Work Text:
“Listen, whatever you see and love—
that’s where you are.”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs
“For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II
Let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, there was a princess and her knight. They rode off the burning field where evil’s corpse laid and never worried about anything ever again.
How long had it taken them to destroy what lurked underneath the castle floorboards? A week? A year? The answer was lost to time. The answer didn’t matter.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” the knight said, and he took her hand.
“It felt like no time at all,” the princess said with a smile.
*
The queen told the princess a story once, and ten years later she told it to her knight.
A princess vanquished evil with nothing more than the soul of the hero, the blood of the Goddess, and the beauty of her right hand. Then she shoved the monster underneath her bed and went back to sleep. The hero joined her, because the hero was in love with her, and they slept for ten thousand years.
“Was that us?” The knight said.
The princess shrugged. “Depends on who you ask.”
*
A ghost told Link a story once, but it went quite differently. In this story, everyone died on that burning field.
There were two survivors –– the lovelorn princess and her battered knight, cursed in cruel mercy to a century in purgatory and a memory so shattered and broken that it was impossible to put the shards back where they fit. It turns out that the amount of time he laid awaiting resurrection did matter, after all.
He learned atop the Temple of Time, the dilapidated ruins where his ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors once stood, that Hyrule had sustained itself on nothing more than stories for ten thousand years. Evil collected underneath the marble floors of Hyrule Castle for centuries. Hyrule had almost unlimited time to find a way to stop it, and yet they waited for two characters out of a fable to save them. Why was anyone surprised when the myth couldn’t sustain itself? Salvation is not the job of two children, regardless of the lofty titles placed over their heads.
But this isn’t a story about a knight. It’s not a story about a princess. This is a story about the aftermath of stories.
This is, ostensibly, a story about a dog.
(“We can’t keep him.”
He turns his head. She’s sitting on a tree stump wearing her best ‘I’m-the-grownup-here’ face, her pout that reads ‘mildly annoyed.’ He likes that pout. He has no intention of getting rid of it.
The dog whines when he takes his hands away from where he’d been scratching, behind the ears. “You sound like my mother.”
“Well, I’d hope that after one hundred years,” she snorts, “you remember more about me than the fact that I wouldn’t let a dog into the house.”
Checkmate, she must be thinking. A year, give or take, in her presence has taught him to be perceptive. But he has never played a game of chess in his life, and even if he had, he wouldn’t recall the rules now.
So he cheats. He says something a little too earnest. “I want to remember everything about you.”
By the way her frown softens, he can tell she wasn’t expecting that.
She looks to the dog. Then to him. Then she sighs again and crouches down next to him, hand on the back of the dog’s neck.
“Fine,” she says. The pout returns, and he is determined to press his lips against it before it drops again. “But only until we return him to the nearest stable.”)
*
He saves her –– half because he wants to, half because he needs to, though he suspects the need supersedes the want. Need always comes before want in these stories, when the hero realizes the thing that will bring them salvation is different than the unattainable goal they’ve been chasing.
Lucky for him, Princess Zelda is both of those things.
Once she’s out of harm’s way, once they’ve ridden off into the proverbial sunset on the back of Link’s horse, Link counts the days she sleeps for by the amount of busywork he’s assigned himself to pass the time and stop him from worrying himself sick. Monday, he sweeps the house. Tuesday, he restocks the kitchen. Wednesday, he does the laundry and buys her an extra set of clothes. Thursday, sweeps the house again.
“The picture is crooked,” is the first thing Link hears Friday morning.
Zelda sits on the edge of the bed, gripping the mattress behind her like she’ll fall over at any moment. Her breathing is labored. Her face is pale and her undereyes are so hollow they’ve almost turned purple.
He’s never seen a person look so weak besides that one time he watched himself die at the end of the world, and she’s worried about the picture. She doesn’t even question how he ended up with it. Maybe in all her once-omniscient wisdom she knows.
Link frowns at the wall. “It’s been crooked since I hung it up.”
“And you never fixed it?”
Link sighs as he joins her on the bed. “I didn’t spend a lot of time here.”
He bought the house simply because it called to him. He didn’t need a house. It never made much of a difference to him, whether he was lonely in some nameless stable or lonely on the side of a mountain or lonely between four walls. But whether it was the tug of familiarity that pulled at his stomach that maybe, once, he lived here or that Zelda deserved more than just the shirt off his back that made him buy the place, he couldn’t say.
Zelda gets up to adjust the frame, but she stumbles backward onto the bed before making any headway. She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“Sorry,” she says. “I’m still finding my footing.”
Link looks back at her. He could help her up. He considers it, but he looks down to find his hands are shaking.
Once, by accident, he laid his sledgehammer against the first-floor window. When it toppled over, the glass shattered onto the floor. Even as he bled all over the shards when he attempted to pick them up, the way the glass shone against the sun was beautiful, somehow, even as it cut him deep.
It’s something like that.
It’s that Link only knows the beginnings of stories. No one told him what to do after the end. The need and the want and the unattainable goal and the key to his salvation is here, now, and it’s terrifying. He’s cutting his hands. His blood is spilling all over the floor.
He smooths his hands against his sides, then tilts the photo back upright. He feels her eyes on the back of his neck as the frame trembles.
“Is this better?”
Her eyes cut right through him as she looks from his face to his still-shaking hands back to his face to the picture and says slowly, deliberately, “Yes. Yes, I think so.”
He stares at the photograph. A piece of his past that he usually dared not look at directly for too long. Months out in the wild have made him a survivalist. He stays away from things that hurt on principle. He doesn’t cut his hands when there’s no need. Usually.
Link lets go of the frame. The photograph slants back on its angle almost immediately.
*
Zelda herself left him the most pieces. Hylia hadn’t blessed her with a sacred power until it was too late, but at least she gave her descendant the gift of foresight.
“I’m not sure whether I should thank you, or...”
Impa chuckled. She steepled her fingers on her lap, sank a bit into her seat. “What’s the alternative?”
“I don’t know.” He forgot his manners. His mouth was numb. “Tell you to fuck off?” Then he muttered: “Excuse my language,” because Impa was his elder, even though that became so incredibly strange to him as the broken parts of his brain started to stitch themselves back together.
If he shifted on his feet ever so slightly, Impa was twenty and her hair was down to her ankles. If he stood upright, she was gone.
“Don’t shoot the messenger. The princess told me to leave that picture for last.”
Link blinked at her. Blinked down at the slate on his hip. He didn’t know what to do besides laugh, dark and mirthless.
It’s not funny. Why would it be funny? He watched himself die in the third person. He made eye contact with the phantom Link as his knees gave out and he fell to the broken ground. He felt Zelda's hands on his face, her own face so close to him that he could see his blood on her chin, cracking against the corner of her mouth as if she’d just kissed him.
She probably did not kiss him. That was a bit of leftover wishful thinking, probably. But wishful of what? Did he wish for it back then, or now? Or both?
He left to stand outside and catch his breath and wrack his brain for the sensation of her mouth against his, if it rang any bells, if his isolation from the rest of the world was driving him slowly insane.
Paya found him leaning on the railing by Hylia’s statue, eating an apple that she definitely knew he stole from outside the shrines near the house, which she came to refill with, you guessed it, more apples.
In his defense, he didn’t remember the intricacies of religion. Hylia or Zelda or whoever would have to forgive him. Why all the apples, anyway?
Paya twiddled her thumbs as she settled beside him on the railing. “Were you in love with the Princess?”
He almost choked.
“It—it would make sense if you were, is all!” Paya continued with a squeak, desperately trying to look anywhere but at him. “I just mean –– the stories, the legends, you know...it would make sense. If you were. In love with her.” She added quietly but quickly: “You did run off, after the...after you talked to Grandmother.”
And what could he say to that? ‘The stories are wrong?’ They weren’t. They hardly ever were. ‘I’m not a story?’ He was, and so was she. The longest-running story in all of Hyrule’s history.
He wondered what Impa had told her that she wouldn’t tell him.
So instead, he settled on: “Do you think I was?”
Paya turned red as the apples.
“I—I would hope you were. She’ll need you.”
*
On her seventeenth birthday, he followed her to the Spring of Wisdom. Later that day it would be etched into the canon of the Hero of Hyrule that he’d walk through fire and rain and uncertain death for her, but we’ll start small.
The fraught, tentative optimism Zelda had so desperately clung to since the Champions were knighted morphed into premonitions of doomsday seemingly overnight. Her failure at the Spring of Wisdom was further proof of the apocalypse. Fun stuff. Happy birthday, Princess.
She stood in the ritual waters until she collapsed from a mixture of the cold and her own despair, and it dawned on Link as he held her freezing, sobbing body that if she were right, this was his last chance to tell her that––
No, he redacted that word from his subconscious, because it was not in the job description to fall in love with the Princess. Because he felt some bone-deep shame that this iteration of the Hero of Hyrule did not want to save the world on principle. He did not love Hyrule. He loved Zelda, who just happened to live there.
No. He didn’t. He struck that word from his mind. It didn’t exist. He wasn’t meant to hold her like this. It’s not his place.
Later that day Link would see the red, angry eye of a Guardian lock its sights on Zelda’s chest and fall in her stead. He doesn’t know this yet, but somewhere, somehow, he’s always known this. He would, will, did die for her. There wasn’t anything he could do to stop it; not then, not when she knighted him atop a stone carving of the Triforce, not ever.
All Link could do before they met their end was pry her away from his chest to take her face in his hands in a way that was too close, too familiar, too fond and ask, “Are you okay?”
All Zelda could do was laugh. Grim, wet. “What do you think?”
So, that was the beginning of the end.
*
“What do people do for fun in Hateno?”
“I don’t remember you ever trying to ‘have fun.’”
“Maybe I’m turning over a new leaf.”
He shrugs. “Gossip, mostly. Sit around fires telling stories, sometimes.”
“I don’t take you for a gossip,” Zelda says. “I thought the hero was pure of heart, or whatever nonsense they spew about us.”
He turns to her. She’s staring at the ceiling, her head propped against his pillow. Well –– ceiling is a strong word for the backside of the stairs where Link’s cot is situated.
Zelda never questioned the sleeping arrangement. She woke up that Friday morning in Link’s bed, with Link settled on a flimsy cot beneath the stairs. There was nothing to question, really. Zelda regained her strength much faster than Link expected. She had almost enough strength to make it up and down the stairs within a day of waking, and by the end of the first week barely needed Link’s help at all. That stubborn streak didn’t burn out over a century in suspension, evidently.
He wants to reach out for her and tuck the hair that’s sitting on her forehead behind her ear. His hands shake. He doesn’t.
“It’s not nonsense.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been a courteous and kind princess,” Zelda frowns. “I’ve always been too headstrong...I’ve always…”
“That’s your father talking,” he says, then he frowns as well. Was that in his right to say?
If that upsets her, she doesn’t show it. She changes the subject. “So...gossip is out. What about a story?”
He thinks about it for a second, and nothing comes to mind. Then:
“When I was a kid, a dog in the village took a liking to my sister. But my mom said we couldn’t keep a dog in the house, so he lived outside and my sister brought him food every night. And every day the dog would try and thank her by killing a bird and leaving it at our door. But then she’d cry because, hey, what the hell, there’s a dead bird at the door. And the dog would run away sulking because he’s a dog, that’s the only gift he could give her, and how was he supposed to know it’s gross?”
Zelda frowns. She turns to face him.
“Why did you choose this one?”
He shrugs. Rests his hands by his sides. “First one that came to mind.”
It’s here that he realizes that he does not know how to be more to her than a mutt with feathers between his teeth and blood on his mouth.
Put a pin in this story. It will come in handy later.
*
(She checks the collar. “Gerudo Canyon. That’s over a day’s travel.” She cradles the dog’s face in her hands. “You’re an awful long way from home, aren’t you?”
He’s roasting meat and mushrooms over the fire when she locks eyes with him from across the campsite. She must sense an opportunity, because a spark of inspiration fills her eyes. He hates that spark; he loves it; it is always at his expense.
“All alone,” she coos, “out in the wild. In desperate need of a bath and some rest.”
“Okay.” He sees where this is going.
“Walking the globe, digging up truffles, throwing cuccos and tree branches at monsters.”
“ Okay , Zelda ––”
“Don’t you have a princess you should be saving?”
She flashes him a smile, radiant and beautiful and triumphant. He replies with a roll of his eyes. Checkmate, she must be thinking.)
*
The rest of the world is healing. Slowly, deliberately. Link receives letters from his allies across the globe. He received one from Impa the other day, though he neglects to tell Zelda about that one in particular. There are too many prying eyes in Kakariko, too many people speaking in hushed tones about fairytales their father’s father’s father once told them over the fire. Which would be fine, if he and Zelda were not the main characters of all of them.
This “healing” business is complicated. He never learned to share his toys or soul-crushing destiny with other kids; he’s not sure how to leverage this burden on his back. His job description a million years ago was simply to stand in silence and attack when provoked and make the occasional executive decision regarding the princess' safety. He’s not built for much more than that.
As for the matter of the Princess, she stands on the shore of Hateno Beach, toes in the water. She sways in the wind, but it’s melodical and strong enough to look purposeful, not like the wind is carrying her. Not like she’s weak.
“I didn’t spend much time at beaches,” she says out to the sea. “The castle was very much land-locked.”
There’s something there, but Link has too many metaphors swimming through his head for who and what Zelda is meant to be to him that it barely processes. Something about the Princess and the Castle being indistinguishable. He’s not a poetic person; this is above his pay grade.
She looks over her shoulder at him, pondering something. Then she sits next to him atop the blanket he’s laid out over the sand. Then: “You said you brought dinner?”
They eat in relative silence. Normal for Link, not so much for Zelda. She spends half the evening staring at the bread and jam on her plate.
“I was thinking,” says Zelda finally, “about Hateno’s survival. I –– there’s a chance your sister and mother survived, provided they weren’t in Castle Town.”
Link doesn’t say anything. Was that supposed to be reassuring? Was she trying to wipe the blood off her hands, assure herself that the wreckage of the castle didn’t seep its way into every crevice of Hyrule? If Zelda is the castle and Link is the house in Hateno, at what point did their paths connect?
“That’s...good.”
“You don’t sound thrilled.”
“I barely remember my mother. I don’t need to be comforted.” He winces. That sounded crueler than intended. “Sorry. It’s just. I just –– you didn’t do anything wrong. I never let myself hope like that, is all.”
What he tries to tell Zelda is that no one is swapping anecdotes about a country knight’s wife. Of course he doesn’t remember her. All he remembers is his sister and the dog and the trail of feathers left in its wake. All he knows are the stories scribbled in stable journals or told to him by a Rito with an accordion, and none of them fit together into anything resembling a cohesive narrative. There’s the one where the world splits into three. The one where the world is all water, and Nayru tied an albatross to a reckless sailor’s neck. The one where they live happily ever after after falling from the sky, living anonymously in a home somewhere on the planet’s surface. And that last one keeps him up at night staring at the underside of the stairs as he contemplates why the hands of fate hadn’t made their ending so cut and dry and pretty.
The sun is setting. The air grows hot and dry as spring gives way to summer. The world goes on. Why can’t they?
What he actually says is:
“Are you happy?”
She doesn’t follow.
“Here,” Link continues, cursing the way his mouth moves faster than his brain. “I never asked you what you wanted –– and if it’s not this––” –– if it’s not me –– “I can have you set up at the inn, or in Kakariko with Impa, or ––”
“I want to stay with you.” Zelda stares down at her plate. “Do I seem unhappy? If I’ve seemed ungrateful, I apologize.” She takes a bite of the piece of bread she’s been eyeing as if to busy her mouth and stop the conversation.
“No, you don’t, I ––” He stares down at his lap. Stupid boy. Stupid hands. “Forget I said anything.”
He looks up after a moment and there’s jam on the corner of her mouth and underneath her lip. She wipes it away with the back of her hand, and something about the red of the berries reminds him that at some point between delivering him to the shrine and sealing herself away she had to have wiped his blood off her mouth, she had to have mourned him in some tactile way. He must have left her with some deep trauma without even meaning to, he must have done so much more damage by not having the good sense to stay alive in the first place. His head is spinning. He drops whatever he’s holding, which, apparently, is his canteen, because water is dripping onto his lap and darkening the sand and ––
Zelda looks at him. Her hand is still on her face.
“Are you alright, Link?”
*
After he found the sword, Link’s mother made him sit his sister down at the kitchen table and give her a talk about the Hard Truths of Life: that his and his father’s profession was very dangerous and had a high probability of death or disfigurement, that eating your vegetables is important but not too much of a burden with the proper seasoning, that most dogs die before their owners do.
She cried, after hearing that. She was only eight. The dog might have been older than her, judging by the grey around its muzzle. The next time she saw him, a forlorn expression had settled in her eyes, like she had realized for the first time that time is cruel and only borrowed.
Link knew that look. Viscerally, intimately. It was the look his mother gave him when he left for Hyrule Castle, Master Sword strapped to his back. It was the look on his father’s face, buried behind a soldier’s stoicism, at his knighting.
As many times as he had been on its receiving end, he was not prepared for the way that his heart fluttered when the Princess gave it to him for the first time, knelt underneath her outstretched hand, the royal crest underneath his feet embossed in stone. She was barely more than a stranger then. She felt no warmth toward him, but he couldn’t unsee the sharp flash of pity that passed through her eyes. Maybe, for the first time, she realized the gravity of their positions; that if her throne held nothing, Link would die for nothing. Maybe, she realized then that the Goddess had placed his blood on her hands. Maybe, in that moment, she saw their end, saw his blood on the corners of her mouth, the taste of iron and salt. Maybe she saw herself.
Maybe, Link reasoned, that was why she hated him so passionately.
*
“So, let me get this straight,” Purah starts, “you walked the entire globe. You fought off six forms of Ganon and Goddess knows how many old Guardians. Which, by the way, you still owe me my share of ancient parts from. You rescued the princess. And the problem is...what, exactly? That you, legendary holder of the Triforce of Courage, are scared of her?”
“That’s...an unfair interpretation.”
Link scuffs his feet against the floor. Why did he come here? Right, to drop off that old core Purah is now inspecting. Well, ‘inspecting’ is a generous term for ‘whacking with a wrench for no reason Link could discern.’ Why did he ask her for help? Right, because he’s desperate.
She scowls, as if to berate him for interrupting her work for something so trivial. “Teenagers.”
“It’s just...she’s different. And I’m different, and––” He can’t help feel stupid as he says, “what if she doesn’t like me?”
Purah puts down the ancient core. She sighs.
“Oh, Linky,” she clicks her tongue, “you’ve got it bad, don’t you?”
And then Purah kicks him out of the lab.
*
Don’t think the Princess is not a player in this story.
The Goron used to send small birds into their mines to scope out whether the air was toxic or not. A dead bird was better than a dead Goron. Daruk told Link this in one of his more pessimistic moments, that he hated the way Urbosa referred to Zelda as her little bird and the way the King treated her like one whose wings he had clipped. Their proverbial canary in a coalmine, shoved into freezing waters and told to grovel for their fate. If she received nothing in return, Hyrule would fall for nothing.
However, don’t think that the Princess is one-dimensional, or that she isn’t more than a bird swept up by the winds of fate. Just because she was made to be a symbol for something greater than herself doesn’t mean that she wasn’t complicit in her own misfortune.
At the end of the day, she chose this fate. The sword asked them both plainly: would you die for love? Link said yes, with that silent but sure affirmative nod of his head, but he did not know what that required of him. Zelda did him one better; she would give up her humanity for one hundred years for it, fully understanding the consequences, because she believed so deeply in it, because she believed so deeply in him.
It was her choice to fall in love with him when he was nothing more than a myth living on borrowed time. It was her choice to bury herself. The canary flew into the castle and didn’t come back out; you can put two and two together as to what that meant for the rest of Hyrule.
But maybe she isn’t a bird at all. Maybe the Princess is just a girl. A lonely girl, whose dog will die long before her.
*
From his vantage point underneath the stairs, he can hear the exact moment each night Zelda decides she’s given up on trying to sleep and begins to pace the floor, or tap at the Sheikah Slate, or write in her journal. He doesn’t ask her why she doesn’t sleep, because he isn’t sleeping, either. He never settled back into any habits you could call healthy, even in this newfound peacetime; out in the wild no one exactly encouraged him to stop what he was doing to rest. Beds cost money, and Hateno was always far and fleeting. But Zelda doesn’t have that excuse.
He hears the cling of metal against wood, and a stifled gasp from upstairs. A deep breath. A sniffle.
He finds her on the ground in front of the photograph upstairs, which is—
“Broken —I tried to fix it, and it...” Zelda trails off.
Link salvages the photograph from the shattered frame. He takes inventory of any collateral damage; besides a small splinter of glass lodged into Mipha’s forehead, the photo is completely intact.
“Hey, look,” Link says. She lifts her head from where it rests against her knees. Her eyes shine in the moonlight. “The photo’s fine. There’s nothing to fix, okay?”
“Okay,” Zelda nods, but her shaky breath after tells him that she’s still unsettled.
“Do you want to talk about them?”
“No.” Zelda takes another shaky breath. “I don’t know how. Not yet.”
She watches from the bed as he sweeps the glass off the floor. He opts to sweep it up this time. Zelda doesn’t need to see him bleed all over her.
The only sounds are the wicker of the broom hitting the floor and Zelda’s still-heavy breaths. He finishes, and he’s on his way back downstairs when he hears Zelda ask, barely more than a whisper, “could you stay, actually?”
“Uh,” is all Link says at first. Suddenly he’s self-conscious; that he should have bathed that evening instead of in the morning, about his choice of nightclothes, that just the thought of her in his atmosphere sends tremors through him. It’s only that she’s the need and the want and the unattainable goal and the key to salvation and ––
“Link?”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah.”
“This isn’t awkward for you, is it?” Zelda doesn’t wait for his answer before tucking her head underneath his chin, feels her shaky exhale warm on his chest. “I’m sorry.”
“We can get a new frame.”
“That’s not…” She looks up at him, then she must decide against whatever she’s going to say and settles back in under his chin. Then she mumbles, “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m not this quick to tears.”
“A hundred years happened.” Link brushes the hair out of her face, hands unsteady. She tenses like she doesn’t expect the touch, and she doesn’t settle into it like he might have hoped. He didn’t expect to get this far. He’s not sure why he tried to touch her at all.
She falls asleep quickly, a furrow to her brow that Link debates pressing his lips to as if that’ll straighten it out.
He shouldn’t. He doesn’t.
*
(They’d long decided sharing a bedroll is romantic in concept, but uncomfortably warm and not worth the trouble in practice. Still he reaches out for her, and is startled when he comes up empty. He blinks awake.
She’s sitting straight ahead in a thicket of trees nearby with the dog, its head resting in her lap.
“Someone out there misses you terribly, you know,” she whispers. “Someone is going to be so happy to see you again.”
And then she adds wistfully, like her mind somewhere is else: “Perhaps they never thought you’d be reunited. They’ll be so relieved. They’ll be so…”
She pets the top of the dog’s head and sighs. She looks back to him, and he does his best to feign sleep while listening.
“Listen to me,” she says. “I’m getting sentimental. That was a long time ago now, wasn’t it?”)
*
The next morning, she’s fine. He expected this; while Link processes his feelings in a slow, rolling burn that settles in his shoulders, he remembers enough of Zelda to know she works through short outbursts of varying intensity.
He wakes to an empty bed and the sounds of Zelda tinkering downstairs at the kitchen table. Which is unusual. The only time circadian rhythm dictated he sleep past the sunrise was that time where he slept through the end of the world.
The photo is back on the wall, framed, hanging from the same crooked nail.
“You slept late,” Zelda says, legs crossed at the ankle as she works on sewing shut a hole in one of his tunics. He didn’t recall asking her to. “It’s early afternoon.”
“Huh.”
“Have you not been sleeping?” She eyes the cot behind the stairs. “That hardly looks comfortable.”
“You’re one to talk,” Link mumbles without thinking. By the raise of her eyebrow he can tell he’s caught Zelda’s attention. “You realize me not sleeping means I can hear that you’re not sleeping, right?”
She doesn’t say anything to that. She returns to her sewing with a soft “hm.”
He’s about to ask if they could just talk like adults, lay their hearts bare with cards on the table, but he loses his nerve when he sees Zelda steal a glance at him, that dogs-die-before-their-owners look in her eyes. He might find some meaning in her coldness that way, if he so chooses. He thinks of the incident on the beach. He thinks about his shaking hands. He thinks about how she won’t tell him why she can’t sleep.
He chooses not to. He’s never been one for poetry.
*
He is, of course, keeping his own secrets from Zelda.
What he doesn’t tell her is threefold:
- They’ve kissed once before, but he’s not supposed to know this. Not in a ‘your memory is half-gone’ kind of way, more like ‘your durability is both a blessing and a curse.’
- He is afraid of her in every way imaginable. What she thinks of him, what she remembers of him that he can’t recall, that he’s doing something wrong.
- Years ago, he buried the parabolic dog in his backyard.
To the first point: He’ll never tell Zelda how long it took him to die that night on Blatchery Plain, because he didn’t die at all. When Zelda rested her forehead to his, he felt the sun against his skin one last time before a century of darkness. He only dozed in and out of consciousness by the time he was placed in the Shrine of Resurrection. If he concentrated hard enough, he maybe could recall the gasp she stifled when she walked into the shrine before he was sealed away to deliver the Sheikah Slate to his resting place.
It could have been an accident. Her face had been close to his, anyway. It was barely a brush against his cold, clammy lips, his lips that did not work anymore and could not so much as utter her name one last time. But he knew it wasn’t a mistake; Zelda does nothing by mistake except that one time she ended the world, and even that wasn’t really her fault.
When she kissed him, he could taste the salt of her tears. And blood–– his blood––that had smeared from his chest to her hands to her face. Iron and salt.
The tender way she cradled his head in her hands, the desperate way she crumpled against his neck––she wasn’t meant to hold him like that in life, but maybe it’s permissible in death. She must have thought he was already gone.
To the second: There’s no beauty in the apocalypse. Nothing to turn into story except ‘we lost.’ How do you go on when the entire world is ash? You don’t. You are destroyed along with it, your soul scattered across the landscape until you gain the strength to carry it again. He learns this the hard way.
When his soul returned to him, he was struck by the overwhelming pain that comes with losing something you hold dear. And when Zelda returned to him, that pain turned into regret: that he hadn’t prepared a warm meal or change of clothes for her before leaving for the castle, that the photograph is crooked, that he’d used a Silent Princess that one time to weave into his armor when he’d been so carefully collecting them for a reason he could not name then. Then the regret turned into fear –– that he’d disappoint her somehow, or that he’ll never truly remember her the way he’s meant to.
He knows she was in love with him back then. He doesn’t know much of love, but he knows it’s more than an anguished kiss against dead lips. He gave her back the world she left behind, sure, but that world is decaying and rotten and soaked in blood. A mangled bird at her feet. She deserves more than he can give.
And, the third.
The dog rots away somewhere underneath the earth, so far down below that he can’t smell the flesh or count the teeth on its skeleton. But it’s there, in a ditch buried next to the bathhouse. A million years ago, Link shot the wolf that attacked the dog clean through the eye after he found him whimpering out in the woods, not so much to save him as in anger that someone dared ruin something so precious to his sister.
He carried him back home, where he tried in vain to close the wound. He thought about amputating the limb. A surgeon at twelve years old––why not? He was already a hero. Stranger things had happened. He debated shooting the poor thing to put him out of his misery. Ultimately he could not decide in time, so he watched the dog bleed out until Aryll returned home to say goodbye. The blood from the dog’s leg swiped against his face when he rubbed his stinging eyes and told her. Something wet dribbled down his chin until it caught in his mouth. It was rotten on his tongue; iron and salt, and he thought in all his twelve year-old wisdom that this must be what death tasted like.
“Where do you think Sir Chester is now?” Aryll asked at the dog's funeral, which was not so much a funeral as it was Link and Aryll sitting outside in the rain, two sad little children on a sad little patch of land in a sad little village.
“You named him? And you named him Sir Chester ?”
“Everyone needs a name,” Aryll said.
Link squinted at the dip in the earth where Sir Chester lay. He didn’t think Sir Chester was anywhere poetic. He wasn’t frolicking through a field, maiming birds to bring back to Aryll as tokens of his admiration. He wasn’t getting pets from a loving ghost family now that he was a ghost dog. He escaped his fate––a death in his teens––and Link only wished he was so lucky.
“I think,” Link pat Aryll on the shoulder, “he’s taking a well-deserved nap.”
Link neglects to tell Zelda any of this because when she kissed him, they both held death in their mouths, and he will hate himself forever for putting it there. It’s terrible. Iron and salt and ash and dust and the aftertaste of every ‘worst case scenario’ you’ve ever dreamt up. If only he could have held on a little longer. If only he could have shot the wolf and amputated the leg. If only––
––he doesn’t tell her because he’s tired of being the stupid fucking dog, and because if there’s one thing he’s learned about crafting a story, it’s that sometimes you edit down the nasty, traumatic shit so you can recite it with a straight face.
*
Zelda insists on a trip to Kakariko, eventually. She’s getting restless in the house; the house is no longer enough to hold her. It makes sense, he guesses. Better not to trade one cage for another. Better to unclip those golden wings.
“I like the flowers.” It’s the only thing she bothers to say as she mounts her horse and notices the Silent Princesses braided into her stallion's white mane. Zelda holds on white-knuckled to the reins, her shoulders a little too high, her mouth pressed into a straight line.
The road to Kakariko Village isn’t an easy one. In theory, the path is relatively straight-forward and only a day’s travel. In practice, it’s the ruins of Necluda and the place where he once died. If you close your eyes and have a healthy amount of trauma, you might still smell the ash in the air. You might still imagine that the princess is in love with you. The canary might drop dead to the ground.
He hears Zelda suck in a breath from behind him.
“Link?”
He turns to her.
“I think –– actually –– I think I would like to return home.”
*
Imagine: you're the hero.
Imagine you sleep for seven years. When you wake up, the trees of your childhood no longer remember you. Imagine you sleep for twenty. Your friends, family, lovers have all moved on, but light a candle at the altar of you they’ve placed in their homes once a year in reverence. You’re taller than they imagine when you show up as a silhouette in their doorway. Imagine one hundred. The earth forgets the weight of your step. There is no one to mourn you. The trees of your childhood have died and the new ones never got the chance to learn your name.
When the hero sleeps, time goes on. But the princess is a different matter.
Written in bleeding ink onto one of the oldest scrolls in the Hyrule Castle library is the tale of a princess who slept for one hundred years and emerged in a speck of light on a golden field. In her absence, the world disappeared.
“I would like to go home,” said the princess to her knight.
The knight looked around. Only the golden field. Only the beauty of the princess’ right hand. Remember once, when there were trees? Remember the earth?
“Home,” echoed the knight. “Where is home, Princess?”
*
One night, Link charts the moment Zelda has given up on sleeping and pulls her gently from the desk upstairs.
“If we’re both not sleeping,” he reasons, “we might as well get some air.”
She smiles as she takes his hand.
Someone once told Link that there’s something about a campfire that inspires you to bear your soul, something about the dead of night and the heat of the flame that makes the space feel too liminal to count as real. Something about sitting in silence with someone that makes you vulnerable enough to admit things you wouldn’t normally. Since Link didn’t speak much on a good day back then, he never put too much stock into this theory.
Either way, a campfire is too much of a hassle. The cooking pot outside will have to do.
“I only made it halfway,” Zelda says to the fire, after a while. Maybe the theory is true. “I couldn’t face her.”
“Impa’ll always be there.”
“No, Link.” Zelda folds her arms across her chest. “Impa won’t always be there. I thought the last hundred years established that no one will always be anywhere.”
Should that upset him? That should probably upset him. Both the message itself and the acidity with which it was delivered.
“Sorry,” whispers Zelda. “I’ve been cold to you. I thought I outgrew that.”
“It’s fine.”
“I’m just trying to understand everything. You, most of all.”
“Oh.” He’s sitting so close to the pot that he gets a faceful of embers. He coughs them down. “What do you want to know?”
He can fill in the blanks: She wants to know why the only thing he remembers of his childhood is that his sister had blue eyes like him and a dog that loved her in a way that revolted her. She wants to know how he made money out in the wilderness, since she forgot to wire Impa funds on his behalf amidst the many preparations she made before the princess merged with the castle in the story. She wants to know why he stepped in front of that Guardian. She wants to know what’s so special about that damn dog.
Her eyes are on him; as radiant as he remembers them, filled with a tenderness he wants desperately to remember. And she doesn’t ask him any of that.
“I want to know everything about you.”
*
The heroes lose, even though they’ve got blood and soul and beautiful right hands and holy swords. This inflicts a certain level of trauma on everyone involved.
The survivors cling to whoever they have left. Earthquakes have aftershocks after all, and the story never truly ends once it runs out of pages. We can only hope that if we hold on tightly enough to the things we hold sacred, evil will never be able to take anything from any of us. Isn’t that what the hero and the princess did, ages ago, in that one fairytale? They saved the world and never worried about anything ever again. It must be nice.
Let’s hope that hoping is enough.
*
(“I know you’re awake,” she says as she settles back into her bedroll. He doesn’t open his eyes, but he hums quietly as she rests her head on his chest.
“I hope we find his owner,” she says, though he hears, I’m glad you came back to me.
“Of course we will.” Of course I did.
“Do you think they’ll be waiting at the stable?” Will we always come back to each other?
“I hope so.” Of course we will.
“I love you.” Good.
“Love you, too.” I’ll always come back to you. And if I lose you, I’ll go looking, in this life and the next, and I’ll find you as many times as I have to, again and again and again and again and –– )
*
Bolson installs a hearth into the corner across from the stairs, so Zelda has the chance to tell him many other things by the fire. She tells him that she’s afraid of him because she’s got all the memory and he’s got all the wherewithal to get them from Point A to Point B. She’s afraid that she’ll say too much and overwhelm him, or tell him something that he wouldn’t want to remember. She can’t sleep, and if she had to take a guess she’d say it’s because of a mixture of survivor’s guilt and bad dreams. His mother was kind the few times she’d met the Princess. His father was reserved and somewhat distant, but always looked proud of him. He got his eyes and his temperament from him.
She tells Link that his father’s faith in him always made her a little sad, because her own father was never proud of her, and then she asks Link what the ghost atop the Temple of Time said.
“I found his journal in Hyrule Castle,” he offers. “I could take you there to find it, if ––”
She shakes her head.
“Can you keep a secret?” Zelda whispers.
“Sure.”
“I never wanted to be Queen.”
“Do you now?”
“No?” She squints. “Yes?” Then she sighs. “Do I really have a choice? I’m all that’s left.”
*
He learned a fairytale, once, from a child in Kakariko Village.
It goes as follows: a prince is in a centuries-long battle with evil. The battle only ends once the prince rips out his own heart and feeds it to the beast, who is a wolf and only wants the flesh and not the soul, and spits his soul back out of his mouth. It breaks into a million pieces.
The prince feels nothing. How can he? He’s missing his heart.
There’s a princess as well, grinned Koko, who had not yet learned object permanence or whatever and thought that every princess is The Princess Link and Impa spoke about in hushed tones. The princess cuts her hands collecting the glass shards of his heart, because if she doesn’t, who will, and her hands bleed as she pieces the mosaic together again. She’s in love with the prince, because of course she is, because the only thing Link remembers of love is that it’s warm and red and slips through your fingers. She makes it her life’s mission. The prince needs her to save him. He fought a thousand year battle for her and the least she can do for him is cut up her fingers.
But here’s the kicker. There is no happy ending. The story was meant to be a cautionary tale, probably, about how men without hearts are a different type of evil than the one that lurks underneath castles and princesses who sacrifice too much of themselves are bound to be unhappy. Remember, kids: roses have thorns, and wolves are just dogs with sharper teeth, and those teeth are bloody with the remains of some poor little canary. Remember, kids: you’re the canary, your bones are hollow and your body can’t brave the cold. The hero is asleep. Stop relying on fairytales and swing the damn sword for yourself.
When she returns the prince’s heart to him, it no longer works, because the princess’ blood has dried in its cracks and the glass can’t meld back together.
The story hung misshapen off of him, but the irony was not lost.
Link blinked. “Why — why did you choose this story?”
“Because the princess is pretty,” Koko said simply. “Can you help me cut apples?”
*
Zelda never mentions her birthday, and Link doesn’t question this because that is a rabbit hole Link certainly doesn’t want to take her down. The only reason he even knows it’s her birthday is that the town of Hateno has gone into a strange mix of mourning and celebration. It’s the anniversary of the apocalypse, yes, but it’s also the first time there’s ever been some hope that the world can rebuild itself. The beginning after the end.
He comes home from whatever errand he was running to Zelda sitting at the table, wearing a somber expression as she ruminates on a pair of kitchen shears. She looks up as the door opens like a dog who’s been caught ripping up the pillows, like she’s just done something blasphemous, even though she hasn’t done anything yet.
“I was thinking of cutting my hair,” she says weakly.
Link sits next to her. She looks down at the shears.
“I thought it might make me feel different,” she explains.
Link has barely ever given his hair a second thought. He’s not in tune with the psychology behind a haircut, but, sure.
“Do you want to do it now?” He takes the shears from her. He tries his hardest not to draw attention to the way they rattle against the table. “We can go out back and ––”
The shears fall to the floor. They’re upsettingly loud for a small piece of metal and plastic. Maybe they just sound that way because Zelda is looking down at them with a scowl, a bomb that’s been waiting to go off.
“If you have something you need to get off your chest, I suggest you do it, Link.”
“I don’t ––”
“Are you afraid of me?”
“What?”
“You keep doing that with your hands,” she says.
He doesn’t know what to do. Part of him still feels like the sad little child burying his sister’s dog, he and Zelda two sad little children sitting in a dark room, having a heated conversation over a kitchen table. He feels too young to wield the heavy words on his tongue or hold the heavier feeling in his chest.
But he knows that’s wrong. He watched Zelda cross the threshold into adulthood and he should have kissed her that day one hundred and one years ago, at that spring, before the world collapsed upon itself, so she would not have to do it later on a burning battlefield. He crossed it some time between pulling the sword the first and second time. They’re little and sad, sure, but he's grown out of the games that come with childhood. It's time to bury that dog in the backyard.
Zelda is not entertained by any of this musing. She drums her fingers on the table.
“Where’s all that fabled courage, hero?”
He takes a breath. Cards on the table.
“You were afraid of telling me too much,” Link says. “But I think that’s where we’re missing each other.”
She eyes him, deliberately, methodically, instead of asking him for clarity. Her eyes go from his hands to his face to his mouth to his eyes.
“You kissed me that day,” he says. “Right?”
“I––” Zelda’s eyes are wide. “I thought you were dead.”
“Our first kiss, and I was half-dead.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t think that’s fucked up?”
“Did you anticipate there being more than one?” Zelda counters.
The question would have been an innocent flirt if he didn’t know her better, if she didn’t know how to make her words cut through him.
It’s not a ‘haha, did you really want to kiss me again? ’ with a twirl of her hair, still long down her back. It’s an ‘ I will never tell you in so many words that I love you, and that I know you love me because you kept seventy eight Silent Princesses in your pack for me and paid someone to braid them into my horse’s hair. You found the only pure white stallion left in the world for me. This conversation was inevitable because we both know but won’t admit that we’ve been in love this entire time, because then we’d have to acknowledge just how happy we could have been if we hadn’t failed.’
“Did you think we’d get another chance?”
He’s not sure at what point their chairs slid closer together. He gets a good look at her face for the first time. It’s a shitty day –– he would understand if she’d been crying, but there’s nothing to indicate that she has been. No puffy, red eyes. Nothing running down her face. But that doesn’t indicate much about her mood. This is Zelda, who didn’t cry when her mother died, and holds onto that fact as if it’s a point of pride. That’s something they should unpack later. He puts a pin in it.
“Did you not want me to remember?”
“I ––” Zelda stammers. Collects her thoughts. Opens her mouth, then closes it again, dog ripping up the pillows. “I didn’t mean to keep it from you. It wasn’t –– I don’t want you to think that I don’t like you now, or am disappointed by –– “ She purses her lips and takes his hand. “It’s that I spent so long knowing you’d have to die for me one day.”
He lifts a knuckle to where the tears should be drying down her cheek. She hasn’t been crying. Link considers, and then considers against, doing it on her behalf.
“I didn’t think we’d get this far,” she says.
“Well, we did. Now what?”
Zelda leans forward. A hand on his neck. His pulse underneath her thumb.
“We don’t have to count the first one.” Zelda rests her forehead against his. “Not if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Good,” she says, just before she surges past a threshold.
*
(“I didn’t think I’d see him again.” The owner is crying. They run an affectionate hand through the fur on the dog’s head. “Is there anything I can do to thank you? Rupees, or resources, or ––”
“Do you have any rice you can spare? We just ran out ––” He’s interrupted by her elbow to his ribs.
“Ignore him.” She sighs. Always cleaning up his messes. “We don’t need the rice. It was our pleasure, really.”
When the owner leaves to pay for a bed at the stable, she clicks her tongue and taps her foot against the rocky ground. “Rice. What am I going to do with you?”
“Return me, maybe.”
“Too much of a hassle.” She considers him for a moment, then offers him a long-suffering sigh and a kiss to the cheek. You’re stuck with me forever, it says. Please don’t ask strangers on the road for groceries. Some might consider that rude.)
*
One time late in winter, Link smashed in his first-floor window in what was at best a graceless accident, at worst an outpouring of frustration that he couldn’t remember if she’d ever been to Hateno –– the town proper, not the fort or the burning field on its outskirts. He set his sledgehammer down too forcefully if you wanted to be generous, but if you wanted to be a realist about it, you could say it was intentional. You could say that Link stood with his mouth open in abject horror that he’d, one, smashed his window open and, two, would have to explain this ordeal to Bolson to get it fixed, because he might freeze to death otherwise.
Maybe he wanted to get down on his hands and knees and bleed as he picked up the glass, because at least he deserved the blood on his hands this time. Maybe it reminded him of that one story about the princess he heard in Kakariko. Maybe he could tell Koko that he met the wolf and his name is Ganon.
Either way, the blood on his hands felt like an apology. I’m sorry, Princess. I’m sorry we’ve been sent back to our birthplaces with nothing to show for it, I’m sorry that mine is a home and yours is a prison, I’m sorry that I got the easy end of the bargain. What is it like to be the keeper of our past? Does it echo around that empty sanctum? Does it get caught between the wolf’s claws?
He hoped she had been to Hateno. He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t explain why the house felt empty without her if she’d never lived there.
This was the first time he allowed himself to miss her. Cutting his hands didn’t hurt so badly.
*
The breeze by Hateno Beach is a welcome reprieve to the cruel heat of early summer. It’s hard to sit like this in the town proper, with Zelda leaning her cheek on his shoulder, pressed to his side, simply because it’s too hot to do so without dissolving into a puddle of sweat.
Link pinches on a strand of hair at the back of her tunic. He’d evened out the cut that morning, but despite sweeping up the majority of it, gold still sticks to her shoulders.
“Did you want a cake?”
Zelda laughs. “No. Please never make me a birthday cake again.”
He glosses over the fact that this implies he’d made her one before, because has a lot of questions about what they had and hadn’t done before they met their end. Did he ever take her to see the aurora at the top of Hebra Mountain? Did they ever dance? Did she ––
“Did you try to kiss me at the Spring of Wisdom?”
She laughs again, a little lighter. Link wishes he were more poetic, he wishes he could bottle up the sound for safekeeping.
“Kind of,” she says. “But I lost my nerve and I started telling this stupid story about ––”
“Us, yeah.” Link squints. “Or, us but...not us?"
“I was trying to tell you something, but your skull is very thick when you want it to be.” Zelda rolls her eyes. “You never heard that story growing up and thought there was something romantic about it?”
“I don’t remember anything about growing up.” Except the dog. “But, sure.”
“Right.”
“And you said they were boring.”
“And I also said boring was a good thing, in their case,” Zelda says, and then adds earnestly, “I’d like for us to be boring together for as long as we can before we get –– well –– bored.”
“Hm,” Link considers. “Romantic. Is that your roundabout way of saying you love me?”
At that, she giggles. Quickly, methodically, she takes his head in her hands and kisses him. The movement is fast, but the kiss itself is slow, gentler than it was in the kitchen the night before; like they’ve got all the time in the world.
“You already knew that,” Zelda says, her lips to the crest of his ear.
*
“Are you okay?”
“What do you think? We’re all going to die, and it’s my fault.”
“Don’t say that.”
“What should I say, then?” Then Zelda said quietly, barely more than a whisper: “I’m sorry, Link.”
Link bit down the impulse to wipe her tears with his thumb. He contemplated it. He would, if not for the way the cold of the spring made him tremble.
She slipped out of his grasp and settled on the rocky ledge, staring at the cuffs on her wrists.
“There’s so much I’ll never get the chance to do,” Zelda said to her hands. “So much that was expected of me. I’ll never have a daughter. I’ll never become queen.” She looked to him, a question in her eyes. She didn’t ask it. Instead she set her gaze steadily ahead, slumped her shoulders, and said: “I’ll never fall in love.”
Something twisted in Link’s gut. “Did you even want to do those things?”
“I wanted to fall in love,” she said delicately. “I thought it would be nice. That’s silly, I know. All things considered.”
He had no basis to think deeply about that. He had no basis to be in love with her.
All he could think to do was say: “That’s not silly. It’s...noble.”
“Noble,” Zelda repeated. “Love falls very low on the hierarchy of needs.”
“It’s still there.”
Zelda paused. She frowned at Hylia’s statue and tucked her knees to her chest.
“I’ve placed a terrible burden on you, haven’t I?” She murmured. “Just by merit of existing.”
She looked to Link with the fond sadness of a child who’s just come to terms with the fact that their family dog will die before them. The math was simple: Hylians lived longer than retrievers. Princesses outlived their knights. It was the way of the world, the way the more gruesome of their thousands of stories ended.
“Maybe it’s not such a bad thing,” Link said. “We’ll always be looking out for each other. This life and the next, right?”
They never discussed the pasts they couldn’t remember, the lives they led before. This was breaking new ground. This was a wolf in the woods baring its soft underbelly. Feathers in his teeth, blood on his mouth, et cetera.
“Yes,” Zelda said, “maybe it is.” She framed his face in her hands. Looked at him like she was pondering something and leaned in, just a little closer to him. He held her gaze for a second too long and felt his heart plummet into his stomach.
She decided against it. She let go and turned her head.
“You asked me once if I really believed that was us.” She stared out into the water. “I’d like to believe it was. It’s...nicer that way.”
“Nicer how?”
“You know the one where we make it onto the surface?” She shivered. Link opened his cloak to allow her some warmth, and she curled into him immediately, teeth clattering as she adjusted to the temperature. He startled when she leaned her head against his shoulder. “I like to think they lived the rest of their lives in peaceful mundanity, you know? Sometimes I wish….sometimes I’d like to have a more boring life.”
“Do you think we’ll get the chance to be boring?” What does that fabled wisdom tell you, Princess? Will we survive this? Will you ever get to fall in love?
“I hope so.”
If he were a smarter person, he would have told her. He should have told her then. If he had, maybe that would have stopped the shadows from swallowing the sun whole once they walked down the mountain.
*
“I’ve decided,” Zelda tells the fire, a nighttime tradition, “that I do get a choice in the matter, and I won’t be Queen after all.”
“Oh. Good.” She looks at him like that’s not an explanation. “I just mean...I like having you here.”
And then she looks at him again, a spark forming in her eye.
“So if I had gone to the castle, that would have been the end of it?” Zelda snorts. “And they say fealty is dead.”
“I mean, I would’ve followed you to the castle if you’d wanted –– I –– “ He stops. Then: “You’re pulling my leg.”
“Maybe you make it too easy,” she says. “What about you? Anything you’d like to get off your chest?”
It comes to him as suddenly as it did that one night, in the first part, the story with the pin in it.
“The dog died,” Link says.
Zelda blinks at him. She frowns. “What dog?”
*
(“We can’t take you in, little one,” she says with a pout. “We travel too much for you to depend on us.”
She picks an apple off the tree out in back of the house and places it at the dog’s feet. The dog’s sturdy, black and tan with a white snout and paws, which tracked mud across the bridge. The dog probably wandered a long way if he didn’t belong to anyone in town.
She doesn’t notice him as he approaches the house.
“It’s a shame. Link would make an excellent…” she pauses to consider her words, placing them carefully, “...dog father. And a good father is important.”
He pauses. She doesn’t talk much about fathers.
“My own father was cruel to me. I never understood why. Children don’t understand the cruelty of adults, you know?” She scratches behind the dog’s ears. “But Link...he’s not cruel. He’s...he’s good.”
And then she turns her head; she always finds him. She quirks an eyebrow.
“Eavesdropping, hero?”
“How else will I hear the nice things you have to say about me?”
“I’ve said plenty of nice things about you to your face.”
“I could stand to hear more.”
“Hm.” The spark he loves and hates and is always at his expense settles back in her eyes. “If you plan on making dinner in the next century, I’ll see what I can do to feed your ego.”)
*
Zelda shouts down from the loft, “Link! I fixed it!”
Link joins her upstairs. The photo hangs straight and perfect, and he betrays his survivalist instincts by looking at it, fully taking it all in. They both look so young, so tense and so unlike themselves. He stands incredibly stiff. Zelda isn’t smiling. Which is a shame; he walked straight into the underworld for that smile. He traveled to every corner of the world, every inch of his map covered just to remember it, and it was worth it.
“Be careful,” Zelda says, and he’s so lost in thought that her voice startles him. He jolts forward, losing his balance and toppling over against the wall. Great job, Link. Some hero you are, Link.
“Don’t nudge it –– Link !”
He backs away slowly. He imagines by the venom in her voice that the pout on her mouth now has softened from a scowl, and he would feel bad about ruining her handiwork, but she always looks so endearingly passionate when he’s found a way under her skin. He moves to tilt her chin toward his face, other hand on her waist.
Zelda scoffs. “Is this your way of making it up to me?”
He smiles. “Something like that.”
The thing Link didn’t know before, back when he was cutting his hands on the edges of her heart, is that stories don’t ever really end. But if they did, theirs might end right here. The moment is idyllic, happy; we’ll never know if either of them ever cry again.
Imagine they don’t. It’s better that way.
Perhaps in a week or so, they travel to Kakariko Village, and this time they make it past that burning field. Perhaps Zelda falls to the floor with tears of relief that Impa’s faith in her runs a hundred years strong, that one piece of her history still lives. Perhaps Link gets to tell Paya that yes, he remembers now, and he was in love with her. Perhaps he never stopped loving her, he just forgot that gravity had green eyes and a beautiful right hand. Then Link will kneel in front of the cooking pot and introduce Koko to the princess. He’ll let her know the wolf has been taken care of and isn’t chopping up people’s hearts anymore. The blood washes away, even after it dries.
Imagine: you're the hero. Imagine you sleep for one hundred years, and still have something worth waking up for at the end of it all.
*
Let me tell you a story.
The princess shoved the monster underneath her bed and went back to sleep. The hero joined her, because the hero was in love with her, but they woke up the next morning and bought some rice from the store down the hill. They’ll use it to make dinner. They’ll sit in front of the hearth at night and tell each other secrets, then they’ll fall asleep and do it all again the next day.
We’re going to make it, somehow. Maybe, it will take a day. A week. A year. One hundred years, like the princess who became the castle who became a memory who became a girl again.
There will always be stories that hurt to tell, and each of them will have a dog and a bird and a shovel in the backyard. But here’s a secret: our story is never-ending. Let’s cherish the time we have together, and try not to worry what will happen when the wolves come.