Chapter Text
The sheets are warm and her chest visibly swells and falls in a familiar tempo when he rises from the bed quietly, so quietly. He puts on the socks that he always keeps on the floor next to the nightstand, ignores the fact that they need to be darned or disposed of altogether—and tiptoes his way towards the stairs. Descends carefully—step by slow step. The wooden panels do not creak underneath him. He’s glad for the years he spent honing this particular skill.
The Sword leans against the wall of the small space beneath the stairs, its splendorous violet almost pitch-black in the dark. He apologizes to it yet again before he picks it up. Takes his worn boots and baldric, and stealthily exits the house to armor up outside.
A breath of brisk air rushes into his lungs. An unabating longing stirs angrily in his chest.
He begins to walk.
There’s no aim in these three-in-the-morning strolls he’s been taking every night; there’s only the need to move, to use these limbs that do not know how to rest. Though it is never as aimless as he intends for it to be—because at the end, his feet find themselves trudging up the same nearby hill just outside the village until his eyes grow hot from remembrance.
He settles down on the grass, the early winter wind stinging his bare knuckles, his nose, his ears.
Tips up his head to the night sky, and keeps it that way until dark blue makes way for the dawn, and he’s sure that that familiar glow of scaly white, cyan, and gold is nowhere to be found.
In the morning, he splashes cold water on his face, hopes the dark crescents under his eyes don’t give him away, and helps her with her morning preparations.
“The kids are having an exam in mathematics today,” Zelda says, placing rolls upon rolls of parchment into her bag. “They’ve been in quite a bad mood because of it.”
“Can’t say I disagree,” Link replies. He longs to turn around and watch her, meet those forest-green eyes, but something inside him remains resolute to stay this way. He keeps his gaze on the simmering pot of potato soup in front of him. “I was more of a language kid myself.”
The holy bell toll of her laugh peals through the air. “I know you are. Your Gerudo never ceases to amaze me.”
His heart flutters. His fingers tighten around the ladle.
“But still, it’s an important subject to learn, so Symin and I decided last week that there’s no use in postponing the exam,” she continues. “Plus, they had six months of essentially no mathematics. It’s high time for them to learn things beyond multiplication and division.”
The ladle stops its circular motion; he exhales quietly. Breathes through the pang in his chest, because those six months should have never happened at all.
She should have been at home, her face buried in a book. She should have been at the Lab, arguing with Purah about the myriad of things they like to argue about. She should have been at the school until late at night, eyes glued upon the messy scrawls of her students, mulling over lesson plans—
Until he’d beg her to get some rest. They’d walk home underneath the grand canopy of the night sky, moonlight dusting the bridge of her nose. He’d take her to bed, then, and realize for the millionth time that moonlight and sunlight and every single thing that can illuminate are already inside her, in divine abundance. Her mouth would be overrun with it as he kisses her, as she calls his name.
Instead, her mouth was closed around a stone.
She still called his name, though it was a battle-cry, a final prayer.
The guilt grips onto his ribs and hangs on with all its might. He brings up a hand to his solar plexus and is surprised to find the skin intact, though another apology knocks against it.
I’m sorry I had failed you, he wants to say.
“You’re right,” is what he utters instead.
The soup is done; he pours some into a container and carefully places it in her bag. When she leaves, she strides up to him to land a quick kiss on his lips, though he thinks it’s more than he deserves. It translates into the curl of his hands at his sides—a restraint. A needed handcuff.
She tells him that she loves him. He doesn’t have it in him to not say it back.
It is surely more than he deserves.
Everyone thanks him, tells him that he’s done his job—and he knows this. He cleansed this realm from gloom, helped its people. With wrath the size of a thousand suns he descended upon that dark lair deep beneath the castle and fulfilled the task that had been given to him since the beginning of time.
She even said it herself—that first evening, when he had taken her to Akkala to their new home, away from prying eyes. You’ve brought me home, Link, oh Link, my love—
His hands were shaking as he kissed and held her as if she would shatter into infinite pieces made of golden light. It wouldn’t be the first time for her to do such a thing.
He had seen it, in the tears she’d left for him.
That night, he spoke very little. Only gave to her what he knew she deserved after all that she had sacrificed: a tether to the present, a homecoming thousands of years late. Helped her shed whatever sliver of evanescence and immortality that still clung to her body and made love to her.
But that was almost two months ago, and the world has carried on.
There’s a kingdom to continue to rebuild. Citizens to guide. Children to teach. Further research to be made. They leave no room for repose nor lamentations.
And with every effort to heal their beloved homeland, the fire in her eyes remains blazing.
It is his life’s mission to do anything for it to stay there.
So it matters not if his insides still wail in grief, in anger and fear—that she would fall from him again, that evil would rise up once more to tear the ground in two and take her away from him again. He’ll keep its maw closed together, keep his lips pressed and let them all fizzle behind gritted teeth to corrode—as he has always done from the day he first wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the Sword.
Whenever she’s away from home, he tries to keep himself busy and keep their provisions well-stocked for the winter. He stays perched up high in the trees, a bow and arrow in hand, and waits for an unfortunate deer to wander across his path. It takes hours and hours before it does happen—but he does not mind; he’s good at hunting, at keeping still and quiet.
Whatever he can’t hunt he buys from the various sellers in the village. She has developed a palate for cheese, now—so he ensures that they never run out of it. The cheese artisan Koyin thanks him endlessly for making up a huge chunk of the shop’s revenue and for bringing the Princess back. He does his best to pull the muscles in his face into a genial smile.
When the rest of the kingdom sends for the Princess’ presence, he follows her—for really, what other place is there for him to be than by her side?
The Castle Restoration Committee asks her to lend her powers to finish the last bits of renovation, and she—the benevolent, ever-selfless leader that she is—happily says yes. So they travel the distance, the route from Hateno to the Castle second nature at this point. The first snowfall arrives as they’re passing through Blatchery Plain, and the sun is already in hiding. There’s no choice but to camp there for the night.
In the tent, she drags her bedroll closer to his and lies next to him. There are words in her eyes and he knows not what they say but can approximate their essence. He feels them as she leans in to kiss his chapped lips, as she lays her head on his shoulder and splays her hand right above his heart—
The stinging warmth of her old grief.
He covers her hand with his own, pressing it further onto his breast—so that she can feel the life that thrums through him. That the reason it’s still beating at all is because she had saved him, more than a century ago, right in this wretched plain.
As her breath steadies, he removes his hand, slowly as not to wake her. Diligently tamps down the longing to keep on touching her, for he will not take more than what is deserved.
His body is perfectly still, but he does not sleep.
In the morning, when she wakes, the sun is already hanging high. There’s no time to do anything else but rush to be on their way again.
They make it to Castle Town a week later. Expectedly, everyone runs up to their Princess, eager to say hello, to speak to her at all. Zelda smiles as she always does, but years of staring at her has taught him how to read her with unfailing precision. She often rubs her hands flat against the sides of her thighs when she’s exhausted or nervous. She’s doing it now—as she’s led by some of Hudson’s men and the Sheikahs to the Castle’s main gate, listening to their various reports: Thankfully, the land has stabilized again since Your Highness reversed the floating grounds back into their original location. We have done all we can afterwards to fix the foundations—now we just require your power of time for the finishing touches.
Link remembers the first time—when he watched with storms packed into his chest as the stone hanging from her neck glowed bright and her hands rose in the air to mend every piece, rejoining them with the gold of her godhood. Today, he watches her do the same—verdant eyes all sharp and brows pinched in great concentration as she puts her birthplace to rights. The moat, the gatehouses, the docks. The barracks, the dining hall.
He’s been here before, he thinks coldly. With nothing but unrelenting faith and a weapon close to breaking, he chased her down every chamber and hallway. She ran away from him; he ran after her. Ran through puddles of gloom, boots nearly eaten from the black-red corruption. He cared not if it’d eat away at him, too. He had to reach her.
But at last, he ended up in the room where it all began, where he had first knelt before her and the blade of the knighting sword in her hand had dug into both his shoulders. His Princess, wrapped in royal blue and gold—
Replaced by a mere puppet. A lure to trap him, to torment, to kill.
It almost worked.
He almost knelt again, and offered his neck to her. His courage had run dry; she was gone. All he had were phantoms, a mirage of what once was. You will not live to see another sunrise, the puppet master said, and he wanted to laugh at his face.
For he had not lived since the earth gave out and swallowed her whole.
What an offense it would be then, if the Hero were to die right there in the Sanctum. She would be twice-doomed to roam around the sky, awaiting a pair of hands that would pull the fruit of her sacrifice out of her head—hands that would never come for he’d have committed the greatest transgression of failing her—
“Link?”
Her gentle voice catapults him back to the present.
Confusion mars her expression. Her hands are no longer held up high to reverse time, but the stone on her collarbone is still shining softly. Innocuous in its glow, as though it did not inflict an unforgivable violence upon her body thirty-thousand years ago.
Link clears his throat. “Sorry, what did you say?”
Green eyes are on him, searching. His mask has thinned from the years he’s spent with her, but apparently and thankfully not thin enough—as they stop inspecting him after a few seconds. “You know, this room that we’re standing in,” she says, arms gesturing around her. “What do you think?”
Unlike the ruined grand chamber he last set foot in, this Sanctum is restored to its pristine state—how she remembers it to be when she called the Castle her home, for better or worse.
The chandeliers hang up high again. Every banister and balustrade fixed. The tapestries and carpets look like they have been laundered. High up on the dais, a pair of thrones stand beneath the massive three triangles.
“Two?” he asks before he can assess what he should say.
Her gaze follows his line of sight. “Oh— yes. I suppose I…” she pauses, then lowers her voice as though she doesn’t want anyone else but him to hear her, “…I was recalling the memories of this room when Mother was still around—subconsciously. And, well. There used to be two thrones there.”
There’s a touch of melancholy on her face. It makes him ache.
But a smile slowly blossoms on her lips as she adds, “Besides, it’s quite convenient—now that I think about it.”
He blinks at her. “How do you mean?”
Her eyes dart about him before she replies, “It will take quite some time until such a thing happens, of course. But one day, every once in a while, I’m sure I would have to sit on it. And my hope is— well, I’d never force you to do anything you might not want—” she breathes a nervous laugh, “—but, I hope that one day you’d be next to me. Up there, on the other one.”
Air slowly rushes up his nostrils. The thought of course has crossed his mind a few times. The first one was a pipe dream conjured up by a lovelorn seventeen-year-old. The next time it emerged on his brain again, they were a century older and had been sharing the same bed for countless nights.
He didn’t mind it then. He loves her, loves this kingdom that has brought them together—and so he would do anything. Even if it required his head to be encircled by a crown, even if Prince Consort would formally precede his name. He’d endure the title and the thousand eyes and everything else that might come from such a position—happily, as long as he gets to do it all by her side. It’s why he had bought a ring a few weeks before their doomed descent.
That ring lies in the dark of his drawer at home now, in its nondescript wooden box, untouched for months and months. He thinks if he were to get down on one knee today, it would be to plead for her forgiveness.
But there’s so much hope carved into her countenance, and her smile is small but unwavering and so, so warm—
And he doesn’t want it to fall away from her face.
“Yeah.” Link feigns a smile of his own. “Yeah, I’ll be there with you.”
The days bleed into each other again. Snowfall comes and goes but the cold only continues to rage, asserts itself through the brick walls of their home and into his weary body. His right arm, though human again rather than Zonai, smarts more than ever. He knows not whether it’s from the low temperature or the recent past that still gnaws at the edges of his thoughts. He ponders if it’s better to be without memories at all like he once was or to be this way—butterflied at the foot of remembrance.
He tries not to let it show when she’s around. He showers in warm water, massages it as thoroughly as he can with his other hand in the privacy of the bathroom. When he’s finished, he puts on his long-sleeved turtleneck. Out of sight, out of mind—or at least he hopes.
The thick wool material is still wrapped around his frame as they lie in bed, awaiting for sleep to come claim them. Next to him, Zelda stretches her arms and yawns. Her flimsy worn tunic hugs her breasts. Whereas his skin is more scar than dermis at this point, hers is unblemished and unmarred—perfect. To everybody else, this is the state that she has always been in—but he can still recall the roughness of her scales, the bladelike sharpness of her talons. The recollection scratches at his conscience like sandpaper.
Her hair, however.
By its own volition, his hand reaches out and runs through her short tresses. Like strings of yolk through his fingers, like spun gold. It feels the same without fail, no matter whether dragon or woman. His lips tremble at the thought.
He retracts before his heart reaches its zenith and his restraint fails. Her eyelids are shut but he can see the littlest movements underneath thin skin.
“Good night, Link.” Her breath whips at him from across the pillow. “Sweet dreams.”
He’s glad that her eyes are closed, that she can’t see what his own might harbor.
“Sweet dreams, Zelda.”
A few hours later, when she is deep in her slumber and the streets outside bear no souls, he rises from the bed and does it all over again.
The Sword stirs gently in its scabbard on his back as he walks towards the same hill. The phantom movement does not land as a protest nor a rebuke—but a small reminder. Like that of a kind mother to her child.
I’m so sorry, he tells it. In his head, his own voice sounds weak. Give me more time, please. I’m not ready just yet.
An echo of purple warmth travels down his spine, a minor chord. He recognizes the question that it carries:
Why?
He doesn’t know, so he doesn’t answer it. But without the Sword, he’d have to account for another cavity inside him, for sure—and every hollow unfilled is just another place where his mind’s perils could flow. There’s already so much inside him that his skin feels fit to burst from it—anger and contrition and fear—and one missing piece is most likely all it takes for him to bowl over and come undone.
It stops stirring. His thoughts are enough of an answer for it can hear every bit of them.
There’s only a low hum vibrating on the base of his brain, its cadence feminine and ancient, lilting up and down until he recognizes the melody:
A lullaby.
He hasn’t cried since the moment he dove through the clouds and caught her in the sky. But as the spirit inside his faithful weapon sings and the music falls upon him like the comforting touch of a friend—his precarious dam cracks ever so slightly.
It allows for a few tears to fall from his eyes.
The next time he accompanies her on a journey, they trade the tough Hateno winter for a brief reprieve of heat in the desert. The way there is long and grueling, but she has stressed before that traveling via the Pad is only as a last resort.
I used to hate long journeys, she had told him. But now, I must try to see as much of our land as possible. Appreciate every inch of it. We have all the time in the world now.
He understood her—and still does—though that last sentence doesn’t ring quite the same in his mind as it did before she fell through time and was nowhere to be found. He believed her, believed the universe—that at last, they’re finally allowed a slice of peace, of rest. They had done their jobs and vanquished the Calamity, after all. But look at how that turned out.
He doesn’t object, however. The three weeks it takes to travel to Gerudo Town will allow them to make a few stops along the way—to reconvene with different villages and see how they’ve fared. There’s something beautiful in seeing the product of perseverance with his own eyes. Twice, this kingdom has seen the end of the world. Twice, they stubbornly refused to keel over and survived. The sight tugs at something inside him; he knows not what exactly, but it instills warmth.
By the time they reach the canyons that hug the desert, the air is considerably warmer. Their coats return into their traveling packs. The muscles in his right arm hurt a little less.
At an inn near Gerudo Desert Gateway, they swap their regular outfits with ones that are definitely more fitting for the desert. He puts on the voe getup since there’s no more need for the crossdressing subterfuge; Riju has made an exception for the man who has saved this realm twiceover.
Zelda, meanwhile, wears pieces that she’s bought at the bazaar a long time ago—which is the same vai clothes that he used to don, though hers is dark blue and without the veil. The bottom, instead of a sirwal, is a long black skirt with a slit on one side that reveals the entire length of her leg.
He wills himself not to stare too much.
Though doing so proves quite difficult; as they surf the dunes, pulled by the thick rope attached to their rental sand seals, he sees her riding ahead of him and watches the abundance of life that’s brimming throughout her body: her short hair blown back, the muscles of her arms and calves all tensed as she deftly navigates her way forward, her skirts flapping wildly in the wind. For a fleeting moment, the dark scurries away, hides. Chased away by the warmth beating down his bare back and the endless gold that fills his vision.
He does avert his gaze at some point. Staring at the sun for too long can be too much for any ordinary man, after all.
The Chief greets them at the entrance of the town, and wastes no time to embrace the Princess as soon as she steps off the riding shield. When it’s his turn, Link offers a hand for a shake—but Riju only rolls her eyes and hugs him, too, albeit more briefly.
Inside the town, remnants from the Upheaval have disappeared; the place is once more the oasis it used to be with its bustling streets, special architecture and waterworks. The eyes that press on him are quite new, however—this is his second time visiting without his feminine disguise, and the whispers in Gerudo are immediately understood to his ears:
That’s a whole man! In our town!
Yeah, the man.
Heroines, he’s as dashing as ever.
Careful, that’s the Princess of Hyrule’s lover you’re talking about.
But you can’t blame a girl for having eyes!
Oh of course not. Lucky woman, that Princess.
Most of it makes him want to knit his brows in confusion because what in Din’s name are these women talking about—but the rest makes him question things, if she is indeed lucky.
All he knows is what he would say back to those vais, if he were to open his mouth and say something:
That he’s the lucky one. Always has been, always will be.
Under the daylight, the Chief and the Princess spend the next few days discussing various strategies to make the desert a safer place, to rid it of its longtime tribe of masked enemies. They traverse the wide stretches of sand, descend into the depths, and take note of the areas that require the most surveillance. Though his limbs tire from seal-riding and walking, he ignores it; the sun proves itself to be some semblance of comfort, a pause from the unforgiving cold that surely has now covered the rest of the kingdom.
Deep below the surface, it isn’t half as bad as how it was when he was here last time—all alone and crawling his way forward through pitch black. But the lack of gloom and the illumination provided by the lightroots are not enough to stop his blood from rushing, from aching. His right arm smarts again. When she isn’t looking his way, he digs his fingers into the muscles and begs them to stop.
The realization kicks him right in.
Though the land may be purified, he is still miles away from it.
When the sun begins to set, they return to the warmth of the palace, away from the desert night’s chill. And during the last evening of their short residence, the townswomen do the second thing they’re renowned for other than fighting—
Throwing one hell of a party.
There’s not one corner in the town that isn’t filled with music. Almost every existing room is graced by many bodies—dancing, laughing, swaying. While he is far from being in a festive mood, he joins them; he can do very little when she’s asking him to come along, green eyes twinkling with a silent plea and excitement. They have been too busy, both of them—perhaps this night is earned. Goddess knows she has earned it.
Zelda makes her way through the throng, Link faithfully at her six o’clock. Though much shorter than the local women, the golden crown of her hair stands as a beacon among a sea of scarlet. He follows her. He’d follow her anywhere—even if their first stop is the bar, and something tells him drinking might not be a great idea. She asks for a glass of Noble Pursuit, and when the bartender eyes him, anticipating his order, he shrugs and caves in. Some liquid can probably do his parched throat some good.
“Just a pint of beer, please.”
“You gotta talk louder, voe,” the bartender half-yells at him.
“Beer, please,” he half-yells back, vocal cords almost protesting from disuse. He fishes out a few rupees from his front pocket, enough to pay for both their beverages, and slides them to the woman.
At his side, Zelda leans into his ear to speak. “Last time we were here, you immediately ordered a shot of flaming hydromelon,” she recalls. “You remember that one?”
He breathes a laugh—it sounds strange to him. “Yeah. It’s got fire on top, right?”
“Exactly, and you drank it without blowing out the flame!” She laughs. “Thank Goddess you don’t have a mustache. That would have been…”
“…Disastrous?” he finishes in her stead.
She purses her lips, as if in really deep thought. “I would say pyrolyzing.”
“Is that even a real word?”
“Well, there’s no way to know for sure since you don’t have a dictionary in hand,” she says. He can feel her breath; their faces are so close. It feels like a tempest through wilting tree leaves. “So I suppose you just have to trust me, huh?”
There’s a slight mischief in her smirk and the way she speaks to him—and it’s enough to make his chest hurt, to make him remember that indeed, the last time they were here, he ordered a shot of liqueur topped with flames, and her neck lacked that yellow stone, and his right arm didn’t ache all the time. They drank and danced and laughed. Wandered around until their feet ached, until a hidden alley bore witness to their love. Grief was still a steadfast company, but its presence was dulled by the promise of what lies ahead of them: a softer, gentler future. He didn’t know then how it would feel to lose her a second time.
But he knows now. And it’s a knowledge he’s afraid he’ll never be able to eradicate from himself.
He’s gone quiet for a bit and she has noticed it, but when her lips open in what he predicts is a question—are you alright?—the bartender finally serves their order.
Thank Gods.
They take their drinks in their hands. He stares into his glass, at the white foam that covers the top and watches it fizzle out into nothingness. He wishes his thoughts work in the same way.
“Alright,” Zelda’s voice rings, her own glass invading his periphery. He looks up to find her gaze on him, her emeralds made all the more godlike from the lowlight. “What shall we toast to?”
“I don’t know,” he answers softly—honestly. “You choose.”
“Well, then.” She raises her glass higher to punctuate her intention. He expects her to utter something ornate and lengthy, but what comes out is a heart-wrenchingly simple, “to us.”
He swallows. Clinks the glass to hers, the sound lost in the loud music and chatter.
When he echoes her, his tongue feels heavy.
“To us.”
The night progresses in a haze of lantern light, noise, and rhythm. The crowd becomes all the more rambunctious, fueled by the performing band and the bartenders. Though he has agreed to come along, he says no to dancing. The soreness in his right arm is unrelieved. His mind even more so.
His refusal to dance is met with a pout and ‘come on, really?’ at first, but he tells her that he’s quite content with just watching her dance. Eventually, she relents.
It’s not a lie. He does love to watch her dance. Loves the way her limbs move in unpracticed grace, loves the laughter that flows out of her mouth as one of the Gerudos holds by her hand to help her pirouette. Her skirt swishes and twirls with the motion, a storm of obsidian and nightsky—wine to his eyes. The multitude of jewelry encircling her body jangles along as she sways and sways, kissing her skin like golden teardrops.
The sight is a knife slice through the flesh of his longing. But he has always been good at bleeding and carrying on, hasn’t he.
And so he does. Endures the loud music and the shoulders that occasionally bump into him. The few of them that notice him, tall as they are, apologize and throw him a smile before returning to the sea of carousal. There’s barely a pint of beer in his stomach but he feels sick and unfortunately, it’s a feeling he’s more than acquainted with.
For he’s been here before—in another lifetime, in a ballroom filled with extravagant nobles, the standard navy blue, red, and white covering his body. Stationed with other men who sported the same colors but feeling foreign regardless. Acceptance slowly dawning on him that this was how it had always been since the day he was born, his soul scourged with a tumor that marked him as Hero. A mass inside him that no one else bore or could even begin to comprehend—not then, and not now.
Except for her.
But the war is over, and everybody has welcomed it—embraced it. It seems that she has, too. And if he’s still lost in it, then that is on him.
His awareness barely registers it when she graces his side again, skin glistening from sweat.
“Oh Gods, that was fun!” Zelda exclaims, pulling at the fabric of her top to cool off. “But I’m so, so beat.”
Almost out of reflex, he pulls out a small cloth that always resides readily in his pocket, and offers it to her. She takes it, dabs her forehead with it before returning it into his pocket herself, the press of her fingers felt by his hipbone through the thin layer of his pants.
“Time to go back?” he asks, voice somehow hoarse.
“I think so,” she replies. Her cheeks are flushed from the heat of the room. “I should say good night to Riju, but I’m sure she’s still somewhere in there.” She nods at the packed crowd behind her. “Or perhaps in a different building entirely…”
“We’ll see her tomorrow at breakfast, no?” His brows furrow.
“Yes, but it’s quite impolite to just leave the party just like that, isn’t it?” Zelda says, lips pressing into a thin line.
Ever the selfless Princess, he thinks with equal parts sweetness and bitterness. After what she has done for this land, she ought to be able to do as she pleases. Leave a party without saying any word, take a long vacation—whatever she wants. If he had any say, she’d never have to lift a finger in her life ever again.
“She’s a friend, I’m sure she’ll understand,” Link assures her. “You need some good sleep tonight. It’s a long journey back home tomorrow.”
A flicker of hesitance passes through her eyes—but then it disappears. “You’re right,” she says, smiles. “Oh, what would I do without you, Link?”
Despite the playfulness that laces her question, it’s enough of a pain-loaded blow because he knows the answer, has seen all of it with his own eyes. She’d stand in frigid waters with hands clasped beneath her chin until her bones froze over. She’d hold down a roaring demon hostage for one hundred years. She’d bend and break and doom her very self to immortality just so he could have another chance.
He grinds all that is unsaid with clenched teeth until he is fit enough to smile back at her, to hold it still on his face as he leads her through the crowd once more. A few well-meaning protests are thrown her way—‘leaving so soon, Princess?’ and ‘the party isn’t finished just yet!’—but he ignores them. Puts one palm up behind his back for her and she takes it. Holds onto his hand as she utters a few ‘good night’s and ‘I’m sorry, my stamina just isn’t as blessed as yours!’
As soon as they cross the threshold and the entrance door closes behind them, a long-awaited hush greets them. The chilly wind licks at his bare skin but he’s been sweating in a warm room all night long, so he doesn’t mind.
Her hand is still in his. Though he loathes to let it go, he slowly does—but she doesn’t do the same. Only tightens her hold and gently pulls at it, taking the reins from him in leading them back to the palace.
They walk at a leisurely pace. His heart has embedded itself into the minuscule space between their pressed palms.
“I’ve always loved this town,” Zelda says, eyes flitting about the view that surrounds them. “I feel like it has witnessed me at different points in time, with different people at my side. People who aren’t here anymore. It’s quite surreal to think about.”
A passing sadness glimmers across her countenance. It’s not hard to know what—or who—she’s thinking about.
He grips her hand harder, a small consolation.
She continues her soliloquy. “It’s even more surreal to realize that I have never been in this town without you—except for a couple of times. Otherwise, you’ve always been there with me,” she says, then laughs softly. “Even when I thought I had successfully left you outside.”
“…Sorry.”
“Oh, don’t give me that,” Zelda tsks. “You wore a disguise just to be able to protect me from afar. I’ll never forget that.”
“Me in vai’s clothing?”
“Yes.” She grins—then squeezes his hand, her voice turning unbearably tender. “And the fact that you saved my life for the first time—though that isn’t isolated to only this place,” she says. “You’ve done it so many times, in so many ways.”
Something inside him is loosening its seams, coaxed by the softness of her words. He fears what would crawl out of it, of him—so he stays silent. Keeps his focus on his feet as they carry the rest of him forward, and on her.
“It’s not only your vai disguise or the unfortunate attempt on my life, however,” Zelda says. “It’s also the flaming hydromelon shot—among a few other things.”
He shakes his head in mirth. “I’m never gonna live that down, huh?”
“Gods, no,” she laughs. “I was just utterly shocked. I thought, Hylia, this man just drank fire and thought it was the norm! But I quickly realized that said man also has eaten literal rock at some point in his life, so it shouldn’t have surprised me.”
With his free hand, Link scratches at his nape, bashful.
A beat, then her green eyes gleam as Zelda adds, “Then I also thought, why did seeing that do unspeakable things to me?”
Suddenly, she stops in her tracks—and he does, too.
It is then that Link realizes that they are not at the entrance of the palace, as they were never heading towards it in the first place. That they have turned corners and crossed streets after streets to find themselves before a dark, deserted alleyway in between two closed boutiques, its mouth half-hidden by stacks of wooden crates.
His exhale fails to exit his lungs. His diaphragm is frozen. There is only her, the knowledge of what they had done the last time they were here, and the wrath of a longing unfulfilled.
“I don’t know where I was going with it, but—” Zelda swallows audibly, “—I’m happy I get to be here with you again, Link. My life was always ever-changing, but you were always there with me. A constant among all the variables.” There’s a soft tremor in her utterance. “And there’s no other constant I’d rather have than you.”
A pause stretches on. His heart is in her hand, and in his stomach, and in his mouth. It trembles, beats a frenzied drum, bleeds from her words.
Still, he presses his lips shut—the last wall holding up the dam.
“You’re probably exhausted from the surveys, so we don’t have to…” a shy laugh leaves her as she eyes the spot where he had pressed her against the wall that last time, “…you know, we don’t have to. I suppose I just wanted to reminisce with you. Perhaps, in a strange way, I’ve missed being with you,” she says quietly. “Just the two of us, away from everybody else.”
He thinks there’s a morsel of restraint left within him, but then Zelda cups his face with her warm hands and leans in to kiss him—
And that morsel perishes into the night air and into her.
With his arms he pulls her close, so close, and opens his mouth for her. His throat looses a noise akin to pain—and is immediately lost upon her tongue. Hints of fruit and sugar linger on it and he chases that taste with his own tongue, his eyes squeezed shut, his fingers digging into the padding of her hips—it’s too much.
Too much, but he can’t stop himself, can’t seem to find the rope that has bound the hands of his soul for the past few months. Can only kiss her with fury and let her maneuver the both of them to hide behind the stacks of crates, her figure sandwiched between his and the wall. He’s kissed her a million times, knows the taste of her like he knows his own name, but he’s starved himself for too long and what flows out of him is a hunger that thunders as though it’s the very first time it’s being caressed.
Her sweet little breaths mottle the air as his lips roam to her chin, her jawline, her neck. The salt of her sweat there is a drug and self-discipline is never his strongest suit when it comes to her, so he takes, takes, and takes. Sucks at her skin, nibbles, licks. She whispers, “Link, I’ve missed you,” and he wants to cry.
He tries not to. Does his damndest not to leave a bruise there. Spares her from being stained with the liquid of his grief.
Ignoring his right arm that begins to ache again, he raises a hand to her carotid and searches for its pulse. It’s there—quick just like his, a beautiful rhythm that evinces her life force. It’s your duty to keep it like so, his own voice tells him—as if he doesn’t already know it, as if it didn’t already kill him that it had stopped doing so for thirty thousand years.
When his palm eventually, inevitably, finds itself on one of her breasts, she moans—the holiest of sounds. He covers her mouth with his own again to muffle it, so that only he may hear it. He wants to swallow it, too. Wishes for it to live inside him, for its echoes to find home within the sunless valleys that mark him as broken and incomplete.
“Please— oh, please,” she breathes, and the roughness that plea carries compels him to thumb at her nipple, already peaked beneath the fabric of her clothes. Gently, he pulls at it, his greed turning uglier with each whimper of his name. He pays all his attention to that—and not the dark that fights to roll in and take hold of him, that tells him that he absolutely does not deserve this.
But it’s a battle, because he sees everything again, indelible on the black of his eyelids—that damned sacred stone that currently lies in their traveling bag. Sees her falling, her hand outstretched as it reaches for him—the same hand that is now clawing into his shoulder blade. Sees her transform and soar into the heavens. Sees her tears raining down upon her kingdom.
Even so, he’s still kissing her, his hands wandering her curves, settling on her backside, his knuckles scratching the grainy wall behind them as he kneads her into him. With how paper-thin their clothes are, he can feel her—the mold of the lips between her legs pressing right against his desire.
“Fuck.” He rocks into her again. His syllables come out in pieces. “Fuck— Zelda…”
“I know.” She nods against his shoulder. His right arm continues to protest, his brain a storm, her voice a lighthouse. “Oh, just like that.”
Another kiss, and then another. Taking what he does not deserve because he can’t help it, he can’t stop. He doesn’t want to. “I shouldn’t… I shouldn’t—”
“Of course, you should,” she disagrees, stressing it with her tongue tracing the bow of his upper lip. “I’m all yours.”
She unlatches her fingers from his nape to take his right hand down, past the high slit of her skirt and to the epicenter of her love—
But at last, both his mind and body fail him. His right arm flinches out of its own accord, the muscles seizing up. He hisses in pain, grits his teeth in frustration—and unfortunately, Zelda notices everything.
When he opens his eyes again, he sees not an expression streaked with contentment but extreme concern.
His stomach drops to the ground.
“Goddess, Link,” she whispers. Her hands rest on his face again, the confidence they harbored before traded with carefulness, as though she’s touching fragile goods. She wouldn’t be wrong to think him as such. “Are you… are you alright?”
At his sides, his own hands are shaking. His breaths are all serrated.
“Y-yeah,” he forces the word out of him. “Yeah, I’m okay,” he says it once more for good measure.
His fabrication fails. She only shakes her head, her frown denoting the slightest hurt. “Then why are you crying, my love?”
A rebuttal is halfway up his throat—no, what are you talking about?—but the soft wind wisps its way into their little hideaway, and the sensation cools two vertical lines that span from the bottom of his eyes to his jawline. He brings one hand up, a thumb to press on his cheek—and feels moisture.
Link steps back, extricates himself from her hold. Months of fortifying his veneer—fractured from her touch. Helplessly, he gathers himself and paves over the cracks as best as he can. He must try.
“I don’t know, I—” he wipes away his tears, hoping there won’t be more on their way. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
Her brows pinch further. “Why would you be sorry?” She takes a step closer. “Link—you can tell me, whatever it is.”
He shrugs it off despite the pain—in his right arm, in his chest, his heart. It’s painful to deny her the truth, but revealing it would only compound that pain and inflict it upon her, too. It’s an affliction only he should bear. “It’s nothing, Zelda—”
“Of course, it isn’t nothing,” she replies. “Is it me? Have I done something wrong?”
“No.” He’s quick to correct her on that. She may be at the center of the hurricane he’s in, but it’s not her fault that the universe is always so keen to see her sacrifice herself. “Gods, no.”
“Then please tell me.” Her plea sounds broken, and it cuts right through him. “Just talk to me, Link, please—”
“I’m fine, Zelda,” he says, the edge of his tone sharp. Too sharp than he intended it to be.
At that, Zelda steps back. There’s no denying the hurt that overtakes her visage, now. The forest-green of her eyes is dimmed, clouded by her own tears.
The sight makes him long to unsheathe the Sword on his back and drive it into his heart.
“Gods, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—” curse his vocal cords for not working, curse him for everything else— “I just…”
“After all this time,” Zelda says quietly, though it does nothing to diminish the heartbreak in her voice. “After all that we have been through, and you still choose to keep things from me.”
“It’s nothing, I promise—”
She raises one hand in between them, a soft stop. “It’s alright,” she tells him. “If you really insist on keeping it all to yourself, I… I’ve no right to force you to do otherwise.”
Suddenly, in this town that has seen much of them, they are not one hundred and twenty-something but just sixteen, and in between them lies a river separating her wish to know him—and his fear of being known. With time, they built a bridge and crossed over to each other’s shore—acquainting, learning, loving. He laid himself bare on the bank and allowed her to pry, covering her fingers with the waters of his truths.
If she does that now, it won’t be water but grease, and he abhors to be the one to dirty her.
At his familiar silence, Zelda merely sighs. Walks around him to stand at the mouth of the alley, her figure outlined in amber by the street lanterns. Her gaze is sad.
“I… shall return to our room,” she says. “Good night, Link.”
And before he can say anything else—mend his ocean of mistakes, beg for her forgiveness for tonight and everything else that he has wreaked upon her—Zelda walks away.
He takes seven laps around the perimeter of the town. The Sword, this time, does not stir gently anymore; there’s reproach in its knell that rings and rings in his brain. He apologizes to it but knows it’s not the only one that deserves to hear it. He vows to fix it—someway, somehow.
When he has gathered enough courage to go back to their room, she’s already asleep, all of her completely hidden by the silk blanket except for the crown of her head. There’s a note lying on the study desk, her neat handwriting inked onto the surface:
Let’s be ready to leave by 9 AM. We will use the Pad to travel home. I’ll ask the stable in Gateway to send our steeds back to Hateno tomorrow.
It’s well after midnight now, and breakfast is served at seven, and if sleep is already so elusive to him before then it is surely impossible tonight, so he skips it entirely. Makes his way to the bathroom to fill the tub with heated water. The waterline touches his chin, the warmth doing nothing to dull the ache in his right arm. He stays in there until the water cools and dawn breaks.
In the morning, they don’t talk much. They bid their goodbyes to Riju over breakfast as planned, Zelda trying her best to feign an atmosphere of normality. She’s rubbing her palms against her thighs again, and his guilt burns into wildfires.
They change into their winter clothes afterwards. Traveling via the Pad requires them to be in extremely close proximity, and so they must. His front against hers, their fingers wrapped around the straps of their bags—and then it’s the familiar blue streams of teleportation magic, disintegrating them into atoms before they emerge on the other side, the shrine near their home looming behind them.
He spends the rest of the day alone, a feather duster in his hand, clearing the cobwebs that have accumulated in the corners of the ceiling. He takes out all their clothes from their traveling packs. His fingers tremble as he folds her Gerudo pieces, recalling the way they clung onto her body as he clung onto her for dear life. He stows them away in the drawer, though the thought remains with him, refuses to leave his mind.
He’s tending to their dinner when she deigns to bless him with her presence again. A thick pile of papers is in the crook of her arm, cucco scrawls all over them. Her nose is rose-tinted from the cold. He asks how her students are doing, and she answers him in a cordial manner.
They eat in silence.
She thumbs through her students’ homework, and he sifts through the pages of his mind—all of them in disarray. Quietly, he promises to put them in order, and to do it soon enough. Ever since she fell from him, nighttime has plagued his insides—and it is up to him to bring daylight upon himself.
He can only hope that she’ll still be there with him when the sun finally rises.
The sky is a canvas of dark blue spattered celestial white as he wanders outside again. Snow crunches underneath his steps, and he’s sniffling from the cold. But when he touches a finger to the pommel of the Sword, it feels like a hearth.
He doesn’t make his way up to Ebon Mountain to sit with his grief. Tonight, he lets it take residence in his boots and lead him to the outskirts of the village where the flora thrives. He remembers it like yesterday—when he picked some silent princesses and catapulted himself into the air with them in tow. Landed on her colossal spine and braided them into her mane.
They don’t blossom in the winter, but the ones that do will suffice. Camellias, cool safflinas, a few cornflowers—all gathered in his shivering hands. He’s no florist and he sure as Nayru doesn’t know what each species symbolizes, but their beauty definitely doesn’t go unnoticed. A certain gladness alights upon him softly, for he does not need to braid them into any dragon’s mane; they’ll find home in the old vase that has long sat on their dining table. He hopes it will bring a smile to her face when she sees them tomorrow.
Back at their front porch, he does his best to arrange the flowers into a humble bouquet so he doesn’t need to do it inside and potentially wake her. When it looks good enough—at least to the eyes of an amateur—he takes a deep breath and carefully unlocks and opens the front door.
The vase is there on the dining table.
There’s a freshly-lit candle atop the surface.
And Zelda, in her nightgown and no longer asleep, is sitting on the chair.
His heart stops. The bouquet nearly falls from his hand.
Slowly, he steps inside. Closes the door behind him, and faces the full wrath of her gaze.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
“I…” he swallows. “I couldn’t sleep, so I took a walk.”
She’s quiet for a while, leaving only the pounding of his heartbeat to be heard. Eventually, her greens wander south to the flowers in his hand.
“What’s that for?” She nods at them.
Another few steps towards her, full of hesitation. “It’s for you.”
The petals shake softly as he offers the bouquet to her—the fault of his wavering hand. Relief is etched into her small sigh, though he knows it’s only slight. Nothing is mended, not yet.
“I was so worried, I thought something had happened to you,” she says, scooting in her seat so that she fully faces him. She stares at his gift but does not take it. “But then I saw that you took your key, and the Sword, too—so I don’t know.” Her hands rub at her lap. “Maybe you just don’t wish to be around me that much after Gerudo Town.”
“Gods, Zelda.” The flowers continue to tremble with him. “That’s not true at all.”
“But how would I know?” she asks. Finally, she takes the flowers from him, their fingers grazing as she does so. The melancholy of her small smile is sharpened by the candlelight. She holds the bouquet close to her chest, holds his eyes captive with hers.
Says, “You won’t tell me.”
There is a pang in his chest at her statement, and pain in his right arm. There is a sacred stone in the drawer of their nightstand. There is a sword on his back—a sword that should have been returned to its rightful place a while ago. There is grief and guilt and anger and fear—and in between them and through them, love flows in eternal cascades, rushing towards the girl who sits in front of him.
He’s no good with words and his mind is far from being in order, but Goddess, he will come to her as he is right now and spill it all for her—even the parts that don’t yet make sense, the pieces that scare him.
It might scare her, too.
But she deserves to hear his truth, just like she did so long ago when they were so young, when his silence had been her torment.
He closes the distance between them.
And as men kneel before a sacred altar to pray, Link kneels before his.
“The truth is that I haven’t been able to sleep,” he starts. “Not in a while.”
She clutches the bouquet even tighter. Says nothing, but those emeralds are knifing him with attention.
The wound opens further.
“Every night I take these walks and stare at the sky, waiting for you to appear. But of course it never happens, because you’re here. You’re here with me now—I’ve brought you home. But I just—” his voice breaks, accepting the tears that now fall openly from his eyes, “—the fact that I had to bring you home in the first place, that I had let you fall…”
Chastisement rings inside him—look at you, can’t even finish your sentence—but stops when her face crumples in painful realization. She lays the bouquet on the table and the flowers fall out of their arrangement. Takes his hands and cradles them onto her lap.
“I told you that it was never your fault,” she reminds him. “That it was always meant to happen. That day went the way it did because I had to fall. I had to travel back in time to—”
“I know,” he interjects. “I know that.” Tightens his fingers around her wrist, anchors himself to the battering in her vein. “But it still doesn’t make it any less true. I did let you fall. And because of that, you had to sacrifice yourself.”
“Link…”
“You may not remember how it felt to transform, but I saw everything in the tear you left for me. Zelda, it was—” his breath hitches, “—it was violent, what you did to yourself. It broke me to see you go through that.”
It’s breaking him again to recall it.
He glances at her lap. Her nightgown has long been stained by his tears. Her eyes are two pools that overflow into rivulets down her face. They hang onto her chin before dripping to join his anguish that has dampened her dress.
“Link…” Zelda whispers. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sorry.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry for letting you fall. I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.” His voice is all fractured by his quiet sobs. “Thirty thousand years. You waited for thirty thousand years.”
“Link, I wasn’t myself during all of it,” she tries to reason with him. “I felt nothing of those years. You mustn’t think about it like that—”
“But I feel it,” he says. Pulls one hand away to point at the center of his chest. “I feel it right here.”
He doesn’t even know how that’s possible; he wasn’t alive for more than most of it. Six months were all it took him to ultimately bring her home—a short span, all things considered. But the yawning crater in his solar plexus says otherwise, where all the time she had spent alone in the sky dwells.
“I don’t know what to do,” he says. “Zelda, I don’t know what to do with this—” he pinches his eyes shut, frustration biting at him as he searches the words, “—this thing that lives inside me. I just know it’s ugly. And that’s why I have kept it from you,” he comes clean. “I don’t want it to touch you.”
And that’s just about the kernel of it, isn’t it—this beast that’s made up from his insides; the one that screams in a hundred different languages, fueling his rage at the cruelty that this lifetime has lashed upon her, stoking his shame for failing as her protector. A beast he has held in his ribcage until now.
She finds it in his blues as she stares and stares at them, awaiting her answer. He thinks this is it—it’s simply too much for her, too frightening—
But Zelda, his confessor, only bends down to lean into his ear.
“It’s a part of you, too,” she whispers. “And I love every part of you.”
His head turns ever so slightly to meet her eyes again. Finds nothing but endless warmth in them. The tip of her nose grazes his cheek, smearing a teardrop. Her breath is a breeze against his face.
“And if you’d let me, I want to touch it,” she continues. “I want to bear it with you.”
He chokes at her answer. “Zelda,” he murmurs, wanting to say more—thank her—but the words would not arrive. He resorts to leaning his forehead on hers, hoping they would be transmitted and understood through touch, whatever they may be. “Oh, Zelda…”
In the fullness of his truth, Link finally lets go of Zelda’s hands to wrap his arms around her waist, his face buried in her lap, where he quietly cries a lake. She rakes a hand through his tresses, the other on his nape, her lips puckered upon the whorl of his hair. In her embrace, he falls and falls apart but is held together—as loose stems of flowers are held by the clutch of a hand, at the mercy of their picker.
He sobs his soul to her, every jagged shard of it crystallizing into sorry after sorry—for his failures and his reticence and everything else. Steadfastly, she utters her mantra—‘you have nothing to be sorry for’—and doesn’t stop peppering kisses all over his skull. They’re interspersed by her own apologies. It tugs and pulls at his love, painful.
“I’m so sorry that you had to grieve me, Link.”
His fingers dig into her back. He shakes his head frantically, the movement almost awkward between her pressed thighs. Not your fault.
“I’ve been so busy with everything else ever since I came back. So much that I’ve failed to truly look at you.” She exhales into his hair, his scalp streaked from her own tears. “To see that you’ve been suffering all this time. I’m sorry for that, too.”
“I didn’t make it any easier for you,” he admits. “I was hiding.”
“Still.” Her fingers twirl in his hair. “It’s made me realize something. Something I should have known since the day I came back to you.”
A particular lilt in her voice lures him to look up. He places both hands on either side of her chair and straightens his back, locking eyes with her. Hers are red, and he has no doubt that his appear the same.
He asks, “What is it?”
“Hyrule. While it needs a lot of mending and reparation, it can stand on its own feet for a few more months,” she says. “I should have prioritized the one thing that matters the most to me, above all else.”
She’s looking at him like he already knows the answer—but he doesn’t. “Which is…?”
Her soft hands frame his face again. Her smile makes his heart coil into itself.
“You, Link,” she tells him. “We should have taken some time to rest after everything,” she says. “Be together, just the two of us.”
More tears, shed by him. They can’t seem to stop. The strings that have bound him together all this time are loose now. Through the cracks, light begins to pour—a guidance to traverse the vast expanse inside him.
No more pitch-black, all alone. Her company is certain.
“Zelda,” Link breathes, “I don’t deserve you.”
She kisses him, soft and slow. Draws back and murmurs against his lips, “My love, you know that’s nonsense.”
An itch of remorse is still there, scratching at his throat, urging him to correct her. Yet somehow, in the haven of her auspicious gaze, it is subdued into soundlessness.
The taste lingers on his tongue nevertheless. He knows it’ll live there for a while.
But for the first time since she was torn away from him, he begins to believe that there will come a day when it won’t anymore.
The candle is halfway down to its brass holder. The flowers are finally in the vase, arranged neatly. The lower part of her nightgown is long ruined by his tears, which did not stop streaming, not for a while.
When he stands up again, his knees almost give out from bearing into the wooden floor for what felt like hours. She grabs his hands to steady him, and he allows himself to lean into them—a small fraction of his weight sustained by her.
He expects her to let go, return upstairs, and try to sleep again—but the exact opposite is proposed.
“You’re not sleepy, are you?” Zelda asks.
Exhausted? Yes. But he knows better than to bet on sleeping tonight. Perhaps it’ll come tomorrow when these wounds begin to scab and his entire being ceases to feel like a bundle of exposed nerves.
“Not really,” Link replies.
She inclines her head. “Alright.” Walks to the spot next to the door where their winter coats hang. Dons it over her nightgown.
“Zelda…?”
Body bent, sliding her boots on, lacing them tight. “I want to take you someplace,” she says, smiling. “If you don’t mind, that is.”
Wherever she goes, he goes—always. “‘Course.”
She blows at the candle’s tiny flame, and darkness falls over their home. Then cool-toned light emits from her hand—the Pad’s screen displaying the map of the land. Her eyes are evergreen as they gaze into his. You know what to do, they say.
Link steps forward. Pulls her into his arms, inhales a lungful of her.
Behind his back, her nail clacks against the screen—and he feels it again: that slightly nauseating sensation of being whisked away from one place to another. He closes his eyes. The last thing he feels is a peck on his cheek.
And then—
Wind. Cold wind. The scent of earth and late-night frost, garnished by her perfume that still sticks to the underside of her jaw. Only when she withdraws from him does he open his eyes again.
Three paces in front of him, Zelda stands, her cheeks flushed, the Pad clutched in front of her. And past her is a set of stairs he arranged himself months ago, leading down from the cliff to the backyard of their second home.
Akkala.
The cognizance must have dawned upon his expression, because she smiles and begins to descend the stairs.
He follows. The past flashes through his mind with each step, of an arm that wasn’t his, attached to his shoulder, teeming with power. Using that power to build something, anything—after watching the ground break underneath him. Her name like a bell in his brain as he drew the floor plan, planning each room in a way that he knew she’d like. Telling himself that she would one day see this building with her own eyes, for even the smallest bit of doubt on that matter meant he’d have consigned himself to failure.
She did see it. That night four months ago. The ancient dress was still wrapped around her as she marveled at the front door, their names permanently carved into a wooden plank. She stepped inside, eyes on everything like a blind woman who had just regained the power of sight. Tiptoeing her way up the stairs, he at her tail, till the bed greeted them. She broke down into tears, and he held her together. Held her clothes up to help her undress, held her thighs open as she begged him to enter her.
Tonight, Zelda does not tiptoe. There is confidence in her gait, in the way she unlocks the front door and ushers him to come in and take off their coats and boots. A flip of the switch on the wall—and light illuminates the interiors.
Back in only her nightgown, she assists him in undoing the belts of his baldric. He wants to protest but can’t find it within himself to do so. A great mass is lifted off his back, and he only realizes that it’s the Sword when she appears in his vision with it, her hands wrapped around the hilt.
His eyes pool again, the image unshakable from his mind—the Sword to her chest, the whites of her eyes turning violet—but he wills himself not to look away. There is no ancient dress and there is no sacred stone, no grime dirtying her beautiful face. It’s just her—her eyelids slightly swollen from crying, her nightgown crumpled from his pawing earlier on—laying a sacred weapon on the sofa and patting it like a mother putting her child to sleep. A woman, forever divine but alive and breathing, all soft skin and white silk and warmth.
Remember this, he tells himself. Remember her this way.
Wordlessly, they step toward each other, barefoot on the wooden floor. Closer and closer until they’re chest to chest, arms wrapped around one another.
His heartbeat pummels his chest. Aches to burrow itself into her intercostals.
“How dare you think you don’t deserve me,” she utters onto his lips, a slice of righteous indignation lodged into so much love, “when you have saved me over and over again.”
Calloused hands curl into her back.
“You built this house all by yourself and then you brought me home,” she says. “You deserve more than just me. You deserve everything.”
Tears fall again. He can’t tell if it’s his or hers, or both. He supposes it doesn’t matter.
“The thing that’s inside you,” one of her hands moves to splay on his chest, “it may be a lot of… different things, but I think it’s all love. Love that you thought would have nowhere to go because I wasn’t there with you.”
He’s half of a mind to kneel before her again at her clairvoyance—of his soul and its plight. Something undefinable to him for the longest time, defined by her in a mere hour.
“But I’m here now, so you can let it all go,” she tells him. “With me.”
The last unbroken seam inside him is barely holding on. Within its precarious brace, his immoderate love pounds like a second heart on the brink of eruption, raging to flood her with its blood.
“Zelda.” The breath of her name, his final vestige of restraint.
“Yes, Link.” She nods, frenetic. “Please.”
Her plea does him in. Cuts the string clean, cracks his chest open—
Opens him to her, and her to him.
The kiss in the alleyway in Gerudo Town was furious—but it is nothing like the kiss they share now: fury multiplied by infinite, full of teeth, longing at its acme. He kisses her like she would fall from him again tomorrow morning. Gathers all of her into his arms as though he just caught her once more in the sky. Devours her loud exhales to breathe life back into him, the substantiation of her mortality so needed, so loved by his senses. He’ll never let her go ever again.
Zelda does not let go, either. Her own desperation governs her every move. She pulls and pulls at his limbs, his clothes, striving to lead them to the stairs. He’d take her here right now—against the wall or on the dining table or on the hardwood floor—but it’s the bed she’s aiming for, and so he will give it to her. He sweeps her off her feet and carries her with him, just as he did that golden afternoon when he carried her out of the pond, his salvation balanced between two battle-ridden arms.
He lays her on their mattress gently despite his ardor. Peels each fabric off of her with shaking hands until there’s nothing left. Steps back to drink up the scene in front of him—his Princess sitting on the edge of their bed, her chest rising and falling from life, bathing in the moonlight that streams from the window.
The viridian dagger of her gaze tears through him. She opens her thighs wide in holy offering.
“Don’t hold back,” Zelda says. “Let me feel all of it.”
Her adjuration is uttered with such tenderness, yet there is nothing tender about what it exacts unto him.
With haste, he sheds his own clothes, her eyes and hands all over him, helping him undress, unlacing his pants. They join her nightgown and underwear on the floor, a pile of wrappings no longer needed by their wearers who want nothing else but to bare themselves to one another. His truth is plainly scrawled all over him and openly discerned by her—from every visible scar to the bobbing in his throat to the blood that gathers below his abdomen, full and hard.
She scoots backwards on the mattress, a siren call of a movement.
He heeds it. Climbs the length of her body, pushes her down and down until she’s wholly spread on the surface, pink blush upon white cotton. That violent, urgent thing thrums inside him as his fingers traverse her topography, from her jugular to her collarbone to the rosy peaks that accentuate her breasts. Beneath the intemperance of his hands, he feels no scales; she is as soft as she always was, supple and vulnerable, his to protect forever.
The sureness of her being draws out more tears from him. Leaves thin rivers upon her chest.
His name rings in her throat, a noise between a rasp and a moan. He returns his mouth to hers, kissing her into the sheets, prying her lips open with his tongue as his right hand skirts lower to consecrate itself with her dew.
There’s already so much of it—that her thighs are damp from it, that sliding two fingers into her poses no obstacle at all. He revels in it. Savors her gasps that are exhaled straight into his throat, the proof of her existence his oxygen. His fingers curl inside her; she cries out his name, begs for another finger. Fulfilling her wish comes as naturally as breathing.
His hand is ceaseless, zealous in its duty, veins and muscles buzzing in relief as her body writhes, her hips undulating to meet his every pump. And when he feels her veer towards the edge, he whispers his own plea onto the skin beneath her ear, his need plain and simple.
“Let me hear you. Please.”
She lets him.
Half-sobbing and half-screaming, Zelda breaks into tremors, her insides pulsing and tightening around his digits in finality. Even then, he does not stop—keeps her chest vibrating with her voice, its resonance clearing the cobwebs off his mind. Keeps her singing until her seam weeps in small trickles, coating his hand.
Her legs spasm around him, so lost in the pleasure he’s given her. He almost comes from that alone.
He pulls his fingers out of her and she pulls him in to kiss him again, unfocused, still trembling. With no preamble, a warm hand wraps around his length.
“Fuck,” he pants into her mouth. “Zelda—”
“More,” she murmurs, slowly working him up and down. “Let me feel more.”
His hunger, ever wrathful, agrees with her.
Somehow, driven by the same string of devoutness that surely binds them both, they move in opposing unison; he extricates himself from her and plants his knees onto the mattress while she flips over and gets on all fours. Link watches with trembling lips as Zelda lowers her torso, her back defining itself into an arch, her hair a golden mess against tousled linen.
The godly sight makes him want to burst out of the limit of his bones.
He scoots closer to her, holds his length in his hand until it meets her folds—still so wet and throbbing from earlier. She gasps as he drags himself between her pink lips, the head firm against her opening.
“I love you,” he chokes out of the blue. She’s here—with him. So long as he lives, he will never let that fact be changed again.
“I love you, too,” she echoes him, her voice muffled from the pillow beneath her face. Even without her eyes on him, she still sees right through him. “I’m right here.”
Hands on her hips, squeezing, pulling her to him. “Yes,” he breathes. “Yes, you are.”
And then it’s her slick warmth enveloping him in one swift motion, returning him to her at last.
His groan is almost as loud as her cry.
It’s slow and gentle for a fleeting moment, and then love rages and kindles, burns him—and it impels him to burn her with it, too.
She welcomes it, her rapture so palpable in her voice, her whimpers fractured with each push, his pace unrelenting. Her arms stretch out to fist at the pillows, fervent yes yes yes prayed into the sheets. It burns any hesitation left within him, spurring his hands to claw into her, feeling her realness for himself. They wander shamelessly upon the planes of her back, rebranding the familiar terrain onto his memory. The pad of his thumb trails the extent of her spine, the ridges of it equidistant and human—no sharpness, no sky-colored crystals that used to cut him whenever he would longingly caress them. There is only skin, of flesh that gives under his touch.
Tears hang from his lashes yet again. When he blinks, they fall onto the dimples of her lower back.
“You’re home,” Link sobs. He feels stupid; she’s been home for months. But the reality is still crashing over him in wild waves. “Zelda, my Zelda—”
“Yes,” she gasps, her body bent and warm and open around him. “I-I’m right here, Link—don’t s-stop.”
He doesn’t stop, only continues to give it to her—and oh, does she take it. Takes his fire and devotion and longing, accepts his deranged yearning to merge with her and returns it to him twofold. It compounds and compounds, overflowing into him and into her until they become cornucopia itself—their love in transcendental abundance.
As a man parched, he drinks it all. Bends down to wrap his arms around her ribs, showering kisses onto her quivering frame. One hand slips to her breast, squeezing; the other roves south to her stomach, and even further south—his fingers arriving at the small swell of her desire. They stroke and rub in circles, her cries turning louder, his rhythm inside her sure and brutal.
It doesn’t hit him that he’s put almost all of his weight on her until he feels the sheets against his knuckles. She’s nearly prone underneath him, her back flush against his front—pressed between the mattress and his passional repetition like a flower pressed between the pages of a book: her body his to preserve, her petals his to tend.
“I want you to come again,” he says into her ear. “I’m not gonna stop, not until you want me to.”
She clenches around him at that, a microcosm of heaven. “Then keep— giving it to me…”
By the Goddess, he will—and he does. He gives all that he has to her—it’s always been hers anyway—and fucks her so deep and full that everything else falls away from his awareness and all his world is just her, her, her. In and out, constant and unfailing, tight and wet and so warm—and then the noisy creaking of the bed is drowned out by her wailing as all of her seizes and she shatters under and around him, a burst of love streaming out of her again and onto his eager hand, the purest form of blessing he could ever receive.
And as he has vowed, he gives some more to her, no promises left broken—never again. With the newfound strength she’s breathed into him in plenty, he turns them both over until her shaking body is draped on top of him, his back propped by the headboard, her knees up and folded on either side of him. His length is still inside her, beginning to move again. She nods and nods her head, her pleas for more near-breathless but vehement—and he fucks her through that, too.
Open-mouthed and slick with spit, they kiss like there’s no tomorrow though there is a tomorrow, there are so many—he realizes this now. But the knowledge doesn’t weaken the grip of his fingers on her waist, doesn’t lessen the vigor with which his hips drive up into her. One of her hands skirts low, above where they’re joined, chasing her peak again—and the sight punches his heart.
They move together through this strange confluence of profound ache and profound relief, their eyes glued upon their lovemaking until it proves too much to do so and they can only close them, only feel this universe that they have weaved for themselves—a second homecoming.
She is home.
It is that thought that brings him to a breaking point, sobbing into her skin as he falls apart, tears flowing out of him from two ends, smeared onto her shoulder and filling her insides with ropes of warmth—all of it sprung out from love, a love fulfilled. Still, he doesn’t stop, keeps thrusting up into her in shallow strokes until it’s dripping out of her—oh Link fuck yes I’m close I’m so close—until she tightens and shudders and comes undone.
Breaths slowing. Their limbs trembling, spent. The sheets are stained.
It only takes a few moments before they’re stained some more.
When day breaks over the horizon, sunlight leaking through the curtains—Zelda is long asleep.
And in her arms, Link, too, is sleeping.
In the midst of winter, they hide from the rest of the world.
Well, not completely—she still teaches her students three days of the week, but she does not return to their little house in the village. He waits for her by the shrine near their second home, breathing in the salty air blowing landward from Malin Bay until she materializes on the platform. He greets her with a kiss, and hand in hand, they walk to their front porch and into the warmth of their living room. He asks her what she wants for dinner, and she pulls out a wedge of cheese from her bag—freshly bought after her shift at the school. Cheesy beef bowl it is.
The cold is blessedly not as intense as it is in Hateno, what with Death Mountain’s proximity to Akkala. His right arm still smarts, though not as often. Begrudgingly, he tells her about it, for he intends to never hide from her again—but old habits do die hard. She draws up a warm bath and orders him to get in it, which he obeys. By the tub, she massages his arm, firm thumbs working the knots—until she pouts and decides it’s too much of a hassle to do it this way, so she undresses and joins him in the steaming water. It is not just his right arm that she massages.
Sleep visits him more and more, but when he awakes in the middle of the night, panting underneath the blankets and drenched in sweat, he doesn’t wander outside—not anymore. He pulls her closer to him, listens to her soft snoring, and breathes in her scent. Fresh soap, lavender, and something indescribable that can only be named as her. Sometimes, she doesn’t wake up from it. Sometimes, she does—and sleepily murmurs sweet nothings into his ear, affirming her being into his brain. Sometimes, she does—and climbs atop him, works him into wakefulness, until they’re both exhausted and sleep visits them once more.
They spend their time touching one another—a lot. With no one else around to disturb them, they seek healing this way. He always thought that he was the one who needed her the most, but he knows now that he’s a fool for thinking so even after all these years. As her love is a perfect mirror of his, her longing is, too. It’s always there, an ache in the base of the soul, a sting in the heart—exacerbated by the weight of their heavy past, only alleviated when they make love. There’s nothing else to do but make so much of it.
By the advent of spring, her hair has grown to her collarbone. When he realizes this, he breaks into tears. Surprised, she hugs him and asks why, but the real reason eludes him. He resorts to telling her the truth as it is formed within his mind.
“I’m just happy,” he sniffles, “that your hair has grown longer.”
Her arms tighten around him. “It’ll be even longer as time goes on.”
She is right; when summer finally comes to wash the land in warmth and light, her flaxen strands have begun to reach her breasts. They stick on the skin of her neck as they sit by the pond near their home, both of them sweating even under the shelter of trees. To cool off, they take off their shoes and dip their feet into the water. Her floral-patterned dress clings to her figure as she bites down on a ripe strawberry, red juice running down her knuckles.
Link takes the view in and in, a mental photograph for his mind to lovingly consume among all the million photographs he has taken of her before.
“You know, I’ve noticed something,” Zelda starts.
“Yeah?”
“You haven’t brought the Sword out with you in a while,” she says, offering another strawberry into his palm. He takes it. “I think for more than a month now.”
“Huh.” His brows perk up. “I guess you’re right.”
It’s not like he’s been traveling outside with her with no means of protecting her at all; he still has his trusty hunting knife in his belt pocket, which in the hands of a man like him should be deadly enough. And monsters around the area are fewer and farther between these days, so bringing a real weapon hasn’t truly crossed his mind.
At his silence, she merely smiles in understanding.
“Take your time to think about it,” she says. “But I think… I think you’re ready.”
There’s an unspoken pride glimmering in her eyes, laced with the same kindness and patience she’s given him all these past months as he does his best to put himself back together—and even before then, when they were just children in another century and she was the only one in this whole world who could ever understand him. And surely, surely—
Even much, much before, with different confines around their souls, different voices—but still the same spirit, the same blood. Throwing their myriad bodies against the currents of this shared curse until the universe deems them worthy enough of peace and rest. It’s ruthlessly cruel, but if such a cruelty is a prerequisite to a love as cosmically great as this—
He’ll never change a thing.
He chucks the strawberry into the pond. Her head turns to him, frowning comically in confusion.
“Link, what are y—”
With no warning, he surges up to her and wraps her in a crushing embrace. There’s a gasp of shock, but then she immediately melts into it—her arms winding around him in almost equal strength. He kisses her into the earth, tastes the strawberry he’s tossed away on her tongue. His body canopies hers, her hair fanning out in a silken halo, splayed upon the grass of the land they’ve bled so much for.
“I love you so much,” he utters into her mouth. “That’s what.”
Zelda laughs at the delay of his answer, but her eyes are welling up nonetheless. “I love you so much, too.”
Resolution burgeons in him: in a few weeks, they’ll make it to the sacred forest that lies in the heart of the kingdom. The Sword will be on his back for the last time, and that nondescript wooden box will lie in his pocket. With her, he’ll step up to the pedestal, and mark the beginning of the rest of this lifetime.
But for now, they simply lie underneath the boughs.
Soft hands on the laces of his pants, pulling him out. Scarred hands on the hem of her dress, hiking it up and up. He aligns himself with her, the movement gone over to instinct—just as a lost wanderer looks up to the sky in search of the north star to guide them forward.
Beneath him, she calls out his name.
He abides by her constellation and finds his way home yet again.