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Legend’s opinion of Sky is that... the man’s somewhat of a mystery. A sensitive and perceptive one, to be sure, but still a mystery. If you used Wind as a benchmark, the guy hardly speaks. They’re a group of nine of the most accomplished heroes, and they share the same spirit, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have little favorites among each other. Legend’s loathe to admit it, but he’s gotten fairly attached to Hyrule. Time, Twilight, and Wild have their own little band of secrets holding them together, and it’s easy to see the fondness in Warriors’ eyes when he listens to Wind tell pirate stories, or the pride when the kid shows off strategic knowledge he’s picked up.
But the first in their (still-dubiously-accurate) timeline isn’t the same. He’s like Wild in that he’s more inclined to listen instead of speak, and walks on the outer edges of their group. He laughs at jokes and adds to them when he’s expected to, but nothing more. He doesn’t share stories from his adventures without several minutes of wheedling, by which point someone else distracts Wind anyways.
It’s hard to get a read on him.
What Legend knows is that he’s got awful lungs, if his stamina and wheezing breaths after too much time spent running are any indication. He’s very skilled with a sword. And he is infuriatingly, ridiculously faithful to that bitch, Hylia.
The group’s opinion of her ranges from open dislike (Legend and Time) to simple distaste (Wild, and Twilight by extension) to polite acknowledgement (Warriors, Hyrule, Wind, and Four). The only one with anything remotely positive to speak of is Sky, and he’s really that devoted.
Of course, Legend thinks that’s naive. But he begrudgingly admits (and with Hyrule’s advice) that he hasn’t exactly had the greatest experience with gods.
Even so, Sky’s faith drives him up the wall sometimes. Legend’s made a habit for himself of cursing Her name as often as he can. After all, if anyone has the right to, it’s him. It’s funny. But though Sky hasn’t outright confronted him yet, it’s the closest Legend hears from him to anger directed at anyone in their group. Whenever Legend trips or drops something and huffs a “fuck you, goddesses” he gets a tense look from the chosen hero.
When the guy hasn’t gotten much sleep, or he’s otherwise on edge for any other reason, he’ll click his tongue in disapproval and openly glare.
Before, of course, remembering himself and looking the other way.
As it tends to happen, conversation turns topics fairly often while the group is travelling. It’s no wonder that they talk about the goddesses once or twice.
“I can’t say I hold much respect for them,” Time says, voice clipped. “Sending children to do their errands and fight their enemies is hardly better than being the one to target those children in the first place.”
No one can really argue with that.
They’re taking a trek through Hyrule’s, well, Hyrule. They’d been dropped a few hours away from New Kasuto, so their journey to the town begins.
Hyrule’s standing up at the front of the line, keeping an eye out for enemies— “there’s usually more, we haven’t been attacked more than two or three times—” “well, the monsters have been behaving strangely recently, we ought to appreciate it—” with Time trailing behind him. Wind, as usual, is at the center of the group with Wild and Twilight to his right, Four to his left, and Legend trailing behind with Sky and Warriors.
Sky is notably silent.
Legend decides to test his luck.
He elbows the man a little roughly. “How about you, Sky?”
Sky blinks at him. “How about me, what?”
“Why you still have that much faith in the goddess,” Warriors clarifies.
“Well, it’d certainly be illogical of me to dislike her.”
The veteran’s about to say something else, but the frown on Warriors’ face catches him off guard. He waits for the captain to say his part, but he’s waiting for Sky to add something. Sky just shrugs.
“I don’t know what else you want. I can see why the rest of you aren’t as… fond.” He says carefully.
Wild mentions something he’s just thought of trying to make, and Twilight mentions its similarity to a recipe he remembers one of the women in his home village making, and without fanfare, the subject is dropped.
It’s a few nights later— they haven’t been able to stock up on much here in New Kasuto, but there’s an old woman who knows how to replenish magic, and Hyrule’s trying to use the method Purah taught him to make a potion out of that energy. It’s time-consuming, and inefficient by Sky’s own words; “You lose a lot of magic during the reactions,” he’d remarked, once, and then Twilight had rolled his eyes and said something about him being the only one who cared about that kind of chemistry stuff.
“If it’s not enough you can make another potion, can’t you?”
“Well, yes, but that’s not the point—”
It’s strange, because chemistry and history are two of the only things he’s willing to go out of his way to correct the others on. The former because it had (somehow) been his own favorite subject in his academy, and the latter because it had been Sun’s favorite subject and she told him about it all the time.
Legend’s pretty sure the first time he heard the man say more than a few sentences at a time was when Wind asked him how Wild’s potions worked. And then a few days later someone had asked him about Sun, and he talked about her for an entire evening.
They’re travelling to Ruto the next day.
They all know that Hyrule’s world isn’t anywhere near the safest to set up a camp in, But with two people awake on watch instead of one, Hyrule allows it. Nobody’s very happy about the arrangement.
Sky’s assigned first watch (“it’s impossible to wake you up, let’s just get you done with it first”) and Legend with him. So after they finish dinner and wash up for the night, the chosen hero and veteran pick a log to sit on while the others doze off.
Well, Legend sits on it. Sky pulls out the wooden Loftwing he’s been carving, props himself up on the side, and gets to work.
The two of them aren’t particularly close at all. Legend’s always been a little mean to him, but nothing malicious . It’s just teasing, something to get a rise out of him, but the guy never reacts. He offers up a little smile and goes about his day.
At this point, even Legend’s grown tired of the bit. Twilight gives him much more fun reactions to work with, but once he stopped teasing Sky for a few days, the guy asked him if he was alright or whether he’d done anything to anger him.
So it was a bit of a routine at this point. And that was the extent of their one-on-one interactions in a given week.
A dim fire crackles behind the two of them and the cicadas’ buzzing serves as a background drone. There’s a routine rustling of leaves in their somewhat-close vicinity, but it’s been happening all day. They’ve been tuning it out by now.
They sit in silence for (by Legend’s estimate. Time would probably know exactly, how does he do that?) maybe a half or three-quarters of an hour. Sky seems content to sit in silence and keep watch. Legend finds it a bit awkward.
The cicadas buzz a little louder. Legend realizes he left his bag by his bedroll— if he wants to pull something out, he’d have to walk over and bring it back. Hyrule’s such a light sleeper, he’d wake up immediately.
That leaves sitting in silence, and conversation.
Legend wants to test his luck again.
It only takes a minute or so of shuffling through (admittedly, inflammatory) topics to remember the conversation from a few days ago. And another second for him to open his, in retrospect, rather stupid mouth.
“Hey, Sky?” A hum of acknowledgement. “Why are you so…” A vague hand gesture. “Faithful to Hylia, and all? Other than being Sun-but-also-being-separate-from-her, she doesn’t seem to be doing you any favors.”
Sky doesn’t look at him, though the grip on the bird tightens. “My Zelda is her mortal reincarnation. It wouldn’t make sense if I was scared of her.”
Legend’s brow furrows. He hadn’t asked anything about fear... And when he thinks about it, the other day, Sky had given a similarly evasive answer. It would be illogical, he’d said. Not a reason, a diplomatic avoidance. The veteran idly wonders who he’s convincing— himself or the others.
“No, I mean…” Legend’s digging a damn hole for himself. “You don’t talk much about your adventure. Other than it being long. If I was you, I might be spiteful. For getting put through all that stuff, and all.”
Legend hopes his wording is enough to give Sky an idea of what he’s getting at. Truthfully, he doesn’t know enough about the chosen hero’s adventure to even bring up something in particular. Still, he peers down at him, gauging his reaction.
Sky sighs. Actually sighs. It’s real impatience, and it intrigues Legend that this is what provokes it. The veteran can’t see his face, but he makes another cut in the wood, one that clearly was done with a little too much force, because the thin knife skids over the wood and slices his thumb. Ruby-red blood wells close to the nail. He does nothing but sigh again.
He opens his mouth as if to say something, then closes it. They sit in silence for another minute or two before Sky makes his mind up, and stands, turning to face him.
“Do you… do you pity me, Legend?”
Insects hum. The fire crackles. Legend doesn't ever think about the fact that Sky is taller than him. But now that he has to look up, really look up at him, he realizes that maybe he'd underestimated the man. He has one adventure to Legend's six, but whether it's a trick of the light or apparent only now that he's really paying attention, the chosen hero looks older. Much older. The youthful distaste for taking command and naive adoration for his Sun makes way for simple exhaustion, wary patience. Or maybe it had already been there, and Legend hadn't known to look. It makes him wonder just how much of Sky's kindness is calculated.
The veteran watches carefully, and shrugs. “No. Just asking.” And because he’s too tired to think twice about what he’s saying, he tacks on a “Maybe I will if you keep dodging my questions.”
Sky purses his lips and looks away, bringing his uninjured hand to rest on the Master Sword. “Yes, I do think well of her. I’m going to look around now.”
With the swoosh of his sailcloth, he’s gone.
Legend almost expects Sky to be ignoring him the next day, but he isn’t. The man treats him like normal, smiling as though nothing happened. There were no major monster incidents that night— aside from Warriors dispatching a straggler bokoblin during third watch, no one had faced any issues at all.
Which gave them the time to focus on their next problem: the portals were appearing more frequently.
Four had been the one to point it out, that they were hardly able to spend five or six days in any one Hyrule before a portal appeared and they had to go to another time. And lately, it’s been getting closer to two days, three days.
Monsters aren’t attacking as much either. They find camps of them, sure, but… they’re being outright attacked less. The rate of ambush attempts has slowed to a damn crawl. Time thanks Four for the observation, and lets Warriors walk a bit farther away from the rest of them for today. The man is clearly thinking.
Well, Legend will let the strategist do the strategizing. According to Hyrule, they’re going to have to cross a bridge to get to his home.
A chorus of groans and boos comes from everyone listening. Hyrule’s bridges are horrible. No matter what, they’re always teeming with enemies and horribly unsteady.
And something about Hyrule’s water is bad . The river water, specifically. Legend had wondered why Hyrule was so hesitant about learning to swim, and it turned out to be because his shitty excuse for water always fizzed and popped and sent droplets flying in the air that stung when they hit skin. Between dodging those, keeping out of reach of the creatures that would nip at their feet and throw spikes down from over their heads… well, Hyrule’s bridges are a fucking nightmare.
It becomes a sort of game, though.
They have Time go first, partly because he’s the most experienced and partly because it’s hilarious to see the old man jig back and forth to avoid the projectiles. They cheer him on from one end, and when he turns his head briefly to give them an unimpressed stare, they all suddenly find something very interesting about their boots.
Next up is Hyrule, who makes it across easily with experience, and Wild, who’s similarly nimble. Twilight goes next. One of the little monsters nearly takes a bite out of his calf.
He picks up the pace quite a bit after that.
In the meantime, Wind is trying to get Sky to race him across. The man seems to be contemplating it seriously— the bridge is fairly wide, and they could walk a few inches apart and be fine.
On the other hand, there’s some nasty gaps in the bridge where one of them could trip over.
Sky… surprisingly agrees, and the two of them end up starting with a run that turns into an awkward, hurried shuffle when Wind nearly gets his foot wedged in a gap and Sky has to haul him back out.
They’re somehow laughing when they reach the other side, though.
Legend, Four, and Warriors make their trip easily (compared to Twilight, at least), Warriors opens his mouth to say something... only to be greeted with a large, swirling portal coming into existence just as they make it across.
All nine heroes look at each other apprehensively.
If they try to go elsewhere, it’ll follow them. They’ll have no choice.
It’s the captain who shrugs, unsheathes his sword, and steps in. The rest follow suit.
A few weeks pass with sharply rising stress— the time between portals has dropped to just a day, occasionally a bit less than that.
Four seems to be taking it the worst. He’s never been secretive about the migraines he gets from time switching, and he’s uncoordinated, constantly rubbing at his temples and squinting.
Wild and Hyrule aren’t much better. Wild finds himself practically hanging onto Twilight all the time from how frequently he’s getting dizzy. And Hyrule’s stamina has dropped significantly. His portal nausea is usually tolerable, but because it’s so frequent, he’s eating less and less.
Sky…
Legend knows Sky gets headaches too. He sees the man shaking his head slower and trying to minimize how much he moves around. But never once does he complain.
Monster behavior is getting stranger by the day.
They’re getting quieter and stealthier. They’d been ambushed by a group of monsters once with several stalfos in them. Those things are the only ones across all their time periods that are supposed to make loud noises when they move.
They don’t need to kill the monsters to know they’re infected. The skill and erratic patterns are proof enough.
Where before, there would be a fairly large group of them that attacked all nine heroes, the numbers have dwindled down to just three or four, that swoop in and try to deal as much damage to whichever few happen to be farthest away from the rest, and run away immediately after.
The heroes’ hands are always resting on their sword hilts by now. Watches increase from one person to two, to often three when they can’t sleep.
It’s exhausting.
They start to set up camps and put their bedrolls closer and closer to each other, no one willing enough to take the risk and sleep too far away. Those on watch shifts don’t just sit around, they start to patrol and pace.
Legend’s sure that it isn’t just him that can’t fucking sleep from all that noise.
If there’s any one person he pities the most, it’s definitely Four. And then Wild.
Wild, already not the chattiest, has nearly stopped talking altogether except at dinner. He takes out a whistle and ties it around his neck. Once, after a scuffle, he motions them in to quickly demonstrate what it sounds like.
It’s shrill, and loud, and Legend really wonders where he managed to get something that sounds that grating.
After that same battle, not even an hour later, a portal appears.
They ignore it to continue preparing and resting.
Which ends up being a mistake, because after a few minutes the ground disappears in pockets beneath all of them and they fall straight into a fucking monster camp, what the fuck—
Four is immediately guarded by Time and Twilight, and a disoriented Wild staggers when he gets up but manages to stay standing. Legend doesn’t see Hyrule, but there’s the sound of someone hurling behind him, so he figures that he’s okay as he can be for now.
A bokoblin takes a heavy swing at Legend. He backs out of the way, then jumps into the fight, grimly focusing on only what’s in front of him.
It happens again.
And again
And again.
They have maybe an hour, tops, before each time switch, and when they do they’re swarmed by creatures of all sizes.
At least Four seems to be adjusting to his migraines. He’s clearly still in pain, but— Legend knocks away a thrown projectile with his shield and slashes at a Wizzrobe in front of him before it finishes forming its fireball— but at least he’s able to somewhat hold his own.
Sky is the first to shoot a baleful look at Twilight when their stock of green potions starts to dwindle. “Magic is magic, concentration doesn’t matter, just make more,” he parrots at him when Twilight reaches for one. Legend thinks he’s trying to sound like it’s just their regular banter, but it certainly comes off as open spite.
Hylia, if Sky is being this snappy, Legend doesn’t even want to know how Time and Twilight himself are faring.
How long has it been since they’ve slept?
Hyrule’s face pales when another swirling portal appears.
They feel so disgusting . Swords constantly dirty, Legend’s tunic has been spattered with blood too many times to count, and loose bandages hang off Wind’s arms like drying laundry. None of them smell even remotely tolerable and they know it.
Legend quickly pulls out his waterskin and hands it to Hyrule. “Small sips,” he demands. The kid has to get something in him.
Hyrule looks at the thing like Legend just asked him to eat a rock. He doesn’t move, only takes deep breaths as if to psych himself up to even lift it to his lips.
It happens again, and again, and again.
How long has it been since they’ve slept?
If Legend had the energy, he’d ask Time— he always somehow keeps alarmingly accurate track of his namesake— but he does not. After what feels like a week, but is probably, by the veteran’s poor estimate, about two days of near-constant fighting, even the old man is getting shaky. It’s Warriors who keeps the most level head out of them, cycling through the group and checking on them like clockwork in the precious half-to-full hour they get after fights.
Legend feels so stupid that he didn’t understand earlier.
It happens during one of their rare breaks.
It happens when they have their guard down.
The veteran is sluggishly winding bandages around his arm when that cook’s horrible whistle cuts through the air.
Immediately, Legend staggers upwards and looks around, trying to see what tripped Wild’s alarm, and immediately catalogues everyone’s position. Hyrule, being pulled up by Warriors. Four, Twilight, and Time, also trying to find the source of panic. Sky, pulling himself up directly across from Legend himself. They make eye contact for a split second. Wild is running towards—
Wind. Wind is standing just a few feet away from the tight circle the rest of the group is in and Legend sees it happen in slow motion as he struggles to get his feet to move and they don’t and
A bokoblin and spear moblin, tailed by a swarm of keese lunge at him from behind. The kid barely has time to register what’s going on before the club crashes into the side of his head and the spear is in his back.
Someone screams. The keese are in their hair, leathery wings scraping and scratching at Legend’s face but he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care because that was what all this was for, all of this portal fucking bullshit was so they could tire them out and take out someone while they were weak, they—
Legend swings his sword in the air with no care for what he hits— he knows his face is dripping with blood, his hat has fallen off, but he makes it over to their youngest and gasps.
He doesn't need to be a medic to know that it's bad.
Warriors shouts that he and Wild will take care of the keese, and sure enough, arrows start flying above their heads. The limp body of one of them drops onto the ground right in front of Legend’s face. He wants to be sick.
Hyrule is shoved to the front and they all crowd around the poor sailor, who’s unconscious and breathing weakly. Hyrule mumbles under his breath and soon enough, a green glow starts emanating from his hands and the injuries start to knit together.
And then he stops. “Potion,” he gasps, swaying on his feet.
Legend doesn’t know who gets it, only that there’s one being pressed into his hands that he hands off to Hyrule. The traveller downs it, not even flinching at the rancid taste, and gets to work again.
Warriors finally resheathes his sword and rushes over, Wild hot on his heels.
“Which direction is the nearest village?” Time demands.
Wild points north. “An hour.”
Four clears his throat. “We only have that potion and one more. If we need to make it that long, we can’t spend it all here.”
The captain looks at Time briefly, then comes to a decision. “Heal as much of his back as you can with part of this potion. We’ll start to the village and on the way, stay by him and keep healing, alright?”
Hyrule picks up the potion and downs half of what’s left, then nods and focuses on casting Life again on just the spot Wind was stabbed in. It’s grotesque and frankly awful to watch the skin at the edges messily start to reform. Legend hopes the kid has a spare tunic. That much blood looks like it’ll never wash out.
He looks away with a grimace. Sky is turned around from it all with his eyes squeezed shut. He’s taking deep breaths. Legend can’t blame him.
Soon Hyrule gives them the confirmation that they can go and he stands up, nearly pitches over, and is caught by Legend. Wind is hoisted onto Twilight’s back in what must be a taxing piggyback ride for the rancher, and they’re off. It switches between a jog and fast walk.
If there’s anything to be thankful for, it’s that the portals have stopped. No more show up. Not for the next few hours, nor for the next week.
Twilight’s forearm has started bleeding again.
Hyrule gets to the bottom of the potion just as they reach the village.
They make it in and the rest is a blur as Wild finds healers and speaks to people and does things and everyone else is just left to wait and watch as he stumbles around this town, probably a few years in the future from when he left it, trying to remember where things are.
There is a healers’ place now. Wind is brought in and the woman sucks in a breath upon hearing what happened to him.
“I’m going to need the rest of the night,” she says tersely. “Don’t get your hopes up.”
They’re all sent out of the room and into an inn in a daze. They cycle through getting cleaned up, mechanically and with no conversation. Hyrule goes first, and passes out on the bed immediately after.
Though the sun is set to rise in just one or two hours, Four settles down on the other bed and goes to sleep too, followed by Warriors getting into his own bedroll laid out on the floor. His scarf has been abandoned, though it’s folded and sitting right beside him.
Legend follows suit.
Sky climbs into his bedroll and just sits.
“What’s wrong, can’t fall asleep for once?” is what the veteran would say if this wasn’t the situation they were in.
After a few moments, he stops caring and tries to fall asleep. Keyword: tries.
Until he hears the quiet creak of floorboards as the chosen hero gets up and leaves.
Legend briefly wonders why.
He wants to test his luck.
He follows him, magic cape fastened around his shoulders but not activated. The night is warm, disgustingly peaceful for how tense everything is. A new moon casts judgement on them. The sound of a faint breeze rustling the tall grass and leaves gives Legend a moment of pause, to breathe.
To his surprise, though, the chosen hero doesn’t go to the healers’, or to speak with someone. He looks around for a moment. And then finds and stands in front of a goddess statue.
No one is out in the village save for a few guards.
At first, Legend’s angry— how dare he stand here and just pray at a time like this? But then, he realizes,
There’s nothing else he can do.
There’s nothing either of them can do.
Legend ducks behind a tree and watches as Sky approaches it. The must have once been surrounded by a small pond or a ditch once, but it’s been pushed up against the side of a hill.
A few moments of silence as the chosen hero just stands there, head bowed.
And then, he begins to visibly shake.
Legend’s alarmed— his breathing was steady, after all— but after a few moments, that starts to stagger too.
Sky starts whispering. Words that are no doubt meant for Hylia alone. Legend can hardly catch them— his ear twitches and he leans forward to hear better.
“I’m sorry,” the chosen hero is mumbling. “I’m sorry, I am so sorry, I let him get hurt, I—” Legend can hear his breath hitch.
The veteran feels sick.
Is Sky a goddess-damned idiot? Both he and Legend had been just as far from Wind, not even close to being within range of protecting him. Why the hell is he here groveling at Hylia’s stupid statue as though she wasn’t the one who let this happen? No, as though she’d bother doing anything now? Does he think she still cares about them? Other than their ability to succeed in whatever quest she has them on?
“Just, give him more time, let him live, I— I promise I’ll be better, I’ll train more, I’ll get Warriors to teach me more skills, I’ll— I’ll start sword drills again. I’ll stop sleeping late. I won’t let any of them get hurt again.”
Legend already thinks this is bad enough. Until the jagged, rough edges of his voice and breath pick up in volume, and they go from well-concealed sniffles to heaving, restrained gasps.
The chosen hero drops to his knees and his mouth keeps moving, why is he still talking, he already can’t breathe—
“Or, or I won’t stop there, I’ll do more, I don’t know what you want, but I’ll do more— anything, just tell me, I know I failed you, I failed them, I should have done better, I’m sorry—” Legend’s feet feel frozen to the ground— “I’ll be better, I’ll— You’re not upset with him, it’s me, just—”
And then, his ragged breaths halt. So softly he thinks he might have imagined it, Legend hears “I won’t let any of them suffer for my mistakes again.”
Something like revulsion and another thing like pity churns in his gut when Sky crumples in on himself further, hands clasped in some awful, scared prayer.
He’s seen enough.
(“Do you pity me, Legend?”)
By now, he thinks he does.
What kind of benevolent goddess has he deluded himself into believing in?
The next morning, the healer sighs. “He’ll live. Don’t let him exert himself for the next two weeks, and even afterwards, be careful.”
Wind, Hyrule, Four, and Wild end up sleeping all day. Sky returns and, after working with Time to try and wash the blood out of the sailor’s tunic, waits by Wind and spreads a towel over his own lap. He starts woodcarving again as though nothing happened.
Legend keeps a closer eye on him after all that… whatever it was. He thinks someone else would make the effort to tell him they’d seen him, try and comfort him, but Legend is not that person. If anyone saw him like that, he'd be beyond mortified. He'd be outright angry.
Days pass.
Sky starts to volunteer for the last shift as often as he can— Legend himself, when he has second-last, sees how taxing it is to wake him up that early. As promised, he asks to join Wild and Warriors in their sword drills.
He lags behind less when they run, but Legend can hear in his gasps and wheezes afterwards that it’s hard on him. The veteran used to wonder why Sky took so many breaks, complained about everyone else's speed, but having to listen to his jagged breathing when they come to a stop makes Legend wish he’d just go back to being slower.
And that’s it, isn’t it?
He’s trying to do too much.
It’s by pure chance that Legend is there when a few weeks later, it crashes down.
The previous day, Twilight ended up getting Sky to not take watch at all, and nobody woke him in the morning until they absolutely had to. After all, it was hard to ignore how tired the guy was getting. What kind of companions would they be if they didn't at least try to let him get a bit of extra shut-eye when they could? Sky certainly looks unhappy about it, but he says nothing. Another day of travelling goes by, and the evening lets them all set up camp.
Which is when the sailor had tried shield surfing with Wild while the rest of them had their backs turned. It was right before dinner— late evening, Wild had handed off the cooking setup to Twilight while he and Wind ran off to mess around.
Not even Time can be roused to keep his eye on them. It’s too peaceful.
Until they all hear a high-pitched, cut-off shout of pain, and immediately they’re all rushing to the hill the two idiots had been riding down.
Wind is sprawled on the ground, clutching his ankle and cursing profusely.
“Mother FUCKER,” he spits as soon as Sky gets down to him and helps him up. The ankle must be broken. There’s a dip in the ground— by Legend’s best guess, the kid must’ve accidentally got his foot stuck in it somehow.
They help him back, and offer up a potion. Wind sullenly downs it, probably misinterpreting basic worry for being treated like a child again.
“You’re sure you’re alright?” Sky checks.
For the hundredth time after they return and get a red potion into him.
Legend’s a little more than disconcerted by the amount of questions getting thrown the sailor’s way— Sky isn’t by any means the most detached, but he isn’t usually this worrisome over any of them. Much less over an injury of this scale.
“I’m fine,” Wind answers evenly. He had looked like he was going to get annoyed after the first few times the chosen hero returned to hover over him, but just before he could say something, his demeanor switched all of a sudden as he realized... something. That irritation evaporated, leaving only patient reassurances in its place.
“You don’t have to treat me like a kid,” he’d snapped once. “I’m not stupid.”
And oh, Legend understands some of that pride in Warriors’ eyes now— now as he belatedly notices that Sky is pacing around, and shaking a little bit, and nervously twisting the ends of his sailcloth in his hands, only pausing his pattern to halfheartedly look at what Wild’s making or come back to make sure that Wind isn’t injured anywhere else, or that he had taken enough potion, or that he’s absolutely totally sure he’s okay. Through all of it, Wind doesn’t dismiss him once.
Seems like it was all for nothing, though, since it all boils over as soon as they finish eating dinner (some soup, Legend hadn’t paid attention) and start to settle down for the night, deciding watch shifts and setting out bedrolls.
The chosen hero volunteers last shift again, denying any attempts to get him to not do it. Of course.
“I need a minute, though,” he says distractedly after a minute, then turns tail and wanders heads off into the woods without another word.
“Uh, does he have his sword…?” comes Four’s voice from across camp.
A few glances are exchanged between the rest of them. Legend, being the closest in distance to where Sky left, somehow gets sent out after him.
Wouldn’t Hyrule be better for this? Or Time? Or— oh wait, literally anyone else?
The chosen hero isn’t hard to track. Legend only has to look around for a minute or two before he comes across the man he’s looking for. Who’s running his hands through his hair, taking conspicuous deep breaths.
“Hey, Sky—” Legend starts, and nearly takes a step back from the alarm in said hero’s eyes when he whirls around— “They’re… waiting for you at camp.” Why did they send me out? he bemoans internally, again. I fucking suck at this. I’m not good at this feelings bullshit, that’s Twilight's thing. Or Sky's. “Unless you need. A minute or two out here.”
He gets a clipped nod at the last statement, and is faced with Sky’s sailcloth again as he crouches down and braces his arm on a smooth tree trunk to calm himself.
They stand for a minute. Two minutes.
Legend fiddles with his rings.
A third.
Ah, fuck it.
“If you…” Sky shifts, blinking at him, eyes catching the dim light a bit too much to be anything other than wet. “...want a hug… or something, I can… you know.”
He spreads his arms a little, looking away. The chosen hero accepts it.
Though Legend sees the movement out of the corner of his eye, he still stiffens a little when two arms wrap around him. He has to remember to return it. And when he does, Sky sags in his arms.
“It’s, um,” Legend tries after a few moments, “not your fault he got hurt.”
A sigh. “I know.”
“Not this time, or the other time,” he clarifies. “In Wild’s Hyrule.”
“Mmm.”
Why is he the one who has to do this? "I know you're blaming yourself. But you're not—"
“I could have prevented it. My hands weren’t full.”
“Would you have made it in time?” Finally, an argument. Legend can navigate these. Sky pulls out of the hug, stepping back to give him space and looking away.
“If I had noticed, maybe.”
“Well, would you have even been able to stop it?”
“We won’t be able to find out now. Useless to think about it,” is the dull response.
“Then it’s useless to blame yourself for it, too,” Legend shoots back. “It’s not your fault.”
“Then whose is it?”
“The Dark’s. Fucking obviously. It chose to attack us, It chose to go after Wind.”
Sky sighs, legitimate frustration leaking into his voice. “I worded that wrong,” he says. “It’s the Dark’s fault he was in danger. But it was always going to be doing that. We couldn’t control it. In a storm, is it the rain’s fault that you get wet or yours for not staying inside?” He gets louder at the end, and then shakes his head, returning to normal. “I’m asking whose fault it was that he got hurt.”
“I…”
Legend can’t even begin to unpack that— no, seriously, what does that even mean? But Sky’s walking away, and Legend really doesn’t want to leave him thinking he’s the reason the sailor was injured, so he grabs the chosen hero’s arm. He can't believe he's the one saying it, but why does the blame even fucking matter? Hyrule's voice saying 'it matters to him, don't dismiss it,' flashes through Legend's head, but it's useless. He can't think of anything to say that isn't what he thinks.
The chosen hero waits for him to speak.
“It’s late," Sky says curtly after a moment. "We’ll talk in the morning.”
But in the morning, he’s back to his regular self. It isn’t brought up again.