Linked Through the Centuries AU!

It’s Hyrule Warriors anniversary! And for that, I drew four(4) different HW Links from different Links Meet AUs. Here they are as well as some rambling about them:

Linked History - Captain @linked-history: I wish I could draw his sash, I think it’s a neat change up from the usual scarf.

Links Connected - Ages @linksconnected: He looks so cute I am going to explode 💥 the hair clip makes him look extra cute

Linked Through the Centuries - Warriors @linked-through-the-centuries: He is the guy ever. Also had the most amount of references on my page trying to draw him lamo, it was fun.

He took a deep breath and raised the wood to his skin, and immediately a searing hot pain ignited the right side of his face. He dropped the wood with a scream and it fell to the grass with a soft thunk, but the burning in his body didn’t disappear, it just spread. Link felt his bones struggling to rearrange and rebuild themselves into a bigger body, and his injured eyelid flew open, which was something he wasn’t able to do himself due to the damaged tissue.

The air was completely stolen from his lungs and he crouched down, curling in on himself, and wishing he could scream out for the deity to stop. It felt like the flesh was melting off the right side of his face and his vision in both eyes had gone completely white.

Fierce must’ve noticed this didn’t feel like it usually did for either of them, or maybe the transformation had just failed, because the god backed off and retreated back to where he usually sat in the back of Link’s mind.

At some point Link had fallen onto his back, and he laid in the grass panting, blinking hard and trying to get his sight to return. His ears were buzzing and his heart was pounding, and his body felt like it had been disassembled and not put back together.

‘…nk! L…! Kid! C… y… hear… e?’ The god’s voice shouted in his mind, and Link just groaned and turned his head to the side.

To his absolute shock, blurry shapes were starting to appear in both of his eyes as his vision slowly returned. The right side of his face ached and felt like his skin had been burned raw, and he raised a shaky hand to gently touch his cheek. His fingers came away wet with blood and he whimpered. 

‘Can you hear me??’ Fierce demanded, his voice finally ringing clearly enough in his mind that he could make out the words.

‘Yeah,’ Link mumbled, ‘I hear you.’

All the tension in his body seeped out of him, almost as if it hadn’t been his in the first place. 

‘I thought I killed you,’ the deity groaned. ‘I’ve been calling you for thirty minutes!’

oh FUCK yes *cracks knuckles* anon I am so so fucking happy that not only did you send me a part of a fic for a ‘directors commentary’, not only did you send me something from my own au, you sent me THIS specific scene. Kissing you on the forehead you made my fucking day

For anyone unfamiliar with this it is my own Links meet au (@linked-through-the-centuries), and this character in this snippet is Mask. There is a link to the fic in the pinned post on that blog! :)

He took a deep breath and raised the wood to his skin, and immediately a searing hot pain ignited the right side of his face. He dropped the wood with a scream and it fell to the grass with a soft thunk, but the burning in his body didn’t disappear, it just spread. Link felt his bones struggling to rearrange and rebuild themselves into a bigger body, and his injured eyelid flew open, which was something he wasn’t able to do himself due to the damaged tissue.

Okay so Mask has been struggling a lot since the end of the war. He’s lost an eye, he’s lost Warriors (in his mind at least), and he’s painfully lonely. The Fierce Deity is trapped in Mask’s body, and since the mask broke, he hasn’t really been able to do anything but talk to the god. Because he’s never tried to transform without the mask, he wasn’t really sure how to trigger the transformation, so he went through the motion of it. The wood is just that, wood, it didn’t do anything. Mask no longer needs it at all to transform, the only reason he was struggling is strictly just a mental thing, this is a bit knew for him. The problem with this transformation is that Mask’s body is not strong enough to house such a powerful deity long term. He tried to draw on Fierce, but his physical form literally could not handle it, and the god quite literally burnt through him

The air was completely stolen from his lungs and he crouched down, curling in on himself, and wishing he could scream out for the deity to stop. It felt like the flesh was melting off the right side of his face and his vision in both eyes had gone completely white.

I watched a lot of videos of the majora’s mask transformations, and they do usually seem a bit painful for Link, but this experience is truly something completely different for him. He’s never felt such an all encompassing pain before like he’s feeling in this moment, because he’s never been a vessel for a god before. When I was working on this part of the fic, I was rewatching parts of supernatural with someone I live with, and I imagined this experience to be somewhat similar to how the hosts of angels/demons feel when their body is becoming inhabited by something Other

Fierce must’ve noticed this didn’t feel like it usually did for either of them, or maybe the transformation had just failed, because the god backed off and retreated back to where he usually sat in the back of Link’s mind.

This is really the very first time Fierce becomes aware of how easy it would be for him to hurt, or even KILL, Mask. He wasn’t super aware of how much pain he caused the kid before, but now he was able to feel for just a moment how he was literally burning through Mask and he felt Mask’s spirit in his body weaken, and that scared Fierce so he stopped. It would be totally possible for Fierce to kill Mask and take his body, though if Mask’s body were damaged and killed, then who knows what would happen 🤷‍♂️

At some point Link had fallen onto his back, and he laid in the grass panting, blinking hard and trying to get his sight to return. His ears were buzzing and his heart was pounding, and his body felt like it had been disassembled and not put back together.

Every single transformation has an extreme physical effect on Mask’s body, and changing his physical shape how he did so many times as a growing kid left him with a lot of physical problems. He dislocates things incredibly easily, his joints and bones do NOT want to stay in place, and he deals with a lot of chronic pain because of all this. This wasn’t even a full transformation, but it really took a lot out of him, and he took a lot of damage in a physical AND spiritual sense

‘…nk! L…! Kid! C… y… hear… e?’ The god’s voice shouted in his mind, and Link just groaned and turned his head to the side.

Fierce very genuinely cares for Mask, he’s grown incredibly fond of this doomed mortal child. He truly wants what’s best for him, and he wants to protect him as much as he can. They have a very “grumpy old man who hates kids accidentally acquires a child and his life is changed” dynamic

To his absolute shock, blurry shapes were starting to appear in both of his eyes as his vision slowly returned. The right side of his face ached and felt like his skin had been burned raw, and he raised a shaky hand to gently touch his cheek. His fingers came away wet with blood and he whimpered. 

When I was writing this out and planning out how exactly I wanted this whole Mask and Fierce in one body thing to work, the like, ‘image’ in my mind that I was thinking of was similar to a cracked mirror, and in those cracks, you can see straight through Mask and stare directly at Fierce. The ‘mirror’ has BEEN cracked for quite some time now, but now we see that this huge chunk of glass has fallen out. It’s not a perfect analogy, because Mask’s face there is STILL partly his face, it’s not 100% Fierce’s, but it more the deity’s than his own if that makes any sense at all

Mask WAS blinded in that eye, it was damaged beyond repair, and the nerve damage left him unable to lift his eyelid easily if at all and he struggled to move that side of his face because of how deep the scar tissue went. And the scar isn’t completely gone, however Mask’s face is like, very thinly stretched over Fierce’s beneath it on that part of his face. He can now ‘see’ out of that eye again because it isn’t his at all, the mental connection he has with Fierce just allows him to ‘see’ what Fierce is seeing, he’s basically showing Mask the images he sees at such a fast and immediate rate that Mask’s brain is perceiving it as his own eye. If they were separated, even if Mask’s body stayed how it looks now after this transformation, he would not be able to see out of that eye

‘Can you hear me??’ Fierce demanded, his voice finally ringing clearly enough in his mind that he could make out the words.

‘Yeah,’ Link mumbled, ‘I hear you.’

All the tension in his body seeped out of him, almost as if it hadn’t been his in the first place. 

While the most clear and obvious part of Fierce and Mask becoming a bit more intertwined with each other in both a spiritual and physical sense is Mask’s face, there are some other things that happened because of this transformation that are less visible. Like here, Fierce’s extreme emotion was able to create a very small physical response. Fierce is just contained to this vessel like he is to the wooden mask, he shouldn’t technically have any control over Mask’s body at this point and yet he does. It’s not a whole lot of control, but his worry and fear did cause Mask to express that physically even though those were not Mask’s emotions

‘I thought I killed you,’ the deity groaned. ‘I’ve been calling you for thirty minutes!’

I wrote this, read over it, and then Loki in avengers saying “I’ve been falling for THIRTY. MINUTES!!” came to mind and I laughed SO fucking hard. Like that’s not at all the tone I imagined Fierce saying this in, that’s not how I intended it to come off, but whenever I reread it or go over it, I read it in that same kinda way Loki said it 😭