Chapter Text
“You won’t have to talk,” Zelda promises as she pulls on a plain cloak and pair of gloves and pins up her hair. Link gives her a look, one of the ones he now reserves specifically for her and specifically in private, sarcastic and skeptical and with a tilt of the head.
She tells him she’s grown fond of it, and he gives it often.
That aside, he doesn’t believe her–he’s clearly going to have to talk, he always has to talk. People want to know how he’s doing, which isn’t entirely unreasonable considering recent events but it doesn’t mean he actually wants to discuss it, and besides she is the princess and people–for whatever reason–feel the need to talk to her and he usually gets roped into it all.
She flips her hood up and peers at him, and he sighs and stops his smile and decides to go along with it, mostly because he likes her, which is mostly because she doesn’t make him talk but–
Oh. Her hands are freezing today. Soft, though.
~
People like them together, he sees it in their faces when they talk to her (and therefore him), he’s heard rumblings of rumors in the bars and basements. One day, over dinner, a private one which he supposed didn’t help the matter, she tells him that this has always happened after a calamity and it would die down soon enough, whether they parted ways or married. He stares, cold as stone, and the words fly out of his mouth before he has the chance to net them.
“I’ll never marry.”
“Nor will I.” Her fingers curl about her soup spoon and a smile plays at her lips. “I suppose that’s more of a problem for me than you.”
“I like being a problem.”
She pushes herself up from her seat and leans forward.
“You’re my favorite problem.”
Her hands were decidedly not cold that day.
~
Link’s head is hazy with some shit they distilled from fermented pumpkin seeds– something bars around the city started carrying after they learned his name. The most celebrated knights had skeins of silver thread sewn onto their scabbards and golden chainmail and fancily-embossed helmets and Link thought it all utterly excessive. You didn’t need all that finery to fight, but in the copper-glow room he admits it is spectacular, a sort of metallic cloud.
Zelda is three tables or a continent away and talking, talking, as she was very good at, to her beloved fancy knights. He wondered if they adored her as much as they seemed to adore her; he wondered if he adored her as much as he seemed to adore her. Because he liked the space she put between them, but liked her in his view. Because no one else really got it but her, no one back home, no one in this realm.
What a strange thing, he thought. To be in love, and not. To want to be with someone, but from three tables away. To be in someone’s world but on the other end of it, quiet and free and connected by a gentle rope, loosely knotted, living.
Later, he tells her this, untangles his tongue as he sometimes does to her. The inn’s bed isn’t as nice as hers but he likes it more, wool and cotton, and her, and words.