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When Link’s young, very young, not even able to walk on his own, he sees the world.
His father’s knights are never in one place for longer than a month or two, and they travel all across the continent. Link’s wide baby-eyes look over his mother’s shoulder at beautiful Zora sculptures and up from his father’s knee at the Necluda mountain ranges. His little ears pick up Rito lullabies his mother can’t quite hear and his pudgy fingers pass through a spectrum of safflina. He’s held so, so gently in huge Goron hands while his mother does needlework, and he’s bounced on Gerudo hips while his father trains.
He learns to swim right alongside learning to walk, because Zora’s Domain is a calm place full of people who don’t mind repeating themselves when his mother doesn’t hear them the first time, and sometimes his father’s job really is too dangerous for a toddler. He tries eating a rock at age 3, not because he’s a curious child who isn’t being watched closely, but because his friend offered to share a bit of rock roast with him. The first time he sings is with a Rito choir, and he makes his first sand castle at the Oasis near Gerudo Town.
Once he’s old enough to wonder why they travel so much, this is what his mother tells him:
His father had come up for promotion because he was a Good Knight, and on the same day, his mother had found out she was pregnant. His father tried to say he’d turn down the promotion, but his mother set him straight on that nonsense and told him she’d just come along on his journeys.
“After all,” She says, on a quiet night under the shining beauty of the Zora Bridge. “I’m an excellent seamstress, and I can do my embroidery on the road. Hyrule needs your father and I’m not going to stand aside and let him pretend he doesn’t need Hyrule just as much.”
When Link’s six, she gets pregnant again, and this time they do stay in the same place for a while.
“You’re a good kid,” His mother says. “But there’s not a six-year-old alive who’s well-behaved enough to manage alongside a newborn on the road. So we’ll set up here in Castle Town for a while. There’s plenty for you to learn right here.”
And there is.
Link learns that he can disappear in a crowd when it’s made of other Hylians, an impossible feat anywhere else in the world. He also learns that other Hylians care more than the other races when he doesn’t talk, which means he also quickly understands his mother’s insistence on using Hylian Sign.
He also learns what it’s like to be around people who only try to give you food you can actually eat and understand your body’s limits. He misses the beauty of the Gerudo while they train, but he definitely doesn’t miss the suffocating heat of the desert. He misses the easy laughter of the Gorons, but he doesn’t miss chipping his teeth on rock roast. He misses the sounds of the Rito choir and how amazing it was to watch them fly, but he doesn’t miss the cold of the Hebra winds or the rude jokes they’d make. He misses the cheerfulness and graceful swimming of his Zora friends, but he likes being able to stay dry all day long.
Castle Town is full of people, but it’s also close to little wooded areas where he can climb trees and look for mushrooms, and it’s all safe. His mother can let him roam around for the whole day and trust that he’ll come home unharmed, because this place is meant for Hylians.
He still travels with his father, sometimes with his whole family, but more and more, as he gets older and starts on the path to becoming a knight, it’s just him. He retraces paths he saw over his mother’s shoulder, all bundled in cloth and wrapped tight against her, and he’s struck with the strange familiarity of it all. He can’t remember the roads they traveled when he was that young, not really, but sometimes he’ll glance to the side while he’s riding and hear his mother’s soft humming or smell baked apple or feel the cool metal of his father’s armor.
Someday, he’ll travel these roads again and be hit with a faint memory of those memories, not tangible enough to grasp but real enough to make his chest ache.
Before then, though, before death and rebirth and phantom pains, he learns to wear all of Hyrule like a second skin. He grows up on its roads, takes in all its wonder and vastness and smallness, and even this young, his Hero’s spirit thrives.
There’s a lot of room in a soul bound for reincarnation.
Link knows this in the way that the Master Sword feels more familiar than his reflection. He knows this in the way that Impa’s story about what happened ten thousand years ago makes a part of him sigh, half nostalgic, half exasperated. He knows this in the way that, even when he’s left tripping over misplaced memories and a land that pieces of him keep expecting to be a century younger, the way that Goddess statues shine never feels anything but natural and expected.
Unfortunately, all the room in a soul that’s lived for thousands of years isn’t very useful when the fractured familiarity is still inside the same person.
His memory becomes a strange thing, once he’s found all the places the Princess left for him.
He doesn’t remember everything, because a century is a long time, and his body had to devote energy to maintaining things more necessary than the color of his mother’s eyes or the sound of his little sister’s laughter.
Things come back sometimes though, flashes or longer scenes or just the taste of his father’s meaty rice balls (always surprisingly good even when he made them on the road). He’s grateful for every piece of his past in the same way that he hates them. It’s painful, impossibly so, because everything’s gone now. They’ve all been dead for so long and his prolonged mourning can only come in pieces.
He also tends to remember these things at deeply inconvenient times.
Take now, for example. He’s sneaking around the Great Plateau, One-Hit Obliterator on his back, trying to dedicate himself completely to the task at hand and ignore how much breathing hurts after having most of his life-force drained away by a mummified Sheikah monk who can’t even be bothered to show his face until Link completes all his trials. It requires concentration. It requires care.
It does not require getting frozen in place just outside the Temple of Time because the breeze is blowing the grass just like it did when he was eight years old.
He’s standing with his mother and baby sister, waiting respectfully while the King and the Princess walk out of the Temple with their guards. It’s a nice day, sunny and breezy and perfect for climbing trees and helping his mother hang laundry out to dry, but instead they have to stand and wait in clothes that haven’t been softened from use.
His mother sighs and murmurs, “Poor thing.”
Link looks up at her, sees how her gaze is fixed on the Princess, and furrows his brows. His mother glances down at him and gives a small, sad smile. He holds his arms out, and she passes Aryll down to him so she can use both her hands to sign.
She’s got so much pressure on her with such a big destiny hanging overhead all her life. It’s too much for someone so young.
Link thinks about that for a moment, brow still furrowed, and then he nods. That does seem hard. He doesn’t think he’d like it very much if people expected him to fulfill a big destiny.
And then they’re both pulled back to looking at the Princess, who is lecturing one of her guards.
“No! Don’t step on that plant, it’s very delicate and an endangered species!” She’s glaring up at the guard with a fierceness Link’s only ever seen matched by an insulted Gerudo or his mother when a shopkeeper made fun of him for not speaking out loud. “You should take more care with how you treat Hyrule.”
Link’s mother laughs, and when he looks back up at her, she’s grinning.
I like her. She’s got fire.
Link nods again, and takes this to heart. He knows how smart his mother is and how good she is at judging character. If she likes the Princess, thinks she’s strong but deserves more care than she gets, it must be true.
He dispatches the next camp of monsters with more ferocity than usual, and doesn’t feel particularly bad about it. He figures he’s owed an outlet for his stress.
He’s at the Desert Oasis, resting a bit before heading back out into the desert or maybe the wastlelands. He’s feeling restless lately, not quite sure where his feet are trying to take him.
He’s stayed here at the Oasis before, but as it turns out, never at this exact time of day, standing in this exact space between the water and the palms.
The fabric is comfortable, cool and soft against his arms in the desert climate. The way his father’s knights are looking at him is the opposite.
Link doesn’t really understand what he’s done wrong, though he can tell pretty clearly that he made some kind of mistake. Maybe the Gerudo soldiers were wrong, and he would look better without the veil?
He’s felt on edge several times during this trip, though the other times were easier to puzzle out. He’s getting older, knows that he’s very likely to start formal training within the year, and traveling with his father and the other knights is exciting, but he knows it’s also much more serious and real than it was when he was a child.
(According to the Gerudo, he’s still a child. They still showed him the basics of how they make swinging a scimitar look like dancing, though, so it’s not that big of a deal.)
He’s cleaning his sword, trying not to look at the knights or listen to whatever they’re murmuring to each other. It’s not hard for him to focus on the motions of maintaining his equipment, and he manages to shove away the prickly feeling that he's done something the knights think is wrong.
Until his father's footsteps come near. Link studiously does not glance up, but he does try to listen when the knights start talking to his father.
“ - wearing those clothes when the Gerudo came back with him.”
There’s a meaningful edge to that knight’s tone, but Link still doesn’t feel any closer to understanding what the actual meaning is. It’s frustrating, and he wishes he could fix whatever the problem is.
“Did they seem offended?” His father asks. He sounds as neutral as always, which is comforting in a way.
“No,” Another knight says. “Actually, they said it looked good on him.”
“Well, that’s the important part.” His father replies. He relays what he learned on his rounds that day, and the conversation changes course entirely.
A few minutes later, his father sits down next to him and pulls out his own sword to clean.
“Comfortable?” He asks, glancing at Link. Link just nods, and his father hums in approval. “Good.”
Link smiles down at his sword, his worries set at ease.
...He probably didn’t go to the wastelands as a child. And there’s sure to be shrines there that he hasn’t found.
Justification firmly grasped, Link teleports away without hesitation.
It doesn’t stop after they defeat the Calamity.
It’s not really a surprise, since these broken up pieces of him have nothing to do with Malice and everything to do with a century suspended between life and death. Still, it would’ve been nice to never again have the air knocked out of him as fragments of his past jab their way into his mind.
But a Hero’s life isn’t really about being “nice”. It’s about duty and sacrifice and obligation and not being a person so much as a vessel.
He’s ruminating on that one night while he sits on top of the roof of his house in Hateno. He knows he should go back inside and try to sleep, but his thoughts are spinning too fast to follow, and he doesn’t feel like laying still for hours trying to pretend he feels fine.
Link’s aware that’s not a feeling exclusive to him, so he’s not very surprised when Zelda pulls herself up onto the roof next to him.
They sit there in silence for a long moment, letting the breeze blow through their hair. Link glances at her and feels the breath leave him for a very different reason.
She’s lovely when she stargazes. She’s lovely all the time, but when she gazes up at the sky, light reflected in her eyes, piecing together the stories she’s told him about constellations woven together through the ages...he’d say it’s his favorite time to watch her, but he knows he’ll find a new favorite tomorrow.
“I dreamed about Urbosa.”
Her voice is clear, which means it probably wasn’t a nightmare. She sounds sad in a distant way, hard to pin down, so it might have been happy. Happy dreams might seem like something to celebrate, but Link knows better.
Pleasant dreams are like slow-moving poison when they’re of the dead.
Zelda continues without prompting, because she knows that he knows that in these moments, she needs to process her thoughts aloud more than anything else. “Urbosa was like an aunt to me. She knew my mother, and unlike everyone else, she was always encouraging me to be strong.” She looks down at her hands then, spreading them out and turning them, like she’s looking for something tangible, something provable. “I think she saw something fierce in me.”
“My mother would’ve liked her.”
Zelda turns to him in mild surprise. He doesn’t often respond to her musings, and he feels particularly awkward after blurting out something like that.
But she smiles at him, and her smiles always make it hard to be worried. “Was your mother a fierce sort of woman?”
(It’s too much for someone so young.)
“She didn’t care what most people thought.” Link says. “But when she did care about someone...that was fierce.”
(I like her. She’s got fire.)
“She sounds like a good person to be around,” Zelda says, voice soft now. He can still see the stars in her eyes, even though she’s looking at him instead. “I’m glad you had someone like that.”
(Brows drawn together when he comes home holding the Master Sword. His sister is awestruck by the glow of it, but his parents know what it means. His father looks concerned and makes plans to continue his training. Before he leaves, he gives Link a hug. He looks frightened, but he still says he’s proud.
His mother takes him by the shoulders, tips his chin up to meet her eyes before she pulls back to sign.
You’re more than just a destiny. You’re a person outside of that sword.
He’s never seen his mother’s face so serious. He nods, which seems to relax her a bit. She draws him close, presses a kiss to his forehead.
(Don’t forget who you are.)
(Sorry, mom.)
“So am I.” Link reaches out a hand, and Zelda takes it without hesitation. Her hand is warm, the perfect contrast to the cool night air.
(I love you.)
(I love you.)