Chapter Text
The shrine doesn’t want her.
Dani’s been circling it for three hours now, her boots scuffing patterns in the dust, and her notes scattered across the ancient stone like offerings to a god — one who isn’t listening to a damn beg or plead.
The columns rise around her in perfect geometric intervals — twelve of them, each carved with text she’s translated six times over, each translation yielding the same useless truth: The chosen one shall know the way.
She wants to break something. Her knuckles ache from where she’s already tried.
The sun bleeds across the canyon, turning the sky a shade of deep red, which feels appropriate, considering. Dani sits back on her heels and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving a streak of ancient dust across her face, like war paint. Her hair has come loose from its braid. There's a hole in her research gloves.
Somewhere behind her, the Sheikah Slate uselessly drones, waiting for her to do something with it. Waiting for her to be something other than what she is.
“If the Goddess won't open it from the inside,” she mutters, flipping to a new page in her journal, “maybe I can reverse-engineer the locking mechanism from the outside.”
This is a stupid plan. She knows it's a stupid plan. But stupid plans are all she has left after sixteen and a half years of praying to a Goddess who has apparently gone on permanent vacation, leaving only an out-of-office message that reads: Sorry! Your call is important to us. Please continue suffering indefinitely while we ignore you.
She's so absorbed in sketching the shrine's exterior that she doesn't hear the footsteps until they're almost on her; quiet stretches, and then, suddenly, the shoes clenching the ground are close enough that dust starts kicking up her ankles.
It's too close.
The kind of close that means someone has been watching her fail for an indeterminate amount of time, probably cataloging her inadequacy for later reference.
Dani’s spine goes rigid when she finally looks up.
Her.
Lara — because that's who it always is, isn't it? The hero with the sword and the destiny and the Goddess's favor tattooed directly onto her soul — stands at the base of the shrine steps. She's backlit by the dying sun, so Dani can't see her face. She doesn't really need to, not when she's dealt with enough forced proximity to know that expression by heart: patient, silent, pitying. It's exactly what Dani loathes. Lara’s pity, more than anything else. The Master Sword on her back catches the light, showing off, reminding her of its agonizing existence. Scratch what she said before. Erase it from the files. She loathes that more than anything else.
“Your Highness.”
Lara’s voice is quiet, which somehow makes it worse.
Everything about Lara is quiet.
Her footsteps, her breathing, the way she materializes at Dani’s shoulder, a shadowing haze in the daylight. Dani’s gotten used to it over the past six months, the constant presence at her periphery, but familiarity hasn’t made it easier; if anything, it’s sharpened the edges of her resentment until they’re small and vicious and pointed directly inward.
“I didn’t ask for company,” Dani says to her hands. It's easier to talk to her hands. In any case, they give better responses and show more emotion than the unmovable Lara Raj ever could. Hey, look at that. She's got more feelings in her hands than Lara has in her entire body.
A pause. Then: “The path back to the stable is clear. We should leave before dark.”
“I’m not finished.”
“You’ve been here since dawn.”
“And I’ll be here until midnight if that’s what it takes.” Dani stands abruptly, turning to face her. Ding, ding, ding. Right on the money with the expression guess. Lara’s face is the same as it always is — carefully neutral and infuriatingly calm. The exact way someone who’s never had to try at anything in her life would act. Indignation bubbles up in the crevices of Dani before slowly moving inward, all-consuming. “Unless you’d like to try? I’m sure the shrine would open right up for you. Everything else does.”
Lara’s jaw tightens. It’s the only tell she ever gives.
And, like, yes, Dani's aware she’s being cruel. She knows it in the hot, acidic way she knows most truths about herself these days — intimately, hatefully, and without the ability to stop. But the words keep coming anyway, spewing from some poisoned well she can’t seem to cap. “Go ahead. Pull the master sword, save the princess, open the shrine. Add it to your list of accomplishments.”
It’s just. She’s so tired. Something ugly and desperate and with a particularly unpleasant taste of bile rises at the mere thought, but it’s the truth.
She’s tired.
Her father had looked at her this morning like she was a rather disappointing speck of dust, the Champions keep asking her when she’ll unlock her sealing powers as if she hasn’t been asking herself that same question every waking moment for years now, and now Lara is here, witnessing the latest failure, probably preparing to write a report about it to her father. The princess continues to be useless. The shrine remains closed. Perhaps we should try a different princess.
“I can’t open it.” Lara’s voice stays level. “It responds to you.”
“Clearly it doesn’t.”
“It will.”
“Why are you here?” Dani pivots, and it comes out sharper than she intends. Than she means. Than she wants. “Did my father send you to check on me? To make sure I'm praying hard enough?”
Lara doesn’t reply; it’s an answer in itself.
Dani laughs, but it comes out all wrong and wonky; jagged, even, like breaking glass. Accurate, really, for how stupidly upset she feels right now. “Of course he did. Can't trust me to do anything right, can he? Not without the hero here to supervise.” She can’t sit any longer — not with the increasing flow of rage flooding her system, making it hard to stay still, to rationally think. To do anything at all. Dani stands up, but it's too quick, and her vision goes white at the edges from the three hours of kneeling she just did. Great. Another fuck-up witnessed by the near and dear golden girl. She steadies herself against the pedestal. “Well, you can report back that the shrine is still closed, I'm still powerless, and the Calamity is going to kill everyone because the Goddess chose wrong.”
She shouldn't say this. She knows she shouldn't say this. But exhaustion has stripped away the layer of politeness she usually maintains, and underneath it is just anger. At herself. At her father. At the Goddess. At the girl in front of her, who makes everything look so fucking easy.
“You don't understand,” Dani continues. She’s moving now, because standing did nothing to relieve the agitation in her bones, gathering her notes and shoving them into her bag with shaking hands. “You pulled a sword and became a hero. Just like that. You're — you're done. Your destiny handed itself to you and said, 'Here, this is who you are, this is what you're meant to do,' and you didn't have to question it, you didn't have to earn it, you just —”
She stops, catching her breath. Lara’s still in front of her, playing the picture-perfect epitome of patience, of pure, utter serenity, and it only serves to piss Dani off more than she thought possible.
“I've prayed until my knees bled,” Dani exclaims, voice cracking. “I've studied every text, every ritual, every historical account of past princesses who could seal the darkness. I've done everything right and I'm still nothing.”
The silence between them is so thick that Dani could drown in it.
“You can't help me,” she says finally, quietly, picking up her bag. “No one can.”
She walks past Lara without so much as a glance, down the shrine steps and into the Tabantha wilderness. Her hands are still shaking. Her throat feels like she swallowed something hard and sticky; it aches like a bruise, making even the smallest movements of her mouth painful. And the worst part — the absolute worst part — is that Lara will probably follow her back to camp anyway, because that's her job: protecting the worthless princess who can't even open a shrine that's supposed to respond to her bloodline.
She doesn't understand. None of them understand. She pulled a sword and became a hero. I've prayed until my knees bled and I'm still nothing.
Another failure. Another closed shrine. Another day closer to the Calamity with no power to stop it. The weight of it presses down, crushing. It threatens to kill her.
Lara, silent as always, follows ten paces behind.
The camp is empty when Dani gets back.
She dismissed the other researchers hours ago, sent them back to the stable with her notes from yesterday because she was sure — so sure — that today would be different. That if she could just focus hard enough, pray hard enough, want it desperately enough, the Goddess would finally answer.
The Goddess did not answer; it's a blessing to have been gifted with an empty camp, at least, because — well, there’s only so much frustration one can hold in. She doesn't think she could spend an entire night catering to snobby, stuck-up researchers after yet another failure.
Dani sits by the fire pit but doesn't light it. The night is cold, frosty wind slipping through the thin fabric of her clothing, but she barely notices. She's too busy replaying the scene at the shrine, her own words echoing in her head like a ghost. You don't understand. You pulled a sword and became a hero. You can't help me.
Lara's face, impassive as carved stone.
Dani puts her head in her hands and cries.
She's not a graceful crier. Never has been. Her face gets blotchy and her nose runs and she makes these awful hiccupping sounds that would horrify her etiquette tutors. But there's no one here to witness it, thankfully, no one to report back to her father that the princess is having another breakdown, so she lets herself fall apart like a tower that's been holding its stony self up for too long.
She was unfair. She knows she was unfair. Lara didn't do anything except exist and be good at the thing she was born to be good at; Dani had taken her own inadequacy and weaponized it. Thrown it like a knife at the one person who's never asked her to be anything other than what she is.
Except that's not true either, is it?
Because what Dani is, right now, is a failure.
A princess without power. A Goddess-blood heir who can't access her own bloodline. It's laughable, really. And everyone — her father, the Champions, the people of Hyrule, hell, even Lara — needs her to be something else. Something she can't figure out how to become.
Part of her wants to apologize. But tomorrow will come, and the words won’t. Because, for the sake of honesty, the thought of facing Lara after that outburst makes her stomach twist with shame; besides, what would she even say? Sorry for screaming at you about having the one thing I can't seem to earn? That's not even an apology. It’s a sheep in wolves clothing, except the sheep is her self-pity, and the worn wolf clothing is an I’m sorry.
Dani wipes her face with her sleeve. Her sleeve is dirty, she knows, from kneeling on ancient stone, but her face is dirty too, so it's not like it matters. Just another fuck-up. The princess who can’t stay clean.
She stares up at the stars beginning to emerge overhead. It’s the same stars her ancestors prayed to, that watched every princess before her successfully awaken her sealing power and save Hyrule from darkness.
What is wrong with her?
What fundamental flaw in her soul or spirit or whatever metaphysical component is supposed to connect her to the Goddess has made her this way — broken, powerless, and entirely, completely useless?
She’s not entirely surprised when she hears footsteps again.
Oh, joy.
Lara emerges from the darkness.
She's carrying supplies. Namely, food, water, and an extra blanket. She sets them down at the edge of where the firelight would be if Dani had bothered to light the fire, and then starts building a fire herself, quick and efficient, like someone who's done this a thousand times in a thousand different wildernesses. Lara has, most likely, in all fairness, done this over a thousand times. It doesn’t mean Dani has to like it. Doesn’t mean she has to watch it, either, or admire the way it all comes together while she just uselessly sits there, hands empty, irritation coiling like smoke in her chest.
“You should eat something.” Lara unpacks the food as she speaks — some kind of meat skewer, flatbread, a few apples — and sets them on a cloth between them.
Dani's throat closes up. “I'm not hungry.”
Lara sits down across the fire anyway.
“Wait.” Dani leans forward, desperate now. Eager to get it out before she loses her courage and adds another tally to her pile of regrets. “I —” she swallows. “I'm sorry. For what I said earlier. You didn't deserve that.”
Lara looks at her for a long moment. In the firelight, her eyes are… softer than Dani expected. Less stone and more breakable. Human. Then she blinks, and the lights glare fades a bit, no longer distracting her. She instead watches as Lara shrugs, the universal ‘forgive and forget’ sign. “You're under a lot of pressure.”
“So are you,” Dani shoots back. “And I don't see you screaming at people about it.”
Lara's mouth twitches. It might be a smile. It's gone too fast to tell. “I'm not very good at screaming.”
Despite everything — the failure and the shame and the exhaustion — Dani chokes out a laugh. It's small and broken, riddled with cracks that echo her pre-puberty voice and make her silently cringe, but it's real. “No, I suppose you're not.”
They sit in silence for a while. When Lara hands her a skewer and Dani takes the stick, it's simply easier to eat without talking. The meat is good, cooked with some kind of herb that she doesn't recognize. The desire to ask where Lara learned to cook like this, what other hidden talents she has beneath that stoney exterior she carries like armor surges; nothing is said, because Dani's always been a coward at heart and the words feel too intimate for the space between them.
“Why do you keep following me?” The question slips out before Dani can stop it. “My father's orders?”
Lara chews thoughtfully. Swallows. “Partially.”
“And the other part?”
Lara looks at her across the fire. The flames reflect in her eyes, turning them amber. “Someone should.”
It's not an answer.
Or maybe it is — just not the one Dani was expecting.
Someone should follow the princess around. Someone should make sure she doesn't get herself killed while losing her mind in ancient ruins. Someone should bring her food and build her fires and witness her failures without judgment.
Someone should.
Not because they want to. Because someone should.
Dani's chest aches with something she can't name. She finishes her skewer in record time, eager to get out of here. “Thank you.” The words come out quieter than she intends. “For the supplies. And for... not leaving.”
The shrine doesn’t want her, that much is true; the Gerudo Desert is actively trying to kill her.
Not metaphorically, or in the poetic sense of ‘challenge’ and ‘adversity’ that her tutors loved to wax on about. The desert is literally attempting to cook Dani alive inside her own skin, which seems excessive even by the standards of a kingdom actively preparing for an apocalypse.
She's been surveying the perimeter of Vah Naboris for six hours.
The Divine Beast squats on the horizon, akin to a mechanical god having a particularly bad day, occasionally crackling with lightning — it must be as irritated by the heat as she is.
Dani's notes are illegible. Half of them have melted into the page. She gave up on legibility around hour three and started drawing angry faces in the margins instead, which is probably not what her father had in mind when he assigned her to document the Beast's functions, but — well, her father isn't here, is he? He’s back at the castle where it's cool and there are servants bringing him chilled drinks and he doesn't have to think about his useless daughter boiling in the sun.
Lara appears at her elbow with water.
“I'm fine,” Dani says automatically.
Lara doesn't respond, merely holding the canteen out until Dani’s stubbornness clocks out of work. The water is cool. Impossibly cool, for the kind of weather they’re dealing with.
Dani wants to ask how Lara managed that; or, better yet, forgo asking and go right to the accusation stage, interrogating her on whether or not she has some weird hero magic skill that keeps things cold, but she's too busy drinking half the canteen in one go to form words.
When she comes up for air, Lara is watching her. It’s patient — consistent as always, Lara is. It makes Dani feel like a child throwing a tantrum instead of a princess conducting vital research, and it gives her reason to hate perfect, knightly Lara all the more.
“What?” Dani wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
“You should rest.”
Dani makes a face at that, all-disgruntled and no-contentment. Rest? For what? So their kingdom can fall into ruin, and it’ll be all her fault, like everything is? “I'm not done.”
“The Divine Beast will still be here tomorrow,” she retorts.
Dani looks at Vah Naboris, at the way heat shimmers off its metal hide. She swivels in an instant, changing her direction so it’s pointedly toward the sandstorm brewing on the eastern horizon, scoffing. “Will it?”
Lara follows her gaze. Something passes across her face — concern, maybe, or the hero's equivalent of it, which is probably just a different flavor of duty. “Yes.”
They've been traveling together for three months now.
Three months of shrines that won't open, of research that goes nowhere, and of Lara following her ten paces behind, a dedicated shadow till the end of the line.
Dani’s learned plenty about her in that time. Small things, mainly, but things nonetheless. The way Lara always checks the perimeter before settling down for the night, meticulous and precise, moving from right to left. Once settling down, she takes her weapons apart and cleans them with a precision that borders on worship. Dani’s watched her use the sword in question too — Lara’s right-handed but fights ambidextrously, the preference most likely trained out of her.
Perhaps most importantly: Lara doesn't argue. She states facts and then waits for Dani to accept them.
“Fine.” Dani shoves her notes into her bag, letting an uncomfortably szhhhh sound ripple out. “But I'm coming back at dawn.”
Lara nods once, which, of course she does. It’s like she's checking items off an invisible list. Keep the princess alive: check. Prevent heat stroke: check. Avoid having any actual conversations: check check check.
Entering Gerudo Town is a relief, in the way that not actively dying is always a relief.
The moment they pass through the gates, the temperature drops twenty degrees and Dani's skin stops screaming at her.
She heads straight for the inn, pays for two rooms without looking at Lara, and locks herself in hers before she can do something certifiably idiotic, like attempt talking to a person that’s more brick wall than human.
Sophia finds her the next morning at the training grounds.
Dani is decidedly not training. Training implies purpose, improvement, or, at the very least, some kind of forward momentum. What Dani is doing is standing in the sand with a practice sword and trying (re: failing, which is all she’s good at doing) to remember the forms her combat instructor drilled into her when she was twelve, back when they still believed she might need them. That is, before it became clear that her role in saving Hyrule had nothing to do with swords and everything to do with a power she can't access.
“Your stance is off,” Sophia observes from the shade.
Dani adjusts her feet. “Better?”
“Worse,” Sophia groans, scrunching her nose. Dani’s about ready to bite it off. “You're thinking too hard.”
“Isn't that, like, the point of practice?”
Sophia laughs, and the sound rolls across the training ground. It’s loud, ostentatiously so, but it’s fitting for her. Sophia’s always been big, in the larger-than-life sense. They’re nearly the same height, but when Dani looks at her, Sophia seems three feet taller. She's in full Gerudo warrior regalia too, which only serves to make Dani feel smaller and even more ridiculous in her borrowed practice armor. “The point of practice is muscle memory, little bird. Let your body think for you.”
Dani tries, and tries, and tries; she swears she really does. But her body's memories involve books, prayer, and kneeling until her legs go numb, not combat forms. After the fifth time, where a sword drop nearly results in a sliced-off arm, she gives up and sits in the sand with her head in her hands.
Sophia settles beside her, graceful despite the armor. “Want to talk about it?”
Dani holds in a sigh. Talk about… feelings with Sophia? A literal Champion? One of the most powerful warriors to exist, charming and suave and undeniably perfect at her job, equipped with her golden Sophia’s fury? And Dani’s supposed to talk to her about feeling small? Absolutely-fucking-not. She opts for politeness. “Not particularly.”
“Going to anyway?”
And, yeah, because Sophia may be a Champion, but Dani’s full of shit. She was always going to talk about herself.
When Dani sneaks a glance, she catches Sophia smiling in a way that suggests she already knew the answer and was just waiting for Dani to catch up. It's maternal too, and it sits uncomfortably in her lungs, making her chest ache, because her own mother died when she was six and the only thing she remembers clearly is how she smelled like white flowers and rain.
“The Divine Beast hates me,” Dani sighs, thumbs twiddling with the air.
“The Divine Beast is a machine,” Sophia corrects. “It can’t hate you.”
This time, Dani can’t stop her surfacing sigh of agony. “Then I hate the Divine Beast.”
“That seems fair,” Sophia chuckles, picking up a handful of sand and letting it run through her fingers. It’s unfairly graceful. Then again, Sophia’s always been oh-so good at that. Gracefulness. “Anything else?”
More like everything else. The shrines, the prayers, her father's disappointment carved into every conversation. The way the other Champions look at her during meetings, like they're trying to figure out if she's actually going to save them or if they need a backup plan.
“I'm tired,” Dani says quietly.
Sophia’s expression softens. “I know.”
“Everyone expects —” Dani stops, swallows. “I don't know how to be what they need.”
“You're what they need right now.”
“I'm nothing right now.”
Sophia’s quiet for a long moment; when that moment ends, she’s reaching over and taking Dani's hand, squeezing once. Her hands are calloused from years of wielding weapons, but warm and solid and real. It’s the nicest gesture Dani’s been given all week, and she greedily soaks it up. "You're sixteen.” At Dani’s glare, she’s quick to add, “And a half. Yes. Sixteen and a half.” Sophia rolls her eyes. “Anyway — the point is, you're supposed to be nothing right now. The tragedy is that the world won't let you.”
Dani's throat closes up. She blinks hard, because if nothing else, she refuses to cry in the middle of the Gerudo training grounds where anyone could see. “I should get back to work.”
Sophia shakes her head, stealing the sword and tossing it out of reach. “You should rest.”
“That's what Lara said.”
“Then Lara is smarter than she looks.” Sophia stands, brushing sand from her armor. “Come on. I'm taking you to dinner.”
“Wait, I have research —”
Sophia merely clasps her hand on Dani’s shoulder, a closed-eye smile settling on her face. “Research can wait. You can't save Hyrule on an empty stomach.”
The tavern is loud, full of excitable Gerudo warriors who look like they could snap Dani in half if she pushed them too hard. The thought comes with a healthy dose of fear, and she tries (again, fails; who’s surprised?) to make herself small at their corner table. It’s difficult to do when her companion, Sophia, is a certified social butterfly and keeps introducing her to people.
“This is Dani,” Sophia says to a woman with a scar bisecting her eyebrow. Dani uncomfortably smiles and looks anywhere but the scar. Oh! Food. Drinks. Tavern things. Do not stare. Do not stare. And, do not, definitely, do not ask how she got it. “Princess. Goddess-blood. In the throes of a mid-life crisis. Early-age crisis? Purpose in life and all that. You know how it goes.”
“Sophia —”
“Aren't we all,” the scarred woman snorts, raising her drink, like she wants to toast with them. Nobody makes a move to clink her glass. After a beat, the scarred woman awkwardly drops her hand. “Welcome to the club, Your Highness.”
It’s a club Dani immediately wants out of, but she says nothing, choosing to nod her head and stare resolutely at a particularly interesting fly buzzing around their table. At least she hadn’t asked about the scar.
The food arrives in waves. Spiced meat, flatbread still warm from the oven, some kind of rice dish that tastes like it was made with God’s touch. It must be that — made with divinity — or it’s Dani’s mind, all-consumed by hunger, exaggerating the deliciousness. In all fairness, she hasn't eaten anything substantial in days and her stomach had been sounding more like a machine’s engine than anything else before they arrived here. Dani tries to pace herself and fails spectacularly, shoveling food into her mouth with all the urgency of someone afraid it’ll be taken away.
Sophia watches her with undisguised amusement. “When was the last time you ate?”
Dani thinks about it, before replying, muffled by the spoon of rice she’s currently devouring. She ignores how disgusting and undignified that is — most especially for a princess. A sufficient mix of hunger and desperation will do that to you. “Yesterday? Maybe the day before.”
“And what did you eat?”
“Lara brought me something.” Dani frowns at her plate. What had… what had they eaten? Uhhh. She racks her brain. Meat? Maybe? Skewers, perhaps, because Lara’s always had an obsession with them. That seemed right; never guaranteed, though. Hesitancy wins. “I don't remember what.”
“Mm.” Sophia tops off both their cups with something that smells strongly of fermented fruit. Dani absolutely does not wrinkle her nose. “And where is your ever-present shadow tonight?”
“She's not my shadow.”
"She's something."
Dani takes a long drink to avoid responding. The liquor burns going down, settles warm in her stomach. She's not used to alcohol — her father forbids it, says she needs a clear mind for prayer — but right now, with failures stacked and hopelessness growing, a cloudy mind sounds perfect. “She's my appointed knight. That's all.”
“If you say so, little bird.”
“I do say so,” Dani says, slightly miffed.
Sophia leans back in her chair, studying Dani with the kind of intensity that makes her want to squirm. “You know what I think?”
Oh joy. A flicker of exasperation flitters across her body, eyes sinking and mouth tugging down. A Sophia-driven lecture. What fun! “I'm sure you're going to tell me.”
“I think you're angry at the wrong person.”
Dani sets her cup down harder than intended. “I'm not angry at anyone.”
“Really?” Sophia deadpans, raising an eyebrow for good measure. “Because from where I'm sitting, you've been taking your frustration out on that poor girl for months.”
“I haven't —” but Dani stops, because that's a lie and they both know it. The outburst at the shrine. The snapping at the desert. Every small cruelty she's inflicted because Lara is there and safe to hurt, because Lara will never leave or complain or tell her father that the princess is falling apart.
Sophia reaches across the table and taps Dani's forehead, gentle but firm. “The enemy is in here, not out there.”
Dani's eyes burn. She blinks rapidly, staring at her plate. “I don't know how to fix it.”
“Fix what? Your power, or your attitude?”
“Both. Either.” Dani laughs; it comes out uncomfortably wet and shaky. “Everything.”
The noise of the tavern swells around them. Someone’s at the front, singing completely off-key but with blinding enthusiasm about a battle from the last war. It makes Dani somewhat envious — she can’t help but wonder what it's like to be a warrior, to have a concrete enemy that’s fightable with weapons instead of this shapeless inadequacy that lives in her chest.
“Can I tell you something?” says Sophia, quieter now, stripped of her usual teasing edge. “Your mother used to come to Gerudo Town sometimes. Did you know that?”
Dani looks up, startled. “She did?”
It’s not often she’s told information about her mother. Her father hates talking about her, and that’s putting it lightly. It’s taboo in the castle, and if it’s taboo in the castle, it’s taboo for the rest of the kingdom.
Sophia’s never been the type to follow social norms.
“Not often. Your father didn't approve — too dangerous, too far from him, all his usual nonsense. But she came anyway.” Sophia smiles, distant and sad. “She'd sit right here and tell me how terrified she was of failing you. Of not being enough.” Her eyes turn foggy, as if she’s transporting back into that memory. Selfishly, Dani wishes she could transport herself back there too. Witness her mother’s shining aura, commanding the tavern’s attention in one clean swoop. Watch her talk about Dani like she’s something special and precious, something to be good enough for.
“But — but,” Dani splutters, “she was the queen.”
“And you're the princess. Doesn't make the fear any less real.” Sophia points out, chugging the remains of her drink. “She told me once that the hardest part of being Goddess-blood wasn't the power or the responsibility. It was the loneliness. Everyone needs you to be something, so you can't just be.”
Dani's throat aches; she forcibly pushes down the urge to sob. She misses her mother more than anything else. “What did you tell her?”
“That she was allowed to be afraid. That being afraid didn't make her weak.” Sophia meets Dani's eyes. “And that she should let people help her carry it, instead of pretending the weight wasn't crushing her.”
The words sit between them, rock-hard and harsh. Dani picks at her flatbread, tearing it into smaller and smaller pieces. Then, like a scolded child, she mutters out: “Lara doesn't understand.”
“Have you asked her to?”
“She wouldn't —” Dani flings her hands up. “It's not her job to understand.”
“Isn't it?” Sophia shoots back. And it’s, like, ugh. Whatever. Dani continues to play with the flatbread, lacking the means or the guts to argue back because, well, it’s not entirely wrong; it’s just not entirely right, either. “She follows you everywhere, watches you work yourself to exhaustion, takes your anger without complaint. Seems like understanding is exactly her job.”
Dani’s silent streak has yet to end, but Sophia has clearly had enough; she snatches the flatbread and eats it in one bite. Dani blinks, affronted, but Sophia remains unbothered, simply standing and stretching her arms above her head. A groan slips out when the targeted muscle cracks. “Come on. We’re going back to my place. You’re staying the night.”
“I have a room at the inn —”
“And I have a room with a view of Naboris. Also tea that'll help you sleep.” When Dani opens her mouth, Sophia shuts it down with a little shake of her head. “Don't argue. You're outvoted.”
“There’s only two people here. The votes a tie.”
Sophia’s grin blooms, full of mischief. “Champion’s rule states that my vote counts for two.”
Dani stands, baffled, voice already hiking because she’s always been an easy target to get a rise out of. “Champion rules? Firstly, that’s not even a thing.”
“It is now! You can’t argue with me! I’m a champion.” Before Dani can retort, Sophia’s slinging an arm around her shoulder. The weight is so comforting, in a way she hasn’t felt in months, and… Dani’s weak.
She lets herself feel it.
Lets herself be dragged by Sophia.
Sophia's quarters are in the palace, high enough that Dani can see the Divine Beast from the window. It's quieter here, away from the tavern noise and the bustle of the town.
Sophia’s busy making tea, robotically, going through motions she’s done a hundred times over; it’s domestic competence that might seem at odds with her warrior persona, but somehow isn't.
“Drink,” she orders, pressing a cup into Dani's hands.
The tea tastes simultaneously flowery and bitter, sitting wrong on her tongue after the copious amount of alcohol she’s just consumed. Dani sips on it anyway, grateful for something to do with her hands.
She takes a moment to stalk the room — it’s decorated with weapons and maps, and punctuated by a few personal touches: a plant in the corner, a painting of the desert at sunset, a small shrine to the Goddess that looks well-used.
“You pray,” Dani observes, a touch surprised.
“Sometimes. When I need to yell at someone who can't yell back,” Sophia offers, settling onto a cushion. Her armor’s discarded now, leaving her in a simple wrap, shedding Sophia of her otherworldly elements for the night. “Doesn't mean she listens.”
“She doesn't listen to me either.”
Sophia, the forever debater, lets out a grunt that silently says well actually. Dani braces herself to hate whatever’s about to come out of her mouth. “Maybe she's listening and you don't like what she's saying.”
Dani gears up to argue, but the tea is making her tired and warm and her edges are softening in a way that feels… dangerous. What fills the gaps is doubt. “What if I can't do it? What if the Calamity comes and I'm still — like this?”
Sophia quiets; it does nothing to curb the silence, not when the wind outside picks up, tossing sand against the windows like claws and reminding her of the Divine Beast that’s only a few blocks away. “Then we fight anyway. With or without your power, we fight.”
“That's not good enough.”
“It's all we have.”
Dani sets her cup down and curls up on the cushion, pulling her knees to her chest. She feels small and young and very far from home. It’s stupid, because home is where her father doesn't look at her, and the weight of the kingdom presses down until she can't breathe. This room with its weapons and its tea and Sophia's simple kindness is more home than the castle has ever been.
Her heart cracks. Something like honest slithers between the broken shards. “I'm scared,” Dani whispers.
“I know.”
Sophia moves to sit beside her, and Dani leans in without thinking — muscle memory. Arms circle her, steady and sure, and she folds into them, letting herself be held like she's six years old, and her mother still lived, and the world hadn’t yet decided to place its salvation in her incompetent hands. Sophia doesn't say anything else. She just holds Dani, one palm slow on her shoulder, and lets the fear tremble through her.
Dani falls asleep there, head tucked beneath Sophia’s chin; for once, she’s not dreaming about shrines, Goddesses, or the weight of expectations. Mercifully, pure darkness is all she’s greeted by.
When she wakes, there are voices.
Dani keeps her eyes shut, floating in that space between sleep and consciousness where everything is muffled and distant. The room is darker now — night, maybe, or late evening. She must’ve been carried to a real bed at some point; beneath her is a soft cushion, and a blanket rests over her, warm and heavy. It smells like desert flowers, sun-baked and worn, more than a little over-used.
“— not doing well.” Sophia’s voice registers, low and concerned.
“Mhm.”
Lara.
It’s not even words, really; it’s a simple hum, a small agreement. It doesn’t matter, because Dani instantly knows it's her, in the same way her body remembers how to navigate every twist and turn (that makes it more akin to a maze than a proper place of living) of the castle halls back home, ingrained into her head and as familiar as the lines on her own palm.
Dani's eyes snap open, but she doesn't move. Hardly breathes. From her angle on the bed, she can see them through the doorway. Sophia leans against the wall. Her polar opposite, Lara stands as rigid as always, like relaxing is a personal failure. A laugh bubbles up in Dani at the thought, and she imagines Lara, gravely serious, saying some nonsensical bull like, I must stay focused; the wolves do not wait for the chicken to flock — she barely manages to hold it in, letting only a quick grin etch across her face.
“She pushes herself too hard,” Sophia continues. Dani’s grin exits as fast as it entered. “Barely eats, barely sleeps. I watched her nearly collapse in the training grounds today.”
Lara's shoulders tense. “I've tried —”
“I know you have,” Sophia interrupts. Lara seems ready to protest some more, but Sophia’s hand brushing her shoulder — an unspoken sorry — halts her path. “I've seen the way you take care of her. The food, the water, making sure she rests.” says Sophia, gentle, like she’s speaking to an irrational child and not a sword-wielder chosen by the Goddesses up above. “But she's angry at you, and you let her be.”
Silence. Then, so quiet Dani almost misses it: “She needs somewhere to put it.”
“That's not fair to you.”
“Fair doesn't matter.”
Sophia chokes out a sound that’s half laugh, half sigh. Exasperatedly fond. “You care about her.”
It's not a question; it’s a fact. A strange twist coils tight in her stomach, a jumble of nerves and emotions she can’t exactly name. It makes Dani feel like she’s free-falling — except she’s already lying down.
Lara doesn't respond immediately. When she does, it’s with a mask, but it’s not as well-placed as it typically is, and the holes are practically gaping canyons. Dani’s more than a little startled to see the cracks, the weak edge washing her words. It’s so… not Lara, the typical, unshakable epitome of strength. “She's my responsibility.”
“That's not what I asked.”
“I know.”
Another silence, longer this time.
Dani's hands grip the blanket, pulse loud in her ears. She shouldn't be listening. Not anymore. This conversation has entered private territory, things Lara would never discuss with her. Not even if her life was on the line. And, either way, it’s really none of her business, except it's about her so maybe it is her business, except —
“The princess needs someone who sees her,” Sophia says. It’s wise in a way that reminds Dani that, despite her outward appearance, she’s actually far older than both her and Lara. In hindsight, their problems must seem small. Little kiddie drama. “Not the power she's supposed to have, not the prophecy or the bloodline. Just her.”
“I see her.”
“Then show her. Because right now, she thinks you're here out of duty. And duty is cold comfort when you're terrified you're going to fail everyone you love.”
Lara shifts her weight. From where Dani is lying, she can see the tension in her frame. One hand rests on the pommel of her sword, and the other grips the handle like it's the only solid thing in the world. “She doesn't want —”
“You don't know what she wants because you've never bothered to ask,” Sophia argues, pushing herself off the wall. “Look, I'm not saying you need to bare your soul to the girl. But maybe stop being so aggressively competent at everything. Let her see that you're human too.”
“I don't know how to do that.”
“Start small. Talk to her. Not at her, not with mission reports or safety concerns. Actually talk,” says Sophia. It sounds more desperate than anything else. Like Lara’s effort might mean something. Or matter. Indignation rises in Dani’s chest. She doesn’t need anything from Lara. Especially not her skewed version of kindness. “She's lonely, Lara. And so are you, whether you'll admit it or not.”
And, oh, isn’t that raw; it’s an accusation that makes Dani squeeze her eyes shut, breathing carefully through her nose, trying not to make a sound that’ll notify them of her consciousness. This is where she’s starting to feel a little guilty. More than that. She feels gutted, like a fish, even though Lara’s soul is the one being bared. It’s just… she shouldn’t be listening to this right now. That much is clear.
Lara seems to feel similarly, clear by the way she mutters, “I should go,” as if she isn’t already half-scurrying out the door.
“Stay,” Sophia pushes, blocking Lara’s retreat. “Have some tea. The night's still young and I haven't finished interrogating you about your feelings.”
Lara makes a sound that might be a laugh if it weren't so small. “I don't have feelings.”
“Everyone has feelings. Some people are just better at pretending they don't.” Footsteps, moving away from the doorway. “Good night, Lara. Think about what I said.”
“I always do.”
The door softly clicks closed.
Morning arrives mostly unwelcome, and Dani emerges from Sophia’s quarters to find the Champion in question gone — some emergency with the Divine Beast, a note on the table explains in Sophia’s sprawling handwriting. Make sure you eat breakfast. I'm watching you. Not literally, but spiritually, which is worse.
Dani folds the note and puts it in her pocket.
The market is bustling by the time she gets there. Gerudo merchants hawking produce, jewelry, and weapons, travelers bartering in a mix of languages, children weaving between the stalls like fish.
Dani buys flatbread from a woman who doesn't recognize her, and it’s a pure relief. For one, her comings and goings are an entire can of worms she doesn’t want to explain to relative strangers. And, well, secondly, anonymity means no one expects anything. She can just be a girl eating bread in the morning sun; there’s no Goddess-blood here, no prophecy. Nothing but herself, and the taste of salt and barley.
She finds Lara at the north gate.
It’s not surprising. Lara is always exactly where Dani expects her to be, like she's been programmed with routes and patrol patterns instead of actual human spontaneity. She's checking her equipment — shield strapped, sword secure, that methodical inventory people do when they're trying not to think about something else.
Dani approaches before she can talk herself out of it. “Hey.”
Lara turns, and for a fraction of a second, her face falters with an almost imperceptible flicker of surprise under the usual mask of careful neutrality. Dani catches it anyway. It’s easy to find when Lara’s typically all she’s looking at. “Your Highness. I thought you were resting.”
“I was. Now I’m… not.” Dani holds out the second piece of flatbread; the one she’d told herself was for later. Before she can think it through, a flimsy, “Have you eaten?” slips out.
Lara stares at the bread like it might be a trap. “I had rations.”
“That's not what I asked.”
A pause. Then Lara takes the bread, careful not to let their fingers touch. “Thank you.”
They stand there in the awkward geometry of two people who don't know what they're doing. Dani watches Lara eat — small bites, efficient, nothing wasted — and tries to figure out what Sophia meant by actually talk. Talking requires words, and Dani has spent months using words as weapons. She's not sure she remembers how to use them as anything else.
“I'm going back to Naboris today,” Dani says finally. “The survey isn't finished.”
“I know.”
“You don't have to come.”
Lara looks at her. There’s something in her eyes Dani can’t read, some equation she doesn’t have the variables for. It doesn’t matter, not when all that comes out is a scoff and a sharp, “Yes, I do.”
“Right. Duty.” It comes out more bitter than Dani intends. She tries again. “I mean — you don't have to. If you don't want to.”
“Want doesn't factor into it.”
Ugh. And there it is. An irritatingly tall wall, the one that makes Dani want to hit Lara square in the face. Duty and responsibility and all the ways Lara has built a fortress around anything resembling a personal desire.
Scratch that — perhaps hitting Lara is harsh. Dani wants, more than anything, to scale it, to knock it down, or maybe just understand why it's there in the first place. The problem is she doesn't quite know how. Understanding requires vulnerability, and vulnerability requires trust, and trust requires not spending three months using someone as an emotional punching bag. So, like, Dani’s not even at square one; she’s in the negatives.
Dani takes a breath. “I'm sorry,” she blurts.
Lara goes very still. “For what?”
“For —” Where to begin? Everything. From the shrine visits to the desert, every cutting remark, dismissal, and moment of cruelty. “For being unfair. To you. You're just doing your job and I keep —” Tears prick at the corner of her eyes. In all fairness, Dani’s never been great at keeping her emotions locked down. She continues on anyway. “I keep taking everything out on you because you're there and you won't leave and I don't know how else to —”
She pauses. This is harder than Dani expected. Words are supposed to be easy — she's read a thousand books, studied rhetoric and diplomacy and the art of courtly conversation since young — but none of her efforts prepared her for standing in front of the girl who keeps saving her life and admitting she's been a tad awful.
“I'm tired,” Dani pivots. It isn’t what she meant to say, but is maybe more true than anything else. Truth and honesty is step one, yeah? “And scared. And I don't know what I'm doing. But that's not your fault and I shouldn't —” she flounders, gesturing vaguely. “Yeah.”
The silence that follows uncomfortably stretches.
Somewhere behind them, a merchant is arguing about the price of hydromelons. The wind carries sand across the courtyard in patterns that mean something to people who speak desert — albeit, neither of them, not when both Dani and Lara are much more assimilated to forests and all that comes with damp plants and humidity.
“You're under a lot of pressure,” Lara says, which is what she said before, which means Dani has somehow fucked this up too.
“So are you.” Dani flicks a shoe at a nearby stone, watching it disappear into the desert abyss up ahead. She wishes she could disappear as easily. Goodbye, fair stone. “No one’s telling you to not express that. You're allowed to tell me when I'm being terrible.”
“You're not terrible.”
"I called you —” Dani stops, because listing her offenses seems counterproductive. “I haven't been kind.”
Lara shrugs. “Kindness isn't required.”
“Maybe it should be,” Dani groans. God Almighty, can this girl just let her man up and say she’s sorry? Lara finishes her bread, wiping her hands on the outer part of her trousers. The sun is getting higher, which means they should leave soon if they want to reach Naboris before the desert becomes actively homicidal. “Look. I don't know how to do this. The talking thing. But Sophia said —” she trails off, suddenly mortified. Because admitting she overheard that conversation means admitting she was pretending to sleep, which means admitting all kinds of things she's not ready to admit.
Lara's expression shifts. So. Definitely caught that slip. Mercifully, she doesn’t push. “Sophia talks a lot.”
“She does. It's annoying.” Lara smiles at that, and Dani almost catches herself smiling back. “But she's usually right.”
They start walking toward the gate, now side by side, as opposed to the usual distance that comes in the form of Lara trailing ten feet behind. It feels significant in some way, like they’re going somewhere together instead of separately toward the same destination.
A unit.
“Can I ask you something?” says Dani, keeping her eyes forward.
“Yes.”
“Do you actually want to be here?” Too vulnerable. Ew. Dani uncomfortably picks at her sleeve. “Not duty, not responsibility. You.”
Lara is quiet for long enough that Dani thinks she won't answer. Then: “Where else would I be?”
It isn’t an answer at all; or, maybe, it's the only answer Lara knows how to give. Part of Dani wants to demand clarity, and for once understand what's happening behind those careful eyes. But pushing hasn't worked so far, and understanding isn't something she can force.
“Okay,” Dani says instead. “Then let's go look at a Divine Beast.”
The Divine Beast is having what Dani, after a minute of staring, flabbergasted, can only describe as a mechanical seizure.
Lightning arcs between its joints in patterns that definitely weren't happening yesterday, and the whole structure is vibrating hard enough that Dani can feel it in her teeth, even from a near fifty yards away. She stops walking, squinting against the glare, trying to figure out if this is a normal Divine Beast thing or an ‘everyone-is-about-to-die’ thing. Dani’s leaning toward the latter.
“That's new,” she breathes. It’s uncomfortable, sure, and unfamiliar, and may lead to her death, but part of Dani can’t help being impressed. It’s… amazing. Beautiful, even.
Glorious.
Lara already has her hand on her sword. “We should go back.”
“We just got here.”
“Exactly.” Lara gestures at the crackling mechanical god-corpse with her free hand, the other gripping her sword with a force that tells Dani she’s expecting, at this point, for Naboris to sprout legs and charge at them. “We can return when it's not doing that.”
Dani wants to argue, but watching Vah Naboris have what appears to be a temper tantrum makes a compelling case for agreeing and staying alive.
She's about to retreat, seriously, admit Lara is right and go on her merry way, when the lightning stops; it cuts out, sudden and complete, leaving the desert eerily quiet outside the continuous wind they’ve long gotten used to.
Dani’s interest reaches a peak. “Huh.”
“Don't,” says Lara, flatly and already three steps ahead in the argument they're about to have.
“I'm not doing anything,” Dani groans, a pout forming before she can help it.
“You're thinking about going closer. I can tell by your face.”
“Why are you staring at my face in the first place?” Dani turns to face her properly; in all honesty, it’s an action that’s both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it shades her eyes against the brutal afternoon sun, and a curse because it forces her to watch Lara be… Lara head-on. “What's my face doing?”
“The thing it does before you make terrible decisions.” Lara shifts, positioning herself between Dani and the Beast, probably without even thinking about it. Hero instinct, or hero complex, or — hero something, the kind of paranoia that develops when your assigned job is keeping someone who has a documented history of almost dying alive. “Like this.” Lara mimics what Dani apparently — apparently, she emphasizes; Lara’s almost certainly a shit-faced liar — looks like right now, which is wide-eyed and curious, foot eagerly twitching as though ready to run a marathon. In this case, the marathon is marching up to a potentially dangerous and life-threatening beast, but. Semantics.
“Hey!” Dani exclaims, but says nothing else. She’d have it in her to be offended if it wasn’t entirely accurate. She does have a terrible-decision face. It’s not her most pressing problem now, anyway. Her most pressing problem is that the Divine Beast has stopped spasming and Dani needs to document what just happened before her father accuses her of wasting time in the desert doing nothing.
She takes a step forward.
Lara catches her arm. It’s not rough, but it is firm enough to stop her momentum, fingers wrapping around Dani's wrist like she's done this before and will do it again if necessary. Unbidden, something in Dani’s chest tingles. “Dani.”
The sound of her name — not Your Highness, not Princess, not some other stupid royal title she’s been forced to hear since birth — makes Dani pause. She glances at Lara's hand on her arm, at the calluses on Lara's palm from years of sword work, then at Lara's face, which is doing something akin to concern, if concern could be expressed through aggressive blankness.
“I'll be careful,” Dani offers, though they both know it's a lie.
“You're never careful.” Lara’s eyes narrow, hand still cloaking Dani’s wrist. Her pulse is thundering against Lara's fingertips, too fast, and she knows Lara can hear it. It goes unmentioned by them both.
“I'm —” she stops, because that's… accurate. She has been called many things — useless, disappointing, the kingdom's last hope and greatest failure — but careful has never made the list. “I'll be more careful than usual. Moderately careful. Careful-adjacent.”
Lara's jaw tightens, warring between rules and common sense and simple agreement, hand flexing on hilt like she's considering whether she should give up on convincing Dani otherwise and simply physically carry her back into town.
“Stay behind me.” Lara says, in lieu of agreement. She releases Dani's arm and starts forward, her whole body shifting into combat-readiness even though, as of right now, there's technically nothing to fight except sand and ancient machinery. “If anything happens —”
"I know.” Dani rolls her eyes. She’s gotten this spiel more times than she can count. “Run away screaming while you heroically sacrifice yourself. Standard protocol.”
Lara glances back over her shoulder. There's something almost like exasperation in her eyes, which is the most emotion Dani's seen from her in weeks. It makes Dani far too happy, to see her just a little bit irritated. “That's not —” she pauses, maybe realizing that is actually the protocol, more or less, written into every guard's training manual under Protection of Royal Persons. “Just stay close.”
With that, they begin approaching Vah Naboris together.
The sand around it is glass-smooth, from where lightning struck, leaving it melted and resolidified into patterns that look almost intentional — like someone drew circuit diagrams with electricity and electricity alone.
The curious itch inside of Dani’s skin, the one that’s never quite gone, longs to stop and examine them, eager to sketch the formations in her journal and calculate the temperature required to turn sand to glass; it’s an unfortunate impossibility, when Lara is already marching ahead. Dani finds herself rushing to match pace, her shorter strides compensating with speed.
It's easier than she expected, moving in sync. Like they've been doing this longer than three months, and it’s inevitably led to them figuring out each other's rhythms without meaning to.
The Divine Beast's entrance is still sealed. It doesn’t bother Dani, who’s already circling the perimeter, half-unconsciously, detailing notes on the current state of the scorch marks, and the ancient mechanism’s shift from yesterday's configuration; her pencil threatens to break, flying across the page in shorthand only she can read.
Lara’s fallen behind her now, simply allowing Dani to work. Despite that, she never catches her hand ever leaving her sword — like, one of those challenges, where if she lets go, she’ll die a horrible death or something. Maybe part of Lara will. The moral siren, at least.
She’s scanning for threats that might emerge from the sand or sky or the Divine Beast itself, head constantly swiveling, like Lara’s preparing for an ambush from every direction simultaneously. It threatens to give Dani a headache.
Dani doesn’t even have it in her to poke fun at Lara’s demeanor — this Divine Beast is, quite honestly, the most extraordinary thing she’s ever seen. “Do you think it knows we're here?” Dani taps one of the metal legs with her writing utensil, listening to the hollow ring that suggests the interior is chambered; all that means to Dani is it’s possibly accessible if she could just figure out the mechanism.
“It's a machine,” Lara mutters back, though she's watching the Beast like it might wake up and prove her wrong.
“A machine built by people who could seal consciousness into objects. Who's to say what it knows?” Dani retorts, pressing her palm against the metal, feeling for vibrations, for any sign of life, or intelligence, or — whatever passes for awareness in ten-thousand-year-old divine technology.
Lara doesn't respond, which in Lara-speak, tends to mean that she thinks Dani is being ridiculous but is too polite to outright say so; though, honestly, polite isn’t the correct word for it, because Lara’s never been especially concerned with politeness. She’s never bothered with courtly niceties, or the elaborate dance of saying one thing while meaning another. Perhaps just too mission-focused to engage with philosophical questions about machine sentience. There’s a princess to keep alive and a Divine Beast that might (jury’s still out on this one) start having seizures again at any moment.
Dani positions herself in front of the next leg, examining the joint where lightning seemed to mostly concentrate. There's residue etched in the area, some kind of energy signature she’s entirely unfamiliar with. Faint blue traces, ones that make her Sheikah Slate hum when Dani brings it close. She runs a scan, watching data populate across the screen in ancient script that she can somewhat read — even after months of study, the grammar structure still manages to elude her.
“This doesn't match the other Divine Beasts,” Dani says, mumbling more to herself than Lara, pencil tucked behind her ear in favor of holding the Slate with both hands. “The energy output is wrong. It's like…”
The ground shifts.
Not earthquake-shifts, but something worse — it’s a disjointed, wrong movement that makes Dani feel like she’s standing on something that’s about to stop being ground and start being air.
Dani stumbles, boots losing purchase on sand that's suddenly sliding sideways. The Slate flies from her hands, flinging into unknown territory. Lara's arm comes around her waist, pulling her back just as the sand she was standing in collapses inward, revealing a cavern underneath, dark and deep and definitely not supposed to be there.
They stand there, Lara's arm still wrapped around her, both of them staring at the hole in slight wonder.
Dani can hear her own breathing, too loud, too fast, too everything; it should make her embarrassed, but she can feel Lara's heart pounding against her shoulder blade where they're pressed together — the simple fact that she’s just as shocked makes something in Dani’s chest warm, and makes any trace of embarrassment disappear.
However, there’s a slight problem: the Sheikah Slate is gone, fallen into the cavern, which means her father is going to kill her if the sinkhole doesn't do it first.
“Okay.” Dani's voice comes out higher than usual, thin and reedy in a way that makes her sound like a child instead of the almost-seventeen-year-old she is. “So. That happened.”
Lara pulls her further back, not letting go until they're a safe distance from the new pit. When she deems them relatively away from death’s grasp, she moves her hands to rest on Dani's shoulders, like she needs to confirm all of Dani's parts are still attached and functional. “We're leaving.”
Dani blinks, a sigh leaving her mouth. “But —”
“Now,” she groans, sharp and final.
“Wait! But, look, there's a cavern under the Divine Beast,” Dani protests, gesturing at the pit with both hands in a pathetic attempt at making Lara understand the significance. The archaeological implications, stretching back thousands of years, to the fact that this could explain everything about why Naboris has been malfunctioning. “That's — that's important. That's the kind of thing my father needs to know about.”
“Your father needs you alive more than he needs information about a hole in the ground.” Lara's hands are still glued to Dani's shoulders — grip tight enough that’ll leave behind impressions — and Dani realizes with a start that Lara is shaking. Not visibly, not in a way someone else would notice, but Dani can feel it through her palms, a fine tremor that speaks to adrenaline, fear, and whatever else is happening behind Lara's carefully controlled expression.
Dani wants to keep going, to argue that her father would prefer the information, actually, and that the useless, powerless heir is replaceable, but knowledge about the Divine Beasts is not; it’s bitterly true, but it seems pointless to voice when Lara is currently preventing her from falling into a mysterious underground cavern.
Instead, she looks at Lara — really looks at her — and sees… panic. Actual panic, bleeding through the cracks in Lara's careful composure like water through stone. It loosens some part of Dani. Makes her feel guilty. “I'm fine.” The words leave her mouth far quieter than intended, almost gentle. It’s not typical of Dani, especially not with Lara, of all people. But the situation calls for kindness, and kindness is something Dani will do her best to give. “You caught me.”
“This time.”
“You always catch me.” Dani lightly nudges her shoulder, a smile cracking. “It’s what heroes do.”
Lara's jaw starts working, like she's chewing on words she can't figure out how to say. “I won't always be fast enough.”
The admission sits between them like a wall, heavy and immovable. Dani thinks about Sophia’s voice drifting through doorways at night, about Lara saying I see her, like it means something. She thinks about the way Lara's hand continues to hover near Dani's back, afraid she might fall again if she stops paying attention for even a second. Something clicks into place.
“Do you —” Dani starts, but doesn’t go further, voice trailing because she doesn't know how to finish that sentence. Do you care? Do you worry? Do you think about me when I'm not actively dying in front of you? Do you lie awake at night cataloging all the ways I could get hurt tomorrow?
Lara waits, patient as always. Dani tries again. “When you said you see me. What did you mean by that?”
Lara goes very still; a prey animal deciding whether to run or fight. “You were awake.”
The tip of Dani’s ears turn pink, but she refuses to apologize for snooping. “I was resting. With my eyes closed. While you and Sophia had a very loud conversation directly outside the room where I was allegedly sleeping.”
“We weren't —” Lara groans, running a hand through her hair. It leaves it sticking up at odd angles and makes her look younger, reminding Dani that they’re the same age and that Lara isn’t some far, out-of-reach Goddess. She’s just a girl, like her. A girl with a destiny far too big for her hands to hold. “That was private.”
“Then you should have been quieter.” Dani crosses her arms, defensive now, because vulnerability is hard and deflection is easier. Because looking at Lara's face and seeing actual emotion there is making her stomach feel tumble and turn, like a sickly child. “You said you see me. Not the power, not the prophecy. Just me. But, what does that mean? To you?”
Lara’s not looking at her, instead focused on some point over Dani's shoulder; maybe she’s thinking that if she stares somewhere else hard enough, she can escape this conversation through sheer force of will alone. Dani wouldn’t know. She’s never been able to read her mind. The silence stretches until it becomes its own language — everything neither of them knows how to voice hanging in the air between them like suffocating smoke. Finally: “It means I know you're afraid. That you're trying. That you're…” she stops, throat working. “It means I see you.”
“That's circular logic,” Dani points out, but it’s wobbly and distinctly missing the edge it held, like, thirty seconds before.
“I know.”
Dani could push. She’s a princess. Use her royalty card, and demand real answers instead of these half-truths wrapped in non-answers.
It’s Lara’s face, careful, like one wrong word might shatter something fundamental, that halts her tracks. Because, maybe this is as much honesty as Lara knows how to give; it’s maybe more than she's ever given anyone, especially when she was handed a sword at twelve and told to save the world without being asked if she wanted to. Who shows a twelve-year-old tasked with saving the world how to say what they feel? Better yet, who cares?
“Okay.” Dani exhales slowly, watching the way her breath disturbs the sand at their feet. “I see you too. For what it's worth.”
Lara's eyes snap back to her, wide and startled, like Dani just said something incredibly profound. All she did was repeat Lara’s own words back to her. “You don't —”
“I do,” she interrupts, taking a step closer. She can see the gold flecks in Lara's eyes; she can see the small scar above her left eyebrow that Dani’s never had the courage to ask about. “I see someone who makes sure I eat, drink water, and don't die of heat stroke. Who follows me into dangerous places because someone has to. And because you've decided said someone is going to be you. Who's probably as scared as I am but won't ever say it because that would make it real.” She takes a breath, commits. “I see you, Lara. Even when I'm being awful, I see you.”
The directness of it makes Lara flinch. Not away, though, like Dani would expect, but toward. Like Dani just found the release mechanism on armor Lara's been wearing for so long she’s forgotten it was there. She opens her mouth. Closes it. Pivots. “We should document the cavern,” Lara says, rough and scraped raw. “From a safe distance.”
It's not what Dani expected, but it’s a thankful reprieve. A return to the mission instead of addressing whatever just happened between them.
Nonetheless, it’s different. We, Lara said. An acknowledgment that they're doing this together, that we is a word they're allowed to use now. That they aren’t two people merely heading in the same direction.
“From a very safe distance.” Dani nods, trying for lightness. Trying — and largely failing; it’s what she does best — to return them to solid ground after whatever precipice they were just standing on. “The safest distance. A distance so safe it's practically cowardly.”
Lara's mouth twitches. It might be a smile, but it's gone too fast to tell. It makes something warm unfurl in her chest anyway, something that has nothing to do with the desert heat and everything to do with the way Lara is looking at her.
They spend the next three hours documenting everything from what Lara calls a reasonable distance; it’s the same distance Dani calls excessive caution.
The cavern appears to run under most of Naboris, which explains the instability and why the Divine Beast has been acting like it's standing on ground that wants to swallow it whole.
Dani sketches the cavern, measures lengths using quick head math, and takes readings with a backup Slate she keeps in her pack for exactly this kind of emergency. Lara’s on the other side of her all the while, maintaining her vigil, eyes tracking every shadow, shift in the sand, and distant sound that could range from a threat to wind to the desert doing what deserts do.
Somewhere in the middle of it they fall into an easy rhythm.
Dani asks for the measuring tape without looking up from her notes, and Lara hands it over before Dani finishes the sentence. It’s as smooth as breathing. Lara points out a detail Dani missed — a stress fracture in one of Naboris's support struts — and Dani adjusts her sketches, lacking the usual knee-jerk defensiveness that accompanies someone correcting her work. It feels like a partnership.
The sun has lowered, when they finally head back toward Gerudo Town, both of them sand-covered and exhausted from maintaining hypervigilance (kudos to Lara) for hours on end.
Dani's hands cramp from writing, fingers stained with ink and graphite. Lara has a particular stillness Dani knows means she's been on edge and preparing for potential threats for too long, that her body hasn't figured out yet it's relaxation time. They should probably rest, eat something substantial, sleep for twelve hours and then maybe another twelve after that.
Instead: “Thank you.” Dani breaks the silence, voice shaky from disuse and the remains of sand in her throat. “For today. For catching me.”
Lara glances at her, shrugging. In the golden hour light, her face looks softer. Warmth is the only word that comes to mind. “It's my job.”
“I know. But —” Dani searches for what to say. She’s not exactly sure how to explain that gratitude doesn't become less meaningful just because someone’s obligated to help, so she doesn’t bother trying. “Thank you anyway.”
They walk the rest of the way in silence.
It’s different now.
Comfortable, almost. Like they've figured out how to exist in the same space without one of them bleeding all over the other — without Dani weaponizing her frustration and Lara absorbing it like punishment she thinks she deserves.
It doesn’t fix anything, not really. She's still powerless, still failing, still carrying the weight of a kingdom on shoulders that weren't built for it. But having Lara walk beside her instead of behind her makes the weight feel slightly less crushing, like maybe if she stumbles again there’ll be someone there to catch her before she hits the ground.
When they reach the town gates, Lara stops walking. “You did good work today.”
Dani freezes mid-step, boot half-raised, like she's forgotten how legs function. Lara keeps going for a few paces before realizing Dani isn't following; then, quick as ice, she’s swiveling around with a questioning tilt of her head — it’d be endearing if Dani's brain hadn't just short-circuited.
“Say that again,” Dani manages, voice cracking. She ignores the embarrassment coursing through her body.
“You did good work?”
“You've never —” Dani shakes her head, attempting to restart her thoughts. She’s a stuck clock. “You don't give compliments.”
“I just did.”
“I know,” says Dani, between a fit of laughter. A little breathless, a little unhinged. “I'm trying to figure out if I'm hallucinating from heat stroke.”
The corner of Lara’s mouth quirk up. Dani has never seen it do that before, and finds herself immediately wanting to see it again. “If you were hallucinating, I'd probably be more interesting.”
“You're plenty interesting,” is what bursts out of Dani, before her brain can catch up to her mouth and implement any kind of filter. It hangs in the air like confession, truth, something Dani hadn’t exactly been ready to admit. Her subconscious had other plans, clearly.
Lara stares at her, and Dani feels her face heat up. She’s an idiot. “I mean —” Dani scrambles, gesturing vaguely at Lara. “Your fighting style. Very interesting. Tactically. From a research perspective. I've been thinking about writing a paper on it. For academic purposes. Purely academic.”
“Riiiight,” Lara drawls, slowly, eyes sparkling with amusement. She knows exactly what Dani is doing, obviously, but she prays Lara lets her have this graceless exit anyway. “Tactically.”
“Extremely tactical.” Dani nods too many times. “The most tactical.”
“I should —” Lara flings her hand toward the town, already backing away. “Report to Sophia. About the cavern.”
“Right. Yes. Reporting.” Dani is still nodding like her head is on a spring. “Very important. Critical, even. Urgent.”
The sunset paints them both in shades of orange and gold, and Dani thinks, wildly, that if she were documenting this moment for historical record, she'd write about the way Lara looks right now; how the light catches in her hair, turning it copper and bronze, and utterly gorgeous.
Lara’s all too eager to agree, walking through the gates in haste, leaving Dani standing in the sand.
She follows Lara into town, eventually, after her face stops burning and her thoughts stop racing in circles like a dog chasing its own tail.
It takes some time.
The next two weeks pass in a blur of research.
Dani spends her days at Naboris, mapping the cavern system with increasingly sophisticated equipment, borrowed from the Gerudo engineers who seem to find her enthusiasm both charming and concerning. Lara spends her days at Dani's shoulder, a constant presence that Dani has stopped pretending to find annoying and started finding oddly essential, like she'll forget how to work without the sound of Lara's breathing nearby.
They fall into patterns.
Dani starts bringing extra flatbread from the market, and Lara stops saying she's already eaten. Lara starts explaining her tactical assessments out loud instead of silently judging threats. In exchange, Dani starts actually listening instead of dismissing them as paranoia.
They eat lunch sitting in the shadow of Naboris's leg, Dani rambling about energy signatures while Lara cleans her weapons with methodical precision, and somehow this becomes…normal.
Sophia watches them with knowing eyes, but says nothing at all, which is somehow worse than if she’d utter it out loud. At least then, Dani could deny, argue that there's nothing to see; they're just princess and knight, doing their respective jobs in close proximity.
But Sophia only smiles her small, secret smile and asks Dani how the work is going. She emphasizes work like it's a euphemism for something else entirely, and Dani thinks she hates Sophia, just a little bit.
“The Beast is stabilizing,” Dani tells her one evening, over dinner in Sophia's quarters. They've fallen into the habit of eating together twice a week. It’s comforting, and fills Dani with a warmth that makes those nights her favorite. “I think the cavern was causing resonance issues with the control systems. Now that we've mapped it, I can compensate for the structural instability.”
“Mm.” Sophia spears a piece of meat with her knife, looking thoughtful. “And how is Lara?”
“She's —” Dani stops, because how is Lara? Fine? Present? Existing in Dani's space so thoroughly, that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to categorize it as purely professional? “She's good. Helpful. Very vigilant.”
“I'm sure she is.” Sophia's smile widens. Teasing. Little Shit, Dani thinks, despairingly. “Very vigilant. About the Divine Beast specifically, or about other things?”
“I don't know what you're implying.”
“I'm not implying anything, little bird,” says Sophia, miffed. “I'm stating outright that the girl follows you around like you hung the moon and you look at her like you're trying to solve a particularly difficult equation.”
Dani's face heats. “That's — I don't — she's my appointed knight.”
“And I'm the Gerudo Champion, but that doesn't explain why you both get that look when you think the other isn't watching.”
“What look?”
Sophia gestures at her face with her knife, forming a quick, pensive frown. It reads as yearning. Dani’s shoulder curls in — from shame, from admission; she’s not entirely sure. “That one. It’s like saying, I don’t know, ‘I'm having feelings I don't have words for and it's terrifying' but without words. Very distinctive. Impossible to miss.”
Dani focuses very hard on her food, cutting her meat into smaller and smaller pieces. Until they're basically atoms. She bites the bullet. “I'm not having feelings. I'm having research insights. About Divine Beasts. Which are mechanical. And not people.”
“Of course,” Sophia agrees, airily, barely suppressing her laughter. Dani glares. “My mistake. Though for what it's worth, I think Lara is having research insights too. About princesses. Who are people. Specific people.”
“Can we talk about literally anything else?”
“We could talk about how you're going to handle this when you eventually have to return to the castle and face your father.”
That's somehow worse than talking about feelings. Dani’s been successful — for the most part — in avoiding thoughts about the castle, and her father. About the inevitable return to a life where she's not allowed to spend her days in the desert, with a girl who makes her feel like being herself is enough. She sets down her fork; her appetite’s disappeared into a hole larger than the cavern she’s been studying.
“I don't know,” she admits quietly. “He's going to want results. Proof that the power is awakening. And I still don't —” Dani stops, a familiar frustration rising in her throat. “I'm no closer than I was six months ago.”
Sophia reaches across the table, covering Dani's hand with hers. “You're closer than you think. Power doesn't always look like… power. Your ability to keep going is a power in itself.”
“That's not the power he wants.”
“Maybe not. But it's the power you have.” Sophia squeezes her hand once, then releases it. “And it's not nothing. Don't let him convince you it's nothing.”
Dani wants to believe her.
Wants to think that what she's building here — the research, the understanding, hell, her budding friendship with Lara — is worth gold, even if it doesn't come with a Goddess's blessing. But belief is hard when Dani’s spent her whole life being told she’s not enough; it’s even harder when the Goddess herself seems to agree.
She finishes dinner in silence, thanks Sophia, and escapes back to her room at the inn.
Lara’s in the hallway outside, diligently keeping watch, even though she wasn’t in her room, and they're in the safest town in Hyrule, and nothing is going to attack them except maybe Dani's own pointed, jabbed thoughts.
“You don't have to do that,” Dani tells her, nodding at Lara's post outside the door. “I'm not going to get assassinated in my sleep.”
“Probably not,” Lara agrees, but doesn't move.
“You should rest. Sleep. Do whatever it is you do when you're not watching me fail at everything.”
Lara frowns, uncomfortably shifting in place. “You're not failing.”
“I'm not succeeding either,” Dani shoots back, because she’s in a self-deprecating mood, and because everything Lara says is going in one ear and out the other.
“Success isn't binary.” Lara's hand twitches, and Dani’s eyes naturally fall to watch the movement. She’s holding something — a small wrapped package, roughly the size of Dani's palm. “Here.”
Dani takes it cautiously, turning it over in her hands. “What is this?”
“Your Sheikah Slate. The one you dropped.” Lara looks away, suddenly fascinated by the wall sconce. “I went back for it. After. One of the Gerudo engineers helped me retrieve it from the cavern.”
Dani stares at the package, something warm and alarming unfurling in her chest. “You — when did you do this?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
Lara shrugs, still not looking at her. “You needed it. For your research.”
“Lara.” Dani waits until Lara's eyes reluctantly meet hers. “Thank you.”
“It's just a slate.”
It isn’t, and they both know it. Dani says this much out loud. “It's not just a slate.” Dani holds the package against her chest. She’s being ridiculous, she knows, getting teary-eyed and emotional about a piece of equipment. The thing is — it's not about the equipment at all. All roads lead to Lara; to her climbing into an unstable cavern system to retrieve an item because Dani needed it. “It's — thank you.”
Lara nods once, jerky and sharp. “Get some sleep.”
“You too.”
“I will. Later.”
Dani crosses her arms. “Lara.”
“After I'm sure —” Lara stops, recalibrates. “Later.”
Dani’s half-ready to drag Lara into her room and make her sleep like a normal person, instead of maintaining this constant vigil, like the world will end if she closes her eyes for eight hours. But that would mean Lara being in her room… which is something she’s not ready to broach; it doesn’t matter anyway, because Lara's face has that stubborn set to it that means arguing is pointless, and Dani is too tired to fight battles she knows she'll lose.
“Good night,” Dani murmurs, slipping into her room.
Once inside, she unwraps the Slate carefully, running her fingers over the screen to check for damage. It's pristine, without a scratch. Not even a speck of sand. Dani wonders how long Lara spent cleaning it, restoring it to perfect condition.
There's a note tucked underneath, written in Lara's precise handwriting: The backup drive was intact. All your data is safe.
Dani sits on her bed and stares at the note until the words blur.
The morning brings news that Dani has been dreading since she arrived in Gerudo Town: her father wants her back at the castle.
The messenger is a Sheikah operative, which means the summons is urgent enough to bypass normal channels. He hands her the sealed letter with a professionally neutral expression that suggests he's been ordered not to react to whatever emotional breakdown the princess might have upon reading it.
Dani doesn't give him the satisfaction. She breaks the seal, reads the three terse sentences — Your presence is required at the castle. The Champions have been summoned for strategic planning. You will return immediately — and dismisses the messenger with a nod that she hopes looks regal instead of brittle.
She barely makes it back to her room before the panic sets in.
It's not the summons itself. She knew this was coming, knew she couldn't hide in the desert forever, playing archaeologist while the kingdom prepared for war. It's the timing of it all — right when she's begun figuring out how to exist in her own skin without wanting to crawl out of it, right when she's started to understand the quiet girl who keeps saving her.
Right when everything was starting to feel like maybe it could be okay.
Dani sits on the edge of her bed and stares at the letter until the ink starts to swim. Her father's handwriting is sharp, angular. Penmanship that suggests his mind had been filled with military campaigns while writing about his daughter. There's no How are you? or I hope you're well. Just orders, expectations, and the weight of duty pressed into paper and sealed with wax.
She should pack.
Should organize her notes, prepare her reports, and figure out what, exactly, she's going to tell him when he asks about her progress and she has to admit that the shrines still don't respond. Hey, sorry, dad, but the power won't come, and she's merely a girl pretending to be something she's not.
Instead, she sits there and lets herself fall apart.
When five minutes have passed, she wipes her face with her sleeve — dirty, covered in desert dust, because some things never change — and begins shoving clothes into her travel pack.
She's halfway through destroying her room when there's a knock at the door.
“Come in,” Dani calls without looking up.
Lara enters in silence. She most definitely knows something is wrong. She probably saw the messenger and figured out what the sealed letter meant; though, hell, knowing her father, Lara already has her own orders to escort Dani back to the castle and return to her post as the princess's shadow — orders to pretend the last two weeks didn't happen.
“We're leaving.” Dani doesn't look up from her packing. “Tomorrow at dawn. My father wants me back for some strategic planning meeting.” She grabs another shirt, rolls it into a bundle, and shoves it in the pack. “Which is ridiculous because what strategic value do I provide? I can tell them about cavern systems under Divine Beasts. I'm sure that'll win us the war.”
“Dani —”
“Don't,” she says, hand freezing mid-pack. She keeps her eyes down; looking into Lara’s eyes, right now, and finding something she might not like, is just too much for Dani. “Don't tell me it'll be okay. Don't tell me I'm more capable than I think. Don't —” Her voice cracks. “Just don’t.”
Lara's quiet for a long moment. Then: “I was going to ask if you wanted help packing.”
Dani laughs at that; it’s less a laugh of joy and more a laugh of utter misery. “Right. Yes. Help. That would be —” she sighs, gesturing at the chaos of her belongings that are strewn across the floor. “I don't know where anything is.”
It doesn’t matter. They begin anyway.
They pack together in silence.
Lara's methodical, like with everything, sorting Dani's research notes by date and subject, and rolling her clothes properly so they don't wrinkle, and making sure the fragile equipment is cushioned with fabric.
Lara’s honestly doing most of the work, while Dani awkwardly stands there and hands her things when asked, watching her move and trying not to think about how this is ending.
Because it is ending, isn't it?
Whatever this was — partnership, friendship — can't survive the castle. Her father’s expectations will crush it; that is, if the weight of prophecy and the reality that Lara is her appointed knight doesn’t do it first. The desert was a bubble, a temporary reprieve from real life. Now, that real life is calling them back, bursting their temporary peace with a sharp pop.
“I'm going to miss this,” Dani murmurs, surprising herself.
Lara pauses mid-fold. “The research?”
“Everything,” Dani admits, perching herself on the bed and pulling her knees to her chest. “The work, the town, the feeling like maybe I'm good at something even if it's not the thing I'm supposed to be good at.” She glances at Lara, who's still frozen in place and holding one of Dani's shirts. “I'm going to miss working with you.”
Something passes across Lara's face; too fast to name, but painful. So. At least she isn’t the only one hurt. It also confirms the truth — Lara agrees that things won’t be as they were in the desert when they return. “We'll still be working together.”
“It's not the same. At the castle, you'll be my guard again. I'll be the failing princess. We'll be —” Dani trails off, because she doesn't actually know what they'll be. She can hardly name what they are now, let alone what they'll become when they're back in their assigned roles. “Different.”
Lara sets down the shirt with deliberate care, moving to sit beside Dani on the bed. They aren’t touching, but it’s close enough that Dani can feel the warmth radiating from her. If either of them shifted slightly, their shoulders would brush.
“For what it's worth,” Lara begins, staring at her hands, “these have been the best two weeks since I pulled the sword.”
Dani's breath catches. “Really?”
“Really.”
“But you're literally destined to save the world. You have the Master Sword. The Goddess chose you,” Dani says, voice climbing with each sentence, disbelief packed in every utterance. “How is watching me poke at ruins better than any of that?”
Lara's quiet for so long that Dani thinks she won't answer. “Because when I'm with you, I'm not the hero. I'm just —” She pauses, fingers fidgeting with the bed’s fabric. “I'm just myself. And that's —” Another pause. “That's nice.”
It’s raw and honest in a way that Lara never is, and hangs between them. It’s simultaneously too much for this small room in a Gerudo inn and not enough for Dani’s greediness.
“I don't know how to do this,” Dani whispers. “Go back to how things were. Before.”
“Maybe we don't have to.”
Dani looks at her properly then, searching Lara's face for answers to questions she doesn't know how to ask. “What do you mean?”
Lara finally meets her eyes. Vulnerable — hope fighting against resignation. “Maybe things don't have to be like they were before. Maybe we can… I don't know. Figure it out.”
“Figure what out?”
“This.” Lara gestures between them, helpless and uncertain. “Whatever this is.”
Dani's heart flutters erratically, a rhythm that feels kind of like panic, excitement, and fear all tangled together. “You think there's a this?”
“I —” Lara looks away, jaw tight. “I don't know. Maybe. If you —” she cuts herself off, hands clenching into fists on her thighs. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”
“No.” Dani reaches out without thinking, covering one of Lara's fists with her hand. “Don't do that. Don't say something real and then take it back.”
“I'm not good at this.”
“At what?”
“Talking. Feeling. Any of it.” Lara's voice is barely above a whisper. “I spent five years learning how to fight, how to protect, how to fulfill a destiny I didn't ask for. Nobody taught me how to —” she stops to catch her breath. “How to tell someone that I think about them when I should be thinking about tactics. That I check the perimeter three times instead of twice because the thought of something happening to them makes me — nobody taught me that.”
Dani's throat closes up. Their hands are still touching; Lara’s pulse is hammering against Dani’s palm, but it merely matches the beat of her own thundering heart. “You're talking now,” she points out, weak.
“I know. I'm bad at it.”
“You're really not.” Dani squeezes her hand once, gentle, because… this is what courage looks like on Lara — not fighting monsters or pulling swords, but sitting on a bed and admitting that she has feelings she doesn't know what to do with. “For what it's worth, I think about you too. A lot. Probably more than is appropriate for someone who spent three months being awful to you.”
Lara's mouth twitches. Almost a smile. “You weren't that awful.”
“I called you —” Dani cuts herself off, because she’s pretty certain they’ve had this exact conversation before. “I was pretty terrible."
“You were scared. And alone. And under more pressure than anyone should be.” Lara turns her hand over, smushing their palms together. It's the most deliberate touch they've shared. Dani's skin feels electric. “I understood.”
“You shouldn't have had to.”
“Maybe not. But I did anyway.”
The last of it is a quick exchange, before Lara’s disappearing again:
“Dawn,” she confirms.
“Dawn,” Dani echoes.
Lara hesitates at the door, hand on the frame. “Dani?”
“Yeah?”
“These two weeks —” Lara pauses, searching for words. “Thank you. For seeing me.”
And then she's gone, door closing softly behind her, leaving Dani alone with her half-packed bags and a chest full of feelings she absolutely does not have time for.
Dani flops back on the bed and stares at the ceiling.
“Fuck,” she announces to no one in particular.
The ceiling, wisely, doesn't respond.
They leave at dawn, as planned.
Sophia sees them off at the north gate, pulling Dani into a crushing hug. “Come back soon,” she murmurs into Dani's hair. “And for Goddess's sake, talk to her.”
“I don't know what you're —”
“Yes, you do.” Sophia pulls back, hands on Dani's shoulders, fond and exasperated. "You're both idiots. Brave, capable idiots, sure, but idiots nonetheless."
“That's —” Dani starts, baffled, but Sophia's already turning to Lara, who's been standing at a respectful distance with both their horses and pretending she can't hear them.
“Take care of her,” Sophia tells Lara.
“Always,” Lara replies simply.
Sophia's smile widens.
She waves them off, and Dani tries not to look back as they ride out of the town gates. Fails spectacularly, because she's weak, sentimental, and already missing the only place that's felt like home in ten years.
Sophia's still there, her proud figure silhouetted against the morning sun, and — it’s painful. There’s this feeling in Dani’s chest; like she’s leaving somewhere she silently, unconsciously knows she belongs.
The ride back to the castle is going to take four days.
Four days of them and the road.
Dani makes it approximately two hours before the silence becomes unbearable.
“So,” she begins, guiding her horse alongside Lara's. “Strategic planning meeting.”
“Mm.”
“Do you know what it's about?”
“The Calamity, probably. Attack patterns, Divine Beast deployment, contingency plans.” Lara keeps her eyes on the horizon, scanning for threats that, in all honesty, probably aren't there. “Standard meeting.”
“Right. Standard. Nothing stressful about planning for an apocalypse.” Dani's voice drips with the kind of sarcasm that would make her etiquette tutors weep. “Just another Tuesday. Casual world-ending discussion over tea and biscuits.”
Lara glances at her, amusement flickering across her face. “When you put it that way —”
“It sounds absolutely terrifying?”
“I was going to say accurate.”
Dani laughs, and it feels good.
Normal.
Like maybe they can do this — exist together, outside the bubble of the desert, maintain whatever tentative thing they've built without it immediately crumbling under pressure.
They ride in silence for a while longer, but it’s companionable; none of the tension that used to fill the quietness arrives.
Dani finds herself watching Lara without meaning to. It’s easy to observe the way she sits on her saddle, the efficiency of her movements — like, say, how her hand consistently rests near her sword, even though they're on a well-traveled road with no visible threats.
Some things never change.
Lara will be checking perimeters and maintaining vigilance, even in her sleep. If she sleeps. Which Dani is increasingly convinced she doesn't.
“You can relax, you know,” Dani points out. “We're not going to get attacked between here and the next stable.”
“Probably not.”
“Probably?”
“The Yiga Clan has been more active lately.” Lara's eyes continue scanning their surroundings, never remaining on one spot for long. “They attacked a supply caravan last week. Killed three guards.”
Dani's stomach drops. “I didn't know that.”
“Your father didn't want you distracted from your research.”
Of course. Can't have the useless princess worrying about actual threats, when she should be focused on unlocking powers she clearly doesn't have. Dani grips her reins tighter, frustration bubbling up hot and acidic in her throat. “Does he tell you everything he doesn't tell me?”
“Most things.”
“That's —” Dani bites down on the rest of that sentence, because yelling at Lara over her father's decisions is exactly what she’s trying not to do anymore. She takes a breath. Lets it out slowly. Begins anew. “Sorry. That's not fair to you.”
“It's not fair to you either.”
“No,” Dani agrees quietly, the fight draining out of her. “It's not.”
They stop for lunch at a small clearing off the main road. Lara insists on checking the perimeter first — which takes fifteen minutes and involves her disappearing into the trees, while Dani sits with the horses and tries not to think about Yiga assassins — before finally settling down to eat.
Dani unwraps the food they'd packed that morning. It’s not special: flatbread, dried meat, some kind of fruit leather that Sophia insisted they take. She likes it anyway, because of how different it is from home, where every dish borders a political statement and every bite is monitored for proper etiquette.
She vastly prefers this. Food that's just food. Eating without performing.
“Can I ask you something?” Dani ventures around a mouthful of bread.
“Yes.”
“When did you —” she pauses, trying to figure out how to phrase this without sounding like a complete disaster. “When did you start seeing me differently? Not just as your assigned princess?” So. Relative fail in not sounding like a disaster.
Lara's quiet, chewing thoughtfully. She’s processing it, probably; Dani can tell from the careful expression making its way onto her face. It's such a Lara thing to do. Measure twice, cut once. Or in this case: think extensively, speak minimally.
Finally: “Do you remember the first shrine? In Tabantha?”
Dani winces. “When I screamed at you about having things easy?”
“That’s the one.” Lara's mouth quirks — not quite a smile, but close. “I was angry at first. Not at you, exactly. At the situation. At the unfairness of it all.” She picks at her bread, not meeting Dani's eyes. “But then I came back the next morning with supplies, and you were still there. Crying. Alone. And you looked so… small. Like the weight of everything was crushing you.”
Dani's throat tightens.
She remembers being shocked, when Lara appeared with food and water and no judgment.
It’d been the first time anyone had seen her fall apart and hadn't immediately tried to fix her, lecture her, or report back to her father about the princess's instability.
“I realized then that you weren't this entitled princess I'd built up in my head,” Lara continues, voice careful. “You were just you. Scared and trying and doing your best in an impossible situation.” She finally looks at Dani, hand swinging up to brush a crumb off her own face. “I started seeing you then. Really seeing you. Everything after that just —” she flounders, helplessly shrugging. “Made it worse. Better. I don't know.”
“Both,” Dani supplies. “It can be both.”
“Yeah.”
They finish eating in silence, but it's different now. Some stupid part of Dani wants to reach across the space between them, and take Lara's hand again like she’d done yesterday; thing is, they're in the open and exposed, which makes touching feels dangerous in a way it didn't in the safety of that inn.
So, instead, she offers: “Thank you. For telling me.”
“Thank you for asking.”
They pack up and keep riding.
The second night on the road, they make camp near Kara Kara Bazaar.
It's practical — close enough to civilization that Lara can justify the stop without admitting she's worried about Dani's exhaustion, far enough that Dani doesn't have to paste on her princess smile for curious merchants who might recognize her; not only recognize her, but since she’s traveling with minimal guard, might try and rob her. Lara would stop them in an instant, but it’s a serious annoyance she’d rather avoid.
Lara sets up their bedrolls with her usual efficiency, precise and control and oh-so robotic (something in Dani wants to make a quip, like, “Did they raise you in a factory?” but they’ve known each other for years and she knows, relatively, how Lara grew up, so she doesn’t think it’d land quite well), while Dani kneels in the sand and attempts to coax fire from a pile of twigs that looks more like a bird's nest than anything resembling kindling.
She's been at it for ten minutes.
It’s a cycle: the twigs smoke pathetically, hope bursts deep inside Dani, and, lo and behold, it stops. She’s never been much of a survival expert, but she’s determined.
Because, well, Dani isn’t useless, okay? And it’s not like Lara, of all people, would ever tell her that — it’s her own brain committing the crime. She needs to prove said brain, the one causing a ruckus up in her skull, wrong. Which is a tad embarrassing, in hindsight, but it’s a realization that comes too late.
So she adds more kindling, rearranges the structure, and tries again.
Nothing.
The fire-starting kit sits beside her knee, mocking her with its simplicity — flint, steel, tinder, instructions so basic a child could follow them. Except apparently Dani, who has read seven hundred books on seven hundred different subjects but somehow never thought that, hey, yeah, it might be a good idea to retain the practical knowledge of making fire exist.
It's stupid.
She's stupid.
The whole situation is stupid, and it’s made worse by the fact that she's acutely aware of Lara watching her fail yet another basic survival skill that literally everyone else in Hyrule seems to have mastered by age six.
The knight in shining armor comes to the princess’s rescue — as always, it seems, because she can’t have a single struggle without Lara effortlessly showing up and doing and proving how easy the task in question is. “Here.” Lara kneels beside her without asking; without judgment too, which Dani is eternally grateful for. It doesn’t erase any of the inferiority that sparks up.
She takes over with those steady hands that never seem to shake or hesitate or doubt themselves. It has Dani more jealous, more envious, then Lara’ll ever know.
Within minutes — actually, within one minute and forty-three seconds, because Dani's counting since distracting herself with watching Lara work is the only thing keeping her from screaming into the sand — there's a proper fire crackling between them. It’s warm, for one. Bright too, and it feels like it’s silently mocking Dani's incompetence with every flicker. Some angsty and ever-annoyed part of her wants to toss a blanket over it and sheathe the fire. She’d rather spend the night cold, then staring at a warmth that does nothing but poke fun at her flaws and failures.
“Thanks,” Dani mutters, not looking at her.
Lara settles on the opposite side of the fire, cross-legged, already reaching for her sword and ready to begin her nightly cleaning ritual.
Nightly cleaning ritual, for a sword. What a joke.
But she supposes it is The Master Sword. The sword that chose Lara, that basically said you're the one and handed her a destiny wrapped in divine metal and leather grip.
Meanwhile Dani, who’s supposed to somehow unlock these special inner-powers and ‘save the world’, can't even make fire.
The silence stretches; comfortable, thankfully, in the way silence has started becoming comfortable over the past few days, ever since — well. Ever since Gerudo Town. The desert. When Dani had decided to start saying things out loud, things she'd only ever thought in the privacy of her mind, and Lara had started responding with actual words instead of her previous stoic silence.
Dani watches the flames and tries to be as least self-deprecating as possible. Fails, entirely. Sealing power? No. Divine Beast mastery? Barely, and only in theory. Basic fire building? Apparently not. Combat? Laughable. Political maneuvering? Her father won't even let her sit in on full council meetings anymore, patting her head and privately explaining that she's simply “not ready,” — which is king-speak for “disappointingly useless daughter.”
She's a walking documentary on royal inadequacy, a comprehensive list of all the ways a person can fail to live up to their bloodline; it’d be funny, if it weren't so pathetic.
If it weren't so dangerous.
Because the Calamity is coming, and everyone knows it. The prophecy is clear as day, has been clear and known for nearly ten thousand years, and when it arrives, Hyrule's defense rests on Dani being able to do the one thing she's never managed: access her sealing power. For God's sake, it’s supposed to be her birthright. But, then again, it was supposed to wake up if she was a good little girl who prayed hard and wanted it desperately enough — it’s safe to say that whoever had told her that was completely, and totally, wrong.
Dani's prayed until her knees bled, until exhaustion made her pass out in shrines. It still refuses to acknowledge her existence.
“We should reach the bazaar by mid-morning,” Lara starts, breaking the silence. She's methodically cleaning the Master Sword with a cloth; starting from the bottom, scrub scrub scrub, before making her way up to the top. It’s the same routine every time. The cloth she’s using has probably, in all honesty, been washed and dried exactly (yes, on the money, she’d guarantee it) three times — Lara has routines for everything. “Restock supplies before the canyon crossing.”
“Mm,” is all Dani gives back.
Lara glances at her over the fire — her eyes look molten in the firelight, liquid gold instead of their usual careful brown. “You're quiet.”
“I'm thinking.”
There's ash smudged along Lara's jaw from earlier, and she hasn't bothered to wipe it off. Some irrational part of Dani urges her to. She ignores it, obviously. “About?”
About how in two more days they'll be at the castle, back to their duties, and this fragile, tentative thing between them will shatter under the weight of expectations laid out for both of them; simultaneously, just when they think it might survive, it’ll be crushed further by the disappointing reality that Dani is a princess who can't access her power and Lara is a hero who deserves better than babysitting a failure.
About how her father will look at her, and won’t say anything out loud, because communicating has never been his style — it’ll still, successfully, make her feel six inches tall and akin to a kid that needs to apologize for existing.
About how the Champions will gather around the strategy table and discuss battle formations and Divine Beast coordination and approaching doom, doom Dani is supposed to fix. She won’t be fixing anything; she’ll sit there, useless, the weakest link in Hyrule's defense who's only included in meetings out of obligation, picking at her nails and trying not to feel sorry for herself.
About how once they're back in the castle, Lara will return to being her appointed knight — ten paces behind, forever professionally distant. All the small moments of connection they've built in the desert reduced to nothing, because duty demands sacrifice in the form of personal feelings.
And, don’t get it twisted, Dani understands that. She does, really. She's been raised on duty her entire life, been told since she could walk that her wants and happiness don't matter. Only her purpose matters. Only the sealing power matters. Only saving Hyrule matters.
For the greater good.
She just.
She's just so tired.
“Nothing important,” Dani lies, pulling her knees to her chest.
Lara doesn't call her out on the flimsy lie — it makes it somehow worse than if she had. At least then, Dani would have something to argue about. Now, all she has is Lara’s acceptance. She doesn’t know or like dealing with that.
They eat dried meat and travel bread in silence, and Dani tries to memorize this. This, before she loses it forever. The firelight on Lara's face, making her features softer, less like carved marble and more breakably human. The sound of wind across sand, the ways a desert whispers. The feeling of being away, for a little while more, from everything that wants to break her into pieces and reshape her into something she's not.
Dani's almost asleep when Lara speaks again, voice quiet enough that Dani almost misses it, under all the wind.
“I'm glad you came to the desert.”
Dani opens her eyes. Lara's staring at the fire; neutral, which would, like, usually infuriate her, but Dani’s long accepted it. And, in all likelihood, it’s simply Lara feeling something she doesn't know how to express and-or admittedly doesn’t have the vocabulary for.
It’s brave. Dani admires it, even with the mask she’s put on. It's the same face she wore in Gerudo Town, when telling her that following Dani around made her feel human, rather than just the hero. It makes the noose around her neck, the one formed from thoughts of returning home, slacken the tiniest bit.
“Yeah?” says Dani, smaller than she'd like.
“Yes,” Lara confirms. When she says nothing more, Dani thinks that might be it — all Lara's capable of saying. Then: “It was good. The research. Working together.” A second pause arrives; this time, Dani knows Lara has more to say. Can see it from the way her jaw works, chewing on words she can't quite figure out how to spit out. “All of it.”
Dani swallows, fingers instinctively curling around her knees. “Past tense?”
“No,” Lara denies, quick, finally glancing at her, shoulders angled as if she’s bracing against a gust — one that only she can feel. “Present. Continuous. I don’t —” she stops, the rest tangling somewhere between her breath and her tongue; she huffs once, a sound more exasperation than air. “Words are hard.”
“You’re doing fine,” Dani says, quiet and certain.
Lara doesn’t say anything more, which is fine. They’ve had enough of spilling each other’s guts for one night.
They sleep on opposite sides of the fire. Dani, for her part, stays awake far longer than she should, watching the stars blink overhead and rolling the words around in her head. Present tense. The way Lara said the desert is good, not was. Like it could still exist for them after they leave. Like whatever this is between them doesn’t have to die the second they’re back at the castle.
The wanting hits her then, sharp and quiet.
There’s no other name for it; it’s just wanting. But, then again, Dani doesn’t really know what to do with that, so she lets it sit there, loose and awkward, like a bag she doesn’t know where to put down. It’ll disappear soon enough, when they’re back at the castle, and the air isn’t thin and filled with sand and fire-smoke, and Lara isn’t lying ten feet away breathing, making her think things she shouldn’t.
Dani presses her palm flat against her own stomach, as if that could keep everything bubbling in her contained, and waits for sleep to take her.
When she wakes sometime after midnight to pee — behind a cluster of rocks, because bathrooms in the desert are a fiction — she notices Lara’s bedroll. It’s shifted. Just a foot, maybe more, maybe less. The thing is, she’s now close enough that if Dani stretched out her arm, their hands might graze.
She doesn’t.
But she thinks about it.
Dani settles back down, nearer to the cooling fire than she remembers, and drifts off wondering about the space between almost and actually, how it can feel wide enough to get lost in and small enough to step across without warning.