come find me in the afterglow // revali x link

waiting to be found

Something's wrong.

Revali realizes it the moment he arrives at Vah Medoh. The Divine Beast isn't responding to him. Frustrated, he yanks at the levers on the control panel but still to no avail. That's when he hears the sound.

It's something like gurgling, like the lava boiling inside Death Mountain, but this sounds...unnatural.

A spark flies past his face. Is something on fire? He blinks, but sees no blaze, even as more sparks start to rise from the floor. He curses under his breath and tries to reset the Divine Beast. Turn it off and back on again, he remembers Zelda saying to him. Except he can't even do that, if nothing's fucking working.

"Link, you son of a Bokoblin, I hope you know what you're doing."

~

Dying is strange. Maybe it's because it happened so quickly, in less than the time it took to blink.

Huh. Revali expected it to hurt more. All he knows is that one moment, he's soaring high above the Windblight monstrosity that had taken up residence inside his Divine Beast, shooting it with bomb arrows, and the next he's crashing to the ground and this his vision goes black.

When he comes to, he's lying on the upper deck of Vah Medoh in front of the main terminal. Blinking slowly, he stands up, stretching out his wings.

He doesn't feel any different, really. A little sore, sure, probably from landing on his wing the wrong way, but nothing else seems out of the ordinary. The deck is quiet, no trace of the Windblight, save for the persistent sickening gurgling sound. He's got to find out what that is.

He struts inside the beast, and that's when he sees it.

Ganon's Malice coats nearly every surface; dripping off the walls, congealing in corners, and bubbling menacingly on the floor. He reels back to avoid stepping in it, turning away, only to come face-to-face with a gigantic yellow eye nearly he size of his head.

"Ugh," he hisses to himself, making a face at the eye. It blinks at him once, then turns away, like it can't even see him. Revali's never felt so invisible.

~

There's not a lot to do when you're dead, a fact Revali finds out very quickly. All he can do is wander the innards of Vah Medoh, avoid the Malice, and watch Rito Village carry on far below him. The bulk of his entertainment is watching the new generations of Rito chicks train at the Flight Range. Oh, none of them come even close to the records he set, but it makes him feel good to know it's least it's still being used.

He invents little games and starts making bets with himself to keep from losing his mind up here. How many targets is this Rito going to hit? Will the next one beat her, and by how many? It's asinine, really, because isn't this what he wanted for so long? To be alone, not tied down to anybody, content in his solitude. Except...this isn't how he wanted it. There's no one to brag to, no arrows to practice his archery with, no one to tell him to pick himself up off his tail and do something.

But there's only so much he can do to keep his mind off the one thing—person—he wants so desperately not to haunt him.

Link.

And before long, those thoughts start creeping into the back of Revali's mind, infecting his daily thoughts the way the Malice blankets the surfaces of Vah Medoh.

It's the big things, at first. One morning, he spots a bit of a commotion on Revali's Landing—his landing, he thinks with a smug little smirk. Curious, he stalks to the very edge of the deck and peers down.