Work Text:
March 13th
The bright, acidic scent of citrus hits Zelda’s nose as she walks through the door. On the table, a Zonai propeller spins, upside down, in a large bowl of frothy egg whites and sugar. Next to it sits a pie shell filled with steaming shock fruit curd.
Cupboard shelves are lined with fully assembled pies. Zelda immediately recognizes an apple pie and a fortified pumpkin pie. There’s a pie with a lattice top providing a view into its intensely red wildberry filling. Another pie is topped with fluffy whipped cream and six elliptical bias-cut slices of mighty banana arranged in a starburst pattern. And there’s a final pie that Zelda doesn’t find familiar at all, caked with toasted chickaloo tree nuts on top.
She surveys the mess of red and golden apple peels and the snowfall of Tabantha wheat flour that litter the kitchen counter. Her husband stands amid the clutter, smashing something crunchy with a rolling pin next to a large chunk of Hateno cheese.
“Wow. You really went all out, didn’t you?” Zelda observes.
“When my princess assigns me a pie-making quest, I take that seriously,” Link responds, his big grin belying his seriousness as he steps away from his labors long enough to kiss her in greeting.
“There’s no way the kids will be able to eat this much pie, though,” she says.
“Oh, I’m not even done yet. After the shock fruit meringue is finished, there’ll be one more.”
“More? So… seven pies? You know there are only four students in the class.”
“We can send the leftovers home for their parents and siblings.”
“I think we’ll have to,” Zelda chuckles. “What kind of pie are you making next?”
“Cheesecake.”
“Cheesecake?”
“Yup.”
“Link, the assignment was to make pie.”
“Cheesecake is pie,” Link says with a mischievous smile.
Zelda cocks an eyebrow at him. “Oh?”
“Sure. It’s a crust with a filling. Sounds like pie to me.”
“Then why’s it called cheesecake?”
“Heck if I know. I’m not the one who named it.”
“I wonder if the students will see it your way,” Zelda says.
“We can poll them. If they vote that cheesecake is pie, then they can have some cheesecake to celebrate Pi Day,” Link suggests.
“Well, then obviously they will vote that it is!”
“All right, then. We’ll hide the cheesecake and only reveal its existence if they vote that cheesecake is pie. We’ll pretend the question is purely theoretical.”
“And if they vote no?”
His eyes twinkle. “Then more cheese pie for us.”
March 14th
With the cheesecake hidden away upstairs, Link and Zelda get to work neatly slicing the six remaining pies before the students arrive. Zelda grabs a measuring tape and a protractor from her desk drawer.
“What do you think? How many degrees per slice?” she asks.
“I’d go with sixty. That way each slice will be an equilateral triangle,” Link says. “There’s just something mystical and sacred about equilateral triangles. Especially in multiples of three.”
“A slice of pie isn’t triangular, though,” Zelda says. “It has one curved side instead of a straight line.”
“Well, there you go! That can be today’s math lesson. Using the number pi, the students can calculate how much longer the curved side is than the other two sides.”
“I suppose that’s a good lesson for today,” Zelda laughs.
Link forges ahead without the protractor, deftly slicing the nut-coated pie into six pieces and transferring them to paper plates. Zelda watches in amusement as he arranges them into Triforce patterns.
“What is that?” she asks. The golden filling beneath the crust of chickaloos threatens to ooze, but just manages to maintain its structure.
“It’s a chickaloo tree nut pie,” Link says. “I made it up. Have a taste.” He hands her a fork.
Zelda dips a tine into the gooey filling of one slice and raises it to her tongue. The cloying flavor of courser bee honey dominates her senses. “Oh, my. That’s very sweet.”
“Sweet as pie. Just like you.” Link wraps his arms around her.
Zelda laughs. “As happy as I am that you’ve taken such an interest in Hyrule’s sacred symbols, perhaps thinner slices would allow the students to sample more different types of pie. After all, with so many delicious options, I’m sure everyone will want to taste them all.”
“Good idea,” Link says. “Then we can make the slices very narrow, such that the curved side begins to approximate a straight line. That’ll be a good starting point for explaining Archimedes’ method for deriving the area of a circle."
“Link, these kids haven’t learned the concept of mathematical limits yet.”
“All the more reason to teach them. You knew about limits when you were their age.”
“Yes, but I had the best tutors in Hyrule.”
“And your students have the best teacher in Hyrule,” Link says, tightening his arms around her.
“Now who’s sweet as pie?” Zelda muses to herself as she snags a kiss just moments before the students arrive.
Zelda ends the day’s classes a minute early so the pies can be enjoyed at 1:59. After the students stagger home with full stomachs and pie pans packed with assorted pie slices to share with their families, Link goes upstairs to grab the cheesecake.
“I guess you were right,” he says. “Apparently the consensus is that cheesecake is not pie. That means we have to eat it ourselves.”
The two of them sit at Zelda’s desk under the stairs, eating the cheesecake directly from the pan, feeding bites to each other between punchy giggles and groans about their overstuffed bellies. They don't hear Azu returning to the schoolhouse to fetch the notebook he left behind.
But the next day, they hear the gossip spreading through town about how Mr. Link and Ms. Zelda were caught in the act, gorging on a delectable cheese pie that they had refused to share with their students.