Chapter Text
Being at home in Hateno is a challenge when it’s all said and done. There’s nothing he can do to get her back. He realizes this now.
There were just some things he couldn’t fix.
He takes the holy Sword back to the forest one day in late autumn, when the trees are but barren sticks in the ground. The koroks greet him and the Deku Tree feels like an old friend.
“You’ve done well in your journey,” his friend tells him as he sheathes the Sword in its pedestal once more, hopefully for the last time. Wrecked from his encounter with Ganon, it hadn’t done much good in recent months. It only served to remind Link that some things are forever lost.
When he returns to Hateno, he reads the rest of her journal.
I bought Link a ring today.
I can’t believe I bought Link a ring!
It was a bit more difficult than I anticipated it being, considering Link can go into Gerudo Town now, but somehow I managed to get him sucked into Ashai’s romance class. His face! I’ve never seen it so red before! Even as I write this, my heart is pounding. I bought Link a ring. I bought Link a ring. I bought Link a ring, and the next time we’re in Tarrey Town I’m going to ask him to marry me and we can proceed right then, if he wants to, and Kapson can marry us and he’ll be my husband.
I wonder if he’ll ever want children.
The next page.
I’ve been thinking more on the topic of children, and I haven’t even decided if I want children in the present moment. If we do have children, there will obviously be a fifty percent chance that it will be a daughter, and if it’s a daughter then we will have to name her Zelda, but even if we didn’t name her Zelda, she will still be destined— cursed to share the same fate as me. I don’t know if I can ethically bring a child into this world, knowing that that’s a possibility.
Perhaps I am overthinking this.
He smiles. The last entry reads:
We made it back home to Hateno today. I hid the ring in a small notch in the apple tree behind the house. Hopefully it won’t have to be there for long. I’ll suggest a trip up to Akkala tomorrow. But as for tonight, I have other plans…
He remembers this day like it was yesterday. He’d made a huge platter of food, only for it to be forgotten when he saw her, fresh out of the bathhouse, more beautiful than ever. He told her that and she grabbed his hand and led him inside.
It’s the middle of the night, but he rubs the sleep from his eyes and grabs his oil lamp, drags it outside. The frogs and crickets sing the song of the wild. The apple tree is in season and the branches bow under the weight of all the fruit. He reaches up and grabs one and it is perhaps the sweetest apple he’s ever tasted, so sweet it tastes like candy. Maybe he’ll make fruitcake with it.
It takes a while, groping around in the dark, but he eventually finds the hidden notch with the ring. It’s lodged in the bark and he hopes it doesn’t scratch in his attempts to dislodge it. He hooks his finger around it and it comes loose.
It fits his finger perfectly.
A brilliant gold, the skyline of Hyrule is etched into the band.
He’s never going to take it off.
*
* *
On bad days, his tongue stays glued to the roof of his mouth. But on good days, he tells her story to anyone who’ll listen. The story of the girl who stood up to the very face of evil and persevered through it all, the girl who lost everything and everyone she ever cared about on her seventeenth birthday. Passes on this story to the young and the old alike, and they all listen, faces rapt as he tells them of her strength and her beauty and her grace. Her unbending will. Her relentless passion.
Time passes. Children grow up. Link feels himself age.
He doesn’t get out into the wild nearly as much as he used to. He anchors himself to Hateno, truly making it his permanent home. He buys sheep and shears them for the wool, takes up knitting, makes hats and sweaters and mittens and socks for the children of the village to outgrow in a month or two. It’s a simple life, but it’s his simple life. It’s a life that he finds worth living. Knitting with one hand is difficult, but there’s nothing he can’t do with a little determination and an innovative old woman named Uma.
Many years later, he finds himself sitting on a stool by the town cooking pots, in front of a class of schoolchildren. One of them is Nebb’s. He remembers when Nebb was this age. It makes him feel old.
“The Great Deku Tree told me that she had a smile like the sun. He was right.”
“Master Link! Master Link!” Nebb’s daughter, Mira struggled to make herself taller, raising her arm as high as it would go.
“Yes?”
“Did you love her?” A hushed giggle runs through the group of children.
Did he love her? Yes. More than the air in his lungs. More than the stars in the sky and the fish in the sea. He’s loved her forever and he won’t ever stop.
“I did.”
“Why didn’t you marry her?” He twists the ring on his marriage finger around and around and around.
“Sometimes, life just doesn’t work out like that,” he says. “Zelda had something more important to do. She saved Hyrule, you know.”
“Was she pretty?” Mira’s voice pipes in before she can even raise her hand.
He smiles. “So pretty.”
The clock in the town square strikes five times and the children get up from where they were seated. “I wish I could meet her.” He beckons her to come closer with knobby old fingers that are far less dexterous than they once were.
He motions to the silent princess tucked behind her ear. “Silent princesses were her favorite.” She reaches up, touches its petals. “I think she would have loved you.”