#in the itchy brain sort of way -- and sometimes the borders of his form blur so entirely that he's the image of what he was when he. y'know

[balladetto]

     Once, when Link was even smaller than he feels, he'd knocked his shoulder out of its socket in a terrible fall.

     Terrible in that he'd cried about it, ashamed and at the then-height of pained, not that it was a particularly horrific tumble. He'd just landed wrong, he remembers someone telling him — frantic and almost apologetic in their reassurance. Too much has happened for him to reconstruct a face for the memory, but Link can still recall the stutter in their words. You're g-gonna be okay. Y-you're gonna— gonna be f-fine.

     And he was. Someone had gone to fetch a healing fairy while others came to keep him company. It'd been the right shoulder, burning at the joint and numb all the way down to his fingertips, but he'd found a spot of hurt he could grit his teeth through; then breathe through; then eventually speak through. By the time the fairy was brought over, Link had been so deep in the rhythm of holding himself together that he'd nearly slapped her away when she broke it.

     He remembers her, he thinks, the most out of everything. There's a distinct clarity associated pain will give you with any recollection. She was rose-pink, a little darker than he was used to, and she'd bristled when he whimpered through a fresh wave of tears and pushed at her with his pinky.

     "Stop that," she'd said. "Bones aren't easy, you know. It'll only hurt for a pinch, it has to for me to fix it. You're already being so brave! Can't you be brave a while longer?"

     Outside the memory, Link lays crumpled on cold tiles, eyelids like crushed butterfly wings and the cave of his chest barely moving as he looks up and up and up. He thinly wonders, for a fixing like this, how long he'd have to keep being brave for.

     Neither of his shoulders took the landing this time, but he knows many things are wrong with both of them. By extension, many things are wrong with all of him. He should take stock, a part of him understands. He'd like to take stock, another part realises, if only he had the capacity to. Each breath shifts the slivers and splinters his bones have shattered into. Agony twists through every vein like a replacement for the blood he imagines paints his trail from platform to windows to the far below floor. He can't feel his fingers, which twitch as if to grip something — his left hand, mangled, rests as if in graveyard dirt.

     There is no amount of searching in this sea that will land him in a place where this might be bearable.

     "Link!" Navi yells, a trilling bell that drowns out the sound of dying. His heart threads an extra thump, like he still has it in him to be scared alongside everything else, before it fades back into a whisper of a pulse. She wheels above him in panicked, powdery circuits: hair to boots and back. "Get up! You have to get up!"

     He does. He does have to. Link doesn't get to think he's gonna die now. He doesn't get to be tired enough — small enough — for that. He draws a rattling inhale, head practically cracking open with how the air presses against its seams. He's sixteen. The world will end if he's nine. He's sixteen, sixteen, sixteen.

     He chokes on liquid rising in his gorge, coughs it up, and closes his eyes when gravity brings the blood down in blotches on his skin. It's— really gross, and that's such a mundane thought in the face of what he has to reckon with that his chest starts spasming with strangled laughter instead.

     "Link!"

     Navi, he replies in his head, 'cause that's all he can do. He traces over more names: Sheik, Zelda, Saria, the Sages, the Kokiri, the list goes on as his voice dips into hitching, searing gasps. It's an awful thing to realise — that's all he can do. Link has to get up, has to be Courage, has to be more than what he is.

     And he can't.

     Sound drifts down from above, mocking. Cruel. It's a laugh getting louder and louder, and Link prises his lashes apart with the sheer will borne from a unique dread. A kind of fear, if you felt it not in sensation, but in the dizzying spiral that is the certainty of where this will all end.

     A kind of fear — and a kind of fury.

     Link is nine, thrown to the ground, battered and muscles stinging with a magic he tastes as something crackling on his tongue. He glares up at the tall man on the tall horse, smouldering so brazenly with protective, frustrated outrage that he shakes with it. He is not unafraid of the sneer that answers him, but he does not look away.

     Link is nine, broken over the ground, near dead and stuck in a body he's tried to make his. His eyes are cold as he watches Ganondorf descend, burning with tears dyed red from failure. The brand on his left hand glows, resonating with a magic he no longer has the nerves to feel. Navi doesn't leave. There are a thousand things he wishes he could scream.

     Large fingers fold around the wrist of his gauntlet, deliberate in their ignorance of the softness a joint that bent must be afforded. As his arm is lifted, the pain dragged along every passing second like some horrible, continuous song-note that eclipses even his fears, he pretends none of the noises coming from him are his and thinks everything that could mean: I hate you.

     He thinks everything that could mean: I'm so sorry.

     The man raises his other hand, palm closing in, and Link forces another entire earth on the child he can't be even here — even now. He does not look away. Navi, oddly muffled, rings something wordless.

     Link waits for the end of this story.

#* lionheart / study. #( so uh. down.fall timeline drabble! [pops a party popper] #i don't usually write on full workdays because i /can't/ write on those days (head fuckening. empty) but god. god #Inspired!! i hope it reads well <3 #thinking about. an ending where li.nk turns out more kokiri than hylian (yay?) in that he's a spirit that no longer ages who takes on the #image of a child most times because that's what his core mainly reflects. but it's like looking at smth you aren't supposed to #in the itchy brain sort of way -- and sometimes the borders of his form blur so entirely that he's the image of what he was when he. y'know #do you get me. do you see the vision < delirious with sleep deprivation #i'm sure i'll find something to regret about this when i wake but i am sending post i can't look at this anymore flksjdf ) #* lionheart / ic. #* ic / para. #* v / a story that can't be changed. #death implied #ask to tag / #* intermission / queue. #long post cw