Prompt No.26
Word count: ~680
Universe: Ocarina of Time
Pairings: Zelink
Rating: K
Themes: Abandonment issues
Abandoned
She had hung her tiny head, a peculiar expression coming over her face, and when he had asked her what it was, she had said it was the voice of the gods.
Then she had turned her back on him and moved towards the light.
His throat had already been raw from the smoke and screaming of the battle he had waged in his other body, but Farore take him if he didn't shout himself hoarse trying to call her back to him.
He shuffled through a bustling, oblivious Castle Town and climbed the ivy up the cliff that ran over the castle gate. He snuck his way into the courtyards and met the Princess of Destiny for the first time, again. He told her he was the boy from her dream.
His throat closed up when she specified that the boy in her dream had been followed by a fairy.
He stayed to make sure Ganondorf was arrested and the Princess was safe. Then he left.
He followed his feet south through Hyrule Field, numb, and found himself back in the woods. The Kokiri children swarmed him. They wanted to know what the world outside was like. They wanted to know where the grassy plains ended and where the forests picked up again. They wanted to know where his fairy was.
When he told them Navi had gone, they all abandoned him, too.
He was homeless—not in the sense that he didn't have a roof over his head, but in that no place felt like home. He dragged himself all over Hyrule, looking for that sense of belonging. But the problem was he didn't belong to that era at all. And the one person who understood had gone.
He was doubled over in the muck and rain in the field between Lon Lon Ranch and the great drawbridge when he decided he had no choice. He either had to try to find Navi, or leave Hyrule entirely.
In the end, he did both.
He took his horse, still just a filly, and went back to the one place he had been trying to avoid. He told the Princess he was leaving. She didn't try to stop him, but he didn't think he had ever seen her looking so disappointed.
He fell through worlds and time, fighting more battles and inheriting more powers than he ever meant to. He was heralded as Hero everywhere he went, not because they knew him when he arrived, but because he somehow managed to get himself dragged into everything that didn't concern him.
He never found Navi.
Eventually he went back to Hyrule, let Epona retire to the pastures she loved, and found his way back to the Princess who had been waiting for him. She was gentle, and kind, and so patient with him, even when he had become so standoffish, and embittered, and feral. He joined her army for lack of anything else he was good at. She kissed him once, when they were sitting on the bulwark watching his troops train, and he stared at her for a long time afterwards, wondering what on earth she had done that for. A few years later he married her.
But she knew that he never quite shook off that lingering scar from the aftermath of that future, where he had lost so much and sacrificed the rest, and then was sent back to a beginning he could never rejoin. Sometimes a light would flicker too quickly in the corner of his eye as the wind would rustle a chime, and she would see that haunted look she could never purge shadow his face again, and spend the rest of the evening pretending it wasn't there. Sometimes, in their private hours, his breath hot on her neck and her name spilling from his mouth in fervent whispers, he would hold her much too tight, like he was afraid she would just slip away in the darkness and never return.
She understood why. She knew that was how so many feral things got their start.
They were abandoned.