Living With Myself

Chapter 26

"I'm sorry that you still feel that way," said Sheik, closing the door behind them. "Have you talked to anyone about that?"

Link left the logs next to the burning heart.

"Sheik, I'm fine. It's nothing to talk about," he said.

"It IS something to talk about. You haven't gotten past the battle with Ganondorf, and pushing all your emotions to one day isn't healthy."

"Maybe, but it's not like my life as a whole is healthy," said Link, almost smiling. "It's really nothing Sheik, please don't worry. You always worry too much about me."

He patted Sheik's shoulder, and Sheik noticed that he was taller than he had been during the war.

'Of course I worried about you. You were our only hope. If you died, we were all dead. I had to cling to a ten year old in an overgrown body as our only hope for salvation."

Sheik punched him lightly in the chest. "You sometimes test my patience, hero," he said, and turned his back on him.

"What? I haven't done anything. You're even more of a worrywart than before," said Link. "Can't we think of it as a celebration?"

"It doesn't matter what I think of it. I can't remember any of it," said Sheik, sitting down at the table. He was getting angrier and angrier, but he didn't want to take it out on Link.

Link sat down in front of him and started serving a couple cups of tea. His expression back to the expressionless one he wore after the forest temple. "You most likely were not there," he said, not looking up from the task of serving.

"So I was trapped in the shield during the battle? What do you know?" asked Sheik, suddenly suspicious of Link's knowledge.

Link shrugged. "I don't know anything. But if you think about it, that seems like the most logical turn of events," he said, holding his cup with both hands. "You say you left after teaching me the song of Spirit, and your memory stops right after going back to report to Zelda. She had to have been the one who knocked you out. It took me a while to complete the spirit temple, but she needed Nabooru to set down the shield I found, so there is something she had to do during that period of time, trusting that she could created the shield with Rauru and Nabooru's help. after I had completed the temple."

"But how could she have known that Nabooru was the sage of spirit when you had yet to purify the temple?" asked Sheik

"She knew because I had to complete it as a child and as an adult. I went back to the temple of time and returned seven years to complete the temple as a child. That was when I met Nabooru, and Zelda must have known of he rebelion during the war. Considering my progress, she must have known that I would be done in enough time for her to complete whatever she had to do, and then when I came back to the temple of time she posed as you. I think, she wanted to use the power of the triforce and the ocarina of time, to resettle the timelines to erase Ganondorf from existence. She must have needed you for it for some reason. The very energy of the shield seemed to resonate against the reality around it, so I figured very quickly that the shield must have been set in place before the timelines changed."

"Changed timelines? Erase Ganondorf from existence? I have no idea what you are talking about. Didn't you defeat Ganondorf during the battle? What... what 'timeline' is the one we're living in then?" asked Sheik, his anxiety skyrocketing.

Link took a moment before explaining. "In the timeline we are currently experiencing Zelda banished Ganondorf to the dark realm, and brought us back to the past. But not the original past. A past where neither Ganondorf nor you ever existed," he said. "And no, I didn't defeat Ganondorf. It was impossible for me, you see, he had a part of a triforce."