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When Legend woke up, it was sudden. There was no gentle rise to consciousness, no gradual transition from deep sleep to wakefulness. The moment the golden power of the Triforce washed over him, his eyes snapped open. Sitting up, he blinked, the light from the brazier in front of him making his eyes water. Closing his eyes quickly, he pressed the palms of his hands against his face to better block the light as he tried to adjust, both to the brightness and to being awake.
How long have I slept?
“Uhm...Miss Zelda? Are-are you alright?”
Legend jerked his hands down, lights be damned, and turned his head towards the voice. The incredibly familiar voice. Squinting down at the blobby green figure at the bottom of the steps—and why is Legend on a dais like this is some sort of open-casket funeral, could that wizard have been any more dramatic?—he tried to force his eyes into focus. A couple hard blinks later, and the blob solidified into a teenager with messy brown hair and a green tunic, staring up at him with worried, doe-like eyes.
Legend started. “Hyrule?” His voice rasped in his throat, as though he hadn’t spoken in a hundred years.
“We’re in Hyrule, if that’s what you mean? My name’s Link,” Hyrule said, offering him a reassuring smile. “You were put under a sleeping curse, and I used the Triforce to wake you up. Are you feeling okay? This must all be very jarring.”
Jarring was a word for it, that was for sure. A better one might be shocking, or dumbfounding, or perhaps flabbergasting? Yeah, that was the one. Legend was flabbergasted. How was Hyrule here? The chain had parted ways just over two years before the beginning of Legend’s current predicament. Had they found a way to traverse the timelines again? But then why didn’t Hyrule seem to recognize his nickname? An uneasy feeling was starting to build in Legend’s gut. He didn’t like where this was going.
Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed-altar thing he had been laying on, he sat up fully, lingering on the edge for a moment as he tried to think. He pressed the soles of his shoes flat against the red carpet that covered the dais, trying to ground himself. He was still wearing his Pegasus boots, and he could feel that the magically-expandable pouch that held his items and supplies was strapped to his leg beneath the pale pink fabric of Fable’s dress, right where he’d left it.
Right, Fable’s dress. The reason Legend was wearing that in the first place was slowly coming back to him in its entirety. Yet another evil wizard had decided to invade the kingdom, though in a slightly more diplomatic way than the other two—and by that, Legend meant the wizard had walked into the castle and demanded to be told the location of the Triforce instead of immediately resorting to murder or kidnapping. It hadn’t been hard to switch places with his sister given how similar their appearances were, though that was just about the only thing that went well about the situation.
Legend noted absently that Hyrule was still at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for him to respond. He sighed, reaching up to try and run a hand quickly through his hair, intricately-pinned hairstyle be damned.
Keyword: try. Legend instantly noticed that here were two things very glaringly wrong with his hair:
One, it wasn’t neatly twisted around the golden circlet on his head anymore--though that was still there, settled lightly around his brow; instead, his hair was loose around his shoulders. Two, it just kept going, until the strands finally tangled around his fingers and forced them to a stop. Pulling his hand, hair still attached, into his lap, Legend blinked down at the bright, cotton-candy pink bundle.
The uneasy feeling grew.
He had made a point to dye his hair blond after his first journey and had kept it that way ever since. He had also kept it relatively short compared to Fable’s, never growing it out past letting the tips brush his shoulders, at the longest—nothing anywhere close to this knee-length rat’s nest just waiting to happen. Smoothing out the locks of hair, Legend saw that it faded into blond a few inches from the tips, just about how long his actual hair had been before the incident. Legend felt positively sick at this point.
“Hy—Link,” Legend said, trying to keep his voice steady. Hyrule was already watching him, a curious expression on his face. “How long have I been here?”
“Oh! Well, I’m not actually sure. Impa told me you are a princess from long ago, who was cursed to sleep by your brother’s wizard after refusing to reveal the location of the Triforce.”
A princess from long ago, cursed by her brother’s wizard. Legend didn’t know if he wanted to laugh at how distorted the story had become, or cry from the dawning realization that if it had been long enough for his era to become a thing of story, then his sister was gone. His hands twisted in his hair, and he heard a few strands snap.
Everyone was gone—Fable and Ravio and —and he was still here, because of course whenever he tried to protect the people he loved, it always backfired on him in some way. Go figure.
It wasn’t until Hyrule spoke again that he realized he’d been staring blankly at the traveler for the pastminute without saying a word.
“We’re in the North Castle tower right now. If…if you’d like, I can take you to meet Zelda? I mean, a different Zelda! She’s the princess. Or, I guess, the other princess…?” Hyrule frowned, a crease forming between his brows. “I have a feeling this is going to get confusing.”
Despite the cold numbness that had taken hold of him, Legend felt his heart warm, just a little. Most of his family was still gone—don’t think about it yet, wait to break down until you’ve gotten your bearings—but he had Hyrule back, even if the traveler didn’t know him yet, and there was Hyrule’s Zelda as well. That meant that Fable had survived the wizard and continued the royal line. She had lived, and if she had lived then there was no way that wizard had done the same.
Legend took a deep breath. He would be able to mourn soon. He would dig through every library he could find until he discovered what had happened after he was cursed. He would scour the land for even a trace of where his family had been laid to rest. Bottling up his emotions was nothing new to Legend, so he forced down his grief and guilt and anger, stuffed it in a little box labeled “For Later,” and chucked it into the back of his mind.
Pushing himself to his feet, Legend took a moment to find his balance before carefully descending the steps of the dais, mindful of the sweeping skirts of his gown. He wrapped his arms around Hyrule, the younger boy letting out a surprised yelp as he was enveloped in a tight hug. Legend could feel Hyrule’s uncertainty in the stiff line of his shoulders and way his hands hovered awkwardly over his back, and wondered how many times the traveler had been hugged before at this point in time. Probably not nearly enough.
Legend was going to fix that.
“Thank you, Hero of Hyrule,” he murmured into the boy’s shoulder, and found tears pricking at the corners his eyes, despite his best efforts to hold them back. “I would like that very much.”