#grimwing writes

As the days went by she realized, she didn’t just half-forget he was here sometimes: it felt like he was still gone. They exchanged a handful of words in the morning, Time coordinating his plan of attack for the day, and again at noon and supper, but by the time they tumbled into her nest (their nest, technically, but there was very little of him in it), he was spent. She knew next to nothing about his last mission, where he was going next, what thoughts chased around his head.

Malon wasn’t happy about that.

“Where are you going?” She asked when she ran into him outside of the house just before noon. She was going inside to put together lunch, she’d planned to do something of a picnic, make him stop for longer than five minutes so that maybe, maybe, they could actually spend some time with each other.

He had the remnants of a thick slice of bread in one hand. The meal of heroes: bread. “Broken planks in the hayloft. Don’t want anyone falling through.”

He walked past her, like that was all that needed saying. 

“Time,” she said with more feeling than she expected. She spun on her heel and caught his arm just below his elbow. 

He turned his head to look at her, raising his eyebrows in a silent question. 

She huffed out a breath. “If I wanted another farmhand, I would have hired a boy from town.” There was more to say. She just wanted to be able to talk to him.

“There’s a lot to do,” he said. Pulled out of her grip. Walked away. 

Two days later, she thought she found her breaking point.

“Time!” She snapped, craning her neck to look up at him.

He hung from a makeshift rope harness secured somewhere on the roof, feet braced against the side of the house, scrubbing the stones that had never, not once, needed cleaning.

“What in Hylia’s Name are you doing?” She demanded, arms folded over her chest. He disappeared three hours ago, long enough before lunch that she hadn’t thought anything of it until she couldn’t find him and had to resign herself to a bland, solitary meal. And this whole time he’d been—he’d been—

“Found some wasps building a nest under the eves,” he said without looking down from the heavy brush he was scratching over the stones. “And this lichen is getting out of hand. I don’t know why I haven’t paid attention to the state of things up here before. I need to assess the integrity of these walls on a regular basis if we expect this house to last.”

Expect this house to… “You’d better get down here right now, or I promise it will outlast you!”

He finally looked down at her.

She knew she looked angry. She wasn’t exactly trying to hide the exasperation, and he could probably smell her frustration even all the way up there. Still, it was gratifying to see how quickly he scrambled up the rope. 

She met him inside, halfway up the stairs from the ground floor. She sent him back up the stairs and to their bedroom. The conversation she wanted to wrangle out of him would come easier in a secure, familiar setting. Normally, a nest was exactly the right place. She had doubts now but couldn’t think of a better location.

She let him talk uninterrupted, hardly made a sound or moved from where she rested, propped up on pillows. Over the years, she’d learned he spoke better when he could pretend he was alone and didn’t need to worry about how anyone else was taking his words (he needn’t worry with her but he did and she worked with that).

“Should have taken care of them sooner, before things got so out of hand, but Hebra is out of the way, doesn’t exactly produce many goods and the trade hasn’t been significant for a while. But someone should have dealt with it. Moblins take time to grow a big pack. They don’t just spring out of nowhere overnight.” He sighed and ran a hand through his damp hair. “No one did. 

“I took a team out there. Wars came. I’ve worked with him before—steady, dependable—I was glad to have him. The others were… good. Soldiers. About what I’d expect to be handed for monster clean up. It’s a long trip out there, figured I’d have them all working together by then. Unified. 

“It’s spring in Hebra now. Finally warming up a little, enough that we had to deal with mud in the spots that weren’t ice. The foothills were fine. We had a few tumbles but I couldn’t ask for better terrain for moblins: big, slow, no ruined buildings for them to hide in. And the locals said that’s where they usually saw them. It made sense, there’s actually grasses growing under the snow, things for animals to eat. Plenty of food for the moblins when they weren’t raiding. We killed a few of them there, more than a few, but they wised-up pretty quick, retreated to the cliffs. 

“You’ve never been to Hebra,” he said, breaking out of the far away tone he’d been using to finally look at his partner.

“No,” she said softly. Heard about it. Never seen it. Had no particular interest in traveling so far just to see an icy tundra.

“The mountains come up from nowhere, steep, icy. The wind never stops. Wear as many layers as you want, if you don’t have something to cut out the wind you’ll freeze. Monsters must feel it, too. They’re meaner up there, fighting tooth and claw every moment to stay alive. It’s harder to trick them, sneak up on them. Everything’s a hundred times more difficult up there. Wars suggested we try luring the pack back down. Didn’t work. I didn’t give it time to work. Should have waited. The king let it grow into this problem, he could have waited a few extra weeks to have them dealt with.”

That old, familiar self-recrimination grew in his voice again, a well-worn companion but no friend. “It was so cold up there. We came prepared for the weather, but I don’t think you can ever be truly prepared for it. Everything is cold, you aren’t going to freeze but you’ll never be warm, even with a fire right in front of you, just less cold. After a while, everything aches. Hurts to breath, to move, to think. You don’t want to be up there more than a day or two if you can help it.

“We scouted them out. Found them mostly sticking to a few shallow caves where they could escape the wind. It was a bad place for a fight, enclosed places or else narrow ledges with too much ice. The moblins knew it. I could see how tense they were, on edge, waiting for an argument to break out over what little food and loot they brought with them and turn deadly because someone stepped in the wrong spot. Waiting for us, too, I’m sure. Some poor creature at the bottom of the pack always had to stay on watch. They weren’t as organized as they had been in the foothills but they were still trying. 

“I should have given them more time.” The admission was like a physical wound when it came, still raw and bleeding and untended, neglected. “But I didn’t want them to get too desperate, too wild when my team went in. And I just… didn’t want to be up there. 

“It went wrong so fast.” He grit his teeth and closed his eyes. “I should have expected that. Should have Marked sooner, before—back when we were in the foothills—before leaving Castle Town. I should have told the king to deal with his own problems.” She knew he never would. “I took twelve men up there… I had a duty to bring them back, but I couldn’t even find some of them—”

He took a breath. She heard how it caught in his throat, the wet stutter as he struggled to hold everything inside. She leaned closer to him, around him, not touching yet but there.

“I just couldn’t—I couldn’t let Wars be the one who—I know him! He’s good and—but they all are! They all were and I shouldn’t pick who makes it out because everyone deserves to have another day. But I just couldn’t let him be the one who died.” He got very quiet at the end, shoulders slumping, shrinking in on himself, curling away to hide from the recrimination all around him. 

Malon put her arms around him, wrapping him up from behind. Tightening when he tried pulling away.

“I let others die.” He choked on the words and couldn’t hold the emotion back any more. “He should have died but I played at being a god! I made them die! I looked at them, I knew them, I spoke with them and trained them and I killed them! Daruki and Imam and Juz and Banson and Twighn and Hudi! I killed them, I killed them,” he sobbed. “I killed everyone to keep Wars and then decided six weren’t worth saving.”

Malon clutched Time as he struggled in her hold, his legs kicking and tangling in the nest as his body tried to find a way to somehow let every pint up emotion out at once. She didn’t try to stop him, just kept him next to her where it was soft and safe and he could thrash for as long as it took without hurting himself. She kept her cheek beside his face, her scent as calming as she could make it. She didn’t pull away from him, even when his chin cracked against her nose, when all she could smell was the scent of his guilt and under it, a shameful relief. 

Eventually, he wore himself out, body tired from working on the farm. He lay limply beside her, gasping for breath as the last sobs trembled and fizzled out on his teeth. 

She didn’t say anything for a long time. What could she say to that? She’d never been faced with the power of the goddesses and left utterly alone to choose. Her magic would never influence the tide of life so heavily. She was, at best, a tiny ripple on the shore. He was the moon, and when he pulled, the tide moved. She could no more find a solution to his pain than she could tell the moon to leave the sea alone. She could, however, wait on the shore and walk with the tide, witness the waves when they came crashing back to her.

She cushioned his head on her shoulder, pulled his hair out of his face and tucked it behind the point of his ear, left her scent on his jaw as she brought her hand down to rest on his chest. “Thank you for telling me,” she murmured, low and deep and almost inaudible. “Thank you for trusting me with your pain.”

He wasn’t going to stop serving Hyrule, and she knew he wasn’t going to stop using his magic. They would build something together, the two of them, to make it work. It wouldn’t look like what she imagined during all the years she waited for him to realize he could still marry her. It wouldn’t look like she remembered her parents having or what most people had. But, then, she gave up on expected normal when she told him to hurry up and marry her.