Noah and Wren were in love.
When they were twelve they both formed a pact. They vowed that they would do whatever it took to save Wren's parents. Wren's mom and dad were both ill with a disease that cut their youth short and rendered them old and infirm when they should've been watching Wren grow up.
Noah and Wren vowed that they'd ignore any feelings they had for each other. They didn't have time for that. They were battling Garington's disease, and it was cutting their parent's lives shorter than the short sticks they had been handed in life. They vowed that they would be there for their parents. Wren was up every two hours feeding a special potion Bertie and Luv had concocted for people with Garington's. Every two hours a little scrap-made alarm clock Noah had hacked together for her would rattle and buzz and she'd wake herself up by winding it up, building resolve to spoon-feed her parents what was keeping them alive.
Noah's mom cooked for Wren, bringing her food while she spent her days collecting potion ingredients and her nights nursing two parents as they slowly passed away.
Noah now had four Loftwings to look after. He took them for daily flights and he'd swoop to the farthest reaching islands to pluck up special herbs for the potions Wren's parents required. He built her a garden full of them, a garden where medicine ran wild. He did her homework and gave her an easily digestible version of that day's lessons, because she couldn't go to school with her parent's lives depending on bihourly medicines. He scoured through library books for old remedies. He called on the headmaster and every instructor on the island and he asked every townsperson in existence for anything and everything they knew.
Behind Wren's back, he tried homemade remedies himself, using himself as a guinea pig.
She cornered him with a stern eye when she discovered this. She was watching her own mother die, she couldn't stand to watch him die too, feeding himself some mysterious concoction.
So, with a dishtowel slung over her shoulder and fury in her gaze, outside in the moonlit garden he'd made for her, he'd kissed her. Looking back on it, he wasn't really sure which of them needed that reassurance more.
They'd promised each other they wouldn't fall in love. She'd been frank about it. "You can't fall for me," she'd said sternly, "because that will ruin everything. We don't need love gunk jumbling what's already a mess." And she'd held out her hand and spat on it. "I pledge to not fall for you," she'd sworn.
"And I pledge to not fall for you either," he'd returned, spitting on his hand in equal. They shook. That had been back when their parents could still feed themselves, but when they could see the warning signs coming on. The warning that Garington's was looming. First they began forgetting things. Then they lost motor function. Then came the hallucinations.
Those were the worst.
After several months of desperately trying to slow the disease's movement, Wren started waking up to screaming, a petrified parent paralyzed in the grip of a nightmare. And then the nightmares increased, several times a night she'd wake to screaming, and during the day she'd play along and hold conversation with her nonexistent grandchildren.
Link inherited his courage from his mother.
Noah saw the pain and the strain of grief on Wren's face. So one day, he coaxed her out for a trip to one of the outer islands, a picnic floating in the sky. He'd spread the food out on the blanket and she had burst into hysterical tears. He'd held her as she cried and blubbered about this and that unintelligible thing he couldn't untangle from her incoherent speech. He'd kissed the top of her head and rocked her and for an hour, she had finally rested.
But her work was never really done.
After ten months of nursing and worsening condition, and Noah still sneaking experimental antidotes only to hurl them and his lunch up over the edge of the world, Noah's dad and Wren's mother slept through the night, one last time.
And in the morning, they were gone.
Noah had discovered Wren sitting, numb, on the side of their bed, staring at the two, who were now growing cold. She hadn't said anything, but Noah understood. And again he held her and felt her cry, because all she'd given still hadn't saved them and because they were finally somewhere better.
She'd folded herself into him and he knew that, regardless of any promise he had made, he'd still fallen for her. And she couldn't thank him enough. Her heart ached with grief and with gratitude for the boy she'd sworn not to love but whose arms she found herself in anyway.
Wren didn't have a head for school anymore. She had a head for ingredients and remedies and caring for those at the end of their line and in pain, big or small. At seventeen, she became the mother of Skyloft. Any kid with a scraped knee could run to her and she'd sooth them with calm word and cook up a medicine for them that went down easy and healed their bruises. The garden overflowed with medicinal herbs and sweet-smelling red leaves that made up red potion.
As kids they had dreamed of both joining the knights, and Noah had done what he could to keep Wren's dream alive, completing her assignments and risking expulsion.
One cloudy late afternoon, Noah was turning in two assignments, one for him and one for Wren, and Gaepora poured over the two, made Noah sit down, and asked him if he'd been doing Wren's work.
After Noah dropped his gaze. "No," he said.
Gaepora gave him a knowing looking. Noah sighed and opened up. Yes, I have. Wren still wants to be a knight," Noah said, "And I can't let her give up on that."
Gaepora told him and Wren to return tomorrow, and they would talk then.
In Gaepora's office, Wren turned on Noah, shocked. "You've been doing my work? I thought you knew I was dropping out."
"I just didn't want you to give up," he said quietly.
"I'm not giving up, Noah. Things change." She turned to the headmaster. "I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't know about this. I've meaning meaning to tell you I'm leaving the academy."
Noah looked down as Gaepora nodded.
"I won't expel you, Noah, because your intentions were genuine and an act of nobility, even if they were dishonest in nature. I will assign you some work around the academy for disciplinary reasons, and ask you to accept Wren's choice. I hope you realize she wouldn't have been allowed to continue with so much plagiarized work."
"I had to try," Noah said, eyes cast down.
In the end, both of their childhood dreams changed. Noah had wanted to become a knight full-time, but he dropped down to help Wren, to continue to help her with her budding apothecary business, to run errands for her and deliver medicine bags and dance around and cheer her up when she was caught up in the tendrils of grief. He wrote down recipes for a thousand remedies that had been tacked to the wall and bound them up into books.
They savored their youth, the two of them. They were poor, giving services for free and hardly ever paying their fees. But the people they were in debt to soon became indebted to them when they whisked a child from danger on skilled hands.
They didn't dare swear to each other that they'd never marry. And soon enough, they were bound to each other, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, 'til death do them part.
Those vows held until the end of time.
With Garington's being genetic, Wren feared she would have it, or that their children would. But in the end, after many tears, and Noah professing that he'd take care of the both of them, no matter what, they welcomed Link into the world.
He grew up in a house of healers, where the smell of medicine was thick in the air. His father taught him all about the world, about the different plants in the garden and bugs in the dirt. He taught him that you could eat a grasshopper if you could catch it, what berries were not to be trusted, and that if an animal was reasonable it could be tamed with a low, calm voice, and a handful of sugargrass. Remlits went crazy for sugar grass. It was the catnip of Skyloft, and Remlits always followed Link's father around, mewing obnoxiously. They were addicts to the stuff. Fortunately, loftwings and other critters, though they liked it, wouldn't badger you for the next ten years about it. Link's mother taught him how to stitch a wound and how to cut the pain, how to soothe a burn and how to splint a break, and how to wrap a cracked rib.
Then the plague hit.
With a deep hacking cough coupled with a crippling fever that bound them to bed, Link's parents were taken ill. He was ushered out of the house as friends tried to care for them. He spent his days alone, hugging his knees in the shadow of a tree, not even a teenager yet. In the wake of the plague, very few people, Zelda and her father among them, witnessed Link climb aboard his crimson Loftwing for the first time at the and streak off into the sky as if it was second nature. Because it was.
His parents were very excited to hear, and as a family they bound together. And that night, as if they knew he was safe under the wing of the creature's legendary bird, his parents slept on, for all of eternity.
Thanks for reading! "Mother of Skyloft" is a dialogue-told partner to this story. So, if you like this head-canon, head over to that oneshot for more. Also, I know that this head-canon is terribly, terribly tragic and sad, and seems to underline the seemingly meaningless suffering that is rampant our world. So I just wanted to say that these events presented incredible opportunities for heroism, compassion, and resilience in all the characters involved, and that all of it had a purpose in Link's ability to save the world. Their suffering had a purpose, as all suffering does, no matter how bleak things can seem. So never, ever give up hope.
Thanks for reading. I hope you have a nice day!