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The air is dry and stale between Link’s cracked lips. The ground wavers beneath his feet, shifting along with the thin layer of sand that skitters across dilapidated stones. The breeze on his face is slow and nauseating, though the touch of fresh air on his numb skin nearly brings tears to his eyes.
He doesn’t realise he’d stopped until the guard behind him gives him a shove, sending granules of sand poofing into the air as Link sinks ankle-deep in the stuff. The corners of his vision blacken threateningly, but the guards drag him along anyway, uncaring of his stumbling gait. He stopped feeling the over-encompassing ache that digs into his body days ago anyway.
There’s sand in his mouth and sticking to his skin, grating into every exposed bruise and stinging along broken scabs. Link keeps his head down, unkempt and greasy hair falling into his eyes as his feet drag onto too-warm stone.
His head hurts. He barely feels the jolt as one of the guards digs a hand into his hair and forces him onto his knees. If he closes his eyes he can pretend he’s back in Ordon on the sun-warmed dock, one foot in the river’s lazy current and the smell of pumpkins in the air. They’d be calling the kids in now, and Link would inevitably be recruited to haul Malo and Talo and Beth over his shoulders as they shriek and squeal, trying to incite him for just five more minutes!
“I’ll take ya fishin’ t’morrow if ya promise not t’ go chasin’ ‘fter monkeys, ya evil imps,” he’d say, and Beth would cheer and Talo would groan. But Link always won in the end, and they’d be hanging off his hands with Colin at his heels come noon the next day.
His hands are wrenched above him, back pressed to stone, but he doesn’t flinch at the irons closed around his wrists. He can’t see the moon, but he imagines it rising above the dunes, casting the same sickly white light of the sages above him.
Link hates the desert. He’s never quite been able to shake the sand from his boots, no matter how hard he tries. It always seems to drag him back into its clutches somehow, from the beginning of his life to the end.
The empty frame of the Mirror of Twilight sits across from him, mocking. One of the sages starts to speak atop a crumbling pillar. Link looks to the stars instead, letting his mind drift there amongst the snippets of a death sentence.
“— k of Ordon, you are hereby—“
He wonders if the bread Ilia makes every night is rising well. She’d shown him how to make it years ago and he often joined her at dusk, rolling the dough in floured hands while she talked softly about the day’s events. She’d mentioned it offhandedly in her last letter, unknowingly resuming an old habit she didn’t remember she had. She told him she’ll be waiting when he gets back. They’ll talk then, she said. He hopes she forgot she wrote that.
“— for acts of violence against the high crown and attempted murder of the Queen—”
Link buries the memory of the heavy weight of his sword in hand, the slick slide of blade into flesh. The spray of blood had covered the screaming burn on his palm, blossoming against fabric and turning gentle lavender into a brilliant magenta. Zelda is one of the kindest people he’d ever met, and he holds her tired smile in her mind’s eye instead. They hadn’t spent enough time together to be friends, not really, but Link doesn’t think he could face her anymore anyway.
“— possession of a cursed item and use of dark magic—”
Midna flashes in his mind, red hair like fire and grin sharp enough to cut stone. Link closes his eyes and wishes they’d just get on with it.
“If you have final words, speak now, or let Death have her claim.”
He hopes Colin won’t be too disappointed when he doesn’t make it to sword practice. He’d promised him this would all be done and over soon, and he’d be back as soon as he could. “Unless you’s happy bein’ the oldest?” he’d teased, flicking Colin’s nose.
Colin had swatted him away, clamping his hands over his mouth and nose to block further attempts. “No!” he’d denied, muffled adorably as his blue eyes flicked down. “I miss you.”
Link has a lot of regrets, but the biggest one might be not making it home to his little brother.
He wonders if he’ll be allowed to stay after he dies. If he can watch Colin and Isla grow up, watch Ilia find her place again and the country get back on its feet. He wonders if he’ll finally be able to go home, just like he promised.
He wonders if he can somehow see Midna again, just once.
But when Link closes his eyes, he sees the Hero’s Shade on the other side, and knows that’s probably more realistic.
He doesn’t see the sword that sinks into his gut. It burns like holy fire, bright white pain bursting through his skin until he’s left gasping and panting, throat raw and tears wet on his face. Its initial glow is bright enough that it blinds him, but it fades after a moment into a thin, pulsing white.
The sages disappear one by one, leaving him alone to die in the coliseum like so many others. Blood drips steadily through Link’s ragged undertunic, the fabric soaking and sticky. It seems to echo, every drop, pattering like rain onto the stone beneath.
He supposes it’s only fair, after everything he’s done.
The breeze rustles by again, hesitant. The moon rises, sand glistening silver under its wake. The stars continue to shine, unknowing or uncaring of the dying man beneath them.
It’s cold, Link thinks.
He opens his eyes to mist. The silvery substance gathers lace-like around him, curling like creeping moss along the ground. It’s strangely heavy, dropping to his shoulders and tapping incessant fingers around his neck like a noose. It tastes of iron, thick and sticking to the back of his throat.
Past the mist Link can see colossal trees, foliage thick enough that he can’t see the sky. The world around is a careful construct of grey-slicked green, fuzzy like a dream and hiding from him what lies beyond.
It’s a middle place, Link knows, a resting point for the wayward— and in between enough for the living and dead alike. The Spirit Woods.
He touches his stomach with cautious fingers. Pain stabs up through his skin, making him smother a groan. He doesn’t particularly want to look at the gaping, dripping wound in his torso past a glance. He stares down at his hands instead, at the Triforce branded across the back of his left and the shackles still on his wrists.
He thinks of bare bones and dented armour, and wonders if he’ll get out of here before he forgets he wasn’t here in the first place.
He’s not sure how long he’s there, staggering blindly among trees— it feels like hours, or days, or perhaps he just got there a minute ago. Link supposes it doesn’t really matter with the relationship between the Woods and time. He can’t tell if he’s fully there either, dirt turning to sand beneath his feet and trees glitching into the horizon. It’s like whatever drew him here can’t make up its mind if it really wants him or not.
Somewhere in the distance, the clunking of hollow wood sounds. It’s followed by a tinkling of laughter, both ethereal and eerie. It echoes strangely in the mists, overlapping on itself for longer than it should.
It’s easy to spy the little feet kicking from a branch above, the mild orange of Skull Kid’s clothing standing out against the grey. His red eyes glint in the low light, his gaze already on Link by the time Link finds his.
He grins down at Link with his ever-present, overly stretched smile and giggles again.
“Am I dead?” Link asks, the words spilling out before he can stop himself.
Skull Kid titters, tilting his grinning face. “I don’t know,” he says, mouth unmoving. “Are you?”
He disappears in a swirl of leaves. Link can still hear him humming; a song that he knows. Three descending notes repeated, then down and up again. The first song that Shade ever taught him.
“Are you here to play a game?” Skull Kid asks, bursting into existence a few feet in front of Link, sitting upside down in thin air. “It’s been so long since you played with me.”
“No, I—“ Link swallows, watching the slow swirl of the mist around the trees. “Am I— stuck’n ‘ere?”
Skull Kid taps his chin, debating. “I don’t know!” he cheers again after a second. “Isn’t that up to you, silly?”
He winks out of sight again, crumpled leaves falling in Link’s hair. Link turns, trying to decipher where he’ll pop back in.
“You’d better decide quick,” Skull Kid’s voice says right by his ear. Link whirls, but there’s nothing there. “Before we decide for you.”
The woods blurs a bit, foliage unfocusing in the corners of his eyes. A sudden hot breeze whistles past his ears, lifting his bangs and searing across his cheeks. Sand cracks between his teeth. The pain from his wound builds into agony, blacking out the edges of his vision as it tears through him.
Distantly, he feels his knees hit the sodden ground and he’s back there, back on the crumbled stone with a cruel hand in his hair, shackles cutting through his wrists and bruises all over his skin as the sages stare down at him with impassive eyes.
Why hadn’t they stabbed him through the heart? Why hadn’t they just slit his throat, why didn’t they just let him die instead of leaving him with a sword through his gut to bleed out slowly into the sand alone —
He knows he deserved it, but he thought maybe, after everything, it would get better. He thought maybe they would actually see him instead of the tainted ranch hand or monster, but they never did. So in reality there’s no fucking point in being angry about it because he knew something like this would happen and he’s better off here anyway— better off simply being nothing. He was always that in the end anyway.
There’s tears on his cheeks when someone tries to touch his shoulder. Of course, their hand just passes right through because Link is stuck in this damn in-between when he should just be dead.
It produces a strange shock-like sensation nevertheless, and his vision slides back properly into the Woods. He’s ready to turn on Skull Kid and snap or wail that he doesn’t know how to make a fucking decision, how is that up to him anyway and Hylia, just let him go home, when he sees it’s not Skull Kid at all.
Curled over on the forest floor, nails dug into his sides, Link stares.
The armoured man crouched in front of him stares back. He’s not wearing his helmet, no longer just weary bones— by all rights, there shouldn’t be any reason for Link to recognise him because he had no idea what he actually looked like, but he does. He knows from a place he can’t reach that this man in front of him, with shoulder-length blond hair and an eye blue enough that Link can tell even through the mists, is the living form of the ancient hero he once knew. The Shade.
Shade doesn’t seem all that taken aback to see Link there, not in the same frozen way that he is. He simply studies Link with a heavy gaze, the hand he’d tried to touch Link with pressed into the ground. Link doesn’t dare breathe under the weight of it.
Shade’s expression twists minisculely when Link straightens enough for his wound to be on full display, the blood crusted over Link’s fingers and trousers and sitting in the back of his throat, rotten. He brings his eye up again a second later, though, catching on Link’s own.
“Who are you?” Shade asks. It’s spoken with a careful cadence, sounding like one he’s often practised. He’s resting his other hand on some sort of instrument tied to his belt— an ocarina, Link thinks.
And isn’t that a question. Hero, but executed by the same country he fought to save. Hylian, but changed. Blessed and feared and forgotten, and yet after everything, despite everything, he’s still just—
“Link,” he murmurs.
Shade looks at him in silence, expression suddenly withdrawn. His fingers clench and unclench around his ocarina, and Link feels dreadfully stupid about the disappointment that wells. Of course Shade wouldn’t know him, not yet; he’s alive right now, for Lanayru’s sake. But the lack of recognition in the gaze of who Link would eventually call friend is all too familiar and makes him feel all that more cold. His vision flips for a second, and he watches with numbness as his hand blinks out, shackle and all, melding with the grassy ground beneath.
Shade notices too, eye dropping as Link’s hand slowly reforms. He realises too late that it’s his left hand, the mark of the Triforce all too obvious in the shadows of the forest. He’s not entirely sure why he has the instinct to hide it, especially when it’s not exactly his anymore, so he doesn’t.
“It weren’t ‘nough” Link mutters, the Triforce etched in the back of his eyelids like a brand. He thinks his insides might be freezing over, icy cold creeping over his heart. “I thought I— I ain’t run, I swear I didn’, an’ I fixed it but it weren’t— everythin’ I did was for ‘em. T’make it better. T’save ‘em. But still— still—”
He doesn’t know what he’s saying, pressed to the earth of the Woods in front of a man gone for centuries while he’s dying in another world. He might even be dying here, his not-quite body flickering like a candle about to be snuffed, but it doesn’t make a goddess-damned difference because he’s dead either way.
Was this always where Link was going to end up? Left to wander, his soul slowly withering as his world— his home— goes on without even a blink? No matter what he did or how hard he fought, was he just simply destined to be alone?
In all the stories he’s read, all the folklore told under the stars, the hero never gets the ending he wants. After all, Shade was left as a shadow of himself, trapped in his regret for hundreds of years, and he’s the only hero Link knows of. The light spirits had dragged Link from a watery grave only to complete his divinely ordained task and send him to a bloody one instead.
He was only ever needed for one thing, and it wasn’t to live.
“‘S always gonna end like this, wasn’ it?” he whispers.
Link isn’t sure if he’s ever seen Shade look sad before, but he does now, blue eye soft and dark. He hasn’t ever seen Shade fit under the description of ‘soft’, either, and wonders just how much those regrets stole from him. If they feel anything like the ones sitting heavy on Link’s shoulders, making him want to tear his skin to pieces, he understands.
“It doesn’t have to,” Shade says into the silence, holding his gaze. “Ends are also beginnings. From here on out, you get to choose.”
A lump rises in Link’s throat, tight and painful. Even if he did get to, even when he did, all the choices he made were the wrong ones. He barely manages to choke the question out around it, a different sort of ache than the one from his wound nearly blinding him. “Where d’I go from here?”
“Only you can find the answer to that,” Shade tells him gently. “It might be the hardest thing you ever do, but it will be worth it in the end.”
Link feels horribly, horribly small, curling over his knees as the backs of his eyes burn. He feels like he’s trying to grasp at a bar of soap, reasons to try and stay slipping through his fingers with every reach of his hand. He feels like he doesn’t want to reach in the first place. “Promise?”
He cringes as soon as he says it, sounding just as much as the child he feels, but Shade just smiles— a humourless perk of his lips, genuine despite its sorrow. “Promise.”
A strange humming begins, rattling the earth beneath his feet until it melts into worn stone and sand. It presses up through his bones and down his spine, gentle but unrelenting, tugging at consciousness he didn’t know he had. He can’t see Shade anymore, everything around him a suffocating black. The humming continues, a little pinprick of light against the void in his head, calling, calling…
The humming blinks out for one second, two, and then everything is too loud. Agony rears its head again, throbbing with a vengeance across every nerve and he’s drowning in it, in the noise, in everything and wasn’t he supposed to be dead, let him just be dead, why—
Someone touches his neck, a careful hand pressing against his cheek. “He’s alive,” a voice breathes, deep and familiar for a reason Link can’t place.
The darkness crowds in again after that, swallowing him in a blink, but he thinks of Shade's heavy eye and quiet smile and tries to hold on a little longer this time.
Just a little longer.