Chapter Text
It was a quiet night, a few days later, when they were all slightly more acquainted with the new link that one of them had the courage to ask.
“Wild, what… what happened here? Your land is in ruins.” It was Hyrule that finally got the guts to ask.
Wild was silent for a long moment, staring into the pot he was stirring. Everyone else was also quiet, invested in the answer.
“The Calamity happened.”
“What’s that?”
“Calamity Ganon, an evil entity, invaded this world and laid siege to the land. We could never have been prepared. It.. almost killed me.”
There was a sharp intake of breath around the clearing at the name. A name they were all very familiar with (apart from Sky but well, he had heard stories.).
“Oh,”
“Is that where your scars come from?” Four asked very softly. He got a hum in response, and Wild didn’t take his eyes off of the pot.
They didn’t return to the topic all night. That is, until Wild woke them all with his screams.
The man was asleep, but clearly in the grips of a nightmare. He was curled in on himself and whimpering. Everyone was woken, but it was Twilight who approached him.
“Hey, wake up. You’re okay, you’re safe.” He very gently gripped Wild’s shoulder to help pull him out of it, and suddenly he was sitting bolt upright and panting.
He crumpled again soon after, but made no noise.
“Are you okay, cub?” Twilight had taken to calling him that over the last day or so, and he couldn’t figure out why.
“I-” he choked, and for a long moment it looked like he wasn’t going to try and talk again. “I’m fine,”
They rekindled the fire, none of them going back to sleep any time soon, and all sat around it like they had that evening.
“I see… I see memories in my sleep. At least, I think that’s what they are.”
With the quiet broken, they all looked to Wild, hoping he would offer a further explanation.
“I guess it’d be kinda hard to hide from you guys, but I lost all of my memories, about half a year ago, before i defeated Ganon.”
Oh.
“Do you know why?” Hyrule asked tentatively.
“I was gravely injured, in the initial attack. I-” He paused again, looking as if he was having to fight to get the words out and fight to keep the tears in. “I think I died.”
There were several sharp intakes of breath around the clearing.
“I slept for one hundred years, to recover, and a body doesn’t need-” There was a deeply haunted look in Wild’s eye as he stared into the fire.
“When I woke up, my mind was a clean slate, and the world was like this. I was the last line of defense when I fell, because the divine beasts had been corrupted, and so had the guardians, and there were so many dead. Ganon had turned our weapons against us, and burnt thousands of lives to the ground.”
The others were torn between looking at wild with pure heartbreak in their eyes and looking into the fire the same way. Wind hiccoughed, and wiped his cheek.
“So you remember nothing,” Warriors asked, voice low and soft, “Nothing of your childhood, your friends, your life?”
“I have fragments. Some people, and places. All dead and gone, except for Zelda, but i see her about once a month. She seems happy now, at least. Sometimes places, things, people trigger short flashes, never more than half an hour periods of it. I also see it, in my dreams, but usually those fade quite quickly. I think I may have remembered my sister’s face, once, but it’s gone now.”
When they did all fall asleep again for the night (well, just before sunrise, by then), they were all heaped together in a pile.
Pain shared is pain halved, after all, and these boys had more than enough between them.