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He saves Hyrule in both timelines. In this one, Ganondof will never get the chance to redden the white marble of Hyrule Castle, never get the chance to dethrone a king. Link warns the king and he only has to see the Triforce of Courage pulsating on the back of his left hand to believe him.
The goddesses chose him as their champion. The people call him a hero. They sing songs in his honour and their voices rattle his bones.
He is on edge for months after coming back. Walking the pristine marbled paths of Castle Town he can’t help but remember the war. There are faces in the crowd pf people who fought and died by his side – of people who didn’t.
There is a man selling pastries a the marked square who always hands him a sweet roll when he passes. In a different time, during a war, he sells a wagon of refugees to the dark Lord’s minions for a silver rupee (Link doesn’t kill him for it, the fear of the darkness lives in all of us he thinks and leaves the merchant trembling where he found him. He finds none of the refugees alive).
In this timeline, the man bakes bread for hungry children; still, Link can’t help the way his hand slips over the hilt of his sword every time he passes. He can’t help the way he keeps his silver rupees well hidden.
Let’s talk about Link stepping out of the temple.
It’s a strange thing, remembering something that hasn’t happened. He steps out of the temple and the street musicians are playing the same song that they did when he left, the bakers baking the same loaves. He comes back and the only thing that’s changed is himself.
(That’s not quite right. Navi has been by his side through all of it. But he steps away from the pedestal and she leaves with only a quiet goodbye and the flutter of a wing. He won’t need her to guide him in this world.
- Or maybe this is the world where he needs her the most? Link steps away from the pedestal and almost stumbles at the smallness of his legs. He steps out of the Temple of Time, and even in the infested halls of the Water Temple, he never felt so lost).
There is an old beggar woman selling trinkets by the road to the castle. She grasps his hand when he stops to look at a silver locket. You have an old soul, she tells him. It’s in your eyes. An old soul, and tired. So, so tired.
He gives her a golden rupee for the trinket and tries not to remember the eerie silence of Castle Town in wartime. But the smell of decay still stings in his nose even now.
He climbs atop a hill outside the castle on bad nights. Nights when he can’t seem to fall asleep without his sword tucked underneath his pillow. Nights when he wakes up and his mind is still fighting a war. (He can’t decide if it haunts him, or if he misses it.)
It’s the same hill he climbed when he first came to this town, when he first left the forest, chasing the destiny on his dying protector’s lips. No more than a season has passed since then, but it feels like years since he cut Gohma’s sickness out of the Great Deku Tree’s underbelly (keep your sword steady, whispered Navi in his ear. Listen, if you hesitate, you are dead. Keep your sword steady, raise your shield, and don’t hesitate).
But lesson number one, you cannot stop death from happening. It comes to all – even the guarded meadows of Kokiri Forest. Link emerged terrified and trembling and alive, but he watched his father wither regardless. He watched the quiet accusation of the ancient children around him. Death comes to all, even to gods.
He had been so much more of a child then, when he first stole through the castle gardens, the first time he knelt before the princess (the first time she held his rough hands in her gentler once – back when they were still smudged with Lost Wood’s dust).
It’s too easy now, to avoid the guards. Now that he knows shadows so intimately (how to hide in them, what hides in there with him, the Gerudo's token still rests hard earned and heavy in his pocket).
Sometimes the princess comes with him, slipping past the guards in her night silks. Quietly on bare feet. She plays him her lullaby on the nights when he wakes up shaking, fingers trailing easily over the ocarina that has been with him through a war (he can’t seem to hold it as easily as he used to. It doesn’t fit in his hands the way he remembers it did). Link hugs his knees like the child he is but does not feel like, he leans into her steadiness.
She’s quiet as he tells her how the air smelled when Kakariko burned, of haunted mansions and fire breathing dragons and fighting your own shadow. She sits and she listens but she does not understand. Link knows this. This is not the queen who emerged from seven years of war, battle scarred and tired. This is a princess who has never killed a man, who has never walked upon the ashes of her own kingdom. She will never understand the cold of the crypts underneath Kakariko. She will never know the dark of those shadows. (He stops at that, words stuck in his throat. The shadows still haunt him on his darkest days. Zelda doesn’t push him to continue; she curls up at his side and brings her ocarina to her lips). She will never understand, nor does he want her to.
She plays her soft tones and their gentleness calm him. Link drinks in her light like it is his own, there is warmth in it. The scars that the war gave him no longer mar his skin, but the way the blackness of shadows make him feel, frozen solid, that will never leave him.
War makes men of boys. When he wakes in brightness of the Temple of Time, this body, this small, weak child’s body isn’t his own. War makes men of boys. He has lived through a war, he is chosen for greatness, the responsibility of it resting heavy on his shoulders for the rest of his life. He lives through storms and battles, through fire and ice and light and shadow. During the war, he gains friends and loses them, when he is sent back their faces are younger than he remembers, they don’t remember him.
(It shakes him. He can’t quite breathe in a world where he is the only one who knows the way Kakariko in flames cast lights in the sky. Hyrule is full of memories that haunt his dreams; he will not stay here long.
But Zelda plays her lullaby, and he lets it soothe him like it did in another time.)
His destiny called him. He pulled a sword from its marbled base and everything changed.
He wakes up, and the King’s white castle is crumbled, the busy town an empty smoking ruin. The dead brought to life, their screams rattling his bones just like they did when he was a child lost underneath a graveyard. More so now, he recognises some of their faces.
He wakes up a child in a man’s grown body, a dead world outside what had been his sacred resting place for seven years. He grows into himself in a time that was not his own - under black skies, the burnt ruins of Castle Town underneath his boots.
This time he saves is not his time. When Ganondorf is sealed away and light returns to the realm, the Princess hands him back a lost childhood like it’s a gift for her to give. Link accepts it like he does everything in this life, gently, quietly. (He wants to rage. He has bled for this future. Fought for it. Is this not his future too?) The princess holds his hands gently – hers too are calloused now, after seven years of war. I took away your childhood, she says. I will make it right.
But that’s the thing. Link has lived through a war in this body. He goes back, and he does not recognise the child that wakes up.
His scars are gone, his chest unmarred where Volvagia’s cruel flame will never leave its web-like mark. There is a spot on his shoulder where a Gerudo warrior’s spear will never pierce him, it will no longer tingle on rainy days. The skies turn grey and he wants to scream.
He wants to curse this body. This short, weak child’s body.
He needs learn it all again, the way his young muscles work. The weight of his shield, the reach of his short sword, (his fingers would be too small to fit around the Master Sword’s heavy hilt now, even if this body had been worthy if it). His hands blister too easily, his arms tire too quickly. He made mountains crumble with his bare hands once, he remembers it and aches.
Link will have to relearn everything that he knows, and learn it differently. There are no sacred treasures to help him on his journey this time. The Sheika’s lens will remain in the darkness of the Bottom of the Well – he will have to find truths on his own now. The Gerudo’s shield will remain in the palm of a stone goddess’ hand. This body is small, but it is lighter, quicker. Link spends months teaching himself how to dodge rather than to attack head on, dance around the enemy and avoid their blows. He learns the weaknesses of armours - how underarms and throats are the easiest to penetrate when your sword isn’t one divinely blessed.
Seven years, that’s how long it will take to grow back to his old heights, but it’s still never really the same. Volvagia is never awakened in this timeline; Bongo Bongo never breaks his seal. Link will reach his old height, and Hyrule’s rolling plains will be green, Death Mountain is sleeping, Castle Town is a shining white beacon, there is no war.
But it still lives in him. In the way smell of smoke almost makes him dizzy (Volvagia’s flames will never burn him, but sometimes his chest stings like it did back then), it lives in the way he avoids crowds – in the way he always keeps an eye on the shadows.
There is no war, but there is always a battle. He will get new scars over the years, in place of those he leaves in another time. The first; he takes a bad hit during a practice match on the training grounds of Hyrule Castle, his opponent’s sword cuts through his leather breastplate and deep into the soft flesh underneath (they weren’t using practice swords, the balance is off, it’s not the same). The blood stains his tunic before he can even manage to stumble back, and his head feels light as they take him to the healers. Even so he feels at ease. Pain is the same in this body; Link wraps his too-small hands around the stinging feeling and holds it tight.
He quickly grows tired of the soft beds of the castle. Even before the war he slept on wood and dried hay – fine silks feel queer and unfamiliar against his skin. He curls up on the floor beside the bed on most nights – throws open the windows and lets the breeze lull him to sleep. Even so, the stone walls make him uneasy. He will not stay long.
The princess doesn’t weep when he tells her; he does not ask him to stay for her either – she tucks the Ocarina into his hands and asks only that he does not forget her. (How could he, really? Link will play her lullaby on dark nights for the rest of his life – he will remember her calm and feel at ease).
It still lives in him, the war that will never come to pass. His destiny called him. He pulled a sword from its marbled base and he came back changed. No one ever told him how to live with the weight of that resting on his too-small shoulders for the rest of his life.
Let’s talk about belonging. When your destiny is fulfilled, what do you do then?
He goes back to the forests of his childhood, he does not stay. He never intends to. In all his short years he’s felt like a stranger in these woods, the boy without a fairy, the man who wears the Kokari green but who is not one of them. This is not his home; the ancient children are not his people. Even before the war he did not belong.
He wanders the land, the songs sung in his honour always egging him on. In his pocket are medallions that the sages will never give him – they are nothing but metal and memories now. He is no one’s hero.
Link grits his teeth and goes walking in familiar woods. He feels more at ease here than he has anywhere else. Seven years looks the same among ancient trees. He breathes in the dank air and relishes the feeling of being lost in a far more tangible way.
Maybe this is why he finds Termina? Or is it Termina that finds him? A ride though the deep woods, a chase and a fall. Link wakes up in another doomed world, in another body that is not his own. The earth is shaking underneath his feet, the moon coming closer and closer and closer, in its eyes something sinister that reminds him so much of Ganondorf. Somehow, he feels at ease for the first time in months.
He stepped away from the pedestal changed. It taught him how to survive. Majora traps him in the small, weak body of a Deku Scrub. He calls it a curse. Link would have laughed had his wooden mouth let him. This it’s not the first time he’s woken smaller and weaker than what he was before. He stretches his wooden fingers, tries to find his centre of balance, if this is a curse; he was cursed long ago.
It is not the first time he wakes up in a body that is not his own anymore. It is not the first time he’s had to relearn everything.
Link learns and he learns. A body is just a body. There is power in every form. He borrows the power of the Deku, learns how to taste dewdrops in the morning air. He sees the world through the eyes of a Zora, the way the sunshine breaks through the surface of the ocean, he learns to relish the steadiness of the Goron’s rough form. Link outgrows the Kokiri Sword. He plays his Ocarina on dark nights and rolls his shoulders when the clouds turn gray.
The war lives in him. It will live in him no matter how far he wanders, no matter how tall he grows. But Castle Town is unburnt and thriving, Termina is no longer grieving under a falling moon. The war will always live in him, there are so many scars that he will never receive, his eyes will always look too old. But the shadows are only shadows. A body is just a body.
Link is breathing, he is growing, he is breathing. He keeps his sword arm steady, his shield raised. A body is just a body.