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The shrine of ressurection didn't bring Link back the same as before - it reconstructed him in the only way it knew how, with the same technology that made it, the guardians, and all the other sheikah things.
He looked normal on the outside, if you met him you wouldn't be able to tell there was anything amiss.
Hell, Link himself couldn't tell until he cut himself on a rock and the stuff that came out wasn't blood. It was the same bright blue fluid that dripped out of sheikah towers into his slate, that later on leaked from the chopped off legs of guardians, when he became strong enough to fight them. It glowed faintly, and it tasted like acid, and smelled like nothing at all.
At first Link didn't think it was unusual. But then one day, not long after he left the great plateau to begin his quest; he got cocky and tried fighting something he really wasn't ready for. There was a stable nearby. But when he approached, covered head to toe in the glowing blue substance, the man outside took one look at him and ran, screaming about ghosts.
Ever since then Link was careful not to get injured around people, he preferred to fight alone, and refused travelling companions.
So it was a long time before he saw a real person bleed, and remembered that hylian blood is red. And it doesn't glow. And they can't afford to loose anywhere near as much as he can before dropping dead.
He didn't sleep anymore.
He didn't need to.
The old man on the plateau had a bed, Link asked him what it was for. When he answered that it was for sleeping Link asked what that was, and the man asked him what he did when he got tired. So Link asked what that meant too.
The old man stared at him for a moment and then asked how long it had been since Link came out of the shrine; maybe he was loosing his ability to keep track of time, 100 years was a lot of waiting.
Link said it had been five days, and six nights.
The man was stunned.
He discovered what sleeping was much later, when he visited an inn. They said he looked a bit worse for wear and offered him a room and a bed for the night. Link had long since learned that telling people he didn't need to sleep earned him strange glances and questions he didn't like to answer, so he accepted. He lay down on the bed the same way he'd seen people doing when he visited stables at night. It was very soft, and he ached all over from days of fighting, so he closed his eyes and felt himself beginning to drift away.
The next morning there was a scene at the inn when Link woke up screaming. He thought he'd slept for another hundred years. Eventually someone managed to calm him down, but not before half the village was whispering about "that crazy boy at the inn". He left quickly, keeping his head down.
It wasn't till later that he noticed all his injuries were gone.
After that Link slept every few months. When he was hurt badly enough to be willing to risk it. He preferred to eat: it was safer. Link knew he'd been bit of a glutton before the calamity, but not like this. He didn't get hungry, exactly, but he found that he could eat enormous quantities of food. That he would eat two weeks worth of food in a few minutes, and then nothing for days. It healed him, when he ate, somehow his body converted the food into something that healed him instantly.
He decided to try not to think too much about it. If it worked it worked.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The first time Link opened a shrine, when he touched the pedestal he felt his whole body hum in recognition. And every time he opened one afterwards, every time he unlocked a tower, every time his slate got a new upgrade or ability.
This, he thinks, is why it didn't work for Zelda all those years ago. Why it wouldn't have worked for him either, or any of the sheikah researchers. They were flesh and blood, Incompatible. But the shrines opened for him now because he was a part of them, made of the same stuff, another one of the web of devices designed to overthrow the calamity.
He knew now what the champions had meant when they talked about their divine beasts as though they were people. With feelings, a personality, a soul. He understood what Mipha meant when she said Vah Ruta sang to her, when Revali talked about the way Vah Medoh hummed and trilled under his wings when they flew together.
Because he could hear them too.
He could hear them crying in pain, he felt it himself, the malice corrupting them. When he got close to the first one - Vah Ruta - he almost threw up from the wrongness of it. Sidon asked him if he was ok to continue and he nodded. Throughout the whole fight he could feel the beast speaking to him.
"I'm sorry little one" it would say. "I don't want to hurt you"
And it didn't, it really didn't, but there was nothing it could do against the corruption. Each time Link was hit he stayed silent, but he could hear Vah Ruta cry out in anguish. Eventually he won, it stopped, he freed it, and when it was released he heard its thanks, felt the sheikah tec inside him hum in agreement as it trumpeted in victory.
So he freed them all. One by one he ended their suffering, heard their cries of victory.
They were with him at the end when he fought calamity Ganon, after making his way into the heart of the castle. Past the hundreds of guardians he tried to avoid rather than kill, because a part of him died with each one he was forced to fell, because despite their corruption they too were made of the same stuff he was. They were intended to fight alongside him. He wished there was a way to save them. He wished he didn't have to be here in this place filled with malice and corruption that made his senses go haywire, and made him worry that if he stayed too long he'd end up just like the guardians and divine beasts. Another piece of sheikah tec overtaken by malice. Another machine fighting for Ganon that wished it didn't have too.
It was for them that he destroyed the calamity, just as much as it was for the people of Hyrule. It was for the guardians who Ganon overtook that he fought the beast, it was for the divine beasts who were raining down their attacks along with him, far stronger than anything he could ever do.
And when it was done. When Link wiped the glowing blue streaks off his face and watched Zelda descending from the sky, he heard them saying goodbye. He felt the divine beasts shutting down, their purpose complete, and he felt his body chime a message back to them. Thanking them, and bidding them farewell.
