Timeline: Majora's Mask
Warnings: Implications of child harm.
Characters: Link, Pamela

The magic holds true, even tested with the weight of heavier sins. He plays to the stars, and the matter of earth reforms, the knitting of bone and reformation of spirit. In his hands, he holds the power of liminal spaces, the doorway through which time and space pass around him, through him, pushing him effortlessly toward futures incalculable.

The girl looks at him with grace and suspicion, and in her he sees the questions he cannot offer and will not indulge. Time moves, and he must move with it, forward and even back again, the locomotion of gears in the clock ever turning. The silence gathers like vines, grown up around the whole of them, but he has learned to cultivate it well. It is his companion when words falter, and they always do.

In her, he can see eternity, all potentialities of living and death, mercy and grief, and this he can give her, will give her, if only because the world is so spare otherwise. In a thousand unfinished futures, she dies alone and frightened and too young, but not in this one, not by his hand and no other.

(Somewhere out there, he imagines, there is a future for him. He must imagine it now, a place where song rings out with good and potent clarity, with joy and light and healing, the power to put even him back together again.)