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Wild didn't know why he felt like this, sometimes.
He'd been fine at breakfast, he knew that. He'd made crepes as a treat because they had walked so far yesterday and it was looking to be a beautiful, cloudless day, and he thought starting with something nice would be—well, nice. Everyone had eaten and smiled and thanked him and helped clean up and that had been that.
Maybe there was a stirring of something wrong at midday. A moment when he slipped out of the rhythm of conversation and didn't feel like he could fit back in. But he wrote it off and wandered away to see if he could find any mushrooms for dinner, and he did find mushrooms, and he also found a very cool frog that he managed to pet and saw a buck with nearly ten points spring away gracefully and the birds were singing and by the time he'd made it back to the chain, he'd thought it had just been a fluke.
He should have known better. He should have known better.
He hadn't felt like this with the chain yet. He'd written it off as being busy, surrounded by people he'd come to admire and respect, heroes who were more intimidating than anyone except maybe Flora but were also capable and knowledgeable and, most of all, kind. He had thought maybe, with a purpose returned to him by Hylia's call to another quest, he wouldn't feel like this again until everything was over.
He looked at his hands. Scarred, both of them, and some he didn't even remember earning. He didn't know what caused the scar that cut across his right palm. He didn't know why his pinky finger was slightly crooked. He didn't know how he'd earned the scarring on his knuckles.
He stared at his hands and didn't feel sad. It was hard to explain. He just felt—absent. A little removed. Like he wasn't quite there. Like he wasn't fully tethered to his body.
That was the thing about his life. So much of it had already happened, and he hadn't been there for it.
You were there, he remembered Zelda saying, patient and sad. You just don't remember, yet. There's a difference.
Maybe she was right. She usually was.
It didn't feel like it.
He'd hoped the feeling would go away after a good meal. Sometimes it did; sometimes, if he managed to eat and sleep and talk to someone and find people along the road or in villages to help, to take on their little quests—not little to them, he reminded himself, but somehow everything felt smaller after defeating the Calamity—he'd manage to put the feeling off until it slunk back away to wherever it laid in wait.
But the stew was finished, and he'd doled out seconds to anyone who wanted it, and there was still that gnawing, empty feeling in his chest. He wasn't sad. That wasn't it, not exactly. Sometimes he thought it would be simpler if he was, easier to understand and explain and deal with.
He lay on his bedroll and breathed.
It was earlier than perhaps he usually went to sleep, but no one questioned him. It had been another long day of walking with a brief scuffle with some monsters in the afternoon. Around him, the chain was settling down as well. Time sat with his back to the fire, ready for the first watch.
Wild looked at them all through his eyelashes and felt that tightness in his chest until he turned on his side and put his back to the group. He liked them; he did. There was, perhaps, no one else across time and space who could possibly understand him as these heroes understood him, except for Flora. But now he felt—a wall. Like he was standing in the middle of a stream and they on the other side, and perhaps all he had to do was wade across but he couldn't, for some reason. There was just this invisible barrier and the burbling water made it hard to even hear them and the light reflecting off of it made it hard to even look them straight on in the face.
Something is wrong with you, Wild thought to himself. Something is wrong with you.
He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes until they didn't feel like burning anymore and fell asleep like that.
The others seemed to realize something was off, which sort of only made the weight of it worse.
No one was weird about it. There were no dramatic confrontations or people pulling him aside to ask him if he was okay, which he was grateful for. He wouldn't have known what to say on a good day, and when he was like this words came so much harder. But he could feel the way they were adjusting around him, a little more—considerate, perhaps. Sitting a little closer. Checking in before he wandered off, with Hyrule or Twilight offering to go with him.
They were giving him space, while also being there for him, and Wild appreciated this as though from afar, because he didn't know how to talk about this. He didn't think he wanted to.
He had brought this feeling up to Purah, once, when he'd convinced himself the feeling of being separate from his body was a side effect of the shrine. He wasn't sure what he'd been hoping for, even. Some kind of answer, he supposed. A solution. Some kind of invention or potion to fix it, or at least a reason for feeling this way.
But Purah had just gotten a look on her face, one that, in retrospect, he could identify as concern. And she'd asked him about a hundred questions, which he'd expected, but they weren't the questions of a scientist trying to create a hypothesis or find a solution. She asked him how often, and how long, and if he knew if there was anything that brought it on, or whether it came with anything else, if he had headaches or lost his appetite or couldn't sleep. She asked what kind of thoughts he had when he felt like this. He'd answered them all, until he'd started to realize the shape of the questions, and then he'd started to talk her down, reassuring that it wasn't often, and it never lasted, and he'd just wondered, was all, it wasn't even enough to really bother him, he just thought she'd be interested and that's why he'd brought it up.
She'd squinted at him, suspicious, but seemed to let it go.
She must have told Zelda about their conversation, though, because for weeks after that Zelda found excuse after excuse to keep him nearby. And she'd had this look, when she thought he wasn't watching. Slightly frantic. Sad in a way she was trying very hard to bury. So Wild had stayed by her and swallowed her excuses without question or protest and eventually, she'd relaxed, loosening her hold, seemingly reassured by his apparent normalcy.
She had so much on her shoulders already, he knew that more than anyone. A kingdom to rebuild piece by piece; a people used to being on their own to unite. Purah and Impa and leaders to meet, a thousand exponential decisions that needed making, and the grief of a land and a country to carry.
He hadn't wanted to be one more thing.
He never brought it up again.
He thought about sleeping, a lot. He didn't feel like he had the energy for anything, but somehow he made it through each day. He cooked. That, at least, was something he knew. He managed to smile when it was called for and share in conversation, some, but always the weight returned.
He moved through the world as though removed. He found a good skipping stone by a river and put it in his pocket. He forgot about it until that evening when his hand closed around it and he stood there, trying to remember why he'd picked it up in the first place. He stared at the pot before dinner until someone asked him what he was making. He zoned out twice in one conversation until Twilight peered at him, concerned, and asked him if he was feeling alright while putting the back of his hand on Wild's head.
Wild thought about dying, too, in an abstract sort of way.
He didn't want to, he knew that. There was too much—the chain, here, Hylia clearly thought they needed him—sometimes he would get a horrible flash of them wandering, looking, of them realizing, of Time's face when he saw, of the sound Twilight would make—he would never do that to them.
And Zelda. Even if he wasn't much use to her, even if he didn't know how to be what she needed and probably never would, even if she had Purah and Impa and people who were good at building towards something—he was hers, body and mind in a way he couldn't really put a name to. He couldn't leave her to carry the weight of the past alone.
And the world. Wild loved his Hyrule so much. He loved the nature, the beauty and splendor of mountains and rivers and meadows and the ocean. He loved the dogs at the stables, and the horses wandering in their herds, and the birds that wheeled overhead at the highest points. He loved the flowers and the berries and the wildlife and all the things there were left to discover. He loved waking up to the sun on his face and endless possibility ahead. He loved the people, so resilient, filled with so much love and hope.
And he was scared of dying. He remembered what it felt like, knew the shape of it intimately. He'd died enough times on his journey to know he never wanted to do it again—guardian beams and one hit too many and his grip slipping on a cliff in the rain. The feeling of his life leaving his body would be etched in his memory forever. He didn't have Mipha, anymore, either.
He remembered the first time, too, one of the few memories he'd regained. He remembered the way the world had narrowed around him, the helplessness and hopelessness and the way he had dug in anyways, Zelda's magic at the end, thinking, she did it, she actually did it, and trying to hold on but not being able to, and Zelda's horrified denial being the last thing to ring in his ears.
So no, he didn't want to die, and he knew that, but sometimes the thought of I should just kill myself floated across his mind, as distant and painful as the rest of the world. And it scared him, a little, even when he knew he wouldn't. That didn't make it any less awful.
On the nights it came he wanted to be alone, but somehow—maybe his scent, maybe just the distant expression, maybe something between them vibrating in recognition, like attracting like—Twilight always knew. He'd sit next to him, a line of heat from shoulder to hip, and Wild wouldn't move away. Sometimes, if he was lucky, Twilight would even transform into Wolfie and let him sleep cuddled up against him and he'd wake after a night without dreaming to his great big head on his chest and feel, briefly, better.
Twilight never said anything, still, and Wild always made his favorite for breakfast those mornings.
Wild didn't want to die.
He knew that.
There was a thing with the water, though. He didn't quite do it on purpose. He didn't seek it out and think, I'm going to do this, now. It was more that—he'd go to a stream, to wash off the sweat and dirt and grime of travel, and he'd duck under the water to rinse, and he'd just—stay there. Let himself sink down until he was looking up at the surface, at the light breaking apart through the water above him, and wait there until his lungs started to burn.
It reminded him of the shrine. Not in a good way, though nothing could remind him of the shrine in a good way. There was just something about water closing over his face, about the way sound went distant, and light went strange, and it made everything feel physically the way he felt inside.
He'd learned not to do it with others nearby. He'd surfaced, once, to find Warriors half in the water from where he'd been relaxing on the bank, trousers wet to the thighs, expression alarmed and hands reaching out. He'd lectured Wild furiously, patting him down as though Wild would have somehow gotten injured just by laying underwater, and then seamlessly transitioned to complaining about his wet pants.
So Wild had learned not to do it when in the water with others.
But then Twilight started coming with him whenever Wild went to a body of water. He'd just materialize by Wild's side whenever he headed off to do dishes, to bathe, to cool off. He'd either help with the dishes, or sit on the bank with his boots off and his feet in the shallows, or, sometimes, he'd transform into Wolfie and wade in beside Wild, splashing and playing and shaking off in Wild's general direction until they were both soaked and Wild was helplessly laughing.
Wild didn't actually mind Twilight coming along. He wasn't going to the water for that reason, after all. He just…ended up there, the way you end up doing things when you aren't really paying attention. And Twilight sitting on a sun-warmed rock while Wild washed the pot from dinner, or swimming lazy circles around him in a swimming hole while the afternoon light came down through the trees and they could hear the others in the distance—that was just. Nice.
It was just nice.
The feeling went away the same way it came; creeping, unnoticeable, until one day Wild blinked and it wasn't there as though it never had been.
He was elbow deep in a cold, ice-melt mountain brook, scrubbing his breakfast pot and humming a tune when he noticed it. The water was cold and clear and there were tiny fingerlings picking at the flakes of food coming off his pot. The stones at the bottom of the stream were colorful and interesting. The morning sun was golden and breaking through the branches, and birds were singing and flitting among the branches, and Twilight was lounging on the bank behind him, idly chewing on a stem of sour clover from a patch Wild had pointed out, and Wild—Wild had been humming a song as he cleaned.
Wild straightened and stood there and felt like a film had been pulled from his eyes.
He felt—fine. Just fine, in an absolutely ordinary way that he suddenly found remarkable. He felt the way he'd felt at breakfast the morning it started, before the stirring at midday, before the wall came down. The world was present and he was present in it and there was nothing he could imagine that was better.
The water was cold and clear. The birds were singing. Twilight was with him on the bank in the sun.
"Hey," Wild said.
Twilight looked up, surprised. A warm grin unfurled across his face, tugging at his markings and making his eyes squint. He had green between his teeth from the sour clover. "Hey," he said back.
Wild stood there another moment. Then he waded out of the brook and joined Twilight on the other side.