Work Text:
The fight begins as it means to continue - out of the blue and with an arrow piercing through Wild’s throat. Hyrule and Warriors fall to their knees beside the Champion while everyone else draws their weapons, exhausted and drawn from days on the road and weeks of battling every other step.
They need a break; Legend zones out the panicking voices, doing his best to trust his brothers. It is a mistake, or maybe it isn’t; there’s a yell, and he turns to see Sky’s body torn open, his guts spread across the ground.
It somehow gets worse from there on.
Even with all of his experience Legend cannot keep the group together, cannot even keep a single brother at his side. No matter how much he screams and yells and curses, no matter what items he uses or things he does, still the voices fall silent one by one.
Hyrule is cut off in the middle of a healing spell. It is four of Four’s voice that scream and fall silent - or maybe that is the head wound Legend has taken, throwing him to one side just in time to see Wind tossed to the ground and crushed by some giant moblin.
Bones snap, and so do a great many other things.
Still Legend fights, in the hopes someone is just unconscious, in the hopes he is wrong.
He has never been wrong before; he is not wrong this time, either.
Somehow he fights back most of the attack, earning himself a moment’s reprieve. Some of the bodies he can identify, others he only knows they are brothers for they are Hylian in form. He counts seven bodies, and finds a still living Time just as another wave of monsters approaches.
Blank-eyed, Time is fingering an old, blue ocarina. Despite his uneven, shot eyes, Time manages to bring it to his lips, and play a series of notes.
A, D, F, A, D-
An axe embeds itself in Time’s throat, ripping his head from his body and splattering Legend with his eldest brother’s blood.
The monster who threw it draws another from nowhere, and takes aim at Legend this time.
Legend takes the Ocarina from Time’s dead fingers, and runs. He wipes the blood from the instrument and dares not look behind him; whatever the song was, whatever it was it was important enough that Time had sacrificed himself to try to play it. What would the next note be? How would the song go?
Long ago, Legend played the ocarina. Once… upon… a dream…
He places the instrument to his lips, ugly wounds and fast pace making it hard to play. Still, somehow, he finds the breath.
A, D, F
A, D
F
An arrows flies for Legend’s throat. Reality warps, and pulls him away.
Legend finds himself thrown into his body, causing him to stumble. He stares in surprise to see the Ocarina still in his hand, but it is perhaps useful so he will not question it.
An arrow flies out of the woods, and pierces Wild’s throat. The Champion falls, and Hyrule and Warriors rush to his side. There is a glow of magic that Legend can only stare at as his other brothers rush into action.
Time falls second, this time, baked alive in his armour by a lizfalos dowsing his armour in flames.
Warriors yells at Legend to pull himself together. Already it is too late. With some idea of the purpose of the song now - and fucking Hylia, that was a secret that Time had been keeping - Legend brings it to his lips, and plays once again.
This time, this time, he will save them.
Wild is to Legend’s left.
As soon as he has settled back into his body, he dives that way, breaking Wild’s shoulder but saving him from the arrow. He’s yelled at, asked what he is doing, but he grabs his weapons and runs into the woods, intent on finding the monsters before they can find them, and destroying those fuckers once and for all.
He hunts, and he wins, and he returns to a pile of eight corpses just an inch closer to him through the woods.
Legend falls to his knees, and he screams.
And once he is done screaming, he snatches up the Ocarina, and plays those same six notes once again.
The next loop, Legend stays close. Wind dies first, cut in half by the same axe that killed Time in the first. Legend does not even wait before he pulls out the Ocarina, and throws himself back in time to his brother’s screams.
The next loop, Four is possessed and Sky forced to cut him down. Legend looks away from the blood, and plays the notes again.
The next loop, Legend himself is cut through the heart. In the few moments he has he plays six notes on trembling hands; the scar remains, even where the injury does not.
The next loop, Hyrule burns his soul in magic to protect Warriors, who falls all the same.
The next loop, there is a bomb, and Legend does not even wait to see who screamed before he is playing again.
The next loop, Twilight is thrown against a rock and his neck twists one-and-twenty degrees. Time is barely screaming before Legend is playing again.
The next loop, it is Sky burnt to a husk.
The next loop, he cannot tell who falls for the states of their bodies.
The next loop, exhaustion wins and the battle once more begins with Wild shot through the throat.
The next loop, Legend forgets.
The next loop, Legend wishes he did not remember.
The next loop, Legend passes out from exhaustion as soon as he arrives, and wakes to find himself surrounded by the corpses of his brothers.
The next loop, the next loop, the next loop…
Another loop, another loop, another loop, another loop, another loop, another loop…
And then, and then, and then, a multi-faceted voice that sounds as he always imagined the sacred three to sound echoes in his mind.
“Sweet hero,” the echoing three whisper. “Dearest hero, why do you continue to fight? Why do you continue to fight, when it cannot be won? Is not surviving enough? Is not victory enough?”
He tells the voice to piss off, that he will save his brothers, he will, he will, he must and he will.
Be they delusions or gods, he will defy them either way.
He brings the Ocarina to his lips, and plays again.
Before he has even fully landed in his body, he leaps to the side, knocking Wild from Epona and onto the ground. The arrow whistles by, he yells out the attack, yells out the position, and pulls everyone into line.
It is rote now, these first few moments. A thousand times he has performed the actions, if needs be he shall do them a thousand more. He leaves Time to take a heavy blow to save Twilight from the tree, only to whip around and pull Sky from the flames. He yells out the poe’s presence before it even appears, and calls Hyrule over to handle the enemies of his own time - ones no other Link has, in the hundreds of cycles Legend has lived, quite known how to cut down. He darts across the battlefield to the left and the right, covering every single threat that he knows.
Still Legend fails.
Even with backup, Hyrule cannot keep all of those monsters at bay. Just like Time in the first cycle, a thrown axe slices through his throat and continues on its way.
The scream Legend gives is one of years of living through this, of these moments again and again. Something in him, something cracked and broken, shatters, he screams himself raw and then takes up Time’s ocarina and plays those notes again.
He cannot, cannot, will not fail.
A, D, F, A, D, F
The world twists and turns and breaks once more.
Again and again and again he tries, the voices in his mind still asking him why. But he must, and he will, and Link refuses to lose again. Determination has given way to panic, plans to instinct, and still he fails just the same as before. Again and again and again and again and again and yet still he refuses to break.
He refuses to break until finally, finally, finally he cuts down the last monster and turns and… And everyone is there.
Twilight is sporting a bleeding head wound, but he is grinning at Time. Hyrule is pale and slumped against a bleeding Warriors, but Warriors is kicking the burnt out husk of some abomination while Hyrule breathlessly, manically giggles from the stress. Wind is slitting the throats of anything vaguely intact, and Sky is wrapping a bandage around the arm of one of Four’s parts. The other three are fussing over each other, while Wild hops down from a tree and swings his bow away.
Unbelieving, Legend looks around. It’s never this fucking easy, its never like this, he isn’t supposed to win, he isn’t supposed to save people - no matter what he does.
Looking down… Looking down his fingers are bleeding, blisters on his fingers where they pressed against the ocarina’s holes, burst and cascading blood to the floor. Scars of so many near deaths coat his body, and cold, bitter exhaustion passes through him as his body gives up.
He hears the screams of his name before he realises he is falling, slumping to his knees as the full-body shudders grow too much. Moments later he’s pulled against someone’s chest, but he has lost all understanding of who. Someone else is checking his pulse, and hands all over are checking him for injuries in a blur he does not understand, but that feels so much warmer than his soul.
No tears come, nothing like that at all, not at first at least; one of the hands dislodges the Ocarina from his grip, and it lands by Time’s knees.
Time, whose face falls on seeing it, covered in blood, and pales himself.
“How long?” he whispers, eyes haunted as he looks at Legend. “Veteran, how long has it been?”
Legend does not know, he does not remember, he lost count some time very long ago. All he can do is shake as his family - his family, his family, alive and here - holds him close. Shake his body and shake his head, and half hear someone mention a nearby great fairy fountain where their injuries can be seen to.
Strong arms pick Legend up, and as everyone gathers tight and cautious and around, he turns his eyes into the neck of whichever brother has taken him, and tries to banish the smells of fire and flesh and blood, at least until the great fairy is reached and, with a gentle hand, brushes Legend to sleep and the memory for a moment away.