He had always been fascinated with fairies. Of course he knew that it was because he didn’t have one, and everyone else did, but really it was more than that. There was something about their light, the effortless way they flew, how they represented healing and rebirth. Link wanted a fairy partner from the first, but he kept that in. Let the other Kokiri think that it was fine, being alone, when they never had to be.
Navi was a blessing when she came. Probably, other Kokiri would have been annoyed that she talked so much, but he appreciated it. He’d gotten too used to the silence, even with Saria as his friend. But “used to” didn’t mean that he liked it. It didn’t help that he was mute himself. That he always had been, except for the “noises” he made. It didn’t make the other Kokiri like him any more, but they were always nice. Polite. Link didn’t feel so quiet and different with Navi around chattering.
The first time he had stepped into a fairy fountain, on his path to becoming a hero, he’d been so enchanted that he’d want to stay. The water, the glow, the promise that they’d bring him back from the dead - but he didn’t know what death was, not really. His mother had died, but he hadn’t gotten to know her. The Great Deku tree had withered, and he hadn’t truly been able to process it. Kokiri didn’t die. They didn’t age. No one had talked about what dying meant before.
“Let them live in one of your bottles, just for a little while,” Navi said, “and they’ll help you when you need them most.” Link had looked at her, confused by what that meant. They’d made it through the Deku tree just fine. It still felt like they’d talk to him soon. “If you die,” she said gently. “They let you get back up again.”
Link had coaxed a fairy into a bottle without questioning further. But she hadn’t told him that dying would hurt worse than anything he’d faced so far.
Eventually he came to understand that death came at the end of pain. Sickness, injury, advanced age. Things that your body had no way to defeat. But it wasn’t an end with his fairies. When he burned to death, he’d flash out for only a moment before the fairies brought him back. When his skin still burned, healing slowly, growing back like bark on a tree. They gasped air back into his lungs when he drowned. They pulled the sword from his chest as he bled to death, stitching torn aching flesh back together.
Again and again and again. Because a hero was made, it seemed, to hurt. That he could die, would die, should die a hundred times for Hyrule’s sake. Because his pain mattered less than Hyrule. Yes, he supposed, he believed that. He had to. There was no other choice.
It made so much sense when he heard this wasn’t his soul’s first time through life. That Link and Zelda and Ganon were caught in a loop they couldn’t escape. That yes, he’d died so many times before, and that even the ones at the end of his lives weren’t the end.
The last death of his adventure, against Ganon, was the worst. Because he had run out of fairies in bottles. Out of potions, that tasted bad and forced his body to function a while longer. Out of milk and second chances. He was bleeding and tattered and breathing so hard it was all he could hear. Ganon was laughing, though. He was always laughing. This wasn’t his first death either, was it?
An ill timed step let Ganon’s sword hit him that final time and he fell without fairies. The pain did stop. The darkness did come. Before Link could truly wonder how he would wake up, next time, what kind of world he’d have left to save after failing, here, failing himself and Zelda and Navi and everything - his wounds were stitching closed and he was standing again.
“I shouldn’t do this,” Navi whispered. “I’m so sorry. I don’t think I’ll survive. I can’t help you anymore, but you can do this Link. You can.”
His first word was her name. The first battle he’d won for her was the only one she wouldn’t get to see. So when Zelda said that she’d send him home, that he’d get to live his childhood like he deserved, he didn’t protest quite fast enough. Because she might be there. Because fairies were life, rebirth, second chances. Because she had to be alive in the past he would no longer understand.
Because he still needed fairies.
