I WISH I HAD A LAWNMOWER

A Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Fan Fiction

If this is Paradise, I wish a lawnmower. – "Nothing but Flowers" by Talking Heads

Link contemplated another set of ruins – thoroughly explored, or, perhaps not as he never thought he could peer into every nook and cranny of these things enough and come up with satisfactory answers. There were treasures to be found sometimes, but rarely answers. There was always the question as to whether or not any of these places could spark the stirring of a memory in him. More often than not, all he got was some vague feeling of distant familiarity. A few places he'd seen in that picture album in the Sheikah Slate had brought back profound memories – vivid images, smells, words, sometimes of wounds, but most of the time, he came up empty.

Ruins filled him with both sadness and joy. The sorrow was for what had once lived and the happiness was for the life that was springing up around them. They were beautiful places – broken walls covered in moss, sometimes in vines, with flowers sprouting through what had once been floors… the occasional swift-violet or those little Korok flowers they'd set up as a game peeking out from a battlement. He especially liked finding the Korok-buds. Although they proved a challenge to chase (a game), finding a Korok provided a bit of cuteness for his journey.

Such cuteness was always welcomed, particularly when most of nature seemed to be trying to kill him. The bright days were beautiful. The land, from the grassy plains and the hills covered in flowers to the arid canyons he'd explored was full of color and life, but a lot of that life really wanted him dead. While finding food provided few problems for him (he had no idea where he'd learned to hunt and gather, but he seemed to know what kind of plants and mushrooms were safe to eat. He seemed to have an intuitive knowledge of how to use weapons, including how to draw bows – and he found that he was a decent hunter and a pretty quick butcher when he felled an animal), the land was rife with monsters who attacked him on sight – or on scent – or if they'd heard him near.

His disgust of monsters was instinctive – but he supposed it was instinctive to people in general. The folk in the villages, along the roads and at the stables he met were afraid of them, for ample reason. He'd come across one or two poor souls fighting off assaulting bokoblins quite often and always stopped to help. Sometimes there was a reward in it for him by the grateful travelers, sometimes they could provide nothing. It didn't matter. There was something distinctly unnatural about the "monster" class of creatures; yet, Link figured that they were a part of nature in their own right. They prevailed in the land enough, particularly in the wilds, to be as much part of the landscape as the rocks and trees. He sometimes watched their camps – moblins sleeping, bokoblins grunting and dancing around campfires while roasting meat. A small part of him wondered, uncomfortably, of his dislike of the creatures wasn't born from survival instinct, but if it was just a form of racism.

He got along well enough with the peaceful peoples of the land, even to the point of faking his gender for the sake of a culture, so he supposed not. The points of civilization were far outweighed by the ruins, though. Even the settlements looked like they'd survived something or else were built from scrap. The stables were rather scrappy in appearance, but served their function. Everything in this world however breathed evidence of it being a shadow of a world before – the remains of a civilization being rebuilt by the descendents of survivors, and few survivors at that. Link knew little, at this point, of what had transpired in the past – only that he had been a knight in service to the Crown, the bodyguard of a princess with bright eyes and scholarly ambitions – these having come to him in a few flashes of memory, and that at some point, he had failed his duties. The elders among the Zora sniffed at him, telling him outright that he had failed their Champion. The Sheikah-girl at the lost technology lab in Hateno and that strange little old man at the other tech lab in Akala had given him a story of having dealt with him fallen, with many wounds. The Yiga Clan assassins that beset him spoke of their desire to "kill a hero long dead."

So, he was a dead man walking in a land that his failure had created. That was the bulk of what he knew.

And Nature had reclaimed its own, in spades. Old walls of temples and cities lay surrounded by grass, flowers and trees. He used them for cover sometimes when some of the lost technology that lay rusted all around proved to not be completely dead, but thoroughly corrupted by malice. Technology wanted to kill him, too – and lost technology from a far older era that the one the people of Hyrule was recovering from at that.

He had an urge to cut the grass, just to get it out of his way. It looked nice waving in the wind, but obstructed his view and, for some reason, he thought he could find treasure in it. He rarely did when he arched a sword through it – and then it tended only to be certain bugs that he knew were good for alchemic elixirs and to sell to people who used them for such purposes. At least the grass wasn't after him in a world where everything else wanted to kill him.

Even the rocks were after him! While Link had no fear that he'd pick a poison mushroom (how did he know all of these foraging skills by heart?) he'd find himself running into little boulders that would pick themselves up, waddle around him and try to punch him. The little ones were kind of cute, really, but best to be taken care of with a good Goron sledgehammer rather than to be left to break his shins. Then there were the parent rocks, the Talus. He tended to just flat out run when he'd accidentally awakened one of those things.

Peaceful goats and timid deer sometimes got a wild spirit when he was hunting and would charge him. Rain was inconvenient and always seemed to happen when he was trying to climb a ridge. Falling was a real danger, even with the paraglider. There were things he had to find to survive in areas that were not conducive to survival – a need for gear and proper foods to stave off cold and heat became apparent quickly. Why people made their homes and settlements out in those places, he'd never know. The Rito were naturally insulated by warm feathers against the cold. The Gerudo were a people evolved to life in the desert. As far as he could figure, it was impossible for a Zora to drown. Hylians were far less capable outside of the greener patches of land, but somehow made do. However, it seemed like Nature won, always. The broken stone walls and the rusted heaps of malevolent machines gave testimony to that as they sat in the moss, the rain, the sand and the snow.

The bones of ancient leviathans did the same. The animate bones of horses that he sometimes mounted and rode on whim were distinctly unnatural. Link would have kept them if he could. What better way to strike fear in his enemies? Maybe the Yiga assassins would avoid him entirely if they saw him riding something undead their way. Even they succumbed to Nature in the form of sunlight, "living" only for a night before fading down into the dust from which they'd come.

As Link gained some of his memory back, he wondered how many things he'd missed – or should be missing. The profound flashes of memory he encountered all involved people. As soon as he'd gained them, he was hit with a wave of mixed emotions and was left in a state of stunned grief. He'd pause and rest whenever possible whenever he'd "met a friend" again. The first memory he encountered was that of Mipha when he first visited the Zora's Domain. It pained him to think that he had forgotten such a sweet friend. Maybe she had been something more? He couldn't decide. He knew that he'd cared about her very much in his former life. He felt like a criminal for forgetting, even if it was because he'd nearly died and had been asleep and recovering for a century. He'd met Daruk and Urbosa in those bright flashes, too. Revali was an arrogant turd, but he remembered something akin to camaraderie with that one, even if it was a bit strained. Despite the memories only being brief bits of insight, he missed them all – these partners of his.

It made sense that connections to the people he last knew would come most profoundly as the amnesia subsided in bits and pieces. What bothered Link a lot; however, were the little things. He couldn't gain any memories of his family back. He'd uncovered a memory of Princess Zelda mentioning him following in the footsteps of his father, but he could not remember his father at all – not a face, not a voice, nor his mother. He had no memories of his childhood as yet. Sidon said that he'd played with the Zoras quite a lot, but he had to take his word on it. Link wondered if he'd liked to sit by warm fires as much in the past as he did now or if he'd liked the same foods. He seemed to be a pretty good chef with what he could hunt and scavenge – the idea of what went together with what, taste-wise being fairly intuitive, though not as much as a knowledge of weapons and basic battle-tactics. He'd made his share of dubious meals while experimenting with ingredients, but, still, he'd made edible, even delicious things most of the time. He liked meat – he knew that much. Link idly thought that it would be hilarious if he'd uncovered some memory of his past life in which he'd found out he was a vegetarian. It wasn't likely, but if so, he knew a Korok he could scare.

He figured that he probably missed seeing the cities in their glory. The towns where civilization had taken hold were nice places – Hateno being so lovely that he'd scraped together enough rupees to buy the small abandoned house there. The broken ramparts definitely made him wonder what they were like before entropy and nature had their way with them.

And he was definitely sick of spending nights when he couldn't find a stable or a safe camping spot to rest at waking up to the pig-grunts of bokoblins, being surrounded by random wolves, being attacked by sentient rocks both big and little and of tumbling down over the crags when the rain started up and the thunder shook the earth.

Link could live in the wild, yes, but he couldn't help but have one thought on his mind as he gazed out over ruins, a silent plea to the Goddess, perhaps;

Don't leave me standing here! I can't get used to this lifestyle!

END.

Shadsie, 2017

This story is vaguely based upon an old song by the no-longer-operational band Talking Heads, "Nothing but Flowers." It's a fun, funky little song about a survivor of an apocalypse noting how nature has overtaken the ruins of (modern) civilization and complaining about all of the things he misses about the pre-disaster world. (It's from a 1988 album from a band more famous for their hits "Life During Wartime" and "Psycho Killer").

At this point, (at the time of my writing this) I have not finished the main quest of the game (I freed Vah Nabooris first, for whatever reason, then Vah Ruta, but have yet to free the other Divine Beasts), but I have gained all of Link's memories. I took a break from the game and wrote this fanfic.