Link and Midna were lost. They'd been wondering the forests around the Sacred Grove for ages, looking for Link's dropped bow. They might have been close in the beginning of their search, but since they managed to lose their way, circling familiar places many times.
"Why don't I just warp us out of here and we can buy another?" Midna offered grumpily.
"No!" Link protested. "The fairy bow was a treasure, no other bow will do!"
"Fine," Midna huffed, returning to Link's shadow, "but you'll have to find it on your own."
Link was frantic. What would the Gorons think if he couldn't return the precious item he borrowed from Death Mountain? He tried not to imagine it sinking into the ground somewhere, never to be found again, leaving countless Heroes after him helpless. He wished that whatever divine power that connected him to the Hero of Time would vanish so the guilt he felt would lift. How careless he had been to misplace it!
Helplessness set in again as Link studied his surroundings. The area was new to his eyes, but locked in a time older than ever imagined. Something in him stirred—unusual, sickening feelings. Feeling too unwell to continue looking, Link sat his back against a large tree long grown over with vines and plants of many kinds. Calmness swelled up in him as he closed his eyes. He felt like a child again, sleeping in the lap of a mother or a trusted friend.
He prayed to the Goddesses for some sleep and, for all the courage he'd been given, he hadn't a pinch of wisdom to find his bow, so he prayed for that too. The forest world's sounds and sights mixed in his head as he fell deeper and deeper into his sleep, but one sound grew louder and more defined. A song. A lively melody his heart knew but his memory did not. It shrieked among the whispers of the forest, louder and louder until Link forced himself awake.
It was gone.
"Midna, did you hear that?"
Midna said nothing from the confines of his shadow.
Link pushed himself up from the trunk of the tree, checking his surroundings for any more lost items. He started to walk away slowly, but his skin began to crawl and his feet felt like lead. Something was wrong. Impulsively, he turned back to the tree, giving it a gentle touch and a mental farewell, as if saying a second goodbye to a long-lost friend. His mind twisted and attacked whatever made him do so. Link shrank away.
He started to wander. He wandered toward the place his sleep was going to take him. His mind was hardly active, his body taking full control, moving to the melody that worked its way into his veins. He stumbled into a clearing.
The source of the song was a small girl sitting on an old tree stump, her every feature blending into the greens of the forest. Her eyes were closed, her fingers moved tirelessly along a brown ocarina. A muscle memory Link shouldn't have had twitched in his own fingers.
The girl opened her eyes and locked her gaze with his. The music stopped, hurling Link back into the world of the lost and unknown forest.
"Link?" she whispered.
She was a ghost before, but his name brought her back to life. Her eyes grew bright and sparkled, the corners of her mouth went hesitantly upward. She wasn't fixed to the ocarina anymore; she was alive.
"Midna…" Link said softly.
"I'm not helping you!" Midna snapped.
"No, that's not it. Midna, do you see that?"
She sighed as she materialized out of Link's shadow and hovered above his shoulder. She turned her head lazily around to look at the forest then focused on Link.
"I don't see anything," Midna said, "so find your bow and let's get moving!"
"Oh…" the forest girl said sadly. She bowed her head, fixating her gaze at the ocarina in her hands. Her eyes lost the sheen they had seconds before. Her body became stiff and fixed to the wooden forest background again. "I suppose it's that time again."
Link had a million questions to ask, but she was in another world now—one Link's mind couldn't tell his voice to reach. He stared at her, stunned at the new and ancient feelings she brought forth. There was a different part of him that woke up and was crashing against the walls of his being, trying to fall into this little girl's world.
A part of him that should have been dead—no, should never have existed, was pounding at his chest, screaming for attention. These obscure, indescribable feelings reeled in Link, turning his blood backwards, bringing new faces, moments, friendships, wounds, and urgencies to the surface.
"It's funny," said the green little girl, ocarina pressed against her lips, "how things born in the forest always find their way back."
She melted into her melody again, leaving Link standing dumbfounded. And then, like a trick of the eyes, she was gone. Not that she disappeared, that she melted or left with a flash, but that she simply ceased to exist. She had never been there before. A smile turned frown with no effort of the muscle. Her song was gone as well, leaving silence to pound on Link's ears.
Link felt complete and incomplete at the same time—a paradox of destinies.
"Look, Link!" Midna gasped. She hovered over to the tree stump where the girl had sat. The fairy bow was resting there, plants beginning to curl up over it slightly, bugs crawling freely from one end to the other. "When did this get here?"
They looked at each other with equal and yet unbalanced confusion.
"Midna?" he said shakily.
"Come on, let's get going already!"
Link shook his head in an attempt to refocus on the present, but in the past few minutes he'd lost all his sense of past and present.
"Right," he said to Midna, wondering if someone in the distant future would ever chance to meet her and experience the same feelings, "let's go save Hyrule."
A/N: LOOK MOM, I CAN BE PURPLE! I feel like I have to explicitly state that this story is in no way Saria/Link, Midna/Link, or Scenery/Link, or people will be all up in mah grills, yo. What? I hate author's notes.