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The air is alive tonight.
Wind breathes across the plains, scattering handfuls of the sweet night-smell of grass and water past Legend. Crickets whine a wishful, hidden melody alongside the soft calls of owls. Sometimes Legend thinks he recognises the notes, but they always slip away before he can grab hold of them.
His head is buzzing with the groggy, slow feeling of alcohol in his veins. It feels unnatural to have his shoulders un-tense, his back bowed instead of rigid, his fingers loose over the porch railing with no tool in need of grabbing. It's a good thing, he thinks, that a person can lean on a porch railing with faint stars above and not have to worry about weapons, but to Legend it is simply this: unnatural.
There’s a myriad of voices rising and falling in the house behind him, a quiet murmur from stargazers in the field beyond. Wild’s laugh rises with the wind. It’s a bright, wheezing, joyful sound and something in Legend aches distantly.
At some point, Time comes out to stand next to him. He’s dressed casually in a home-spun tunic, face relaxed and a smile playing on his mouth as he watches Hyrule roll into Wild in the field, as their giggles fade with the crickets.
“What an adventure we’ve had,” Time says lightly— proud, even. His hand comes up to muss Legend’s hair gently. His palm is warm.
Legend hums in agreement. He wonders if the portals will come for them tonight. He wonders if they’ll come for them in the morning. He wonders how long this part of the dream will last, all apple orchards and laughs and stars above fields. They have been together for nearly two years now. A unit. A troop. A chain, even, for the pun-happy kids.
And beyond that, brothers. A group that, despite everything, didn’t change and didn’t last forever. Legend knows this feeling. He’s known it over and over and still… still. He’s never had brothers before. He’s not going to have them anymore.
“My house,” he says, staring at the grass curling around the worn wood of the porch, “is… going to be very quiet.”
Time rests his elbows on the porch railing. “But you have people waiting for you at home, no? Family?”
“Yeah,” Legend forces the word past the lump in his throat. “No, yeah, I do.”
It’s just larger than it was before, he thinks but does not say, and I can’t have you all anymore and my house is going to be quieter.
Legend knows that trying to hold on, trying to relive everything they’ve had together, will only make this worse. He can’t turn back to the moments he wants to stay in. He can’t stare the flow of time in the face and dare it to cease and double around and open itself up for his family. There are so many years between them all it’s incomprehensible. But oh, how Legend feels them.
Tonight, the night sky is empty of things Legend can reach.
“I just…” he trails off. Time’s presence, once hard to reconcile with, is steady and warm beside him. His arm presses gently into Legend’s. “There’s so much time left.”
“I would hope so,” Time murmurs. The small smile on his lips recognises the pun; the way he casts his gaze over the dark-soft fields doesn’t. “You’re only twenty-one.”
Legend’s throat burns, burns, burns. “Yeah. Seven adventures later, and I’m fucking twenty-one.”
Time’s head tilts his slightly, the marked half of his face falling into shadow. “And home waits.”
Legend wants to ask, Does it? Does it, when so many parts of his home will be lost to timelines and eras? Is it enough, when chronic pain eats at his joints and nightmares scream in his head and he’s only twenty-one? There are years ahead. There are years with all of the fallout and none of them.
“It’s too much fucking time,” Legend means to snap, for his hand to tighten into a white-knuckled fist, but he just sounds pathetic. He bites the inside of his cheek, hard. “What the fuck am I supposed to even do with it?”
This is his seventh adventure that’s come to his close and somewhere in his bones, Legend knows it’s the last. He hasn’t stopped in between any of the others, not like this. All of it feels like dread. It feels like bile in his mouth and grief in his chest. It’s too much time he never expected to face.
Time’s gaze is soft, soft. Legend can’t bring himself to meet it. “Live, I assume.”
“Ha, ha,” Legend says, deadpan. “Pursuing comedy now, are you?”
Time tilts his head, just slightly. The evening breeze plays with the ends of his hair. “When my body was younger,” he starts, “I couldn’t fathom it, either. My adventure was over. The kingdom was at peace. As for myself, however, I had a mind that both grew and didn’t and a body that hadn’t been linear in the past. I felt like there wasn’t any part of me that was supposed to see that side of my adventure. I should have disappeared with the end of it, because what was there to do now?”
Legend had just kept going. He loved the spirit of adventure, the curiosity of it, new people and new places. Yet they had been more transient, excluding the clingy bastard that is Ravio. Legend hadn’t felt stuck, hadn’t felt trapped. But now there’s an exhaustion in him that wasn’t there before, and it doesn’t feel like he has a place to house it, either. Everything is quieter and he hates it.
“Then I started rescuing dogs from illegal racing games,” Time says.
“Sorry?” Legend coughs.
Time’s smile is enigmatic but warm. He nudges Legend’s shoulder gently with his own. “Malon dragged me to volunteer with farmwork here. I learned how to make jam. I learned how to swim. I started keeping a journal.”
That splintered feeling behind Legend’s ribs flares. He wants to huff and roll his eyes and move on from his own dramatics, but he instead listens for each of his brothers along the breeze. The wood grain of the railing beneath his elbows is worn. He aches, aches.
“I don’t know if journaling is going to fix this one, old man,” Legend mutters.
“I never said it would,” Time replies. “The point was to take it day by day. We all run out of time eventually.”
And then, softer, fingers reaching to tuck a stray hair back behind Legend’s ear in a movement that makes Legend’s heart constrict out of its sheer thoughtlessness: “I’d hate to see yours end prematurely, Legend.”
Legend’s throat closes around any response he could think up, eyes burning as he blinks and blinks. How fast he’d been seen through. How quickly this brother of his had known his mind, had stayed just close enough to comfort and far enough to not scare him off, had known what to say. Legend is going to lose this— he’s losing all of them. It hurts like nothing he’s ever known.
“How do you know how old you actually are?” Legend asks, mostly to quell the feeling he can’t seem to escape.
Time shrugs, easy in the cool night air. “I’m aware of my physical age in this timeline. Anything beyond that I’ve decided not to dwell on.”
“Does it not matter to you?” Legend asks.
“It matters,” Time says, meeting Legend’s gaze and knowing, always knowing. “Of course it matters. But there are things I have learned to let go, the things that I know will cut if I don’t.”
“What if they’re important?” Legend can’t imagine. He doesn’t want to imagine it.
“They’re still important,” Time answers gently. “They always will be, yet things can be important without being sharp. The hurt isn’t what makes them, even if we forget sometimes. Even if it’s been there for a long time.”
That’s not fair, is the first thing Legend thinks, though it doesn’t make sense whatsoever. The sentiment is childish and Legend doesn’t really remember being a child, honestly, but it still haunts his thoughts. Nothing has ever been fair, really, but it doesn’t stop the fact that Legend kind of just wants to cry.
He wants to go home, he does— he just wants to bring the rest of it with him.
“I don’t know what we’re talking about anymore,” Legend murmurs with a see-through huff, with a helpless lean towards Time’s shoulder. “Get a bit of alcohol in us and suddenly we’re waxing poetic like we’re possessed by the birdbrain.”
The corner of Time’s eye crinkles, the laugh lines there stark and obvious and enviable. His smile is full. “That simply means we need more alcohol.”
Legend laughs softly. “Maybe it does, old man.”
The crickets continue their nostalgic singing hidden in the grass. Legend stops trying to place the tune and closes his eyes instead. In the house, the voices of his family rise and fall, rise and fall.
When he gets home, Legend’s house is going to be quiet.