Chapter Text
Twilight likes to think he knew Wild.
He knew Wild like he knows every inch of Ordon’s moss-soaked woods, like he knows where the drooping brambles grow the sweetest of their fruits, dripping from the vine like jewels. He knew Wild like he knows how to trace every rippling stream to it’s source, like he knows the plants that cluster around their banks, soaking in the water from the silt.
Twilight knew how to navigate through the thickets, where to step carefully and what was safe ground. He knew how to make his way to almost every glen, knew what birdcalls echoed through the trees, knew every nook, every cranny, every fern or bit of lichen save for those enclosed at the very centre of the forest where none but the stars themselves had ever set eye upon.
And then Wild had left.
Quickly. Quietly. A rip in space opening up and the faint glimmer of a sword, Sky’s eyes widening as he translated her message. A single second of silence, a single second when something cracked like glass behind Wild’s carefully calm eyes. One tiny moment when Twilight could see, with gut-wrenching clarity, the engulfing fear curling its wicked talons around his cub’s still (unnaturally still) form.
The briefest embraces, a smattering of faint goodbyes and ‘good luck’s, and then he was gone. There were eight where there had been nine, and the fire was colder that night, and it was as simple and horrible as that. Barely two minutes between when the portal had opened and Wild had stepped through, tension scraping along his back but head held high.
Four weeks. Twenty seven days. Almost a month. The Chain sticks closer together, heartbeats race faster whenever someone has a near miss in battle. Bedrolls are laid out in a tighter circle than before. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner all taste bland as stale dungeon air.
Twilight doesn’t sleep much. He can guess, based on how many times sensitive ears have alerted him to hitched breathing or muffled sobbing—the unmissable signs of a nightmare—that he’s not alone in that regard.
Once or twice, someone brings up the topic. Twilight usually takes his leave at that point, slinking off into the woods and letting familiar shadows consume him before he reaches the edge of the circle of light cast by the campfire. No one tries to stop him, and when he returns, no matter how late the hour has become, it’s only ever to a cup of tea and the silent offering of a listening ear, or a shoulder should he need it. He never takes any of them up on that offer, not even Time.
Four weeks, twenty seven days, almost a month after a portal ripped Twilight’s family apart, another appears to stitch it back together. It appears exactly the same way as its sibling had, ripping open the air in the middle of their camp bright and early in the morning. Twilight, looking back, will swear he’d nearly fainted once the sight registered.
They all freeze. The sword on Sky’s back remains dull.
Wild sprints out of the portal like he’s being chased by a horde of bublins.
He’s hardly even visible at first, merely a golden-haired blob streaking forward like his life depends on it, but something in Twilight’s gut just twists and he knows.
Wild crashes head first into Warriors. He looks up, and promptly starts sobbing.
The rest of the day is a bit of a blur. There is more crying, everyone’s knees soon carry grass stains. Wild makes sure to berate them for the ‘breakfast’ that he’d found over the fire, and creamy heart soup simmers in the pot when the sun starts to dip below the horizon, the aroma drifting around the campsite like a warm blanket. The light from the campfire seems to spread further into the grassy field, casting the green in shades of gold.
Wild’s hair is lighter and longer, he’s two and a half years older, he has at least one new scar on his collarbone, another by his eye, and he’s missing an arm. He’s also, and this is the important part, back. He’s here. They can deal with everything else later.
(You failed, hisses the voice in his head. You promised yourself he would never be alone again, and how’d that turn out?
Shut up, Twilight mutters right back)
Twilight allows himself exactly one glorious evening, and wakes up the next morning with a fire in his belly and steel in his eyes. He sits with Wild as he cooks them breakfast like he’d never left, and he watches.
See, Twilight’s been down this road before. He’s done his own time adventuring, and he knows that no one makes it out of one unscathed. Twilight knew Wild, and he swears to Ordon themself that he’ll know him again.
So Twilight watches, for the rest of the day and a few after, and the chain links itself back together again as though it were never broken. He gets more than a few little tidbits from his watching. Wild puts less weight on his right shoulder now, and Twilight often spots him rubbing some sort of salve into the spot where skin meets metal, hissing under his teeth. He’s jumpier than a jackrabbit again, but he hides it well, using the same tricks he did when the chain first met. He won’t look at the Master Sword.
And Wild’s quieter, now, and he doesn’t just mean how his voice is notably softer. He hasn’t said a peep about what happened on his adventure. Wind managed to weasel out that Flora was ‘fine,’ but Wild had clammed up tighter than a like-like after that.
His eyes are sadder, and he stares into space on occasion while whipping up dinner on muscle memory alone. He’s always within arm’s reach of someone, and doesn’t run off into the horizon without Roolie along for the ride. Twilight’s watched as Wild counts them under his breath, like he’s trying to make sure they’re all still there.
But. He’s still Wild. He still pokes fun and happily joins in on the cuddle piles. He still hums when he cooks, and every day he seems just that little bit lighter.
It feels too easy. Twilight knows far too well what adventures do to you, how they scoop your heart out and leave it to rot, how they clamp iron hands on your shoulders until the weight is all you can feel. Wild was gone, and now he’s back, and Twilight couldn’t do anything, and so it makes no sense that everything would turn out so well.
But Twilight’s never been one to deny what his own eyes can see.
They’re still the Chain, miraculously returned brothers aside, and so they’re fighting another horde of black blooded monsters within a few weeks. Wild runs off, just like he used to, and Twilight bolts after him to drag him back by the scruff, as usual. They make it back to the chain, and as Wild proceeds to show off some ridiculous weapon he’s gotten his hands on from Hylia-knows-where, he turns to Twilight with a sparking smile that screams mischief. It pinches the corners of his eyes, tugs one corner of his mouth a little higher, and points his ears back just a bit.
It’s beyond familiar, and—There he is.
Twilight barely stops himself from bursting into tears. He’s a little different now, and it would honestly be scarier if he wasn’t, but that expression is just so Wild that it’s the thing that finally drives the reality home in Twilight’s heart. It hurts, the truth stabs into his heart as it settles, but he’s beyond glad for it. His little brother is back with them.
(Twilight couldn’t have done anything anyway, right? So there’s no point in feeling guilty.
Right?)
Wild’s not fine by any means—none of his brothers are—but that’s alright. They have each other, and they can work through it together.
And Twilight is fine. Completely fine.
He is.
He may have failed Wild once, but some power saw fit to give him another chance, and he’ll take that gladly, with open arms.
All this being said, the Goddesses must hate him.
See, three seconds after he comes to this conclusion—Wild still grinning as he tosses his blade wildly, enough to imply he has no concern for the rest of his limbs staying attached—things begin to spiral rapidly into the depths of madness.
It starts with Four quite literally coming apart at the seams over sheer horror at ‘a perversion of blacksmithing.’ Twilight barely has two days to process the fact that Wild went through an entire adventure with barely decent weapons before his protege pops out of the floor and Time nearly steps on his head. That whole situation is not nearly far enough in the past when Wild throws himself at a rock monster and reverses the flow of time inches before getting hit by a boulder.
So yes. Twilight is stressed. Sue him. It’s been one fucking hell of an emotional minecart track and he’s hardly had any time to stop and breathe, and honest to Hylia, does Wild have a death wish?
He’s cursing, for Din’s sake! Uli would have his head if she could read his mind right about now!
The worst part is that he knows it’s not over. Twilight just doesn’t have that kind of luck.