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Just after midnight
"What a beautiful evening, right?" Zelda sighs and stretches her legs loosely wrapped around Link's waist.
A frown builds on his forehead as he presses a kiss to the skin right beneath her new necklace. The secret stone dangling from it radiates a faint glow but he pushes aside the complicated feelings that come with the sacred item. There's something else, something much more mundane that sets his senses tingling.
He mulls her words over in his head, carefully dissecting them like she used to with her lab samples, before. It takes him a moment of dragging the kiss from the spot under her ear to her pulse point where her heartbeat goes thump thump thump against his open lips to solve the puzzle.
Her pattern of speech is off.
It's subtle, but there's a lilt to her voice that hadn't been there before. He hadn't noticed after the rush of falling from the sky and the wonder of having her back, hearing her say she's home with her own words. He must have missed it on their ride to Hateno, where they mostly dozed off on his horse's back, too.
It's to be expected, he soothes himself and pushes his thumbs into the softness of her waist until she giggles against his lips. People change. It's been a long year that she spent in the past; of course, that wouldn't leave her unaltered. It doesn't mean…
Nothing. It means nothing. He shoves the images in his mind that loom for him like those cursed hands of gloom away.
"I missed you," she sighs, lips brushing the pointed shell of his ear. They've been exchanging lazy kisses for the past hour, her straddling his lap and him leaning against the tree next to the cooking pot. It's slow, and a little awkward after all this time with a misplaced hand here and an accidental clash of teeth there, but mostly, it's full of wonder.
Hateno's evening chill, which always comes as a surprise, no matter how long they've been living close to the sea, settles on their bare arms, but Link refuses to move. It is a beautiful evening and he doesn't want to waste a second with her.
It's funny, isn't it? Hope is an easy concept but a complicated feeling, and he surely hadn’t expected an outcome of today's epic battle where he ends up with Zelda combing fingers through his hair, with her lips tasting like the fruitcake he dug out of a forgotten slot of the Purah Pad for her.
"It's been so long…" Her voice is sweet but he squints one eye closed at the sound of it. The lilt is still there. It means nothing. It's a simple new quirk, just as he has adapted to everything that has happened during the year of the upheaval. It's like Paya picked up Tauro's sea puns, just that Zelda was in the past. He knows it. He knows it!
His bangs fall into his eyes when she brings her hand to his chin, studying him and he pulls himself together.
"You weren't exactly subtle about it," he manages to tease and massages her with his thumbs through the foreign dress. "I wondered why Rauru winked at me every so often when we met, but when I saw how you gushed about me in front of him and Sonia, I knew." A genuine laugh surfaces at the memory of the moment when he found out how flowery Zelda painted him to the first king and queen of Hyrule. Reckless, she has called him for years, nay, centuries, but to Rauru and Sonia she had described him as noble and never backing away from a challenge. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say, and maybe it's true.
"I can't encourage your recklessness by praising you for it, now can I?" She laughs, too, eyes crinkling, stomach quivering under his hands, and it's nearly as it used to be. Her laughter ebbs away and turns into a sweet smile. So sweet, it makes Link's mouth taste bitter with gloom, and he's only saved from leaping up and running by the fondness in her eyes. He clings to that fondness as it's the one thing that separates her from them.
His hand jerks up to her face — goddess, he needs to kiss her, taste her — and he pushes desperate fingers into the hair at her nape. He pulls her into a kiss, open mouthed and messy, dismissing the voice in the back of his head that keeps whispering and whispering.
The sudden change in tempo and urgency make her hands scramble over his chest, suddenly equally frantic searching for purpose, and she asks, "Can we? You're not too exhausted? Injured?"
"Nothing the thought of you in my bed couldn't fix," he growls against her lips.
She slips experienced hands under his tunic, tracing scars he took for her, always for her. Her touch is light and immediately familiar, even after a long year with barely anyone ever touching him, let alone like this.
A hum sits in his throat right above his chest and he lets it resonate with her when she coyly toys with his waistband. The cool night breeze grazes his bare skin where she lifts the fabric and he shivers, arms covered in goosebumps. It must be closing in on midnight, but it doesn't matter. They've won. She's here. They have won.
There will be no red rising from the—
Gong! As if on command, his bones grow stiff, the gooseflesh turning into an icy chill spreading over his nape and arms. An Aerocuda cries for blood in the distance, loud and hungry. No, he berates himself and nudges Zelda with his nose. It's an owl. A harmless owl. Nothing mo—
Gong! He digs into her skin, kissing her harder. The air is tinted red. She's here with him. She's real.
Gong! "Link?" Zelda asks, pulling back. There's concern in her eyes, earnest and a little bit confused. The others were never concerned.
Gong! "Just a memory," he lies and grits his teeth. "It's nothing."
Gong! He holds his breath and sinks his lips to her throat, waiting for the red ash to rise from the earth around them. It won't come, will it? He can't tell. Even if it comes, Ganondorf will have to pry the dream that they've won from his cold hands.
Gong! The grass starts to burn with sickly flames at the edges of his vision, so he forces his eyes shut, shut, SHUT. Hands with long fingers and sharp nails form anyway, grasping for him. Every fiber in him screams to run but he holds onto her waist as if she is the weapon to beat back the gloom. Maybe she really is.
Gong! Her skin smells like sulfur. The hands have eyes now, and they don't need to watch out for a weak spot this time, he has plenty of weaknesses to offer.
Gong! Gong! Gong! He waits for the air around them to thicken to the point he can't breathe, for the hands to grab him and hurl him out of this dream. Gong! Gong!
"When the glow of the blood-stained moon shines upon the land…" Zelda's sick voice echoes through his mind. He would scream if his mouth wasn't full of ash. Gloom, there's gloom everywhere, nurturing creatures back to life on her command. No, something, someone in him yells from somewhere very distant, not hers. "Link, what's up?" Her voice is soft. Concerned. Nearly normal. "You're tense."
Tense? He's taut like a bowstring on his hardest bow. Somehow, he manages to inhale clear night air, then peels his eyes open. The grass curls damp under his palm and she smells like cool safflina. Hateno's clock has stopped its funeral march and a veil of nightly sounds covers the village again. Crickets, the faint gurgling of the well behind the house, two owls. It's just after midnight, the ivory moon half-hiding behind some clouds when he glances up to the sky.
"Let's go inside," he murmurs and squeezes her hand. She's still frowning, but doesn't voice any objections, so they shuffle to stand. He doesn't let her go. His legs wobble but he pushes the weakness back with the expertise of years of pretending to be the perfect hero. Just a nightmare, he tells himself. "It's nothing," he tells her.
She shifts her hand so that their fingers interlace when they walk through the door.
The house is warm from the day's sunlight and clammy from nobody living in it for so long. Someone has put a bouquet of flowers on the table and the clean scent of fresh linen lingers in the dusty air, too.
"Oh," she breathes, driving a palm over the stair railing. "It's been so long. So many memories…"
Memories. Link misses a step, barely catching himself so that he doesn't pull them both down the stairs. "Does it awaken memories? Memories of our time here?" she said the last time he saw her. No, not her. The illusion of her. The castle had looked so spotless, like before-before when her father sat on the throne, pressuring her into praying and the eyes of a kingdom long carried to the grave rested on them. Zelda would never have forced those memories on him. On them both.
The old wood of the loft creaks under the weight of two lifetimes and Link inhales. "We can make new memories, you told me. It's just as true today as it was back then."
"It is." She smiles and gently squeezes his shoulder. "I didn't think I would ever be able to come back home, but yet, here I am. Are you sure you're alright?"
It's the softness in her eyes that breaks him.
Words never come easily when he needs them most, that has not changed, so he grabs her face with both hands and pulls her close. Closer to him, closer to where she's precious and he's vulnerable, closer to where the others never dared to intrude. She makes a surprised noise but doesn't push him back. On the contrary. She crosses her arms behind his neck and makes sure she's pressed flush against his body. Her immediate reaction makes his eyes sting with tears but he fights to stay in control. If he ever wants to have a chance at the old happiness they had, he must work through the mess inside him and she's the key. She always is.
The trust she gives him so readily now, was his initial downfall. To think it was just budding over a hundred years ago… Now she has proven a millennia makes no difference to her either. If only her trust didn't paint a target on him, maybe then he could kiss her without threads of gloom chaining him to memories he'd rather forget. Her trust was like the mark of a lover, imprinted onto his soul and his body. Against better judgement, it made him rush to the spitting image of her waiting at Death Mountain and follow up the path of Dueling Peaks in a haze when he heard but a word of her sighting.
It's behind them now.
She whispers something against his lips but the only thing he hears is the lilt. The wood creaks under their steps when he walks her backward, the planks grinding against each other arhythmically just like the stones that gave out under her when he couldn't catch her.
It doesn't matter.
He caught her, the next time. This time.
They've won.
Another word threatens to tumble from her mouth but he can't stand the lilt any longer and presses his lips against hers, not soft as he used to but demanding and rough. The familiarity of the taste of her lips (fruitcake and Zelda), cuts through the looming doubts in his mind like her light once did through the onslaught of guardians in Blatchery Plain. It's her.
She's back at caressing his neck and rocks her body against his in a leisurely curve, closer, closer and then gone. He nearly chokes at the parallels; just like their lives in the years before…
He doesn't have time to brood, not now when she entangles her fingers in his hair, loosening the blue tie he found in her well and wrapping it around her wrist with practiced ease. The cold from outside is long forgotten, leaving only the heat that radiates from her cheeks, her palms, her mouth. He's boiling in it but it's still not enough.
His hands yank at her dress, this way and that. Where does this thing open? Another ancient, demonic trick to keep her from him, probably. She chuckles and slips her hand under the shawl. Something clicks, she rolls her shoulders, and then she's bare in front of him. His thumb is hooked under the waistband of her panties quicker than she can grin, and he pulls them down, mouth already on her. He needs to taste her.
Giggling, she pushes him off and gets rid of his tunic. He kneels for her as if he has never done anything else. That's what the others did wrong. They were too sweet, too suggestive. There was nothing divine about them like about his Zelda. Nothing to worship.
She sinks onto the bed, fingers already grasping the sheets in anticipation. Moonlight spills over her softly heaving breasts as if someone has taken a handful of it and allowed it to drip onto her like wax. The moon is still white, he assures himself and shudders when he pulls her towards the edge of the bed.
He can't be soft. He can't, he can't! Not when he needs to feel how she squirms under the hard flick of his tongue in a merciless rhythm more than the air to breathe. Sounds he has never heard from her escape her lips, guttural and desperate, but he can't stop. He needs her. It's her. The moon is still white.
The smell of spring water clings to her and something foreign he can't identify. Must be from the past, maybe a soap, the dress, he can't tell. It's normal, he berates himself and circles his tongue around her clit. Finally, she crushes his head between her thighs and bucks her hips against his jaw until she goes limp.
"Link," she breathes belatedly, voice raspy from arousal and all the cries he drew from her. His name in her voice sounds right. It sounds like waking her up with wet kisses in the morning, erection pressed to her back. It sounds like clothes pushed aside somewhere in the wild under the burning afternoon sun and making it quick. It sounds like fancy dinners and taking his time with her as the dessert in the evening.
Her breathing barely evens out again when her hands pull at his strained pants. Maybe she has her own reasons to be desperate for him. He is in her hands quickly enough and he's so worked up, he immediately groans her name.
He kneels again for her, between her legs this time. Her other hand disappears in his hair and fisting it deliciously, she yanks him against her lips. He whimpers, thrusting into her hand. It's still not enough to keep the whisper in his head away.
"What happened that you need me so badly, Link?" She kisses him hard and slow, tongue slipping against his teeth. A flush radiates from his chest and face when she tightens her fist in his hair. Goddess, he needs her now. He nudges against the restriction and lowers his hips to hers. Her fist around his erection opens just so he can slip his tip against her folds in a desperate roll of his hips. "Talk to me," she commands, allowing him to slide inside her inch after inch. Words, she's torturing him with words, now when they're both so needy. "Don't try to work this out on your own."
They are in a stalemate of breathing in fresh flowers on the nightstand and feeling smooth linen on heated skin for a moment before Link breaks eye contact and kisses her.
"They toyed with me," he pants against her lips and then she withdraws both hands, allowing him to thrust into her hard and fast. Moans fall from her lips when she arches her back to meet him deeper and he groans into her mouth. The air around them smells like sex and sweat and safflina, but there's no ash on his tongue. No red radiating from the moon, no sickening smoke emanating from the floor. No hands grasping for him. No puppet.
He grabs a pillow between open-mouthed, messy kisses, and stuffs it under her to support her position. The friction she offers him so readily lets his mind grow white-hot and frayed at the seams, but she needs to know.
"They used you as bait," he hisses, barely able to speak at the fast pace he's setting to keep his thoughts from turning to ash and red, to swirling smoke and gloom. "Yiga. Ganondorf, too. A puppet looking like you."
She doesn't appear as if she's listening, eyes shut in bliss, muscles clenching around him, but he knows she is. She always listens to him. The moon is still white. She isn't whispering nonsense to herself like Yiga-Zelda and isn't toying with his senses like Ganondorf-Zelda.
With firm hands, he grabs her to angle her hips and he has barely hit that spot inside her, when she shatters again. Her fingers dig deep in his hair and she cries his name like it's second nature to her. Because it was. It is, he corrects himself.
Her skin radiates a faint, golden glow like so often when she's happy, when she's letting go of the hundreds of thoughts in her head. She says it's her power, he says it's her soul that's sunny.
It's her.
He's crying now, hot tears smearing against her cheek and he kisses her at every spot of skin he can reach.
It's her.
His Zelda.
The relentless rhythm of his hips falters when the realization finally hits him, and one last time he presses himself as deep as she can take him. He pulsates, voice stuttering something that might be her name.
The golden glow is everywhere now when she wraps her arms around him and kisses his sweaty forehead, his brows, his temple. He's trembling, hardly able to hold himself up enough on shaky arms to see what she's doing. Her face is flushed and golden and beautiful, the tears she has drawn on her cheeks long replaced with quiet ones of her own.
She lifts one hand to his chest, palm flat, just over that scar the guardian left on him so long ago. The glow intensifies into something round, something bright and divine. After lingering in the space between her palm and his chest, it sinks into his skin and beyond, radiating warmth and traveling through his veins. He… knows this feeling.
Gloom steams from his skin in ugly swirls and disappears into thin air. What? His mouth falls open and he stares at his arm because it's the closest body part to his view. But the shrines… the lights of blessings… How could there still be gloom left?
"She can't hurt you anymore," Zelda breathes, and moves her hand back to his hair with a smile. He lets out a faint laugh. Of course, she had listened to him. "You're free," she adds.
Her green eyes shine on him and he falls into them headfirst. She pulls him into something like a hug, slow, teary, and skin on skin.
"It's really you, right?" he murmurs into her hair and softly kisses a line from her ear to her jaw. Her chuckle teases him where they are still joined, but he's much too spent to do anything about it.
"Should I be offended that you just went down on me although you weren't completely certain?"
"I am — I was. Most of the time. It's… Goddess, I apologize. That was very insensitive of me."
Her fingers play gently with his hair and she smiles. "Don't you ever apologize again for a result of something they've put you through, okay? You know I'm happy to give you everything you need to work through it."
"I know, I know," he whispers and bumps his forehead against hers. "Goddess, Zelda, you gave me a scare when I saw you swallowing that stone and I couldn't do anything about it."
"I'm sorry," she says, and her hand in his hair stills. "I guess deep down I knew if anyone would find a way to turn me back, it would be you. I never lost faith in you. Never will. Thank you."
Link's gaze travels over her face from which the golden glow has faded. It shines white in the moonlight when Hateno's clock gongs one in the morning. "Always, Zelda. Always."