Chapter Text
A light passes through the empty, empty expanse before him. It's quiet. It’s kind of quiet that feels empty, like it’s just him here with cold feet and dirty fingernails, with nothing but the rock under him to be real. Like there’s nothing in the air, like there is no air, like he’s drifting like a little boat untethered out into the open nothingness, the dark night sky a heavy roof overhead waiting to crash down around him. Like he’s alone. Like the breeze he can feel rustling thin blades of grass—
why do they grow? Why do they live? Surely there’s not enough ground below them for roots to hold fast, for the trees to get so tall when the weight can’t be anchored down without carving into the ground unrelentingly enough to crack the bedrock and send the edges tumbling down, falling into the abyss, cold and alone until
— against his bare calves isn’t actually there. Tiny dots of light are spinning freely. Maybe they’re fireflies, like the countless flickering in the fields of Wild’s stubbornly beautiful era. Maybe they’re little illusions telling him he’s not breathing enough. Maybe they’re both, or maybe they’re neither; Wind isn’t real enough to tell. He might not be real at all. The only real thing is the red stuck under his fingernails, lodged in the creases in his skin, cracking and dry and there, and the ripped, stained blue cloth over heavy legs he no longer feels.
His chest lifts. It's quiet enough he hears the air flow up his nostrils, feels it cold in his throat and down into his aching chest. The exhale must happen, because between one blink and the next, he’s again breathing in. Breathing out. It’s rhythmic. Instinctual. Unreal as he is, he supposes that’s a good thing.
In: lungs inflate, chest lifts, and the air is cold.
Out: lungs deflate, chest falls, and the air is warm.
In and out, out and in. On and on, breath flows like tides.
A body doesn’t need a person to be alive, he thinks. It’s real all on its own. But Wind reckons knows a lot about realness, and not realness, and the way sometimes things can be not real and very real all at once if you just look at it from a different angle. Like how things can be fine, because you’re fine and he’s fine and the healing went fine after the flight up here went fine and how everyone is fine because no-one is talking!– and that’s fine too; but really nothing is fine because you’re not and he's not and the healing only went fine because no-one has asked to find out any differently and the flight was awful with the rain so fine there is subjective too, but that’s fine because it has to be fine, because everyone knows if just one thing isn’t fine then every other bit of fine they've built up like teeny tiny bricks to make a drafty hut of sanity in this situation that’s makes no sense at all will collapse and crash into each other with an almighty clatter, all sharp and loud like the game with little dotted white blocks that Legend taught him and Sky to play when none of them could stop the shake, and nothing will ever be fine again if—
Another light. He inhales. Feels the shapes of threads under his fingertips, silky and fine, and tries not to think of what stains them.
That evening with the blocks wasn’t fine. Not at first, at least. Not with the rain drumming like restless fingers, or the crashing of thunder, or the sharp stabs of lightning that made Sky rub at his chest with a trembling hand and keep knocking the pieces over so they had to start over. But by the end, when the line of blocks went all around the house and up and under and between Four’s feet he wasn’t allowed to move (“or else”) to weave around the table legs, when Legend made him nudge that first piece and the rest all followed, painted wood tumbling into each other with neat little clack clack clacks that never ended and he couldn’t look away, when a cascade of laughter so much louder than the storm outside from ten people cheering and a bird tweeting a silly little victory song filled the room, when Legend was grinning like he never does when Ravio handed over a shiny silver rupee and their eyes said so much more than Wind could ever hope to understand– that was fine. That was more than fine, even. The hug he got, held to a chest shaking with laughing and broad with safety, was too.
Wind hears himself inhale. Catalogues the sensations– lungs inflating, chest rising, the air stinging cold– and realises they barely brush him. Water is creeping into his ears, soft sweeping whispers urging him up and away from the twisting, vicious emotions that drove him here just that tiny bit more. Wind lets it swallow him, drown out what he can’t think about, and hears himself exhale. It shakes. He doesn’t think about the next. Instead, as though from miles away, Wind watches mucky fingernails dig into just as dirty fabric with a wobbly sort of fascination. Wrinkles burst into being like stars. The ripped cherished blue says that if he were real even the hut of silent sanity wouldn’t be able to make things fine. That things might not ever be fine again. He’s not though, so it is. Probably. If you tilt your head and squint a bit, but not at all if you don’t.
“Breathe, guppy.”
Pale yellow wavers in the smear of rain before him. His fingernails are dirty, The fabric is ruined. Wind’s head doesn’t tilt.
His eyes creak towards the edge. The whistling cold barely stings his bare feet anymore, having entirely lost their realness around the time the waves came calling, and he wonders whether clouds feel like much. To him they’re wet, and they’re cold, and the touch of them is fleeting (fleeting like blood-slicked fingertips on wet cheeks before they land heavy on wet mulchy ground and you’re left alone in–) and uncomfortable and it makes you deaf for a while from the rush, but do they feel anything? Four would say of course not. He’d delve into books and slot knowledge into the many wrinkles of his brain so he can recall it in moments where it’s either useful or funny (or both) to prove they’re not alive, that they feel nothing and here’s why, but Wind knows a lot of things are alive that wouldn’t be if you’d stopped to ask books for their opinion, so maybe– just maybe– clouds could be too.
He thinks they might be lonely, clouds. Drifting in the nothingness, touching nothing that lasts forever, buffeted by winds and driven by deities you can never truly understand, who can’t ever truly understand you… Wind wonders, in his unrealness tethered to this place only by dirty nails, a patch of rock, and torn-up material, whether they wonder if they’re real too. If they feel sad, but the only way they’ve got to show it is to throw it to the ground below to make hands shake and brothers play silly games to keep the fear at bay, if maybe they make others feel something– like laughter, or worry, or slight suspicion at the gathering smudges of grey surrounding the bright mid-afternoon sun– just to feel something too. If they go away sometimes, too.
Wind then wonders, seeing another bird and its rider circle around for the fourth time in– according to the little ticking caused by the hourglass he knows is empty but still burns hot when the waves want to talk– a very short amount of time, whether the clouds want to keep those that come by close. Whether they don't want to let them go. Whether the wet touch of fingers on their cold selves, fleeting and sad– or maybe brief and bright with momentary freedom– on their way to land heavy on the ground the poor clouds are always apart from, hurts terribly. Whether the clouds scream, and if that's what thunder is. Whether rain is just tears, and lightning the grief they can’t shake, and the storms that blows overhead are moments of realness that the clouds can’t possibly keep hold of.
Whether they ever feel so alone they might just die from it.
If Wind was real, he might feel that too. He isn’t though, and everything is fine, and the clouds are just water moving much too fast to stay where everyone else is. Wind does that too. Did that too, drove everyone mad with it once upon a time, when the blue wasn’t ripped but draped around the owner joining him on a walk to burn off the energy that makes him sick with how much of it there is. Now he’s too still to stay put, body vibrating on the inside too fast with emotions that can’t touch him to move, and his brain is so floaty it might as well reach up towards the stars with how anchorless it is.
Maybe he is anchorless. Maybe he’s not.
Maybe he’ll drift so far he’ll never be found.
A bird and its rider come by again, wings silver under the glints of moon and persistent rain. Somehow, the tiny lantern is just enough to drive away the dark, and a small part of him wonders, tiredly, how that could be. If Wind were real he might’ve thought to grab a light too. Instead he’s just got dots of green whirling out the corners of his eye, pretty and defiant and bold. There’s one in the tattered folds held in his lap. Again and again it illuminate the cloth like a tiny blessing, pulses green-lit messages he can’t understand over spoiled threads he can’t quite make sense of, but no matter what it says the stains don’t change. The tears don’t mend. The light doesn’t leave. It's all just… there.
It goes blurry after a while.
They’re pretty, these bugs. If he existed, he might try coaxing it onto his hand. He doesn’t exist though, he’s intangible like clouds, like seafoam on waves, and his paled fingers don’t even twitch. Instead he breathes, he thinks. His chest might be rising, it might be falling– or maybe not. He’s no way to know. Trapped between the waves and the sky, real and not real, fine and not fine, drifting and motionless, Wind watches the light of the lantern, flickering in starlit blue, dive into lonely clouds so rarely touched to leave him alone with the fireflies, torn cloth, and the dark he can’t move to escape.
It’ll be back, he thinks, that persistent light. Or maybe not. Maybe this time it’s gone for good.
Something lands heavy behind him. His fingernails are still dirty, he knows, but orange is now illuminating the grass just enough to see tiny flowers that make no sense to be growing up here in the nothingness of air. There’s a voice, he thinks. If he were real he might check, hope he was found– or maybe not. Maybe he imagined the sound. Maybe he never existed at all.
Foggily, he watches the shadows of two birds circling through the sky, and wonders (somewhere, something is hurting) whether they realise the clouds they touch will be gone tomorrow, all shredded and scattered, with nothing to remember–
Something thunks against him. For just a moment, in a split second of stillness, he’s breathless and awake. He’s still too lost to resist.
Dragged half an eternity behind himself, tossed and tumbled from one blink to the next, he lands, burning alive yet too heavy to cry, sprawled across wet grass and a warmth he hates. It’s too much after nothing at all. It doesn’t last. The realness is quickly shrinking, the ache of his body leaving with it, but a voice still breaks through. It says a name as though it was said several times before, and maybe it has. Maybe it hasn't. It’s too late to tell. Beneath the whooshing of tides sweeping him away, from within thick air so terribly quiet up here in the clouds, he hears nothing else. He’d not hear the water at all if he was a little more substantial, so far from the ocean he might belong to, but he isn’t. He might never be again.
A name– his name?– is said again, forceful and urgent, and he’s turned. The grubby blue under grubby nails comes with him. A speck of determined light throws watery green across the person’s lone eye when it flies past, and he just looks. It’s all he can do when he doesn’t exist. Not properly. Not when he might just…
“Wind,” they beg, hoarse under rain. His name, then. “Wind, can you hear me?”
He hears them, Wind thinks, numb to it. The words sound like they’re for someone else. A trembling hand covers his cheek; the warmth is at a distance, but it still burns through the clouds and the waves and the anchor-less fog to reach him through the touch stroking under where his eye should be. Where it is. Wind blinks, feeling the motion of tiny muscles and the glide of eyelid over eyeball and lashes brushing against his cheeks, and watches the other do it too. He looks old, this man gazing back at him. Pale, and scarred, and worn thin like old curtains in dusty windows. Wet trails are flowing over his cheeks, gleaming in the weak light of the obscured moon. Is he crying? Or it it the rain?
Is it raining? He might’ve forgotten.
Wind’s fingers twitch. His face does too, threads of consciousness seeping into a few tiny cracks it's meant to be in (most of it still in the sky, under the waves, reaching for clouds that might just understand) and he blinks again. It is raining, it has been since– don’t– but this man is also crying. Looks as though he has been for hours. The sudden hug he gets feels a little like nothing at all. More of the green lights spin through the air, all of their bravery vanishing, to abandon Wind and the rock and the fabric in his lap all alone like…
The man is shaking.
“I’ve been looking all over for you–” he gasps, words wet against the tip of his ear. It sinks Wind a little deeper into his body when he realises who he is. Who’s holding him. “When Pippit said– Hylia I thought–”
Time chokes, pulling him closer with a shudder. His arms are tight enough to hurt, or maybe not. Maybe it’s just the deep pressure squeezing further him into the sharp empty spaces of the body he was swept away from. The cloth, ripped and ruined, is still in his lap. His fingernails are filthy. He wonders, and the thought tears through him like a scream, whether anyone has cleaned up his hands too. He really doesn’t like being mucky. He’s always said–
Wind inhales. Lungs expand, chest rise, air is cold– and a hand catches the back of his head, warm and real, and holds him closer. He doesn’t want to be. He begs and the waves hear him, they come back, stronger and louder, and he drifts…
And a song hums, rough and watery, and Wind– suspended in the space between blinks, adrift and stationary, real and not, lungs expanding and shrinking but never quite enough– notes with distant surprise that he’s only ever heard it on an ocarina, in places where echoes of regret linger. Will there be a place like that here? Will anyone know? The thought crumbles soon after. Magic hums within the melody, and all he can do is listen.
Piece by piece, his tethers to reality slip away; he’s weightless, he’s held, the fabric is soft and his fingers are blurry and his cheeks are wet and the waves subside, and he’s– warm? He’s warm, and he’s calm, and for a perfect, impossibly perfect, moment it’s like he’s… home.
But home, he knows, is so very far away. There’s nothing to catch him. There’s nowhere to go.
Wind falls. Back to land, to wet ground, to thin air and torn nails, to dirty skin and ruined blue cloth, to an embrace in the rain and a brother who–
He pauses. Closes the thought into a tiny box he buries deep down and tries not to cry. He thinks, if he remembers right, that’s how he ended up here. How long ago that was he's not sure, but can’t feel his feet. Blinking feels like sandpaper, even that’s too much, and there’s a cramp in his calf that’s pulling harsh on his knee but still somehow worse is the hollow gnaw of his gut.
“Just ignore them, kid. I’ll have a word with Time after dinner, but ‘til then– how about we get out of here?”
Reality shreds him like claws.
Throat burning, Wind listens to Time’s heart, to the song, to the patter of slowing rain. He watches the stars twinkle between clouds, the fireflies dancing their unknowable messages, and straight ahead a bird and its rider soar higher than they have all night. He feels the weight of numb feet, the tightness of his muscles, the heavy band around his back to hold him to a body unsplit by an axe but still shaking him fiercely. He smells Warriors’ laundry soap in the fabric of Time’s shirt. He hears his brother cry.
Rust spills across his tongue.
Wind exists now, he thinks. Enough that he could ask. He doesn’t, though.
Everything is fine if nothing is said.
Wind holds the scarf a little bit tighter, feels the hurts of a fight he won alone but still lost, and pretends he doesn't mind the silence.