#also enduracarrotchips on the slim chance ur reading this i'm working on the prompt u sent me asdghs

[syilcawrites]

a/n: ok ik I said I was going to take a little hiatus but I found this one-shot in my files (back from like aug 2020) so I fixed it up a bit. And I wanted to post this right now for some reason!! (now I’ll take a break from writing heh). Hope ya enjoy it! So summary: Link has an existential crisis in Robbie’s tech lab

ao3

are you in the clouds or the rocks right now?

Link wears their corpse on his skin.

It's heavy and a little stuffy sometimes, but being the winner feels great. Like a sucker-punch to the face, like a ha moment.

Like a I win you lose moment.

Except, the corpse is the one winning and he's the one losing even though he's wearing its skin. Two corpses, to be exact. One (him) is still alive to a degree and the other one (Guardian) is actually really dead. Was the other one (Guardian) even alive to begin with? If Zelda were here, she would say something smart, say something to counter what he was thinking. Maybe like in their own way, they are alive, just like you and I. And then she'll insert another intelligent, meaningful phrase, and he'll nod and say yes, you're right.

Or something like that.

He's not entirely sure, because he's never met her—not really.

"Perfect fit!" Robbie says, smiling with all teeth. He's so short. Link wonders if Robbie has always been that short. Link also measured himself last week—he grew approximately five whole centimeters, but he's still pretty short. Does that mean both of Link's parents were short too?

Parents.

That means… why hasn't he thought about this before? It's never crossed his mind that he has a family, he had a family—

"Hm, hm, just a few more tweaks and then your shield will be ready too," Robbie says, and his voice sort of bonks Link on the forehead. Knocks his thoughts on the ground, and it's just

s p l a t t e r e d

in between the two of them, but Robbie doesn't even realize it's there.

"Nice," Link says, through his teeth. He tears his gaze away from the mess on the ground that Robbie can't see, and in return Robbie hands Link the helmet. It looks like a bucket; a trash bucket. But Link doesn't say that and decides to just stare at the helmet blankly because for some reason when he stares blankly people don't ask him questions and Link really doesn't want to be asked questions right now.

Today is one of those bad days. One of those days where he can't really hear her—hear Zelda. She disappears sometimes; for weeks, even. He usually hears her in the flap of the birds, in the whistling wind; sometimes in the ground, within the tremor of the dirt or the coolness of the grass.

She usually likes staying above though, in the sky, and who can blame her? It's so free up there, and she's been stuck down here for a century. He would've gotten tired too.

"Well, try it Link!"

So Link tries it. He puts it on, and he can see through the eyes of the Guardians now. He wonders if he can see his own death through these too, if he goes back to Blatchery Plain.

"You're right, it's perfect." He takes off the trash bucket, tucking it snug between his arm and his hip as he fishes for some extra rupees. Robbie's been a lot of help, because he keeps Link from getting blasted to smithereens whenever he goes toe to toe with a Guardian. Well, tentacle to toe—were the limbs of Guardian's called tentacles? They definitely weren't toes.

Toetacles?

Zelda probably wouldn't laugh if he said that to her, but he still wants to tell her anyway. Maybe she'll laugh at how dumb it sounds, then she'll smile and then he'll smile because she's smiling and that'll be a really nice thing to see. It would definitely be a nice thing to see.

He hands Robbie the extra rupees, and the little old man doesn't hesitate to take it. He then tosses Link some extra ancient parts for some reason, which… defeats the whole purpose of him giving Robbie a tip. But Link isn't going to say no either to additional material—material that's definitely going to end up back in Robbie's hands when he comes back to Akkala for more weapons (and Akkala buns).

"You heading back to Hateno any time soon?"

Link struggles to pull the rest of the Ancient Armor off of him as he thinks.

"Yeah, I was gonna head there next. Maybe," he says, with a grunt, tugging one last time over his shoulders—the Ancient Cuirass pops off of him, finally.

It's been a while since he's been at his house—a month to be exact—because he has all of his dead friends' weapons hung up on the walls. For some reason he thought it would make him feel better, but it just makes him feel worse.

And they're dead. They're all dead.

His stomach twists into knots, as he quickly pulls the Champion's Tunic back over him, so his heartbeat can stop THUMPING against his chest.

THUMP-THUMP. Someone is knocking politely (yet loudly) on the door to his heart.

Safe, a voice reassures him. With it on, he's safe.

He straps his belts around him tightly, trying to concentrate on his fingers moving rather than the fact that his fingers can't do anything he wants them to do. Can't save anything. They can hold a sword and a sword is supposed to protect yet he can't even do that.

"Whenever you go back, would you give this to Purah for me?" Robbie is already fishing for something through his mess of a desk, scattering all sorts of metal trinkets onto the ground, before Link even responds. Everyone knows that Link will always says yes, I will. I'll help. Because he's a hero. "Thanks a lot," Robbie says, placing the thick paper envelope into Link's outstretched hand. The paper is wrinkled and yellowing—how old is it?

"Anytime." Link slips it into his shirt, where it'll be safe. With all the belts attached to him, it's like he can store anything in there because nothing falls out. He's stored all sorts of things—weapons, material, random stuff he finds around Hyrule that he thinks looks cool; like a pebble. He found one shaped like a heart on Death Mountain before. He likes to bring it around with him, in his shirt of course, for good luck.

Link presses his hand against his chest to feel the envelope. He's never stuffed paper behind his tunic before, and it feels… heavy. Physically, it is heavy since it's a package of envelopes… but there's something else to it that he can't quite put any of his fingers on.

"What is it?" Link asks, keeping his hand pressed against his chest. Hearing the crinkle of the old paper is satisfying to his ears. It's sharp and loud. It reminds him of swords clashing against one another.

Robbie doesn't say anything for a moment, and he doesn't look at Link either. "Just about a world you've forgotten. Don't think too hard on it, it's nothing important," Robbie says with a haggard sigh.

Sighing like that only makes Link more curious and agitated about the entire thing now.

"Letters are always important," Link responds back immediately, annoyed. "That's the point of them." He's not sure where he's getting this statement, but it's buried somewhere in his head. It's something he's always known.

He thinks, anyway.

Robbie turns his head to look at him, but Link can't tell what he's seeing because the shade of Robbie's eyeglasses are perfectly tinted. "It doesn't have to mean something, letters can be anything. There's no rules."

"Letters always mean something," Link says, insistent.

Something, nothing, anything; he hates hearing and seeing those words.

The sound of his breathing is loud in his ears, and his hand tightens against the fabric of his tunic, around the shape of the envelopes, as he waits for Robbie to respond.

"You're right," Robbie says. The tone of his voice shifts, as if something has clicked, as if he understands something that Link doesn't understand.

Link takes a step back.

"There's always a meaning..." Robbie's voice sounds smaller and smaller, until Link can't even hear the rest...

He takes another step to the door as his other hand reaches for the Sheikah Slate on his hip.

"Thanks for the armor," Link says, his fingers fumbling on the screen, and he taps onto the closest icon he finds.

"Link—"

Blinding blue light swallows his vision, and Link ceases to exist for just a split second.

——————————————————————

He ended up somewhere in Gerudo, and he sat there for five grueling hours on the edge of a Sheikah Tower before teleporting to Purah's lab to hand her the stash of envelopes.

Now, Link stares down at the empty parchment paper on his desk. He fishes for the single letter he stole from Robbie's stockpile of envelopes.

He hasn't opened it yet—for some reason, he feels like he won't like what he'll see. If it really is just meaningless? Just something... that doesn't really matter? Then what? What matters then, if his own thoughts were going to be considered something useless and unimportant?

Something shiny on it keeps catching his eyes, and irritably, Link stands up to glare at the object on the table downstairs.

The sunlight that glints off of the blade of the Master Sword winks at him. Maybe it's even laughing at him. Sometimes it feels like it is. He stiffly sits back down and hunches over the table so that he doesn't have to see that annoying glint anymore.

Why do people write again? Koko writes letters to her mom, because it means everything to her. It makes her feel better, and Link wants to feel better, so he's going to write, because unlike Robbie, Koko writes with meaning.

Zelda.

It comes out so sloppy, it looks like he wrote Zehdae.

He crumples up the paper and tosses it over his shoulder.

Z...e…l…d���a…

Zelda.

It's the best looking name he's ever written.

"Zelda," he says, loud and clear. But the dry air around him remains quiet.

The longer he stares at the shape of her name, the weirder it looks.

Who is Zelda? Is she the girl from his memories? The girl stuck in the castle? Is she the words that people whisper about? There's a Zelda in his head, a Zelda in the world around him. There's even one that hides in his heart, but that's a Zelda he'll never get to meet.

Link watches the ink from the tip of the quill drip onto the parchment. It taints her name with four dark droplets of varying sizes, but he can still read it, so he doesn't throw it away.

He decides to start off with a question first.