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Ten paces away, he looks back at her. She’s not sure if he is trying to hide his look of betrayal from her, but she always knew his emotions either way. The mask of stone he wore over his true face may have fooled others, but she wasn’t looking at his face. She saw straight to his soul - his spirit - and there was no hiding from her.
He’s wearing an arm that doesn’t belong to him, with a dark hand that doesn’t seem to contain the warmth she’s used to feeling. It looks cold. He looks cold. Distant. Angry.
Betrayed.
His voice doesn’t say it, but she still hears it echoing within her as he stares her down-
It’s your fault. I’m like this now because of you.
She’d tried to tell him that it would be dangerous, that she wasn’t certain of what lay ahead in the chamber, and to be on his guard. But he never really listened, even long ago before the Calamity. He was always brushing off her warnings and barreling head-on into danger, the knight-turned-hero trying to strongarm a destiny he never asked for, but wouldn’t back down from.
They’d been caught off guard by the attack they couldn’t have prepared for, by a demon that knew them but wore a stranger’s face.
The ground had crumbled beneath them. She’d felt herself fall - watched him leap - so sure they would be separated in the depths beneath the castle dungeons, maybe never to see each other in this lifetime again. Yet here they still were. Together.
He pulls his gaze away from her, wiping away a stray tear with the back of his hand, flinching at the sensation of the foreign limb’s mechanical construction against his cheek.
He’s torn in two.
Half of him wants to scoop her up and press her to his chest, praising the goddess he didn’t wake up alone this time. To ignore the raging burn of gloom still settling within both of them and face the coming fight together.
But the other half is poised to leap off the sky island without another backwards glance. He’d always trusted her, always tried to keep her safe. Surely she was meant to do the same for him. They were a team, a divine destined partnership. But even her divine power couldn’t keep them safe, and now all of Hyrule was once again in danger, and it would fall to him alone to fix it.
He felt so weak, so helpless. Everything he’d built himself to be since waking up seven years ago was once again gone, and it hurt so much more this time to be burdened not only with a destiny, but also with the memory of how it had befallen him. Outwardly he is wearing a stranger’s arm, but within, he feels possessed by a gloom-addled stranger that calls itself by his name. The gloom she hadn’t been able to protect him from.
He hesitates another moment, eyes bouncing between her and the open expanse below. A soft wind whistles through the long threads of grass, dry and brittle from the bright sun’s rays. As a shaky sigh escapes his lips and mingles with the warm breeze, he steps back from the edge and turns towards her again. Destiny or not, they were partners. He didn’t know what lay ahead, but they each still had their parts to play, a duet as it was.
Link reaches down and gingerly grabs the Master Sword’s hilt, the blade still settled deep within the grass from where he’d thrown it to the ground in anger. As he places her into the makeshift baldric tied across his back, he shakes away a few blades of yellow grass that are stuck to the hand’s – no, to his – fingers. He combs them through his untied hair, trying to relieve the uncomfortable heat already sticking to the back of his neck, and turns his eyes back to the looming structure up ahead.
That strange dragon is still circling around behind it.
“Come on Fi. We’ve got to find Zelda.”