Work Text:
There are lives where they never meet. In those lives, he is more likely to be aware of her than she of him. He remembers—
He doesn't remember, but he remembers catching a glimpse of her, newly crowned on the step of the temple, pale with grief for her father, a queen too young, and the twist and pull of something great and terrible and beyond his grasp in his chest, the glancing blow of something so much larger than himself, then overlapping him and consuming him and—
And then his husband's hand had tightened around his, and he was only himself, only one man with one lifetime of memories in his skin, leaning closer to his husband against some strange chill, and he would forget it all like a nightmare before the day was out.
He would see her again, on certain festival days, on high holidays, as any common man might catch a glimpse of a queen, but the feeling would never come back, and they would never meet in that lifetime.
Or many lifetimes.
There are many lifetimes where Link lives normal lives. He has been so many normal men: a knight, a baker, a fisherman, a husband, a father.
He does not know where the people he loves in those lives—when he is just a man, not her hero—go when they die. Maybe they cease to be. Maybe they go on like he does, recast in just as many roles. Maybe they go on to somewhere he cannot follow.
But it's never his husband he meets again. It's never his children he recognizes, looking back at him out of new faces.
It always just comes back to her, her, her.