Work Text:
The bodily is a matter of pain, Link learns. He learns through headaches and bruises and scrapes, he learns through bitter practice, through walking out onto the grass and being met with a bokoblin’s stick. He learns of pain through pain, because nobody ever bothers to tell him these things. They’re too busy running their mouths about matters of dead men and almost dead no longer men.
So, when Link begins bleeding, he just sighs with a begrudging annoyance, and stuffs more cloth down his pants. It’s not a wound, and he doesn’t feel hurt, and he figures that on this bitch of an earth, blood just sometimes pools out of your orifices, and nobody bothered to tell him. Oh well. He eats a hearty meal, just in case, and goes about his day. Oh fucking well.
The one who actually explains it is Paya. She sees splotches of red on his pants as he rides into Kakariko, and panics so much her stutter makes her almost incomprehensible. Her hands shake as she tries to take him, they shake and they convey enough with their warmth and trembling fingers. It’s not a wound, he tells her, with his fingers, in turn. She scrunches her eyebrows, and then a bulb lights up and she blushes and stutters even more.
She explains it to him with hushed tones and a red face, she gives him soft fabric and awkwardly shows how to use it with an imagined diagram in the air, too embarrassing to actually draw out. When he presses rupees into her hands, she shakes her head fervently, and tries to get words out, but when her tongue fails her she shyly and roughly imitates Link:
‘It’s the least I can do,’ she signs, and it’s clear it doesn’t come like second nature to her, like it does for Link. It comes like a tiny piece of a hurricane she’s trying to tame, bare. ‘For a hero like you.’
Link smiles at her gently, thanking her with a bow, too, which might be a little over the top but he means it. He throws his pants in the next river he finds and watches the water go a murky red before kneeling down and beginning to scrub.
Paya used words like ‘person’ and ‘someone’ when telling him about the apparently monthly godly wrath (that’s not what she said, that part is Link’s own addition. Maybe he’ll ask the Goddess about it, the next time he runs into a statue. He doubts she’ll respond in any way, but he’ll imagine her laugh inwardly anyway. She strikes him as good humored, the Goddess). Link has nothing to do but assume that this just happens, and nobody talks about it because that’s just life. Nobody explained breathing to him, either. It just happened.
***
“You’re a voe,” the tall Gerudo guard tells him. Her face is covered, and Link gets lost in the patterns adorning her entire clothing, almost her entire body covered up by geometrics. “Voe are not permitted inside town.”
What is a voe is a stupid question, Link realizes, because the answer is him. He is a voe.
‘I am?’ he signs, instead, which is a much more logical inquiry, to him. The guard’s eyes shift ever so slightly, as she raises an eyebrow. She understands the language, though, thankfully, because she responds.
“Well, I’m assuming,” she admits. Her spear hits the sandy stone with a soft thump. “Are you?”
‘I’m a boy,’ Link guesses. That is a word that has been used in reference to him, and something tells him this voe business has something to do with all the merchants outside town constantly talking about men and women, saying the latter as if there’s shit on their tongue. Link still doesn’t quite understand, but he knows he doesn’t like it when people say things with that inflection.
“Yes, boy is voe , in our language,” explains the guard. “Or, well, voe is man, but child and adult voe are equally prohibited from entrance.”
‘Okay,’ Link nods. He still doesn’t quite get it, but he’s used to accepting things and figuring them out later. ‘I need to talk to the chief, though.’
The guard bursts out laughing. The other guard, who’s only been listening to snippets of the conversation, starts snickering too. The people bartering behind them give lazy glares, but turn away just as quickly. It’s not uncommon to see the sight of a young man trying to claw his way into Gerudo Town being laughed at by the guards.
“About what?” the guard has finally stopped laughing for long enough to speak, although the stray giggles say she’s still not taking him seriously.
As the answer, Link just points at the sandstorm beast, seen clearly, not obstructed at all by the tiny fence-like enclosure the merchants have put up in front of Gerudo Town walls. There are glimpses of moving machinery, clanking together in between flashes of lightning and pillars of kicked up sand. The beast roars. You can’t hear it, but you can feel it in your bones.
The guards are speechless for a moment. Then they bark out even more laughter, a bitter, cold edge to it, this time.
“Why, how brave, a Hylian voe promising to save the poor, weak Gerudo from their own internal affair in order to sneak into our town,” the second Guard speaks to Link, leaning on her spear. She’s also tall, but she keeps eye level with Link, slicing anger in her dark eyes. “You’re not getting through, and the next time you choose to make our divine lady the subject of your joke, you’re leaving.”
She points towards the exit to the vast desert, but Link doesn’t even look.
‘I’m not joking,’ he insists.
“You’re not going in, kid,” the first guard grits through her teeth.
‘Okay,’ Link nods. ‘I don’t have to. Can she come to the gate and talk to me?’
At this, the guards are struck. They blink at him once, twice, and suddenly Link feels incredibly poignant.
‘Sorry,’ he quickly bows his head down in an apology. ‘That was rude. I shouldn’t presume of your leadership customs, I was disrespectful–’
“No,” he’s cut off by the second guard. “We’ll talk to our lady.”
Link signs a million thank yous before walking towards the little pseudo-inn-tent. Whatever the voe rule is, it seems important. So he’ll respect it.
***
When the chief of the Gerudo walks towards the East gate of town, Link realizes she’s like, twelve. That’s fine. Link is also like, seventeen. He’s taken down the blight of Vah Ruta and Vah Medoh. Who’s to say a twelve year old can’t take down the economy.
“Speak,” she says in a commanding voice, and Link figures sign would be okay.
‘I’m here to tame Vah Naboris.’
The chief looks him over with a squint. She scans him up and down, eyes lingering a bit on the slate, but ultimately catching on the blue hilt behind his shoulder.
“Show me the blade you carry.” she orders, and he obeys.
The blade of evil’s bane lays light in his fingers, and still smells of pumpkin from when he made soup and didn’t have a knife on hand. Three sets of eyes widen, and the deal is sealed, from there. Chief Riju, as Link later learns, is well read on the history of Hylians, and claims that he’s, firstly, not of the Yiga Clan (which was a valid concern to have, Link agrees, judging by his run-ins with the lot), and, more importantly, is possibly not talking out of his ass.
He walks away from Gerudo Town, that day, with two Gerudo soldiers accompanying him. He runs a few errands for the tribe, accompanied by those same soldiers, who talk a language he doesn’t understand over his head, but that’s fine. They tell him when they think he should slash, and when, in their opinion, he should throw a comically large pile of bananas down from the rafters of the Yiga hideout, providing the perfect distraction for him to slip into the shadows and retrieve the Thunder Helm.
It’s a relic he isn’t allowed to touch, and that’s one thing he does understand. He understands the power hands hold, his fingers being his main mode of interaction (his mouth being the second). He watches the helm with reverence and respect, and the soldiers watch him in turn, with curiosity and a glint of caution.
***
Riju jumps off her shield first, her seal halting to a stop in the sand. She watches the beast, on its knees, with reverence and a glint of loathing.
“Okay,” she exhales, adrenaline still rushing in veins. “You have some time before it rises. Tame it.”
She looks at Link with intense expectation. Not the kind the King eyes him with, no, this chief is twelve and looks at Link all with desperation, respect and a glint of loathing. She watches him the same way she watches the beast, the two being synonymous in her mind. Go on, promised boy. Save us. Save us, because our chief is twelve and can’t save herself, apparently. Save us, you sack of shit, because the Goddess plays favorites, and you think she’s good humored. I don’t. Enter the beast, and save us, so you can get out of my sight.
Link doesn’t squirm under this expectation, because he’s used to accepting things and figuring them out later. He gets off the shield, untying the rope from the wild animal so it can set seal to wherever it wants to. He watches it go.
Then, Riju squeaks.
“Link,” she goes a little pale as she points towards his leg.
When he looks, he sees a tiny stream of blood running down his pants. Oh. It has been around a month since the last one. He’s momentarily in awe of human biology and its comprehension by humans, and he snaps out only after he notices the strained expression Riju’s wearing in his peripheral.
‘It’s not a wound,’ he signs, smiling at her. He reaches towards his slate to pull out the soft fabrics Paya gave him.
He tucks the fabric into his belt, so he remembers that this is the first problem he’ll need to take care of the moment he’s in private. Riju watches him with wide eyes.
There’s a moment of silence between them, before it breaks.
“You.. you’re a voe, right?” Riju shifts in place, awkward and hesitant. Link blinks, unsure of what brought the question about.
“I’m a boy,” he says the words out loud, this time, and it feels strange on his tongue. All things that are not food feel strange on his tongue, he supposes. It maybe should be some kind of revelation, injecting the phrase into air, making it audible. It isn’t. Link said he’s a boy plenty of times before. Even if it’s never been committed to speech, his nimble fingers spelled out that reality plenty of times. It’s not a new development.
“Okay,” Riju nods. She’s still awkward, but she lets her face adopt a slight smile. “Sorry. I just… It’s weird, with gender and non-Gerudo.”
The wetness feels weird on Link’s skin, but he urges Riju to continue. This conversation is important, he realizes, even if he doesn’t understand it.
“Plenty of Gerudo are, hm. Like you,” Riju speaks as if she’s dancing around something. Link doesn’t know what she means by ‘like you’. Do Gerudo also bleed monthly? Paya said ‘people’, so Link just assumed it was universal. He doesn’t know why it’s being highlighted. “But, with others, sometimes… it gets weird. They pretend to be things they’re not to get things, and they act strange around bodies. So I didn’t…”
Riju sucks in a breath. Link imitates her, because he feels he’s lacking an awareness of something, and, maybe, if he just follows her lead, he’ll get it.
“Sorry. My question was rude,” Riju bows her head down, curtly, before continuing. “The Gerudo are a strictly vai culture. Hylians, and many others, believe that means all Gerudo are vai, but that’s not true, of course.”
She stands in silence for a bit. Then she looks at Link, with a glint in her eye.
“Do you know why voe are not allowed in town?”
He shakes his head.
“That’s because the Gerudo are a strictly vai culture. And, long ago, it became apparent the Hylians did not respect that. It was mainly Hylians, who thought the Gerudo needed them, for some purpose or another. We do not allow voe in town, because upkeeping tradition is very important for us.”
She digs her feet into the sand with a displeased expression. She knows Link doesn’t get it. She knows, and tries anyway.
“There are Hylian voe who think that makes us cruel, or unreasonable. They think we are rejecting evolution, by keeping faithful to our ways, by not making exceptions. But, it’s not evolution when man takes a bird, plucks it dry and throws it in a lake.”
She’s hugging her shoulders, her shoulders that are sore from the weight she’s holding. She’s twelve, and she’s a chief of a town in a desert, and many think that her biggest problems are the harsh climate, or the hard sandstone, or the lightning beast feasting in her backyard. They never think of the hordes of Hylians bartering for what they call exotic trinkets and unique wares out front. They never think, but she does. She wakes up, and it’s the first thing she sees, eyes clouding with dread. With jaded, chipped away dread.
She’s twelve, and a chief, and also a girl. That’s what vai means. She’s a girl, Link realizes.
“Maybe, if the world was a better place, all restrictions would be lifted,” Riju whispers, quietly. “Maybe, if the world was a better place, voe of all kinds would come in, and understand that the Gerudo are a strictly vai culture, and then they’d leave, with everything the way they found it.”
But the world is not a better place. There is a lightning beast in your backyard, and hordes of Hylians out front. You’re under siege from both sides. You’re under siege.
“Sorry, my question was rude,” she says again.
‘It’s okay. I thought nothing of it,’ Link assures her. The blood is seeping further down his pant leg.
“Here,” she extends her arms, the Thunder Helm clutched between her small fingers. Her head is bowed down, her eyes trained on golden sand. It’s a rejection of rejection, Link realizes. She’s not looking at his fingers, silencing him, he realizes. “This will help you in your quest. It’s too big on me, anyways.”
Link shakes his head, even if she doesn’t see it.
“Keep it,” he says, firmly. Out loud. “I’ll find other ways. And you’ll grow into it.”
Riju looks up at him, smiles in disbelief. He’ll introduce her to Zelda, when he saves her, he thinks.
Riju props the helm under her arm, to free both her hands.
“Thank you,” she says, and signs something Link has never seen before.
Gerudo sign language, he realizes. He replicates it quickly, doing it a few times to get the movement down. He does it one last time, making eye contact.
“What are you thanking me for?” she grins.
‘For sharing,’ he grins right back.
Then, he enters the beast, rising out of her sight.
***
Link saves Zelda, but that’s not important. What’s important is that her favorite dish is fruitcake, so he learns to perfect the recipe.
He sits by the cooking pot, delicately cutting wildberries and apples, adding sugar and just enough salt to make the taste pop, and he presents the finished product with a semblance of pride. Zelda likes all the dishes he makes, and all the fruitcakes he bakes, too, but he still learns to perfect it. It’s the least he can do, he thinks.
In one of his attempts, he drops a wildberry square on his shirt, staining it a translucent rich pink. She snickers at him from her place by the fire, and he glares at her, in the soft way friends do. Sighing, he pulls the shirt over his head, and drops it haphazardly by his side, a reminder to soak it in the next lake they stumble upon.
He continues his work, but Zelda goes quiet. It’s not her usual quiet, where she’s engrossed in some book or writing down her notes. She’s quiet, and staring at him.
Slowly, she reaches out and her fingers brush just beneath his pectorals.
Link flinches, on instinct, and she flinches back, in response. They both blush.
“Sorry,” she lowers her head. “Couldn’t resist. It’s just… they didn’t change, over the century.”
Link blinks, and gazes towards his chest. Towards the two scars slicing it. That must’ve been what she was trying to touch.
That reminds him.
“How did I get those?” he asks.
She stares blankly at him. She furrows her brows.
“You don’t know?”
He shakes his head. He doesn’t know about any of his scars, really. From battle, he can assume. He just doesn’t know what kind of battle sliced his chest open. It must’ve been a really cool one.
“It’s, um,” Zelda staggers. Her hands fly up to gesture something, help her explain, but she comes up short. “It’s, okay. Well. You really don’t know?”
He shakes his head again. He’s frowning, now. Should he know?
“Okay, well, you know, some people change their bodies,” she begins. He doesn’t really know, but he can imagine. “So, some people do it, because they’re not happy with the bodies they were born with. For some people, it… it’s because the bodies they were born with, they’re gendered, by others.”
Gendered. Voe and vai. Men and women. Okay. Link knows what that is, vaguely.
“And those people, they’re not happy with the way their bodies are gendered by others. They’re not happy with the way they’re gendered, in general. Those people, they’re transgender.”
Link nods. He’s following, kind of. He looks towards Zelda, but she looks as if she’s expecting something from him, too. As if she’s prodding a corpse, expecting it to move.
‘And?’ he prompts.
Zelda lets out a strangled sigh. She pushes hair back out of her face, taking a deep breath.
“So, for example, um. I have boobs. And some people, who have boobs, they don’t want to have boobs. So they get a doctor to give them a surgery, to remove them.”
She looks up at Link, with a strange hope. He feels uneasy. He feels like there are things he’s missing here, like there are things he’s expected to know. Some things, he’s expected to just know, like breathing. And he doesn’t.
Zelda buries her face in her hands with another long breath. Her hands might be shaking, a little bit. She looks up, to try again.
“Link, I- it’s, um, how do I… it’s just, shit- you’re trans, okay?” her face is scrunched up in an expression of exasperated pain. He wants to reach out and touch the ridge of her eyebrows with his thumb, keep it there until it smoothes out. But he feels this is important, so he doesn’t. “Don’t you… wouldn’t you remember?”
He blinks, still trained on her face. Her eyes, somehow, become glassier in the split moment he had his eyelids covering his vision.
“I don’t.”
Zelda seems to stop breathing for a bit. She looks so damn hurt, searching for something in his face, in the universe, in anything. She turns up empty handed. She nods, lowering her gaze, and sits in silence. Something inside her dies, excruciatingly slowly, and Link feels that something’s final breaths dwindle as he sits next to her.
“You’d like Riju, I think,” Link says, after the heavy silence. “I want to introduce you.”
“The Gerudo chief?” Zelda scoffs. “Yeah, I’ll probably like her.”
‘You guys can hang out while I go kill Moldugas,’ he continues in sign, when he’s sure Zelda’s eyes are on him. After a stray thought, he adds: ‘Do you know the Gerudo language?’
Zelda smirks, and answers with words Link doesn’t understand. He catches only one: the word for yes.
She bursts out laughing at the bewildered expression he’s wearing.
“I’m rusty, though,” she admits. “I’m looking forward to getting the practice.”
Link nods, eyes looking through the fabric of the universe.
Zelda is a girl, too, it sets in.
***
When Link and Zelda stay at stables, they prefer to sit outside. She likes to sleep outdoors, and he likes to hog the cooking pot. It works out.
Link is cutting up apples for a pie, with Zelda settled in beside him. She already closed her eyes, and judging by the way her chest rises up and down, she already fell asleep, too. The orange light of the fire bounces off the blue shadows in her golden hair, dancing on her lying form. The blanket sits next to her, and Link plans to cover her with it once it gets a little more chilly.
He sets the knife down, all the fruit sliced, and he encases the square bits in dough. It’s not exactly a pie, but that’s what Link calls it, anyway. It tastes close enough.
Some men laugh loudly inside the stable. One of them careens out the entrance, a glass in his hand. The man is approaching the campfire, Link realizes, but he isn’t really bothered. Many travelers sit down next to him while he cooks. They’ve always done so, and Link doesn’t mind, as long as they don’t disturb him.
This man, however, clearly isn’t one of those. He sits on the wooden stool, staring at Link. Then, slowly, he turns his gaze towards Zelda. That makes Link a bit more weary. Still, he continues with his pies.
“That your girlfriend?” the man asks, slurring his words a bit.
Link pauses. Yes, Zelda is a girl. Yes, Zelda is his friend. However, when similar questions were posed to her, before, she always rolled her eyes and scrunched her nose with a bit of disgust. No, she’d say. He’s not my boyfriend. That didn’t make much sense to Link, since he is a boy and they are friends, but he has deduced that putting those two facts next to each other in that way meant something else.
He shakes his head.
“What, your sister?”
He shakes his head again. Him and Zelda are not related.
“Oh,” the man squints, his mouth spreading in a grin that doesn’t make Link feel at ease. “You two are just friends, then?”
Link doesn’t understand the use of the word just, but he nods, anyway. Yes. They are friends.
“M-m-m,” the man scoffs. “And you cook for her?”
Link nods. He cooks for both of them, but yes, that includes her.
The man chuckles, a look of disbelief on his face.
“Damn, boy, who’d you learn gender from?” he laughs at a joke that passes by Link completely.
‘The Gerudo,’ he signs. The man doesn’t acknowledge it, and Link groans, mentally. Of course, nothing is easy on this bitch of an earth.
“The Gerudo,” he says, out loud.
“Ah!” the man slaps his thigh so hard Link flinches, and checks if Zelda woke up. She hasn’t. “Those damned hags seduced you?”
“What?” Link almost chokes.
“Of course they taught you their backwards stuff,” the man continues, undeterred. “They’re all chicks, they know nothing of men.”
Link blinks. They know far more of men than him, he thinks.
“You see, men, when they see a girl, it’s just nature.”
It is nature, Link agrees. When Link first saw Zelda, he saw blue skies and fields of green grass and endless trees, and birds, and he saw hurricanes and mountains and he saw a world that was alive in its desolation.
“So, you can say you’re just friends all you want,” the man smirks, and Link notices, he talks like he has shit on his tongue. All the time. Link doesn’t like it. “But you can’t fool me.”
“I didn’t lie,” Link scrunches his brows in confusion.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” the man waves dismissively. He takes a swig of his drink. It stinks. “Maybe that’s what you think. But mark my words, one day you won’t be able to take it anymore.”
“Take what anymore?”
“Look, man!” the guy points towards Zelda. “All splayed out here! She’s teasing you!”
Well, yes. They’re friends. And friends tease each other, sometimes, and so of course Zelda does it too. Like when a tree branch falls on his head or he gets drenched by a Lizalfos or when he drools in his sleep. Link gets back at her, though. Rest assured.
“Why will I not be able to take it?”
“Because you’re a man.”
Link furrows his brows.
“And?”
“And men think with what’s between their legs,” the man supplies, like it’s evident. Link’s pies lay neglected, now, the wok heating up for no reason.
What’s between their legs? What is so notable between Link’s legs?
“The blood?” he tries. That doesn’t make sense. It hasn’t been a month yet.
It’s the man’s turn to be confused.
“Blood?” he looks at Link with bewilderment.
“Yeah, the blood,” Link tries to prod further. “Like, sometimes there’s blood between my legs.”
“What, mate, you got your dick chopped off?” the man giggles. He chugs more of his glass, disappointed to find it empty.
Link furrows his brows.
“What’s a dick?”
Zelda rises as if from a grave, towering over the campfire. Link didn’t notice how long she’s been sitting awake for, but, evidently, a while, not a blink of sleep in her angry eyes. She’s clutching a knife she grabbed from the cutting board, still slicked in apple juice.
“If you don’t leave right now,” she speaks to the man, raising the knife up. “I’ll stick this in your crotch and twist it. Get lost.”
The man jumps up on self preservation instinct, and tries to cover it up by scoffing and dusting his pants off. He mutters something as he trudges back to the stable, Link only catching the words crazy and cunt, and knowing the meaning of only the first one.
Zelda takes a deep breath before putting the knife down. She lays back down, turning away from Link, but he knows she doesn’t close her eyes. He feels uneasy. He tastes bile in the back of his throat.
“Sorry,” he says. His throat is sore. His hands itch to sign, but Zelda is turned away from him.
“For what?” she turns back towards him with a frown. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I didn’t know what he was talking about,” Link attempts to put a pie into the pan with shaky hands. “I–”
His voice breaks, and he swallows, thickly.
‘Sorry,’ he signs.
“Link, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Zelda’s frown deepens. “That guy was being a dick.”
‘What’s a dick?’ he spells out the word. ‘It’s a thing. It’s not just an insult.’
Zelda sighs, screwing her eyes shut. She sits up, exhales, tries to flex her fingers to try find the words.
“A dick, is, um,” upon failing to find an explanation that would suit the situation, she falls back to a typical biology textbook passage. “A dick, or a penis, is a type of genitalia commonly found in Hylian males. A vagina, on the other hand, is found commonly in females. You have a vagina.”
She signs the new words as she speaks them, to hopefully shorten this painful conversation.
‘Boys aren’t supposed to have vaginas,’ Link signs, dumbly. It’s less of a question and more of a statement.
“You aren’t supposed to have or not have anything, Link,” Zelda sighs. “You just are. I told you, that guy was being an ass.”
Link sits in silence. He fries two more pies.
‘Do people bleed out of their dicks?’ he asks, then.
“No,” Zelda exhales. Her fingers are on her temples, elbows on knees. She tries to make her tone as gentle as possible. It’s difficult. “That’s something people with vaginas do.”
‘Okay,’ Link nods, placing the ready pies onto a wooden plate. ‘Okay.’
They let the silence envelop them again. Zelda knows the conversation isn’t over, so she keeps her hands where they are.
‘Why was that guy being weird?’
“Because sometimes, Link, men are weird about women,” Zelda’s eyes are full of anger, but Link is sure it’s not directed at him. “And sometimes they’re weird about people with different bodies. Sometimes, everyone is weird about gender.”
Something in Link’s head clicks. About Gerudo Town, about the way Paya was being quiet and shy with her explanation. About Zelda.
“Oh,” he says, out loud.
He takes the last pie out of the wok.
“Do you want to eat?” he offers one to Zelda.
“Sure,” she takes her hands off her temples to accept the food. “I’m not sleepy anymore, anyway.”
***
When Riju meets Zelda, they become friends, just like Link thought. He waves them goodbye as they disappear into the depths of town, and he tells the guards he’ll go kill a Molduga by the Eastern Oasis. They respond to him in Hylian, but sign some words in Gerudo, and he picks up on the new gestures eagerly, committing them to muscle memory as he rides his sand seal.
He gets stuck on the signs for voe and vai. Riju taught them to him, not long ago. She added a third one. This is for those to whom voe and vai don’t apply, she said. Link wanted to ask Zelda about that, but he forgot.
Maybe he doesn’t need to ask, after all. Maybe he'll figure it out later. On his own. Just like he did with breathing. And with pain. And with apple pie.
He blows up the Molduga until it dies. He collects the guts, and rests on the tall spire of the oasis. He takes his shirt off, lies in the shallow pool of water, and stares at the sky.
He is a boy. How did he know? Like how he knew how to breathe. He traces the scars on his chest. He wasn’t always a boy. How could he forget? Were people weird about him, before? How could he forget? Like how he forgot his favorite food. Like how he forgot his best friend. He forgot, so he had to relearn.
He sighs. The scars on him used to mean something. They all have stories behind them, stories that are forgotten and buried without a body. The body is his. The body has a history that’s no longer passed down. Link died. There are no two ways about it.
He gets up. He is soaked. The wetness feels weird on his pants.
He used to be deeply entrenched in gender, soaked in it and drowning. He wonders if he understood Zelda better, then, he wonders if he ever looked at the Gerudo Town guards, back then, and never stepped foot inside those walls with a deep meaning behind his inaction. He wonders if he used to cry when he bled. He wonders if pain wasn’t just physical.
It’s a eulogy for a boy he never knew. A lethargic ballad for an understanding that he lacks, and the awareness of that lacking. Anthology of poems about the imitation of grief, but never the real thing. He wonders if he used to feel like he wasn’t the real thing too, sometimes.
This Link, he is a real boy. He’s just probably not the real Link. This one is new, and this one learns of pain from bokoblin clubs, not from pure existence. This one is a boy, in the most passive way there is, perhaps even more passive than the men that were born and didn’t bleed, the men who drink and sit outside Gerudo Town looking for what they call exotic wares, the men who think the word was granted to them from the beginning of time.
Nothing was ever granted, to Link. Things just were, like breathing. He accepts them, and then figures out later.
Link sighs, deeply, to compensate for his shallowness in everything else. Then, he spies a green sand seal in the golden sea, and sets out back towards town.