expression slowly morphed into something devastated and confused. The quiet sat uncomfortably, suffocatingly, on Orville’s chest and he wanted to take his eyes off of Link but he couldn’t. He never could, when it came to Link.
“They all missed you,” he forced out. He wondered why he couldn’t bring himself to say we. “Lizzy was almost as devastated as I was when I told them about your—arrest.”
That seemed to be the worst thing to say, however. A look of nausea seeped into Link’s expression.
“And our squad?” The question entered the air between them so quietly Orville half thought he imagined it. A stone sunk deep in his stomach, knowing he couldn’t half-truth his way out of it this time. Link deserved honesty, with this, at least.
“W-We’ve—fallen apart, since you were…imprisoned,” he said, the words falling unnaturally from his lips. “We still have to do our shifts together—and still fight together—” And with each other, he thought to himself. “But there’s none of the… camaraderie from before. It is—” Not a team. “The group feels empty. You could almost feel the hole in it.”
His feet were rooted in place as Link shut his eyes, sliding to the ground with his back to the wall. His friend dragged in a shaky breath as he pulled his knees to his chest. The guilt on Link’s face was the same guilt that festered in Orville. He swallowed and forced the roots binding his feet to be torn from the floor, kneeling in front of Link.
“It’s alright, though,” he said, internally wincing at how artificial his bright tone sounded. It was all wrong for the somber light gently touching them, completely jarring to the guilt and pain in both of them. Like a neon splotch of paint in the middle of a painting of a warzone. “You’re back now. We can begin to heal, all of us.”
Orville hated how naîve, how stubborn he sounded, a weak suggestion whose support was swept away by the death hanging over the land. It was a hope lacking any conviction, the words thin and fragile in his mouth. He couldn’t even bring himself to believe it.
Link looked at him with blue eyes that were turned gray in the dim light. He looked conflicted and tired. The shadows in his gaze dragged him down, tugging on his shoulders so that they curled in, draining the passion that used to bring the light to his eyes. With limp strands of matted hair framing his scarred and gaunt face, Link looked like he already had a foot in the grave.
Orville had to tear his gaze away. It was like pressing salt against an open wound, seeing the devastation wrapped so certainly around his friend’s shoulders. Whatever Link he knew from four years ago, Orville was slowly beginning to realize, might not ever return. So he let his gaze slip from Link’s, eyes instead finding Link’s dirt-streaked hands and thin wrists that were wrapped around his bony knee. It struck him how filthy his friend was. The stink of the prison still clung to him with ferocious intensity, something Orville expected would take several baths to fully ease.
He tried not to stare at the bloody blisters left behind by shackles that hid among the dirt along Link’s wrists and ankles. He pretended that Link didn’t tense up under his gaze, and quietly wondered when it got so easy to pretend, to lie to himself.
“You need to be cleaned up,” he decided. Another thing Orville had learned in the past four years was ignoring his thoughts. “Do you think you’re strong enough for a walk to the bathhouse? At the very least, your wounds need to be treated, but that will have to wait until tomorrow so we can call a healer.” Once again, he was glad his older sister Adeline had decided to study under the city’s head healer—otherwise managing to find one would be nigh impossible.
Link let out a heavy sigh, letting his shoulders relax. “We’d best get going before sunset, then,” he said. Orville gave a small, crooked smile that felt more tender and raw than anything they had shared before, and helped him stand.