Archive of Our Own

Right after he gets his normal body back his mind is too full of images, and smells, and sounds, and light, and the sensory overload makes it almost as though nothing has changed from those hours—days?– in the Twilight. Every glint of sunlight on the water at his feet turns into the gleam of buried treasure. He clenches his teeth, and his jaw—canines too small— aches. His veins are full of adrenaline and purpose, not blood, and he takes off running as soon as the spirit will let him. It doesn’t matter that he’s been busy, nonstop, since before the attack in the spirit spring.

Link has things to do.

Luckily for the world, and for his face, and for the dirt in front of him that his face would be crashing into if his body realized how long it’s been operating at full speed, Link has never paid much attention to the passing of time. He goes into Faron Forest during the day. He finally makes his way into the Forest Temple in the middle of the night. He stumbles a little, on a windy bridge surrounded by high tree walls and monkey calls, in the afternoon.

And then, after the battle is over and Midna has warped them away, Fused Shadow safely stowed, it’s somehow morning again. Link would find it funny, but time has always flowed around him differently. Fado remains astounded by just how long Link can mind the goats without going crazy or nodding off. Rusl says Link has a swordsman’s focus. Link says nothing, because Link never says much. If he did, he would shrug off their words anyway; the attention to what sets him apart makes him uncomfortable.

Midna says a lot, all the time. Now that they’re on the outside again, and nothing looks like it’s trying to kill them, her voice perks up. She tells Link they must leave immediately. There are two more Fused Shadows out there, and she needs them, and she needs them preferably weeks ago, so come on! Swaying, three days away from a good night’s rest, Link responds by falling face first into a patch of whistling grass.

He wakes up a full day later.

Midna can’t believe her shitty luck.

He’s not the easiest Deku Nut to crack, but Midna figures out soon enough that she isn’t stuck with a narcoleptic hero; only a stupid one. And, as much as she would dearly love to trade him in for someone better, there isn’t much she can do in her current state of affairs but make sure he takes care of himself. If she notices shadows around his eyes, she complains until he finds a place where he’s least likely to die while he naps. It’s a shame because the shadows do improve his face (ugh, Hylians) and every moment he isn’t running around, doing her bidding, is a moment wasted. And once in a while the monsters find him anyway. But he heals quickly, and more often than not Midna is likely saving time when she tells him to sit his ass down behind a crate while she goes to find food. Bludgeoned dodongo is incredibly nutritious (compared to the other things she could have shoved into the lava instead).

This is the most responsible Midna’s been in years, for Twilight’s sake. What is she, his mother?

The thought makes her cringe.

The cringe makes the remains of the dodongo’s head thwap comically against the rocks she had been beating against it. To make sure it’s dead, and to wash the horrible association away from her mind, Midna has the flickering shadows drag the meat off towards what looks like a set of abandoned pickaxes. After the pickaxes, it’s only a short glide to a vortex of flames and a very well-done steak. What Link doesn’t know won’t slowly starve him, unlike his ridiculous idea that a single bottle of milk will sustain him for this entire clusterfuck of an adventure.

Also Midna isn’t maternal.

She is not his mother.

Fuck this.

When she returns with what is either breakfast or lunch, or maybe brunch except she can’t quite envision Link ever eating brunch, Midna finds a keese attempting to chew off Link’s left ear while he slumbers. She sighs, and uses her magic to crush it. There. Lunch and dessert.

“Link! Get up!”

Link shakes his head and gets up. At least he’s trainable.

Hena promises she will never tell anyone about the time Link falls off his canoe and almost drowns after 36 hours sitting in silence, but it’s a close thing, and the deal is only sealed because no one she knows would ask and she’s too busy laughing herself silly to realize how much blackmail she has on her hands.

She tells him, through crinkled eyes, that throwing his body into the pond counts just as well as using a sinking lure, so she can’t consider the greengills in his boots real catches.

There is no input from Midna but a sharp giggling in the back of Link’s mind.

In recent days, Ooccoo’s excursions are less like delightful vacations and more like horrific nightmares. All the brochures she gathered reported that the Gerudo Desert was absolutely lovely this time of year! Either her sources of information are terribly outdated, or someone at the travel agency has a fetish for flesh-eating monsters and incredibly annoying beetles. Ooccoo does not feel she has enough information to pass judgment on the subject quite yet.

And the Arbiter’s Grounds really do have quite a lovely collection of pottery.

That, above all else, is Ooccoo’s single shameful weakness, and the reason for her many trips. Oh, how she regrets the night, so long ago, when she had her first taste of earthenware! The first stone-fired urn she sat inside! The original cause of her shameful, unending madness. It isn’t something she can give up, and although she loves her son dearly, she knows this kind of lifestyle isn’t right for him. So she hides behind ‘vacations’ when really…

Really…

Ooccoo has a bit of a pots habit.

Nothing—nothing out of control! Nothing like those ridiculous fairy orbs have, no, but Ooccoo can’t quite find it in herself to stop, now, and her son has begun asking questions that she has the answers to but doesn’t want to give, and—. And this is what makes the Hero such a blessing. He’s such a young thing, this boy in green, or blue, or red. And he always looks so drawn; so tired. Oocco half wonders if he has his own bad habits.

Perhaps an addiction to hot springwater?

Or bulbin flesh?

(He’s acquired some very strange bloodstains around his mouth, this time around.)

Ooccoo doesn’t pry, but as the Hero only ever seems drowsy, she releases her son into his care under the guise of letting the Hero warp out of the Grounds without losing his place. It’s a system that works well for all of them. The Hero can breathe fresh air and rest his bones, Ooccoo’s son can make a new friend, and Ooccoo can… indulge herself. This time, as soon as they meet, the Hero nods his assent to her question of whether he wants to be let out. And then he falls back into a puddle of scarab-infested quicksand.

Ah.

Ooccoo doesn’t have the strength to drag the Hero out of the mire, where he is slowly being devoured by sand. He’s quite enormous in comparison to her own body, and then there’s the matter of the monstrous beetles.

Ah.

But before he can die in front of her, and her son’s, eyes, the Hero gamely drags himself up towards the solid slabs Ooccoo and her son (and her pots) stand upon. He disposes the scarabs with his sword after he finds his footing and before any of them can threaten Ooccoo’s safety. She does appreciate that. That done, he slumps down onto the stone tiles. He waits.

His breathing deepens.

Ooccoo swears, as she sends her son and the Hero off to disappear before the Hero can attract any more undead attention, that she hears the faintest we’re warping to Ordon, but you’re dragging your own ass up that stupid ladder jeering up from the shadows beneath the Hero’s leather boots.

Link wonders what his own life would have been like if he had had someone to relate to. Navi—and it doesn’t hurt to think of her now, after so long it’s only the ghost of a twinge—didn’t count. She was a voice to talk to, and a companion, but she was a fairy, and if Link knows anything it’s that fairies never truly understand.

(Listen!)

He also knows that destiny is a strange thing, unusually cruel, and that the boy who is sometimes a wolf didn’t have to be clad in clothes straight out of Link’s crypt to save the world. Really, destiny. In life Link used to wonder just how tasteless fate could be in doling out roles, and responsibilities, and lack of choices. In death, standing in a snowy practice ground, Link only needs to see his old hat set atop a face that mirrors what was his (when he had a face) to know that the answer is very.

Fate is very tasteless.

But Link draws his sword anyway, and so does his descendant. “You have a little more of the look of a hero than you did befo—”

Link groans and rolls his single red eye as Link hits a snowbank face-first with a soft PLOP and stays down. He also knows the look of an adventurer who hasn’t been getting adequate rest, has hilariously already lived this moment at least a hundred times, although never before with another version of himself and never before on the side still standing. When he approaches the boy, glad to see he hasn’t fallen on his sword (the Master Sword now? So soon?), Link huffs and lets his own sword slide back into its scabbard. He hoists the boy out of the bank, arranges him flat on his back, and waits. The dreamland they stand (and sleep) in won’t break until Link allows it to. The outside world won’t keep track of the time that flows while its savior sleeps. No one needs to know what business a Hero gets up to in his dreams.

For now, Link stands guard over the face that used to be his, and hopes his successor’s war resolves swiftly.

When he goes back home, after all of it, in some ways it’s like he hasn’t even left. Because of his intermittent visits and sporadic warps home, Link was never gone for more than a week’s time at once without stopping back to relay some message to Uli or pick up milk from Sera’s. To them, Link has been back and forth to Kakariko for two months, and not much else. Now the villagers are grateful for the return of their children from that place, at long last. Everyone knows Link had something to do with it, but they will never know the extent, and after three days the celebrations are over and life begins again. Exactly seven weeks after being clubbed in the back of the head and dragged away to rot, Link sits in the back of Ordon Ranch and minds the goats like he has for years and will for years.

The sun shines bright around him, until Link looks up from his sketches and suddenly it’s sunset, and time to get the goats in. It has to be one of Fado’s days off; otherwise he would have reminded Link to get the chore done earlier. Link finds he needs more reminding than usual to do the things that used to come naturally.

Or maybe he only wants the reminding.

Who knows?

He finishes the job without any of the goats escaping to the village, as they are wont to when Fado is left in charge, and soon there’s no light but the stars. Instead of going home, or to Mayor Bo’s, where he always has a standing invitation for dinner, Link we’d be happy to have you, he goes back to his spot in the field and sits.

There aren’t any monsters in the skies of Ordon; in that way it’s entirely unlike Hyrule Field, or Kakariko, or even the gates of Castle Town. The stream bubbles along its winding path, but there isn’t enough water to recreate the same echoes as Zora’s Domain. It’s neither too hot nor too cold, sitting in the breeze. Ordon Village is something entirely its own, something peaceful, something soothing, something safe.

Link spends the night looking at the stars, wondering when he will feel the pull of sleep.

He doesn’t for a long time.