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You wake up.
It’s cold and it is dark something is wrong. There’s a voice in your head and your legs shake as you climb out of this room. You don’t know what’s going on, but the voice calls you Link and there’s an ache in your chest and throat that doesn’t make sense and you realise you don't like it in here.
There is wet on your cheeks.
You make your way out like the voice is telling you what to do but it sounds sad and lost and confused and you think they’re aching like you. Like they don’t really know, but they’re trying just like you.
The outside is too bright and you close your eyes, but it’s better than in that room . Everything is so much. The wind hurts and the green tickles your ankles and there’s a person calling out loudly. It’s not inside your head and it’s not the voice so you don’t realise they’re talking to you. Instead you are distracted by noises coming from the leafs, the slip of the grass under your feet and the dew on the leaves and that pretty flower that's dancing in the breeze. There’s a warmth in your chest and it’s a nice sensation this time and your face twitches. You wish you knew why.
The person calls again. They look at you concerned, offering you something to eat. They have to tell you what it is. This apple is warm and you aren’t with how there is still wet over your skin so you go closer to the orange flickers where the apple was and it hurts. It hurts and it’s frightening and more wet is on your face. The person understands then. Their face, hairy and lined like your face doesn’t feel, goes weird. They reach out but stop as soon as you shy away. You’re happy they do. Everything feels too much and this person makes a frisson of unease run up your spine and you find yourself wary. The voice is too. You don’t know how to talk, you barely know how to walk, stumbling and disorientated as you are, and you can barely understand what they’re saying. They tell you things anyway.
When you leave the fire and the apples and the person behind you go exploring. Its fun and there are monsters but branches work just fine to make them stop.
When they stop, when they don’t get up from the dirt and the grass and black is trickling across the little flowers and little bugs in the earth, your chest goes tight. The voice goes quiet. It’s cold. It's very cold and someone is–
You carry on exploring.
Along the way you find a strange thing that scares you. It leaps from the ground, things fall around you and you want to run. Your Slate calls it a Tower. The dark place you came from frightens both you and the voice but it feels safer than this. The person finds you and that is scariest of all.
The person– man, he tells you, which makes no sense– says a lot. A lot a lot. None of the words explains anything. But you listen and you can only obey. The voice dislikes it and you do too but neither of you know what else to do. You don’t know how to get down, and you think down is the only way to escape him.
You sleep, and when you sleep you are There in front of the dark-danger and so very scared. The dark-danger whispers your strongest fears as it circles you and it hurts. The voice is There with you. You both wake up screaming.
The man makes make you do things anyway. You finish their tasks that hurt and frighten and your voice is unhappy and worried and hurting too, and when you are done the man tells you even more things that make no sense. They seem sad when they talk about the Castle and the dark-danger-frightening thing weaving around the tall building so far away. You still don’t understand anything but your voice is sad and upset and that feels important. You think you are too.
You escape the man who is a “king” and make it down. You find yourself laughing at the fall, and your voice does too. You do more puzzles and get gifts and the tall statue that makes it hurt a little less sounds sad like you and your voice are. You go exploring and things are missing and you meet people and discover new hurts and fears and you are so very lost. Your voice is lost too. You are running running running, always running, but you don’t know where to or what from. Every time you close your eyes you are There, in front of the dark-danger that whispers, and you and your voice become a little closer.
You find an old lady with a big hat that looks at you and the old lady is so very sad. You and your voice are too. You’re sent away to find things that are missing and it aches. Everything you remember just hurts. Everything you find does too. Your home never got to be your home. This Hyrule with these ruins became your home before you knew it was meant to be any different. Nothing makes sense. These memories cannot be you. Your voice doesn’t recognise them either.
Every time you close your eyes you are There.
You discover new places, new people, new faces and new things and this world is so very large. People realise how lost you are. They explain how to catch horses and how to cook food so it doesn’t make you sick. They tell you that too cold is just as bad as too hot, that the metal– because that’s what it is– you carry is what makes the bright-burn-hurt lightning come from the sky and right for you when it’s noisy and raining. They wake you up when you’re screaming. You tell them you closed your eyes and you were There.
The people carry on helping. They tell you where is safe and where is not and you keep on going because what else can you and your voice do? You learn to sing, how to play with smaller people and leaf people and with the animals around you, how to climb and dance and run without fear. You’re still chasing, you’re still fleeing, you’re lost and alone but you and your voice are still here.
And every time you close your eyes you and your voice are There.
You find new people that you don’t realise you love until the thought of them being gone aches just like the ache you awoke with. You’re told, one night when you wake up screaming and desolate (a word you learnt from a nice King who knew you once and wants to get to know you now) that the always-ache called grief. The Rito who wraps you in his wings and holds you tight yet soft– a hug, you've learnt to want them– tells you that grief is so much love that doesn’t have anywhere to go. That grief is the memory of someone that you never want to forget. That it’s not a bad thing, just a hurting thing, that one day it’ll be less sharp and more a soft hurt that you think of with tenderness. He promises you, he says. He stays with you and he promises you that too. You cry because you don’t know who you woke up missing. You cry because it hurts anyway. Your voice is crying too. Neither of you know anything. You just know your voice and that when you close your eyes you are There… and that when you are woken from screaming again, he is still there too. You like his songs.
You defeat the monsters and see people who make you ache. Dead, they tell you, and the nice King’s daughter is so sad when she tells you what that means. You and your voice are too. She doesn’t let you stay dead. Her gift is strange.
Over the seasons you have found a best friend and a bird friend and a little sister and two little brothers too. None of them are the same species as you but they don’t look at you like you are wrong. They accept you don’t know things and they try to help and they don’t know you any different anyway. They talk to you and they talk to your voice and it is nice. Bird friend and best friend seem to know what’s going on with you and your voice much more than you both do but it’s okay. You and your voice don’t mind. You’re still lost but it’s getting better. It’s getting better and every time you close your eyes you are still There.
The Lost Woods feels like home. You and your voice stand in front of the Great Deku Tree and he already knows you are both there. He tells you welcome home. He is nothing but kind. He treats you like one of his children– the leaf people who you dance and play hide and seek and solve puzzles with! Are they your family too? Are you a leaf person too now?– and tells you to rest. The gifts from the strange puzzles that the sad statue uses to makes it stop hurting so much are even more helpful now. They’ve made you stronger and the voice in The Master Sword recognises you. She says hello to you both. She sounds sad but happy. You and your voice think you are too.
That night the dark-danger whispers your worst fear with a smile. You wake up screaming. The leaf people who might be family panic. The dark-danger is getting stronger. You and your voice are angry now. You and your voice have people to lose that will make that grief-love-hurt worse now. So you leave to make it stop.
You are running. You are There. You always have been. You and your voice are tangled and afraid and furious and you both fight and fight and you are both running and running and you are both There.
You always have been There.
You never have been There.
You are you you are not you you are–
Running. The running hasn’t ever stopped.
You don’t think it ever will.
You win the fight. Your voice is gone but they are there and you are there and you’re looking at yourself from two sets of eyes and hearing yourself with two sets of ears and you don't understand. You don’t understand. You are both crying and you are both so lost and you are both afraid and you both hurt-hurt-hurt and you are both there. Here. You are in two heads and two minds and two bodies all at once and it hurts and you are bleeding and you are lost and afraid and you are there and it is gone but it’s not done it’s never done you tell yourself, you’re broken and you are split and you are afraid. You are so so afraid. You reach out and you reach back and you don’t understand.
You stumble back towards the old lady with a hat. It’s what she’s said to do. People run toward you and try to help and all you can do is cling to yourselves and hope to wake up.
You don’t think you ever did.
The resonance between them doesn’t so much stop as it… dwindles, as it always does. The immersion moves to a slow dripping of knowledge, invasive and vile as it always is, and Sky is left emptying his stomach onto yet another kingdom’s surface with another lifetime's worth of memory slotting into another dark corner of his mind. With another person’s fate ensnared with his own, another life interlaced with his own, for eternity and then some. Only this time, it isn’t only one other he has been brought to know so completely.
(Has suffered to know, though never with regret.)
Sprawled across the floor, wrapped around one another, faces slack and hair almost indistinguishable in the chaotic lake of blonde locks they lay upon, are Link and Zelda both. Once more, they are both so young. Why are they always so young?
Sky feels their heartbeats against his. He feels the warmth of their merged soul held tenderly amongst the seven already nestled against his own. He sees at the pair he would both kill and die for without question, and he feels like weeping.
Link died in Zelda’s arms. The shattering pain of that memory, the icy sensation of that horrific night, thrums in the back of Sky’s mind; waiting to be wept over in the darkest of hours like so many heartbreaking and destructive experiences he has no right to weep over.
(They aren’t his. For all he carries them, they aren’t his memories to mourn.)
Link died. And somehow, the tomb that they they buried him in didn’t have just one soul leave. If Sky remembers right, if he understood correctly (which he thinks he has)—
“The shrine pulls on holy power to piece him together,” a tiny child with big glasses says. “Given the absence of the Goddess for nigh on forever, the biggest source of holy power we have is coming from the Castle.”
“From the– Zelda. It’s used Zelda to– she’s his ‘voice’?” The big-hat lady chokes out, looking ‘stricken’ as Kass would say. “This whole time, from the moment he awoke, she’s been his ‘voice’?”
“Impa–”
“Can this even been fixed?!”
From outside, you try to understand what she wants to be fixed. It doesn’t make much sense. They’re talking about afters, and Zelda, and waiting and testing and so much of it is going over your head you feel dizzy and you can only assume they want the dark-danger gone from the Castle much sooner than you feel ready for. Your hands are shaking when you finally pull away from the window.
Perhaps you should leave for the Lost Woods tomorrow. They’re clearly upset. Maybe, if you can defeat it, the dark-danger being gone will make them feel better again.
— then these two teens are entwined so much more thoroughly than Sky and his brothers ever could dream to be. They aren’t two people in two bodies anymore, are they? Not entirely. They’re almost one new being, barely a hairsbreadth between them, and as lost as a child in a storm.
The memories continue to slot into place.
(They break his heart with each and every one.)
“Well hells,” Warriors says hoarsely, making Sky jolt harshly from surprise. His brother is staring at them both with an expression more wretched than he has ever seen. “Which one are we supposed to take?”
Time hums slowly. It’s a familiar sound; though it’s not the sound of bright mischief that inevitably leads to a prank war, nor the clever churning of thoughts that will place an integral piece in a puzzle that will makes clear the path to solving it. It’s the cry of a loftwing absent of their rider, a parents wail, a child’s cry, and it’s…
“I think the question is more can we take either at all?”
It's still the clever churning of thoughts after all, Sky thinks; toiling over an unsolved puzzle, five steps ahead and looking at the greater picture from higher ground and seeing to the root of the problem. Only this time there’s no satisfying solution nor a worthwhile treasure to be found in it Only another new complication they hadn’t yet considered, with consequences they are yet to unveil.
Sky isn’t the only one to come adrift now. Feeling a little faint, he takes a seat on the grass beside the pair still recalling lifetimes not their own and thinks. He can't imagine the influx will help them. He knows first-hand how disorientating it is, how confusing it is, and after what he saw… well. The balance of their memories to memories not their own will be significantly more disproportionate than Sky’s. It’s a travesty.
(Just another consequence of this infernal Gods game they can only call fate.)
He hesitantly takes Link’s and Zelda’s hands in his. What he expects from the touch he doesn’t know– fear? Shock? Repulsion?– but the new little light in his chest bouncing in recognition isn’t it. The trust is cherished. He will never let them go.
With burning eyes, Sky watches them breathe for a while. Blessedly alive. Every flicker of their eyelids, every twitch of their lips, every rise and fall of their chests is perfectly in time. Twins, yet not. More mirrors, reflecting with little distinction to be found. His.
(He knows them. He loves them. For their own sake, he wishes he didn’t.)
Sky has felt responsible before. Responsible for finding Zelda, for defeating Demise, for Ghirahim’s destruction, for building a new life, for the absence of new loftwings that have left their children flightless, for his failure shaped by that damnable eternal curse carrying across the ages; for the burdens his brothers have had to bare and the countless injustices inflicted upon them, for their restless inability to live in peace even after their work should be done. He’s felt responsible for their lives too, but never quite as intensely as he does now; these spindly fragile fingers resting in his and this new flittering warmth held safe within his ribs carry a weight his heart feels unready to bare.
(A weight, he thinks, he will shoulder willingly to the ends of time and back again just to let them rest a while.)
To take one half of the pair, to forcibly place centuries and timelines alike between these two fragile beings, to have no way to reunite them unless they were by chance granted leave to do so… What damage could that do to them?
What ruin would he bring upon these souls (coalesced so tightly they’re indistinguishable to even his own soul’s touch) if they continue being complicit in Hylia’s games?
Can they...?