Whole
For Pan
It starts slowly, almost unnoticeably so. A few faeries here and there get a cold; a flower or two begins to wilt. Had she been paying better attention – had they all been paying better attention – to that outside world, maybe they would have been prepared. But she's too wrapped up in her solitude while the rest don't think to trifle themselves with human matters, and that becomes their downfall.
In the end, saying goodbye was just too difficult, so you avoided the problem all together by leaving without a word. Better for everyone this way, you convinced yourself as you fled to the window back to your world, sparkling dust trailing in your wake, your blue light noticeably dimmer.
The hero always ends up with the princess, never the sidekick. Silly you for thinking otherwise.
A few years pass, and suddenly their frothy little fairy hideaway isn't so green anymore; there's an unmistakable chill to their very existence. Plants are shivering, wasting away. More and more faeries are succumbing to an unknowable, incurable disease. It snows in fairyland for the first time since anyone can remember.
Returning to your grassy home was just as you imagined it would be, or maybe not at all. At first, your sisters were all soothing noises and sympathy. Who among you didn't know the feeling of being left behind? He wasn't your first child, nor was he supposed to be your last.
But then you never thought you could feel this way about a human before. And so there were no more.
For one beautiful moment, the snowflakes glisten in the moonlight over their forsaken land. For just the briefest whisper of a second, they can pretend that it's alright.
That's when Death starts to flex his bony fingers throughout their world.
As the days faded into weeks and weeks into months, those soft smiles became harder and harder the longer you refused to move on.
"He's just a boy," one particularly bossy tinker fairy snapped at you as you turned down yet another assignment from the Deku Tree. "One silly, snot-sniveling boy dressed in a tattered green tunic."
"You would know about boys in green tunics, wouldn't you?" you said icily in response, but the irony wasn't lost on you. Maybe every fairy has that one who's her undoing. You were just forced to reckon with yours first.
Now it's so cold even the winter fairies can't survive. How ironic that she, the first of them to lose her way, the fairy fallen by a boy turned hero, is the last of them to go. As far as she knows, she's the only guardian fairy left – maybe the only fairy to exist at all. She stays curled up in her tree, surrounded by the thickest, palest snow, counting down the breaths until she, too, quits this wretched existence.
"Navi?" says a voice long ago heard but never forgotten.
She opens her eyes and is transported in time, back to a place of green leafy tree houses and childhood innocence. There in the center of it, a dirty hand outstretch, is him – her hero, her boy, her burden, her pride. Here there are no pretty pink princess to save, no villain to conquer. All she sees is her child of the forest, her golden boy.
"Come play, Navi," the child says, and for just an instant the image flickers in front of her like a dream about to end. And although it may simply be a mirage born from the last thoughts of a solitary blue fairy covered in snow, she reaches out for his hand.
And she is whole.